adenverd

> That sounds a lot like work.

Correct. This is why the Product Manager role exists - to define "what problem are we solving, why, and for whom?" by engaging with the market. But if you already know what problem you want to solve (for yourself, or for fun), don't bother. But also don't expect others to pay for a solution to a problem they don't have.

> agile poker and code commenting and stuff

These are tools for team collaboration and business planning, i.e. when there is more than one person involved in a project. You don't _need_ them for solo projects (although I do think code commenting is still a good practice even for solo projects).

> If you've listened to NPR or watched PBS, you know they're about as neutral as you can get while still covering both mainstream sides.

NPR is about as far from neutral as media gets, both in topics they choose to cover and in editorial bias.

Side note/feel good moment: the author Raymond Chen is an OG beyond-super-engineer at Microsoft, and is an incredible person to work with. He assisted me with my intern project many years ago, and was amazingly eager to share his wealth of experience with a green-eared intern from outside his org.

Thanks Raymond! I decided to go the startup route instead of returning to MSFT, but you were an inspiration all the same.

And just using the phrase "performative erudition" is itself an example of performative erudition!

I'll add that real world sensors (including cameras) are noisy in ways that are difficult to model 100% accurately in simulation. Same thing with aerodynamic effects, especially when the drone gets close to the ground or other objects, or y'know...it's windy outside. Dealing with these types of noise and unpredictably and building in resilience to them is a big part of testing and validating systems like these, and can only happen in the real world.

I'm pretty confident the drone linked in this article doesn't have high reliability. I'd be shocked if they managed to get >70% critical without significant real-world iteration.

The US DoD already has drones with these capabilities for recon in contested buildings and caves:

https://vimeo.com/316222669

https://shield.ai/products/nova-class

https://www.wired.com/story/shield-ai-quadcopter-military-dr...

AFAICT they are. You can't find a GTX 3060, 3070, or 3080 for less than 4x MSRP right now.

> developers control the cryptocurrency issuance because despite the issuance is (usually) determined algorithmically, developers have the power to change these algorithms...If we compare this system with the US dollar system governed by the Federal Reserve, the Supreme Court of the US, the Congress, and the US government (in different ways), I’d say that the blockchain developers are at least as likely to become corrupt, coerced, or influenced by the system beneficiaries than the Fed and the Government officers and judges because the latter are 1) older on average, and more senior people tend to act more independently; 2) much better protected, physically and financially.

Don't miners and nodes then have to adopt those algorithmic changes though? It's essentially voting by adoption - if a majority of miners/nodes don't adopt a set of changes (e.g. increasing the supply cap or rate), then they aren't propagated to the blockchain.

This seems a lot more decentralized than the US/Fed monetary system that the article compares it to, where citizens have effectively zero influence on policy.

Sleep Cycle [0] does this with "Intelligent" wake mode, and has a standalone app for the Apple Watch.

I'll also be shocked if this isn't a native feature of Apple's Sleep app within a year.

[0] https://9to5mac.com/2020/05/12/sleep-cycle-apple-watch-app/

"Noob gains" doesn't have anything to do with setting goals or quantitatively measuring progress. It refers to the speed at which unadapted athletes are able to progress (e.g. add weight to the bar, run farther) each workout when they first start training, compared to athletes who have been training longer, are more adapted, and progress slower.

Most professional and highly adapted athletes are extremely quantitative about their training programs, much more so at the advanced stages than in the early stages. They just progress much slower because it takes more training for their bodies to continue adapting.

One of the engineering teams I work with is building an image pipeline to correct rolling shutter distortion from a robot camera. I still have no idea how they're generalizing a solution to different types of movement and angular velocities, but at least now I understand the problem and a taste of the math behind it.

Thanks for sharing!

Video games will become a much more powerful force at sparking kids' interest and creativity in a subject, which will lead to better educational outcomes. In my experience, video games are a fantastic way to learn the initial 50% of a new subject, and to appreciate and enjoy it. Some anecdotes from my life:

- I learned programming through an in-game (Star Wars Galaxies) scripting language. That little bit of experience automating repetitive tasks set me up to excel in high school and college programming courses, which led to a career in data engineering, and now AI and robotics.

- I was introduced to game theory by a prisoner's dilemma situation in a video game (KOTOR).

- I learned economics and market forces by trading on Runescape's Grand Bazaar, and how to model and optimize a production system by managing a little island kingdom.

Not only did I learn new subjects from these experiences, but learned that I could excel at and have fun giving them my attention, on my own time and for my own purposes, without the external pressures of grades and tests. This gave me the confidence and energy to pursue them more deeply in school.

One thing that's interesting about all of these experiences is that they were all multiplayer and extremely social games (KOTOR, while a single-player RPG, was played with siblings and friends). I suspect that the social aspect was a primary motivating factor, and wonder if that principle holds for the broader population. I certainly wasn't the only kid in my class trading on the bazaar to get some extra GP.

Don't know if I agree with "never" punching down, but I wanted to share a poignant example of what punching down poorly looks like:

https://twitter.com/davejorgenson/status/1269288466493341696

Wayne Brady and Aisha Taylor handled this extremely well, but I'm glad he stood his ground and didn't smile and laugh along, despite the situational pressure to.

This is one the most important jobs of product managers, if you have them: building out a backlog of shovel-ready high ROI work aggregated from customer requests, user analytics, and strategic engineering efforts.

If PM is doing their job well, engineers can build and ship multiple times within a sprint without significant delays waiting to gather feedback.

GIMP's UI/UX has been garbage since long before 18.04. Not contradicting anything you're saying, just noting that it might not be the representative example you're looking for.

Amazon effectively leveraged investment capital to do exactly what they said they would do - innovate, learn into the market, and improve iteratively. From investors' perspectives (and probably consumers' perspectives as well), Amazon has succeeded brilliantly.

Not backwards. The point he's making is that hard problems attract talent and capital, which makes them easier to keep going.

Optimism is arguably a form of error, just as pessimism is. And yet it is one of the most valuable qualities you can have when undertaking ambitious projects.

I'd love more info how Netflix propagates schema changes to downstream stores. How do you apply migrations to heterogeneous databases? Applying binlog messages only works if downstream stores are the same flavor database as the source. And common message formats like Avro don't have a guaranteed migration strategy like protobuf.

I suspect it's more of a process solution than a technological solution. Are non-backwards-compatible migrations scheduled in advance, and broadcast to dependent teams? Are downstream consumers expected to have a replay/dead-letter queue?

Came here to suggest Streaks, I've been using it for a few months now. My favorite features are:

- Streaks that track Apple Health data. Really nice job with the integration. I use this for tracking daily calorie, macronutrient, and workout goals.

- "X times per week" streaks. I take rest days from working out, so it's nice to have an abstraction that doesn't treat them as failures or breaking the streak.

I guess I should go give you guys a good app store review now. Thanks for making this!

Would love to learn more about this. Any resources you can recommend?

Probably not what you’re looking for, but I started writing regularly after getting an iPad and Apple Pencil. There are a number of good apps that let you mix handwriting and typing and a bunch of other media, including OneNote (my current choice), Notability, and GoodNotes.

Bit of a crypto-tangent: more than anything else, the hope of replacing advertising as the economic engine of the Internet is why I care about the cryptocurrency space. In most cases, I think crypto is a solution looking for a problem, but the capability to trade edge compute/memory/disk/network for an ad free Internet experience would be immeasurably good for our collective mental health.

Tyler makes a compelling case in his book[1] that economic growth is responsible for most of the biggest improvements in human flourishing over the past century. He concludes that economic growth is a moral imperative.

All three participants in this interview discuss the "exponential inputs, linear outputs" problem/slow-down that industries face as they scale and mature.

Question: how far does ROI have to fall for the growth of an industry to cost more than its returns to society are morally worth? Is this even possible? Or is there an assumption that the market would somehow fix/prevent this scenario?]

[1] Tyler Cowen, Stubborn Attachments, 2018

I'm afraid to ask, but, in what community is this phrase spoken frequently enough to warrant an acronym?

> Hopefully there's something useful in that context but many of these ideas could be applicable beyond that also.

They’re very applicable outside the context of consulting - they’re fundamental for any leader joining a new organization to integrate well and get things done. Consultants transition more often than most; the principles you’ve shared are a great reference for the rest of us on how to be effective in a new environment.

Engineering manager here. I think a lot of people miss the point of standup, or abuse it to somehow micromanage engineers.

Standup is for the team, not the manager or PM. It serves multiple functions, but the most important is the last bit: "are you blocked by something?". Most of the time, someone else on the team knows how to unblock you. Other times, your manager is better positioned to get you what you need than you are. Most of us don't care when you work, or how much progress you made today, or whatever. Our job is to keep the ball rolling, not manage your time.

The status update portion exists so that your manager doesn't randomize you in the middle of the day asking about that thing you're working on. Not because s/he thinks you're slacking, but because your work ties into a bunch of other work that's going on, and it's the manager's job to coordinate. While you may be more effective working as an information silo, your team and org are hindered by it.

This article omits some pretty relevant info:

* Thiel founded Palantir [0], which has a very deep and ongoing relationship providing counter-terrorism info and analytics to 3-letter agencies. His comments are likely an attempt to protect Palantir's contracts from Google.

* Google recently (2018) had trouble with employees exposing a censored search engine project targeted for China, and quitting over it [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palantir_Technologies

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/16/technology/google-employe...

+1 would really love to read any style guides or writing class materials from Amazon, if anyone can share!

GS has a track record of working well with the OSS community. They open-sourced and maintained GS-collections (now Eclipse collections), a highly-performant Java collections library that they had developed internally. They benefitted from community use and contributions, but no more than any other company that open-sources an internal project.

GS benefiting from open-source doesn't imply malicious intent.