The tradesmen working on my house renovations aren't consuming SAAS products during their day jobs.

The white collar workforce can't rapidly switch to blue collar jobs.

So for these companies to remain viable, they need the white collar workers to still somehow end up with enough money to pay for services that ultimately the companies provide.

Maybe the turning point will be a recognition that companies can't only focus on maximising shareholder value. They also need to consider their role in maintaining and improving the societies they operate in.

I first snapped the top tube of a stell framed BMX near the stem after many years of using it for a local paper round with a milk crate roped onto the handlebars. The weight of the papers was certainly a contributing factor.

I've snapped a chain while out of the saddle, accelerating a road bike. Nothing too serious, just banged by knee on the bars. Still, do not recommend.

While riding up a long steep hill, I snapped the nut off the outside of a clipless pedal. Luckily the pedal didn't slip off the axle and I could get to a safe stopping point.

I had a carbon top tube delaminate from some aluminium lugs near the stem. Something felt off with the handling so I glanced down and could see ~1.5 cm of the lug showing. Decided to walk the bike the rest of the way to work that day. Got a local carbon repair specialist to re-bond it and it lasted a few more years.

That carbon frame eventually developed a crack in the bottom bracket and frame from front to back right next to the seat tube on the chain ring side. When it failed, the bike started feeling "noodly" to ride, so I looked down and saw the crack opening and closing as I pedaled along.

Somehow I snapped the rear suspension pivot in a Trek Y3 without realising it until the next time I went to ride it. I jumped on it to ride to uni and something felt off. Then I noticed the front and rear wheels were both tracking straight but significantly offset from each other. Took a while to get it repaired as it was a custom part.

When borrowing my brothers (pre-suspension era) MTB I tried a little jump up a kerb. The front fork folded in half. I bent it back straight enough to get sufficient wheel clearance to finish the ride (slowly).

I have buckled many rims over the years on BMX, MTB and road bikes. The early aluminium rims were expensive and really easy to buckle compared to steel rims.

Had the freewheel pawls fail in a rear cassette suddenly one day. They would catch once every few pedal rotations for maybe 1/3 of a rotation. Initially I thought I'd dropped the chain. It was a long walk home.

I was having trouble keep my front QR wheel on a road bike from vibrating mildly as I rode on it. I thought the bearing were loose, so I took the wheel off then found the hollow QR axle had snapped in the middle.

From riding with many others over the years, I'm also aware that larger (taller) riders can break stuff more easily as well. One work colleague who was probably 6'3-4" snapped a cog off the rear cassette almost perfectly in half while accelerating. He wasn't a strong rider, he'd started bike commuting a few months earlier. Maybe the crank length he needed brought extra torque.

Another very strong 6'1" guy I rode with for a few years cracked 3 carbon Bianchi frames within the first few months of owning them. All replaced under warranty. I think he was just heavier and stronger that the frames were generally designed for.

Frames are typically weakest at the joins as that is where the stress is concentrated.

Any rotating part will eventually wear and fail.

Ride a bike long and often enough and something _will_ give out.

You also need a browser that has NPAPI. IE 11 was the most modern browser I am aware of that still supported applets.

The old GUI framework mentioned in the GP might have been Swing. It is still included in most JDKs and allows for cross platform desktop GUI application development with no other dependencies outside the JDK. Finding documentation on how to do GUIs in Swing is getting increasingly difficult though.

Perhaps the restaurant was leasing the premises from a landlord. The landlord may still have a loan for the business premises. That loan could be at risk of going into arrears if no other person decides to try their luck running a restaurant in a location that doesn't have sufficient patronage.

Consider now that the office workers who have refused to RTO work for the bank that holds the loan for the business premises. There is a risk to the bank now that the premises is less valuable because it can't be leased and is less attractive for a future purchaser.

The point is that most businesses don't operate without having other businesses as suppliers or clients. When one business does badly it can affect other businesses in their network. A small number of isolated businesses failing doesn't cause knock on effects. However, if a larger number of smaller retailers, dependent on foot traffic close in the same locality it will have a ripple effect out to many other larger businesses.

Business owners and executives have an interest in trying to maintain a healthy business network. Some will believe that pushing for RTO should help other local businesses in their business network and thus will be beneficial for their company in the long term.

Many such businesses failed during COVID knockdowns due to lack of customers. Some are still struggling to become viable again with a low RTO percentage.

For some medium to large businesses, these struggling smaller businesses or business owners are their customers. So there is some self interest from many companies to go back to the way things were.

Arguably the failed or struggling businesses could be being replaced by other services, eg home food delivery, but I've not personally noticed anything like that happening.

Sometimes people glue a butt or mitre joint, then once the glue has set, drill a through hole for a through dowel from an outside face of the joint.

The blind holes approach is tricky to get perfect alignment on where dowels are being added across a longer length. As a hobbyist I've tried a few cheaper dowelling jigs and had mixed success. This challenge lead to other loose tenon solutions like biscuits or dominos which allow for some side to side misalignment while retaining the ability to keep the visible faces aligned.

The through dowel approach avoids the misalignment problem, but comes with the visibility of the end grain of the dowel on one exposed face. Some people are ok with that.

Dowels are still one of the "strongest" options for end-grain to long-grain joints. Many professional woodworkers now favour dominos simply due to who quick it allows them to work and the additional allowance for some side-to-side alignment.

However others have no indicator or sound. To make things even more confusing is the pedestrian crossings can also be programmed to happen automatically at peak times with no button press, but absolutely need a button press outside of peak hour.

Similarly, the icons on my mobile for making a call, answering a call and hanging up are all based on the shape of the handset for a corded phone.

The Save button icon in many applications is based on a 3.5" floppy disk.

I sometimes need to save data as a PDF, which in many cases involves "printing" to PDF. The icon is based on a paper printer, but the action I am using it for doesn't include any external device or paper.

This makes me wonder about what icons we could use in the future where so many actions are done via a touch interface on a phone/tablet. There are less physical objects involved in common actions. So the skeuomorphic approach to icons for buttons is becoming less valid over time especially for younger people.

Maybe the addition of dedicated Move button next to the minimise, maxmimise and close button would be a reasonable compromise?

That would provide a consistent target to click on with your mouse. Obviously a button is a lot smaller than the entire titlebar for clicking on, so there would be some efficiency loss for people that regularly move windows (I am one of them). Getting move use out of the titlebar space would be worth the minor inconvenience of a more accurate click-drag to move operation.

https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1495...

Immutable objects often require you to construct a new object to store an updated value and garbage collect the now unused previous object. So a lot of early Java code was written with mutable objects to avoid performance issues.

The Java Bean spec was written in 1997:

https://blog.joda.org/2014/11/the-javabeans-specification.ht...

We have a team dedicated to performing security reviews for most code changes. Your change can't go to Production until it has been assessed by someone from the secure code team. They can request rework if they think you have introduced a vulnerability.

We have regular pen-testing performed.

There are various vulnerability scanners running against the code repos and blocking builds if a dependency is identified to contain a new CVE.

The project I mainly work on has been in active development for decades. It has well defined frameworks for many common actions. Most of the time we are working within those frameworks, which have been already been vetted thoroughly. Ironically, it is rare that we would need to touch code in a way that could introduce a vulnerability.

In a previous role I worked on desktop applications for engineering simulation. There was no requirement for secure coding for those projects as there was no central database. All the models were file based.

So it depends on the project and the risk and consequence of an malicious actor finding a vulnerability and exploiting it. The health and finance sectors have to take secure coding seriously. From experience, many Oil and Gas companies are also super strict on controlling data access and will often request proof that a software application has been security reviewed and pen-tested.

Perhaps not an issue for many development activities, but anything involving lots of calculations (CPU or GPU) will inevitably generate a lot of heat.

Desktops tend to be better at dissipating heat.

In a previous job, our desktops massively out performed our similar spec laptops for long running simulations.

Also you can typically attach more storage and GPUs to a desktop than a laptop if you need to.

While I am waiting, I often retreat into my own thoughts, mentally processing some difficult problem or trying to plan out a project in my head. When I am thinking hard I adopt a "focus" face with a slight frown with lips pressed together.

The servers must be reading my face as annoyance or anger.

I always say thanks and smile when I collect my order so they know I wasn't unhappy, especially with them.

I guess most people are more "in the moment" and maintain a neutral or friendly face.

Often though, the decision on who to lay off also considers who might be close to retirement, who might cost more to make redundant (redundancy pay in many places is based on years of service and there might also be long service leave owed), and the mixture of skills and knowledge the company thinks it will need going forward.

Also some people will have built up strong relationships with colleagues, teams and clients through their work. Their potential to continue these relationships typically drops dramatically without it being a regular part of work. That can make some people quite sad personally and frustrated that all of the work developing those relationships will suddenly not be very useful anymore.

So a lot of design work for oil and gas production facilities is around minimising shutdowns. A large part of this is working out storage capacities, and for LNG, the shipping rates. If the LNG carriers (tankers) are unable to offload at a receiving terminal there is a higher chance the LNG loading terminal will reach tank tops. Tank tops at the loading terminal means the upstream production facility will need to turn down or stop all production. Given the high costs (capital and production opportunity) that incurs for the production facility, it might be better to take a short term loss for a few cargoes to prevent the tank tops at the loading terminal and thus a production shutdown.