alaskamiller

Operated with food delivery robots for two years in a major downtown city area. City councils were excited but they can't accommodate as much as school councils though.

Also fun fact, the robot companies are usually contracted and dealing with the food service providers to the college than to the college themselves.

Glad I'm not the only one

What's cool also is that this is from the West African tech scene.

I found a book teaching HTML at a library somewhere in 1995. It was in a visual format explaining what the markups do.

My favorite was the one that made words blink.

I typed things into Notepad, meticulously tabbing and aligning the little tags to make sure it's okay.

Next year I stumbled upon a Taiwanese website somehow, with a call to action for submissions to their design contest.

I made something and sent it. For some miracle I won. They called my jr. high school for it too for some reason and got confused when I answered thinking I was a student in a fancy college in the Americas.

For the award ceremony my mom had to go accept. She was on the way home grocery shopping and didn't understand what the Internet or World Wide Web was. They congratulated her with her shopping bags in hand.

What a wild 30 years to the whole world getting connected.

Microsoft grinds constantly and consistently though, sprinkled with some monopolistic tendencies now and then to clinch a win.

I think the grind from Windows CE to Windows Phone is just a blip to them for now.

That's Bing Copilot and it's still not that impressive, it's just search engine with Clippy then.

Google can't change for now, in doing so they undermine all the AdWords accounts, the real customers to Google, paying six figures to stay on top of SERPs.

But the other competitors can and will.

So it goes

In short: a chat bot is not AI.

Xbox, Surface. Holo didn't go far. May return back to mobile in some form soon.

Services, and their sales team, are still Microsoft's strong point.

Apple seeing its services grow and is leaning in on it now.

The question is whether Apple eats services faster than Microsoft eats into hardware.

Airbnb hosts do this.

An engineering friend of mine has documented and labeled every aspect of his vacation rental in Hawaii.

The only thing is, it's styled the same as the 1980s terminal systems he worked on down to the embossed black tape labels that gets attached to every switch, knob, and dial.

Treat your house like a black box.

You built Patreon, even that stock photos carousel you have above the fold is ripped from patreon.com but the rest of isn't even built out.

So yeah, you niched down to say creators and IRL tasks, tossed in some sense of community activism.

Well, this is an example of how it really is about ideas and not just execution to reach success.

This is a great idea. Who hadn't thought of some utopian altruism in the middle of a global crisis?

But it's not a good idea. Because you don't have the means to get traction because it's a two sided platform play that without critical mass will not lead to further utility. And because it's merely but a singular use case out of multiple for the larger entrenched competitor.

You need more usage to even build your way into success and you don't have usage because... while this is a great idea it's not a good idea.

But now we're here.

You want to know what to do?

1. Highlight user stories.

Find the most interesting one, make content, share. Segment on a morning infotainment news? Blog articles on guest writing platforms? Sappy robot voice TikTok videos? Reddit?

2. Quit and add this to your portfolio.

Your friends and families don't want to be spammed with this. Don't be weird about it.

Health insurance is a coupon code you subscribe and pay for every month.

Did Google culture in 2011/2012 then again in 2022/2023.

2011 was watching them recruit and hire everyone smart enough to sit around to just make stuff and eat each other's dogfood. There were posters for little experiments to try at the elevators or lobbies. Good times! Will we release this Dropbox clone or not? Should we drop this dorky AR glasses or not? Anything is possible in the quest to organize the world's information and free food!

2022 was watching the new cohorts come in and realize the game is now just throwing stuff against the wall, clinch an exec to back you, get to google scale, and get your bonus so you can finally buy a house in a post-G+ landscape. Oh, on top of that you're really just a pawn in a corrupt game of keepaway from the other companies.

Now everything scaled back, a lot of projects get scrutinized, then boom, someone else is taking Google R&D and productizing it better than Google PMs can and we don't know what to do anymore. But we still do leetcode, and if you pass then just press that space bar so you can buzz in during the standup to say all good, no updates.

This new silicon valley era is weird.

I know much more about this. You'll have more luck building relationships with VCs that focus on dual use military tech, with partners that have prior military service experience, or you'll need to find a consultant that knows how to get you into the SBIR process, knows how to look up grants, write for lots of grants, and apply for grants.

It's a small world, prior military experience gets you far since everyone would rather pull someone up like that, not necessarily just the tech.

The website reads fine, there's even three FAQs to answer your questions at the bottom of the page you referenced.

Job Corps is a training program for 16-24 year olds as an alternative or supplement to high school or college. Your first touch to this would typically be your high school guidance counselor. Your second touch might be your community college counselor. Your other pathway might be through your parole officer.

It's free. It's listed multiple times on the website.

They learn welding, manufacturing, automative tech, construction, hospitality, healthcare, and the best one is probably forestry. It's listed multiple places on the website.

How long is typically 1 to 3 year stints.

Job Corps centers are located in almost every major city in almost every state. It's a government program since the 1960's. There's an entire program finder on the website.

Started web dev five years prior but went through the same trajectory in the 00s. This is rather clever and reminds me of ajax. The a11y focus is great, definitely modernizes this. I don't think the script kiddies these days are going to appreciate this as much though.

This is the part of inflection where corporate personhood and GAI makes it so that no one will talk to your chatbot.

The magic sauce is the empathy part. Which is different than what was done back then in male-dominated, boomer-centric work places. It's equivalent of making a safe space before embarking on the rest of the standard design/dev processes.

How you feel about safe spaces will be analogous about how you feel of design thinking. A lot of consultants cashed in on this trend to sell all kinds of stupid things. That's also what he's talking about.

Now with new generation coming in, empathy is by default. Therefore, if you really think about it, design thinking is fizzling out because it's now the standard.

A realistic portrayal. Always amusing when I step into a conference room and the little cubbies or trays full of post it notes and sharpies and markers left behind telegraphs how the next few hours in talking with the stakeholders will go since it's clear now I'm here for the "how".

Then when I started leading the design thinking sessions all I can think of is how silly all this is. When we went remote during covid, introducing in virtual whiteboards like Miro and Figma, made the rituals and ceremonies more tolerable and more importantly actionable.

After all this time weaving through Stanford where this all went down, the corporate war rooms all over, settling down now, ultimately I think it just comes down to this: design thinking is really just empathetically solving problems rather than apathetically solving problems (as in working off requirement documents or best practices or protocols or just because you're told what to do).

All the little ceremonies and rituals is inclusivity of everyone to empathize and feel good about each other, and consider things from additional POVs. Which back then at the tail end of Gen-Y transition into the workforce was needed. Now you talk to the Gen-Z workforce about using empathy at work more and they'll just go: facts.

My non-English-speaking first-gen immigrant grandma that assembled rice cookers in factories back in her day figured slide down for notifications, right slide down for control panel, and slide up on day 4.

My mom didn’t ask about it until after the first year.

So to answer your question… maybe it doesn’t take to be the top 1% of something.

After twenty years of hearing the same thing over and over again I believe the actual fallacy is that ideas are a dime a dozen, good execution is hard.

Now I learned ideas and execution are minimum requirement, good execution is common, great execution is hard, good ideas are hard, great ideas aren’t worth it.

Starting with a good idea can save you plenty of opportunity cost, money and tears; but many can’t explain nor tell apart what a good idea really is.

Then you have the metaphorical sand trap of great ideas. Don’t get stuck in those.

And, finally, it doesn’t even matter if it’s good ideas nor good execution, if people don’t know your story nor are they willing to retell your story then none of this matters in the market.

I don't get it. On first boot my iCloud email is already setup, I add my other three email accounts (2 gmail, 1 self rolled). In the Mail compose window I have a dropdown that lets me choose any of the accounts to reply. I can also use Apple's new hide my email option.

Good memory, x.ai indeed was a calendar bot in place of a virtual assistant before chatbots were a thing.

No one was using Android phones in 2007. It was BlackBerry and Moto Q days.

Spatial computing as an idea is from early 2000s. It was in Wired and sci-fi pulp and something the graybeards would hobnob about. Sometimes it just takes 20 years for an idea to come to fruition.

Tested spacetop last year; it's not good for extended use. Glasses were dim, it's Chrome OS based so web apps for everything. You have infinite virtual desktop, readability is good, but ultimately it's just a consumption tool for reading and typing. But the cost is looking dorky.

Emphasis on progressive web apps in macOS is a good hint with the first wave of apps this will have. Similar to how iPhone first didn't allow for third party apps, this will take the first year to sort out all the HCI before allowing for app store uploads.

This is very much nReal but polished, and those goggles are dim and not as immersive as this. Magic Leap went with the wrong direction it turned out.

The pizzas are pre-assembled by a 6dof arm at a production facility, this is their value add as being equivalent of replacing the manual labor to finish a pizza similar to what Costco food court's been doing.

The pizzas are then par-baked in a van with built in ovens, then when given the order ticket the ovens then switch to baking mode after determining routing information.

The vision is that all these work smoothly and in tangent to give you the best tasting, cleanest, hottest pizza upon arrival.

The robot stuff is to hype them up to be futuristic and worthy of half a billion dollars instead of bunch of biz, tech, and ops folks hanging around a big empty warehouse in Sunnyvale configuring and reconfiguring lines, with a motor pool full of food trucks installed with heavy ass ovens with no where to go and a iPhone app using Onfleet API.

The last chatbot wave (when FB opened up Messenger API and when Microsoft slung SKYPE as a plausible bot platform and when Slack rebranded their app store) fizzled out after 18 months.

All to figure out the singular most important thing: chat interfaces are the worst.

A la Google wave circle sharing. I think the lesson from that war was that humans inherently are bad at pre-judging their own relationships. But now we're in the LLM era so I would hope it would be automated for me.

Another old timer Yahoo engineer showed me something like this at a cupertino coffee shop a few years back but with like half the features ready but the enthusiasm is there so I guess vcf sharing is a pretty deep idea. The headline, sub, and intro copy can do with simple jargons. The nfc cards/stickers are a good incremental add on. Good luck!