479 karma · joined August 20, 2010
Co-founder of Pingm/PhoneSys (S11)
Built Airbnb's telecom infrastructure (Kamailio + FreeSWITCH)
https://github.com/ddol
Surely what matters is the architecture:
> The Waymo Driver evaluates the input from fleet response and independently remains in control of driving.
Waymo tell us that fleet response agents can only provide waypoint suggestions, they don't have steer-by-wire remote control of the vehicle.
> The Waymo Driver evaluates the input from fleet response and independently remains in control of driving.
I feel it’s similar to having learnt Photoshop (7) and then struggle to use GIMP. I keep looking for tools that aren’t there, expect panels to show certain details and they come up short.
It reinforces for me how valuable usability and interface design is for power user tools. But also, how important training materials are, and how loyal a user will be once they are accustomed to completing a workflow with their tool of choice.
We tried Hive when my eldest was 6 and it was beyond them. We tried it again a few years later at 8 and it clicked, has been part of our regular rotation of games since.
The following are much better perfect information games for kids. I play each with my kids and have listed the age when they were able to strategise 2+ moves ahead:
- Gobblet Gobblers (4)
- Onitama (6)
- Hive (8)
Those boxes have been phased out in favour of “Personal People Meters”[0], which are basically a pager with a SIM card that you wear which has a microphone listening 24/7 for TV broadcasts. You must keep it on you, listening at all times.
Nielsen will pay you $250/year (less than a dollar a day) for the data you provide.
[0] at least, they really should. kids need to socialise with others their age
My father-in-law was an engineer in the navy and loved seeing the morse & radio equipment.
But the trip was fun for all the family; the driveway up to the reviving station building is lined with Monterey cypress trees, which have grown into a tunnel. [0] It’s a beautiful scene, my wife and mother-in-law were really taken aback.
[0] https://www.nps.gov/places/point-reyes-cypress-tree-tunnel.h...
Spintronics also helped give me a new perspective on electrical current, current division and capacitance. Seeing and feeling resistance in the chain, how little/no load results in high current (chain link throughput) was more valuable than the “water in a hosepipe” analogies I learnt in my University EE classes. Really looking forward to induction in the expansion set.
I was curious about the company, and discovered that the co-founders are a husband and wife couple who were in engineering and education respectively before starting the company. I’m glad to see they are able to operate profitably without listing on Amazon, and hope they continue to release more excellent educational engineering toys that I can explore with my kids.
* David Bowie - _The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars_ (1972)
* The Who - _Quadrophenia_ (1973)
* Pink Floyd - _The Dark Side of the Moon_ (1973)
* The Streets - _A Grand Don't Come for Free_ (2004)
It has one of the biggest Budget to Box office multiples I know of: ~120x ($7k -> $841k)
They bought the most promising AI startup in the world for $650m and failed to integrate it or make use of it until ChatGPT was released.
That was DeepMind, nine years ago.
There was no sales bell, but there was an outage gong. Any time we had an outage affecting the “Book It” flow and revenue stopped flowing that gong rang out. Hearing the gong meant engineers would abruptly leave meetings or lunch to come help fix the issue.
As we scaled and hit the limits of various systems we had periods where the gong rang out semi-regularly (a few times per month). These were hard times for engineers.
Soon, engineering started to push back on Product requests, took the time to re-architect and build better systems, and calm was achieved. Months went by without hearing the gong ring out, then years passed. People joined the company and got promoted, never having heard it ring. Until one day in 2018.
I was working near a pod of project managers, and I hear the gong. Like Pavlov’s dog, it triggers an immediate wave of anxiety in me: something is very wrong. But my blissfully unaware PM colleagues have no idea, it’s the first time they’ve ever heard the gong.
One lady looks up from her laptop and asks: “oooh, did the Food team make cookies?”
I suspect it will be some time before we can get insurance policys for privately owned autonomous vehicles. If Google own the car and wrote the AI software then there’s only one party who is ultimately responsible should a collision occour. This is more complicated if you privately own an autonomous vehicle which is in an accident. Does the AI share culpability with the owner? How will insurance claims work?
Tesla requires users “maintain control and responsibility for your vehicle” while autopilot is on, and it feels like that is a CYA hedge should autopilot fail (“see, we told them to stay in control”).
Time to find a new vendor, as your continued usage of their unsecured services is now a liability.
> Even though Mr. Whistler was perfectly aware that his mother was a hideous old bat who looked like she had a cactus lodged up her backside he stuck wither her and even took the time to paint this amazing picture of her.
I’d like to see that trial.
If I look at a photo of Prince and then using that image as reference create a new silkscreen painting is that fair use or infringement?
Because the US Supreme Court has ruled that instance I referenced was infringement as both images were used for magazine covers [0].
I was born in Ireland, my wife was born in the US. We had our eldest son in San Francisco a few years ago (he’s in elementary school). My wife gave birth at UCSF, a world class hospital in a liberal city, in the land of personal freedom.
We did not want our son circumcised but hospital staff couldn’t seem to comprehend this. Six separate people attempted to schedule a circumcision, one saying (condescendingly) “well, you know it is safer that we do it now than you waiting for later”. One person asked us twice, the second time asking if we had changed our mind.
Either they were on some kind of commission for extra services, or they genuinely couldn’t grok that we didn’t want our son cut. It was a very strange experience.
My title at Airbnb was “Data Engineer” in 2016, then “Software Engineer - Data” 2016-2019, then just “Software Engineer” 2019-2023.
When I joined the DE team we were not in the Engineering Org, our manager reported to the head of Analytics (Chief Data Scientist). The DE perf cycle, job levels and comp were all tied to the Analytics Org levels. There was a Data Infra team (DI) under Engineering > Infrastructure who managed Presto, HBase, HIVE, &c. but didn’t touch pipelines, that was DE’s job.
Most of the DE’s owned more than pipelines though, many of us also wrote and owned services. Max on our team built Airflow and Caravel/Panoramix/Superset during hackathons, Johnathan built our Data Quality tool, Amit built the Minerva semantic metrics layer (which Nick, James and Paul spun out as Transform), Aaron built our Anomaly Detection platform, John built Dataportal, I built our Customer Support Roster service and a Kafka indexing service.
Our manager was awesome. She saw that we were undervalued in Analytics and lobbied successfully to move the team to the Engineering Infrastructure org. We were all retitled in Workday, our perf structure changed to align with the rest of Engineering, as did our levels.
DE living as a whole org team under Infra lasted less than a year before we were split up and distributed into the respective product teams we supported, as Software Engineers with a focus on building & maintaining pipelines, schemas, logging libraries… and the existing tools we had built. The intention was to be embedded into the product teams (Homes, Trips, Support Tools, &c.), skill up these teammates and share the oncall load. In reality what happened was that (at least) 3 DE teams then grew in the various product orgs.
> Plexiglass vs. Plexiglas®: Acrylic Sheeting Facts
> These two terms are pronounced the same, spelled almost identically, and can be compared to the relationship of tissue and Kleenex. These are known as proprietary eponyms, meaning a trade name has become the generic name for a product or service. Sometimes these are referred to as generic trademarks. What makes it particularly difficult to know the difference between plexiglass and Plexiglas® is the small variation in spelling. The difference in one letter stumps many people. Plexiglass with two s’s is the generic term synonymous with acrylic sheet. Plexiglas® with one s is the brand name. Other trade names that have become comparable to Plexiglas® include Acrylite®, Lucite®, and Perspex®.
[0] https://www.acplasticsinc.com/informationcenter/r/plexiglass...