busybee fluffy rambles

I just watched this video about energy dependence and it got me thinking about some stuff.

In particular, it struck me how one of the quoted figures is that even LED lighting is only about 30% efficient in its conversion from final energy to usable light. My experience with LED lighting has been that 120V AC lamps do indeed generate a lot of heat, and I guess 30% sounds about right, but so much of that heat is just from the power circuitry: namely from having to convert AC to DC and step the voltage down.

But does it have to be that way?

I wonder how many things are going to break on November 20, 2286.

Throughout my career, I’ve noticed that quality/test engineering is usually seen as a bottom-of-the-barrel discipline, something that someone should want to be promoted out of rather than someplace to end up. I find that really strange.

It takes a lot of skill to look at other peoples' code and write tests to exercise it and determine correctness, and to do it well. And to have exacting standards about code quality and testability of the code in the first place.

Nearly everywhere I’ve worked, though, test engineers have been incredibly junior and not particularly skilled. Which made it part of a self-fulfilling vicious cycle; test engineers do poor-quality work (and don’t seem to bring much value to the actual product development), so low-calibre programmers end up being put in those roles, and so then they continue to do poor-quality work. Test engineering seems to be treated as glorified QA in most places.