You meet ur 18 year old self, but uu can only say 3 words. What do you say??

Why titanium never became the next steel, - In the 1950s, titanium was considered a metal of the future. It offered steel like strength, 43% less weight, and exceptional corrosion resistance. - America's SR-71 spy plane later demonstrated its potential. Flying above Mach 3, its airframe became too hot for conventional Aluminum alloys. - The expectation was that growing production would bring prices down, eventually opening titanium to automobiles, construction and everyday manufacturing. - But by the year 1957, American producers already had more production capacity than customers willing to buy. The anticipated use cases had simply never caught up with the expansion. - Titanium's chemistry was one obstacle. It binds oxygen so strongly that extracting pure metal requires several expensive processing stages. - And the difficulty doesn't end there. Welding requires protection from air, while machining generates concentrated heat and wears tools rapidly. - China has since expanded production enormously, accounting for around 70% of global titanium sponge. Yet some producers now face oversupply to this day. - For automobiles and buildings, the trade-offs remain. Steel is stiffer, Aluminum is lighter, and both are generally cheaper to manufacture into components. - So increasing titanium production doesn't automatically create demand. Even cheaper raw titanium must still become an economically competitive finished product. Ultimately, titanium never lacked extraordinary properties. Its problem was that relatively few applications needed those properties badly enough to justify the expense and complexity. The lesson is that having superior properties alone isn't enough. For a material to become mainstream, it must also be affordable, easy to manufacture and practical to work with at an industrial scale.

Most people are allergic to doing the tough "figure it out" jobs. The amount of stump grinding jobs I've gotten after a competitor's stump grinder "broke down" the morning of is crazy. Every single one of these jobs has been tough which is probably why my competitor opted out. But being willing to figure it out (and price it accordingly) has always paid off. Expecting every dollar you earn to always be easy is insane.

You just won a 2-week, all-expenses-paid vacation to Europe. But there’s a catch: you have to stay within one region the whole time. What are you picking?

Sometimes I just shake my head in wonder at some of the ridiculous decisions companies make. Why? Why, for crying out loud, does Gmail call a folder a label? 100% of the world's population understands "folder". What purpose (or advantage) does renaming it to a label serve?

I can't find my tool thread, so I'll post this solo: Huge win for America. Amazon now sells Tekton tools... and they're price-competitive with the Chinese brands. Tekton is an American company based in Grand Rapids Michigan, and while not all of their tools are made in the US, they strictly avoid China-based manufacturing. All of their "budget" tools are made in Taiwan. ICON Tools are a brand of Tekton. I just wish they were at the top of the charts for tools. I'd like to see amazon pull the no-name china slop.

Have you done business outside of tech? what was it?

What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever seen in someone’s house?

If you died in a car accident your coworkers would forget about you six seconds later

If you don't ship an API, your customers will build one based on your webapp's HTML. One web app I had to automate already uses a JSON API underneath. Customers just don't get a key. So I automated their web UI with a headless browser. Ship the API. They'll get in either way. So...

now that programming is easier than ever can we leave Electron and go back to native desktop apps?

Wow. Nike, $NKE, is down more than 6% today, hitting its lowest level since September 2013. It is down more than 55% in a year. It has lost roughly $60 billion in market cap. If you invested $1 in $NKE 5 years ago, it would now be worth about 23 cents. Yesterday, it missed revenue estimates and guided for sales to fall again this year.

fable absolutely slaps for ui 😍