alaithea

Not exactly. They can be and are often used for larger provisional purchases. For example, when we wanted to get Slack or any SaaS, it was put on a charge card so we could start using it quickly, but that would start the clock ticking on an official procurement, which entailed legal and security reviews, etc.

Have you worked for the federal government? Employees literally have to fill out forms and follow a strict process to buy anything when they don't have these charge cards.

That sounds like more of a failure of management than of the employee charge card system. They should be screening those charges and periodically reviewing contracts anyway.

Many government offices had no free coffee already. This was the case in the mid-teens at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, which houses the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), where the federal CTO and CIO sit, and the National Security Council, just to name a couple.

Government workers were already making do with a lot less than is generally accepted in the private sector, especially after the GSA conference scandal of somewhat over a decade ago.[1] During my time as a federal employee, many government offices had no soap at the kitchenettes, and some had no coffee. Folks tended to bring in their own drip-coffee pots for the office.

[1]: https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2012/04/03/14993...

Sure, but it also has some correlation to body size. Larger animals generally live longer.

Dumbest change ever. The employee charge cards are there to get rid of red tape. Now workers will have to spend $100 of their time filling out forms to buy $50 worth of office supplies.

Dog aging is irrelevant. It's well-documented that dogs have a faster biological aging process due at least in part to the telomere caps on chromosomes which protect the DNA. Dogs lose these caps at a rate around ten times the human rate.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221112471...

A lot of folks have already given you good advice.

One other thing I'd recommend is to really work on making your impact seen. When you see something that could be improved, start measuring it, even before you try to improve it. Write everything down. Document processes even when they're (or perhaps because they're) not ideal. Then try and connect these things with metrics your leaders care about. All these things will make your work visible and valuable to the business.

> there not many books about failures! Any great recommendations?

The Logic of Failure is a fantastic book about failures, including some famous examples of failure (e.g. Chernobyl).

https://www.amazon.com/Logic-Failure-Recognizing-Avoiding-Si...

This makes me think of how my dog reacts very quickly, of course, for hard-wired "dog" behavior things, but when I use human language and gestures to communicate something to him, such as "go find Daddy", I can figuratively see a loading spinner over his head for several seconds, until the recognition comes and he responds. I don't know what's going on in that head, but it definitely appears to be "rummaging" from the outside. Probably similar to how we feel when conversing in a foreign language we're not fluent in.

Can someone explain what we're looking at here?

This is great. I started creating something like this almost twenty years ago, but didn't finish. You're living my dream. :) Kudos to you!

It's in the Wikipedia article. It was a device he invented to help himself get out of bed after having been disabled by polio.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.

What are the chances that this will reduce the seeming push, from every VC and Wall Street, for companies to have everyone in the world on a monthly payment plan? I would love to see that trend end. Most people cannot afford to have a monthly subscription with every company they interact with.

It's already back up.

But the article says it was published in 2023.

Site's back up. Good info, but I felt nauseous by the end of the article.

This was interesting:

> Perhaps the most disconcerting feature of the zaps is the jumpy lateral eye movements. “People actually hear their eyes move when they move their eyes from left to right. They almost feel a faint ‘whoosh’ sound in their heads,” Papp explained. “Sometimes, people feel as if the brain stops for a moment and reboots like a computer.”

I wouldn't say I could hear my eyes moving (!), but I definitely noticed that eye movements or a turn of the head could trigger a brain zap. That was one of the most disabling things, as it eventually led to a feeling of restricted freedom of movement and exploration.

Thanks, my doc knows about it, but I get the feeling they don't know anything about it. I'll keep that in mind.

Would love to read this, but the site is down.

I weaned myself off of Sertraline and pursued OTC options just because the brain zaps and the yawns/drowsiness were so bad. Didn't matter what time of day I took it, didn't matter that the dosage was low. The brain zaps made me lose trust in my own faculties. These momentary, split-second losses of consciousness, where after each one, I'd have to spend another split-second reorienting myself to the environment, got way too disorienting. It also got worse the longer I was on it.

Finally weaned myself off and use SAM-e instead. No perceivable side-effects there. For anyone who doesn't know, SAM-e is an OTC supplement in the U.S. but the same chemical compound as one of the front-line antidepressants in Europe.

Truth. Sometimes the modern dance movements don’t even have names; it’s a wiggle in this direction or that, so you’re using either photo- or kinesthetic memory to mimic and remember if you’re able.

Sure. There’s a Wikipedia page on Chunking.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunking_(psychology)

Arrhythmia and trouble doing sequenced moves… that’s interesting. I can’t quite make the connection but wouldn’t be surprised if there is one. On the flip side, I’ve actually used rhythm to help me memorize things at times, e.g. saying multiplication tables like they’re a poem or a chant. My kid just picked this up from me and started doing it on her own and it seemed to accelerate her learning.

I've danced extensively, and tap can be brutal for the sheer number of steps you need to remember. Other dance disciplines, like ballet, tend to chunk sets of smaller movements into a larger, named one, so once you learn those sequences, it's easy to learn and recall longer routines. The way ballet is put together aligns with advice from brain science about chunking objects in memory for better recall. But tap has few of those chunked sequences, other than the "time step," so you're left trying to parse long strings of very finite instructions. "Left ball right heel left flap ball change..." Personally I found it overwhelming and didn't pursue tap into the most advanced levels for that reason.

Aside: it seemed like neurotypical folks struggled less with tap than I did as an AuDHD person, so tap may land differently with different neurotypes.

tl;dr Australia moves north by about the speed your hair and fingernails grow.

I would love to know if the creator has plans to use different note forms. Sometimes reading only whole notes has a similar effect to reading all caps lettering... There's less signal coming from the overall shape. The direction of the stem on e.g. a quarter note provides some signal as to where on the staff the note is.

Otherwise this is pretty great! It's akin to something I've wanted to build for years. As a sight-reader akin to the linked video in another thread and former piano teacher, I used to dream of sharing my methods through technology. Nice to see somebody else is doing it.

Was bothered by that myself, but found that going fullscreen gets rid of the hide keyboard button, making the experience much better on mobile.

I was surprised at how well it worked when I tried it again recently after a hiatus. Now I just wish they would get Docker-based environments working.

An honest answer to that question requires the employee having a high degree of trust in the team lead. If they won't answer, the lead can't fix it, and the employee may feel more stressed by having to gloss over their feelings. That said, it's a great question to be asking if the trust is established first.

If you didn't read all the way down, this was one of the coolest parts:

> Here's an amazing fact: The discoverer, Gennady Borisov, is an amateur astronomer who works as an engineer at the Sternberg Astronomical Institute. He makes his own telescopes to hunt for comets and has discovered seven of them along with several NEOs. He recently completed a new 0.65-meter telescope, the instrument he used to discover the new object.

What you are calling an "educated guess" is basically the definition of insider trading.

> On Friday, August 25, 2017, Ying texted a co-worker that the breach they were working on “sounds bad. We may be the one breached.” The following Monday, Ying conducted web searches on the impact of Experian's 2015 data breach on its stock price. Later that morning, Ying exercised all of his stock options[.]