RACI is an acronym derived from the four key responsibilities most typically used: responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed. It is used for clarifying and defining roles and responsibilities in cross-functional or departmental projects and processes.
I wish more people briefly defined acronyms at first usage in a document.
I agree, but it's a hard balance to strike and depends on the writer's target audience. RACI is a pretty common acronym for anyone doing project management professionally. I'd not define REST, HTTP, etc; in an engineering doc.
Details can be hard, even if small. Don't get me wrong, I try to do it myself every time I write, but I often find myself wondering if it's worth to link to a definition or will it be too obvious and come across as condescending. Maybe is just me.
For me an author disqualifies if there is an unnecessary use of jargon. In my experience the use jargon is often just a distraction from the fact that there is no thorough understanding of the subject.
This has been my take as well. There is a lot of disruption in a company when a key part, like the FPGA that serves as a communications nexus in the product goes EOL and everyone scrambles for a year trying to engineer in a replacement.
Buy enough parts for expected product life, make good use of the time you didn't waste on scrambling, and when your product is EOL sell any left-over parts on the secondhand markets.
Plastics leeching toxic chemicals/compounds into food and water, especially when being heated, is a known thing. It's especially bad for the endocrine system. The disruption to the hormonal balance is noticeably affecting people.
Parent probably intended to say silicone, which is a plastic polymer. Silicone rings are commonly used even in stainless steel kettles or glass bottles for sealing the cap or lid.
"Technically, silicone could be considered part of the rubber family. But, if you define plastics widely, as we do, silicone is something of a hybrid between a synthetic rubber and a synthetic plastic polymer. Silicone can be used to make malleable rubber-like items, hard resins, and spreadable fluids.
We treat silicone as a plastic like any other, given that it has many plastic-like properties: flexibility, malleability, clarity, temperature resistance, water resistance."
It's a little misleading to just call silicone plastic with no disclaimers. That site is also called "life without plastic", so I'm not sure it's the most neutral source.
Strictly speaking, "plastic" simply refers to the physical property of "plasticity". Though it's also used as a general term for "all polymers", which would therefore include silicone (polysiloxane) too. However people also use "plastic" to mean "organic polymers" specifically, thus drawing a distinction between plastics and silicone.
I get the sense that people on the internet believe silicone to be more safe (e.g. for sous vide cooking or baby products) for whatever reason. Maybe because it is more chemically stable or decomposes to sand or whatever. But really you can't draw many conclusions about any synthetic material unless there has been thorough research. A given polymer species can have very different properties depending on the additives used, and those can be the most dangerous to health. And the same material between different manufacturers could have different chemistry and health risks. It's a big complicated world...
On the theme of "Unexpected Alan Watts" I'd like to recommend the game "Everything" which after a slightly bizarre start develops into a "achieve subgoal, get an Alan Watts audio clip as a reward" gameplay loop. It's fantastic.
To add some spice to your observation. I read somewhere that "This statement is false" can act as a oscillator, a "clock" going tick-tock, at the deepest level of reality.
Well actually, it was a comment on a blogpost (I don't know what it was about). It said since if our world is a simulation, then it needs a computer to run on. And every computer needs a clock. So this statement changing its truth value could act as a clock.
I asked ChatGPT 4.0 what LMR meant as applied to coaxial cable. It gave me an excellent response, including that LMR is a trademark of Times Microwave Systems.
I rarely use search engines anymore. I'll bet the same is true for many people.
In fact when I used regular Google, the results are good enough for me to deduce that on my own.
So I consider GP's search skills inadequate. I mean it's not exactly wrong to desire a tool that handholds you and feeds you the answer; but if you are willing to do a little bit of deduction Google is fine.
Regular Google itself tells you that. At least for me, when I tried this search right now, the first snippet says "These letters indicate the brand. LMR is a trademark of Times Microwave, whereas RFC is made by Shireen." It's the second snippet that says the last minute resistance thing, and it appears to be from someone's personal blog that blocks IPs from the United States, so without logging into a VPN, I can't open the site to figure out why it thinks this.
It appears to indeed mean nothing, but of course, it took me a whole two minutes or so to find an actually authoritative source. Everyone knows no real user will ever do that and just wants a search engine or chatbot to dictate reality to them.
You might enjoy this article on the Therac-25 [1]. It's kind of the standard example of how errors in software can wind up harming people. I have written medical device software for about 30 years. In my experience, delivering high quality software for Class B and Class C devices is both challenging and expensive.
Every software developer should know this story, it is a humbling and important lesson. Yes luckily most of can’t ship code that accidentally kills people but we can absolutely empathize with the conditions which led to it happening.
Thank you so much for the link to the postmortem. I will be sharing it and discussing it with my colleagues. We are currently working on the embedded software for an AED.
