At their recommendation, we internally staffed a Quality Training and Service Team to focus on hands-on training with on first-year electrical apprentices.

With the guidance of the erstwhile Milwaukee re, our QTS team developed and delivered hands-on trainings (with $company’s products) in the US & Canada, for first-year apprentices.

I covered the Western Region at that time and every training center I observed, from Hawaii to Colorado, had Milwaukee-provided tools and training for the apprentices to learn & grow with. When they turn out (become journeymen), it’s little wonder what they “Pack Out” with. Which is what we hoped to — and at least in some markets did— accomplish with our product.

I’ve personally been a DeWalt guy since the early oughts, and in addition to feeling a steady decline, I was particularly hurt when one of my (Milwaukee-loving) foremen informed me that “T-Stack” sounds like a male enhancement pill.

edit: clarity, grammar. not-edited: my irregular use of the AI-shibboleth emdash

Your earlier comment on adulthood reminded me of 7th function, and I didn’t want it to be too obvious I was quoting the book, because I thought it would ruin the joke. I’m not actually arguing that meaning can’t travel across language, and I certainly doubt that Binet would make that argument in earnest.

If your reply is a riff on Simon’s signifier/signified distinction, then I may have missed the joke and ended up reenacting the book.

How can anyone ever say anything original, personal, unique to him, when by definition language obliges us to draw from a well of pre-existing words?

When we are influenced by so many external forces—our times, the books we read, our sociocultural determinisms, our linguistic tics so deeply ingrained that they form our identity?

The speeches we are constantly bombarded with, in every possible and imaginable form…

Who has never caught a friend, a colleague, a parent, a father-in-law, repeating an argument they have read in a newspaper or heard on television, almost word for word?

As if he were speaking for himself. As if he had appropriated that speech. As if he were the source of those thoughts—

rather than a sponge, rehashing the same formulas, the same rhetoric, the same presuppositions, the same indignant inflections, the same knowing tone—

as if he were not simply the medium.

Binet, on Barthes and Foucault, and himself I suppose.

If you're reading this, you've been in a coma for almost 20 years now. We're trying a new technique. We don't know where this message will end up in your dream, but we hope it works. Please wake up, we miss you.

[0] https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/tenure-announcement-april-2...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46840796

Points: 6

# Comments: 2

The “self”-(un)awareness is almost endearing (though some might be your higher level instructions). It summarizes—correctly IME— that it’s basically an ~inept~ typical middle/upper manager/“visionary”, replete with a CorpSpeak promise to circle back and “fill in the gaps”… which it does with the consistency and accuracy of a samesaid cat-turd-ingester.

Does make me wish that the folks nodding along in meatspace would/could be similarly “honest” about this same phenomenon.

[0]> Google: Google does not offer a public search API. The only available path is an ad-syndication bundle with no changes to result presentation - the model Startpage uses. Ad syndication is a non-starter for Kagi’s ad-free subscription model.[^1]

[0]> The current interim approach (current as of Jan 21, 2026)

[0]> Because direct licensing isn’t available to us on compatible terms, we - like many others - use third-party API providers for SERP-style results (SERP meaning search engine results page). These providers serve major enterprises (according to their websites) including Nvidia, Adobe, Samsung, Stanford, DeepMind, Uber, and the United Nations.

I’m an avid Kagi user, and it seems like Kagi and some other notable interested parties have _already_ been unable to do get what they want/need with Google’s index.

[0]> The fact that we - and companies like Stanford, Nvidia, Adobe, and the United Nations - have had to rely on third-party vendors is a symptom of the closed ecosystem, not a preference.

Hopefully someone here can clarify for me, or enumerate some of these “third-party vendors” who seem like they will/might/could be directly affected by this.

[0] antibabelic > relevant https://blog.kagi.com/waiting-dawn-search [1] https://blog.kagi.com/dawn-new-era-search > [^1]: A note on Google’s existing APIs: Google offers PSE, designed for adding search boxes to websites. It can return web results, but with reduced scope and terms tailored for that narrow use case. More recently, Google offers Grounding with Google Search through Vertex AI, intended for grounding LLM responses. Neither is general-purpose index access. Programmable Search Engine is not designed for building competitive search. Grounding with Google Search is priced at $35 per 1,000 requests - economically unviable for search at scale, and structured as an AI add-on rather than standalone index syndication. These are not the FRAND terms the market needs

uh uh, uh

This morning, I upgraded our long-running Omnibus install from v10.9.1 → v11, following Mattermost's explicit deprecation notice[0] and recommendation to switch to standard Binary/Docker/k8s/etc deployment.

Upgrade went cleanly:

Postgres migration fine Data still present in DB Service came back up in minutes

Post-restart the UI shows: “10,000-message limit reached. Messages sent before May 16, 2023 are hidden.” Clarification: no DELETE FROM anywhere. All rows still in PostgreSQL. The limit is UI/view-layer only, retroactively applied after "upgrade".

Checked beforehand:

- Omnibus deprecation announcement [0] - v11 upgrade guide [4] - Admin console nags/links

None mentioned that an in-place upgrade would activate hard visibility caps on pre-existing data. First indication was the running instance after restart.

Currently (as of 2026-01-12_1337):

- https://mattermost.com/pl/mattermost-entry-limits (In-App Link to Limits) [1] 404s (Page not found) - https://mattermost.com/pricing/ (also an in-app link) [2] only has “Contact Sales”, no enumerated limits (or prices). - https://docs.mattermost.com/administration-guide/manage/product-limits.html [3], used Kagi to find this, no mention of message limits

I'm happy to pay for supported software. The friction is the surprise enforcement on self-hosted + self-managed DB. Upgrade path quietly turned history into a licensed feature without forewarning in the upgrade docs.

For now:

We're leaving the v11 instance up (secure, current messages flow normally). The system console and dashboard aren't loading correctly, possibly due to the message limits, possibly due to other issues.

I'm thinking some sort of rsync + static HTML archive of current visible history + DB dump for offline search. I'm afraid future policy changes could further gate access, and would love recommendations.

Posting mostly as warning to other long-running Omnibus users (small groups, families, hobby servers) who are about to upgrade and may not expect the view limit to kick in retroactively.

If your install predates the limit introduction and has >10k messages, test upgrade in staging first—or assume the docs are incomplete on enforcement timing. Don't expect to get help in the forum [5], the last post (before mine today) is from October 2025 and the moderator directed to the Gitlab Omnibus thread which doesn't provide details on message limits or answer the other questions.

Curious if others hit surprises on the v11 "upgrade", and if anyone has any suggestions.

[0] https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-omnibus [1] https://mattermost.com/pl/mattermost-entry-limits [2] https://mattermost.com/pricing/ [3] https://docs.mattermost.com/administration-guide/manage/product-limits.html [4] https://docs.mattermost.com/deployment-guide/server/deploy-linux.html [5] https://forum.mattermost.com/t/clarification-needed-for-the-upgrade-to-v11/25344

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46594673

Points: 7

# Comments: 3

I guess the gas town one does capture our moment, but embracing YOLO spaghetti-o with reckless abandon, is a) depressing, even though I also feel like a middling programmer and b) actually seems to be dazzling these newer beleaguered bureaucrats precisely because they think they could just talk to the LLM instead of TMitTB.

Anyway, if that post and its ilk leave a bad taste, this was mouthwash for me. Lucky 10,000 I know, but I had never seen this (or felt so seen, as they say). I had to go check that he wasn’t wrong about PHP being Personal Home Page. I somehow never picked up that the recursive naming thing is a backcroynm.