81 karma · joined April 28, 2016
The hard part is the former. Once you've done that the negotiation bit is trivial because you don't really need to care - you can just take it as a given that eventually you'll be paid more (unless you're taken ill and stop/slow down working).
I toyed with the idea of visualising travel time using colour heat maps.
London tube map https://tubermap.com/
(in the options you can turn on 'times').
I'd love to see the transit authorities themselves put together something that encompasses all the possible forms of transport. Metro/bus/cycle etc.
the only limit is yourself.
We've just gotten finished pushing out a new mobile interface update for our tube map and thought this would be a good opportunity to show it off!
We're using hammer.js for pinch zoom, html5 canvas to draw the map and a wodge of js for routing and drawing.
Best on desktop due to hover effect, though works very well on mobile now too (we hope!)
I made this as a test of what can be done locally in the browser without a backend, and because I was frustrated with certain things missing from traditional maps.
You can draw routes around the tube network, get time heatmaps from any station, use alternate maps, disable lines, etc.
It should work in latest Firefox and Chrome desktop, Chrome mobile, and hopefully Safari (though I couldn't test it myself yet). IE definitely doesn't work until I've had more time to play with it, it doesn't support maps/sets without polyfill...
I'd really appreciate screenshots from Safari if anyone feels particularly helpful :P
Thank you. For everything. I'm sure the rest of the community shares my opinion that you've contributed so much to the field.
For all that it matters, I wish you a pleasant departure.
If your company can only extract 50K per employee, and a home costs 500K in the region, then I don't think you have a legitimate business, and I don't think it should be surprising that people leave for pastures new.
I've spent far too long trying to improve companies' profitability to the point that they can actually afford to pay my mortgage - it's looking likely that I'll be lounging on 10 hours / week for the indefinite future.
Burn my youth so I can rent a fancy apartment? No thanks!
I'd love to buy a Zero (linked lower in the thread) if I had a safe place to store it or some good insurance (motorcycle theft is common in the UK).
WRT weather and other concerns - frankly, the time saved by riding a motorcycle in a congested city blows that out of the water, IMO. In conditions other than gridlock you can maintain an average speed ~50% higher than all other traffic.
I'd love to see electric bikes go mainstream because I think they address almost all of the concerns people have about cycling (sweaty, no good for the unfit/disabled, etc).
You can park 4-5 scooters in a car parking bay, tuck them away at the side of footpaths and in front of stores, if the roads became populated with them it'd possibly double or triple throughput for single riders.
I currently own a 125cc motorcycle and it's a godsend. Especially in the summer months it turns commuting into a joy, and reduces the time taken to perform errands by 5x over public transport (there are plenty of places I can ride to in 20 mins or take a combination of buses and trains to get to in 1.5 hours).
I think living in a large metro area for an extended period of time would be unbearable for me without owning a motorcycle. Most cities have radial transport networks - concentric journeys outside of the core have ridiculous routing as a result.
(I have done no verification of the contents here, merely added an 's' and checked that the download still works).
But the data retains its toxic qualities (of being a database of every action I take on the Internet and some in the real world).
I fire up the YouTube homepage and all of my recommendations are for UK daytime TV. Celebrities, 'Jeremy Kyle' (the UK Jerry Springer), etcetera.
YouTube sends me adverts for female hygiene products and dog food. (I am male and I own no dog.)
Even when I get advertising that's not selling me stuff that would require I buy something else first (sex change, dog) it's invariably for something vastly overpriced or some sort of megabrand.
Land, or at least a small garden or garage (in order of decreasing usefulness), is incredibly useful for woodworking, mechanical tinkering, painting large objects, basically any sort of real world craft that's not 'micro'.
My social life is less important than the ability for me to sit on that bit of land that's mine and do things that I want to do.
The urban equivalent of that seems to be going to find a specialist to do whatever you want doing. Basically, urban living is capitalism embodied - you can get some fantastic things done, better than you could ever do yourself, but you're trading for it. And you have to take part in the economy too.
In the UK glycerine is available in pharmacists for ~$2 per 200ml. https://www.boots.com/en/Value-Health-Glycerin-B-P-200ml_852...
The devices themselves can be bought from overseas - AliExpress has many variants, some for <$10.
At that stage, the 'safety of e-cigarettes' is equivalent to the safety of inhaling atomized glycerine. Stage smoke.
Flavourings - you can look for things which are used in aromatherapy (e.g. menthol crystals), but you'll probably want to study whether any chemical changes can occur under heating.
Pre-mixed nicotine is a difficult one. I don't use it so I'm not sure if you can acquire it from trustworthy sources.
I would not want to fall into the habit of using e-cigarettes produced by tobacco companies such as the 'vype' disposable (British American Tobacco). They have a history of producing methods to increase the addictive potential of cigarettes, ramping up nicotine levels, to cheating on tests, using ammonia to produce 'freebase' nicotine, etcetera. I wouldn't be surprised if the same bag of tricks comes out in the e-cigarette market.
I used to live in Zone1/2, and had 24 hour bus routes. So still ~an order of magnitude - 10GBP vs 1.50.
I'd forgotten about sharing with friends. Taxis certainly work out well there. Maybe that's it?
It's probably simply that I hate spending money! :)
For personal use, they're just so astonishingly expensive that it's difficult to justify them. As far as I can remember I've used Uber once, to get home after missing the last public transport, and I had to really consider whether it was worth just finding something to do for a few hours until the 5am train.
I live <1h from Central London via train. The fare for that is ~3GBP off peak or 5GBP peak. An Uber costs an order of magnitude more (~30-40GBP).
It would be an extremely notable expense in my budget - probably the largest single item.
I think I'd have to have a home paid off and a fairly high salary before a taxi became anything other than a frivolous luxury, to be honest.
(Business use is excepted here. I've used taxis plenty in my professional life. Uber as a platform doesn't seem focused on business travel, though.)
I think it's difficult to create an all encompassing post for that reason. It's a bit like trying to describe how any application protocol works - can you assume knowledge of TCP/IP? Do you just black-box it? etc.
My contact details are in my profile and I'm happy to lend a hand if you think that might be useful.
That seems to sidestep the issue neatly. As a passenger, security is not a discrete part of the process. I'm actually surprised that airlines haven't done more to make the security experience more streamlined.
I have bought and sold items from/to individuals using bitcoin, bought and sold bitcoin from exchanges, received them in donation for programs I have produced, and sent them in donation for programs/services others have produced/rendered.
The best argument I can come up with is that digital security simply isn't understood well enough for us to have solid evidence trails.
It's far too simple for an attacker (not necessarily law enforcement, a frustrated savvy neighbour is enough) to target someone and the consequences are so dire.
The War on Drugs criminalized the possession and transfer of physical objects, in the process providing convenient mechanisms by which to persecute undesirable individuals.
Laws against the transfer of information seem to provide the same loophole, but in a digital space. To me, that's far more worrisome.
I've often found myself wanting to read a reference book prior to purchase (technical books are extremely expensive to buy).
Do any of the universities offer subscriptions to members of the public?
In computing, we know quite well that a system's inputs and outputs don't have to be coupled as well as they seem.
I can produce a program '/bin/sha256sum' which drops the sha256sum of a file onto stdout, unless said file is a JPEG image depicting a Shiba Inu, in which case it puts 'such file'.
In computing this is really kind of an obvious result. If we have a debugger or a disassembler we might be able to find that behaviour without actually encountering it. But if it's a HTTP API, we really have no way of knowing what's going to happen.
We can gather lots of empirical evidence, but we have no reason to believe that 5M results or 25M results or 50M results increase our certainty that it 'always does X'. (Simply, it's not provable).
It seems to me to be tautological to say that 'reality may not be what it seems', in that sense, because we know that we cannot be certain that it even acts the same way at t=t and t=t+1.
Even if we found some sort of 'higher state' - if we found the source code to the program that actually runs all there is - what's above that? Turtles all the way down!
I found 'Return to the Cave' particularly interesting.
The prisoners, according to Socrates, would infer from the returning man's blindness that the journey out of the cave had harmed him and that they should not undertake a similar journey. Socrates concludes that the prisoners, if they were able, would therefore reach out and kill anyone who attempted to drag them out of the cave.
That's the sort of quote that inspires one to study philosophy. It illustrates perfectly the difficulty we have as humans in informing each other.