aesthetics1

AI accelerates dysfunction. It will help you get to the wrong place faster if you're already heading there.

I do believe the opposite is true too. If you have a strong culture, a product or idea with promise, and a team of smart and capable people, it can move you faster in the right direction too.

The problem is that every person or company in group 1 thinks they are in group 2.

> Since April, monthly commits have grown from 1.4 billion to 2.9 billion

Bonkers.

You can tell the entire industry is in a "productivity panic" and here's more proof. There's a velocity zealot crying tears of joy somewhere.

I have always believed that the MagSafe connector should be on the brick. A short, regular USB type C cable to the power brick and a MagSafe connector between the brick and the wall.

Bonus points if the brick incorporates a small hub with additional ports. This would allow you to choose between using a regular USB type C power cable or the proprietary brick with MagSafe built in.

One of the great features in Chrome is that you can open your recently closed tabs with CTRL+SHIFT+T. This will bring back an entire window full of tabs and even works between reboots. I usually have a dozen tabs open and when I reboot, I simply open up Chrome again, CTRL+SHIFT+T, and I am right back where I was.

To get around this problem I just use a simple command-line utility that I wrote called gitswitch that I call whenever I jump to a new project. My name never changes but my email does, so that's all the utility changes. I suppose it would be neat to build in profiles, but I jump between 2-3 PCs regularly and would probably forget to update my profiles.

https://github.com/jboyer87/gitswitch

Example:

  gitswitch jboyer87@my-work-email.com

  gitswitch jboyer87@my-personal-email.com

Thanks a lot for this. I'm in touch with the red gate folks now and I appreciate you sharing your experience.

Thanks for sharing this. I have been evaluating the red gate suite of tools. Is there a particular module in their deployment suite that helps manage/automate standards as you mentioned?

Our team consists of a single DBA and around a dozen developers. We're a .NET/C# shop but we use Oracle Databases.

It's more likely that he has a browser extension that is doing this. I have DarkReader installed, and I similarly saw a bunch of style tags at the beginning of the page related to DarkReader (which applies some CSS rules to make everything "dark mode"). To the GP, you probably want to double-check your browser extensions (unless you were actually kidding).

This seems to generate mostly word salad. I haven't been able to find an artist (even one of the recommended artists like Drake) that it generates intelligible lyrics for. It seems to grab existing lyrics from other songs and mash them together, but it's not doing a great job of it.

Interesting. I think this is useful if implemented correctly.

I had an idea similar to this a few years ago. Basically, you would be able to bookmark your place on the page and come back to it later or send the link to someone else. I didn't think that using a word or phrase was useful because it could show up multiple times on the page. Instead, I used the scroll distance. Here's a crude demo:

http://jboyer87.github.io/page-progress/

Of course, this isn't device-independent. I never went much further with it.

It's an interesting concept. You need more photos - I need to see how the slats interlock, I need to see photos of how the frame works. My immediate thought was that with a long enough desk (de-sk?) it would bow in the middle. A lot of questions I have don't seem to be answered on the landing page. I think overall, the landing page could be simplified and cleaned up so I don't need to go hunting through the "FAQ" and "Why De-sk?" pages to know if this is the desk for me.

As others have pointed out, I think the biggest weakness is the seams. It looks like it would be impossible to write on. I would suggest that you include some sort of optional desk pad as an add-on.

I'm from the US. Although it doesn't look like you're shipping here yet anyway, you might include inch/pound units too if you plan to ship internationally at some point.

Cool concept, good luck.

EDIT: Here's what I meant by a desk pad, in case it wasn't obvious. This one has a lip so that it stays put, and a metal backing so that you wouldn't feel the slats underneath while you were writing: https://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/40246156/

Seasonic does. They make excellent power supplies. I've used a 400w fanless in a media center PC, but they also make higher wattage units like this for example: https://seasonic.com/prime-titanium-fanless

You are right and make many succinct points. I imagined this in the context of the todo list example given in the article, and assumed there would be a sane limit on items in a list, and that each record in the database would be tied to a list ID, or user ID, or some other method to allow only pulling the items that are actually in the list.

That being said, this would not alleviate the problems you mentioned when walking the list. It would need to be arranged once retrieved either by the client, or by the backend before passing to the client. I imagined that I would traverse the list recursively to order it before passing it off to the client. This should take O(n) time, since we only need to traverse the list once, and we haven't retrieved from the database any unrelated rows (list ID, user ID, etc - there has to be some boundary in place).

My immediate thought was to store the information in a doubly-linked list type structure in SQL. Obviously the space efficiency is not optimal, but I am surprised that the article didn't even point this out.

The table could be designed with a unique PK, the todo item, and some binary or bool field to determine first (head) and last (tail). You would then add 'previous' and 'next' fields that would be updated for insert/delete/updates.

I work for the government (for now). We write our own performance evaluation annually (a simple Word document template), with a list of projects completed, and a list of systems that we maintain (and associated maintenance tasks). We also have a section for personal/professional development to keep track of training, education, and self-improvement. It is nice to reflect on what I have done over the past year.

That being said, the performance review is basically a formality. We have 5 steps in each pay grade, and I have never seen someone miss a step after each year. Someone could be sitting at their desk reading their Kindle all day and still get their 5% jump every year. In addition to that, nearly 100% of promotions are based on tenure. You will probably go from a level 1 --> 2 --> 3 --> Senior every year, and supervisory/management positions are only opened upon the incumbent's retirement (to be filled typically by the most tenured person to apply, regardless of fit).

It is not a good system. Lots of people stick around who should receive the boot, and the wrong people are placed in supervisory/management positions simply because they have been there for a while.

I feel like the statement is fundamentally contradictory, seeing as how humans have invented and trained the AI systems. By definition, that is something that humans are doing.

On the other hand, it may be more insightful to say that if humans cannot perform the task (time is not a factor), than neither can AI. For example, assessing non-tangibles, or something abstract like identifying sarcasm in text without context.

I went through the first several weeks of course 1, and you are spot on. The quiz in week 2 is absolutely wrong (did anyone audit this?). I skimmed through the first 6 weeks and even for a beginner course, this is way too dumbed down.

I checked out some of the material a bit further through the course as well, and I cannot recommend it for anyone serious about the profession. It looks good on the surface (reading the course summaries and the objectives), but the quality just isn't there.

It's hard to find anything about working at Google that isn't geared towards SWE. What job title(s) would someone working for Google in IT support hold? Is the interview process as grueling as the SWE positions, or is Google looking for generalists?

You can change the default meeting time to 15 minutes under settings. Once you have done that, just clicking defaults to a 15 minute meeting. You can already drag a 30 minute meeting to a 45 minute meeting pretty easily. This is close to what you want, but it does not solve the problem of being able to easily click and start a meeting at 9:15 with a 15 minute duration. Microsoft Outlook (desktop application) has a way to change the default intervals (example: 4 divisions show for an hour if you choose 15 minutes versus 2 divisions for 30 minutes) shown on the calendar - that would be a nice feature for Google to add.

This looks great. I've been learning ASP.NET Core with scattered resources around the web, and your book seems to explain everything in a simple way. Adding to my list of resources...

This seems aimed squarely at VSCode. VSCode does a lot of this now out of the box (or with a few extensions). I think Atom is really just trying to keep up. I personally do not believe they have the horsepower to compete with Microsoft here though. VSCode is a phenomenal product.

I noticed this as well. If you poke around, you can see that only 53 cities are currently available. I tried "Portland" and received "Orlando" as a suggestion. Looks like it uses some sort of half-baked search algorithm that looks for a close match, but does not work so well.

This drives me crazy in my mathematics courses. Sometimes I just do not recognize the pattern, and tools like Mathway or Wolfram Alpha can say "right here dummy" and give me the first step. It is not always about cheating, but seeing the steps for solving the problem logically outlined. I often back myself into a corner working out a difficult problem and need a lifeline.

Any site with an instant search, similar to Google's, is sending a steady stream of your keystrokes to the server. Even the Omnibar inside of Chrome has to send your keystrokes over to receive suggestions that aren't local.

When I click a details link, it sends me to the Canadian Amazon link. Any way to fix that? Looks neat otherwise.

"According to psychologist Ron Friedman, the first three hours of your day are your most precious for maximized productivity."

This is tough for me, because I find that I am most productive during my last 3 hours of the typical 8-5 workday. I am a bit of a zombie in the morning and don't find myself really slipping into my groove until around 10-11am. Unfortunately government jobs do not offer a flexible schedule, so I have never been able to work when I feel I am most productive.

What does an alternative look like that does not eventually lead to another Facebook? I've seen decentralized platforms, platforms that do not sell your data or target you with ads - how are they sustainable?

I think what the author (and most of the piece in general) is implying is that because this is the way these interactions with technology occur, it is forcing us to be less focused overall.

I'm off of it and I could not be happier about the decision. Concerns about privacy aside, I realized how much time I was wasting scrolling through ads and news stories instead of photos and thoughts from friends and relatives. I didn't mind the Facebook of old where the content was mostly interesting to me, but today it is mostly full of ads, memes, fake news, and clickbait.

Same here. I feel like in the early days of the web, I was able to find this kind of content on forums specific to a particular topic. Now it seems like forums are on the way out in favor of social media or social sharing sites like Reddit where as you mentioned the SNR is out of whack. I miss the smaller more intimate communities.