Tactics like this will make me get a dumb phone and stop using those websites. If that means no more credit cards, online shopping, etc so be it. You have to draw the line somewhere.
There's nothing wrong with Woodford but... idk if I was going to have a bottle engraved with my name maybe find something more interesting? Strange behavior though...
Speaking not as a professional mechanic, but as someone who maintains a car, two trucks, a tractor, a couple boats, and has googled quite a lot of torque specs in my time... If you're googling torque specs in 2026 you're gonna have a bad time. They're frequently just flat out wrong, especially the AI summaries ;). Use the authoritative source of truth--the shop manual published by the equipment manufacturer. Accept no substitutes.
Absolutely - factory repair guides/apps are the only source of truth for official specs, although 3rd-party manuals are very good as well. That being said, I've often turned 3-hour estimated repairs into 15-minute jobs through clever shortcuts. For example, rotating an alternator to replace the run clutch through the gap in in the intake manifold as opposed to removing the complete intake manifold. I think that's where using experienced (and resourceful) developers pays off.
Also, for sale: BMW E60/61 Bentley 2-volume set. Barely used.
Yeah Bentley (and in some cases Haynes) make good aftermarket manuals too. And you can find good information on some forums. But you can also find a lot of bad information. Reliably sifting the good from bad only comes with experience--much like in software.
Sounds great. I'll watch it with the kids. We've recently done this podcast about the history of the cup and it was funny and fascinating. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUZmk_G6rFE
Good leaders always lead from the front. There's nothing special about this "knowledge work". It's the same as any other industrial job in this respect. A good foreman can do everyone's job better than them and knows how to keep the higher ups off your back. They're someone you look up to professionally. There's no way you can look up to someone who can't do the job well.
If you actually did talk to your plumber, or electrician, or mechanic, or anyone else you view as "lower" than you, you might have actually learned something. Interesting paradox, that.
I usually ask them if I could watch them work. They always say yes. Then I watch what tools they use and how they use them and ask about them. They're always happy to tell me.
For example, I watched the cable guy install coax. I then bought the same tools he used, and later wired up the coax myself in the next house. I also watched tradesmen cut & sweat pipes, service my furnace, install molding, etc. All very interesting and useful.
IME they're often more than willing to share details about how broken and bad the software systems they use daily are. This is the kind of knowledge that can make you very successful as a technologist if you know how to look for it, but you'll never find it if you can't relate to people of differing backgrounds on a human level.
> It used to be if you found a GitHub repository with a hundred commits and a good readme and automated tests and stuff, you could be pretty sure that the person writing that had put a lot of care and attention into that project.
I think this highlights a problem that has always existed under the surface, but it's being brought into the light by proliferation of vibeslop and openclaw and their ilk. Even in the beforetimes you could craft a 100.0% pure, correct looking github repo that had never stood the test of production. Even if you had a test suite that covers every branch and every instruction, without putting the code in production you aren't going to uncover all the things your test suite didn't--performance issues, security issues, unexpected user behavior, etc.
As an observer looking at this repo, I have no way to tell. It's got hundreds of tests, hundreds of commits, dozens of stars... how am I to know nobody has ever actually used it for anything?
I don't know how to solve this problem, but it seems like there's a pretty obvious tooling gap here. A very similar problem is something like "contributor reputation", i.e. the plague of drive-by AI generated PRs from people (or openclaws) you've never seen before. Stars and number of commits aren't good enough, we need more.
reply