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jowiar

2,625 karma · joined April 25, 2011

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jowiar··on Apple (Pro) Mouse (2014)
Are you clicking with the pointing finger? Every time I see someone do that (which is common), it looks incredibly awkward — especially a click and drag.

Fingers for pointing and gestures, thumb for clicking. Use arm or fingers rather than wrist. I usually point with my middle finger, occasionally index, scroll with my middle and ring fingers.

jowiar··on Choose Boring Technology (2015)
I’ve found boring in this context to be a function of 3 things (in no particular order): - Your experience using the tool in question to solve this problem or very similar ones - Your teammates’ experience using the tool in question to solve this problem or very similar ones - The world’s experience using the tool in question to solve this problem or very similar ones

The specific drivers of this tend to be a mix of problem-solving pattern matching ie “Hey, we know what the usual suspects are know when things are slow/crash”, and ecosystem robustness — what is the probability of you being the first to trip a bug in a dependency / has a library been used to solve 10000 problems or just 3 — It’s more likely that APIs have been sorted out, bugs have been closed, etc. or that your team knows the quirks.

As an example, OCaml might be a relatively boring choice for writing a theorem prover, but for something like a RDBMS-backed web application, things are a lot more “interesting” as you go off the map much sooner.

jowiar··on Ignition: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants (1972) [pdf]
I spent years following Lowe for the Things he Won't Work With, but somewhere a few weeks ago I was made aware of his coverage of COVID drug development, which has been phenomenal (and is what he actually does work with).
jowiar··on Finland adds the demoscene as a UNESCO intangible world cultural heritage
I think the two places I'm seeing this right now are in the Processing/P5 community (https://editor.p5js.org), and interesting things built on top of Glitch.

Hydra is fascinating -- I sat down with it for a couple hours and was having lots of fun layering transformations on top of webcam input. https://github.com/ojack/hydra

jowiar··on “Mamma Desta” and Ethiopian food in the U.S
Within the US, of the cities I've lived in (NYC, DC, Philly, Pittsburgh, Chicago, SF), it's thoroughly mainstream in DC, and that's it. In NYC, Ethiopian Food is something I can get if I want it. In DC, everyone I knew ate Ethiopian food semi-regularly and many have their favorite hole in the wall that nobody else had been to.

At least per https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/beyond-regional-circ... -- the location of Ethiopian-Americans is: "If the descendants of Ethiopian-born migrants (the second generation and up) are included, the estimates range upwards of 460,000 in the United States (of which approximately 350,000 are in Washington, DC; 96,000 in Los Angeles; and 10,000 in New York)."

jowiar··on “Mamma Desta” and Ethiopian food in the U.S
Fried pizza is most certainly an authentic Italian thing -- it's street food in Napoli, and it's absolutely fantastic.
jowiar··on One Medical S-1
Their logistics are absolutely phenomenal. The general practitioners I attended before One Medical always was overcrowded, any appointment required sitting in a waiting room for an hour past the appointment time until I finally got in.

For One Medical, it’s super easy to stop by for a 10 minute “something isn’t quite right” appointment, last minute travel immunizations, etc, and, at least in NY, it’s likely there’s an office within 10 mins of where I’m going to be in the city that day.

I think a specific practitioner makes a lot more sense if you’re often sorting out several long-term issues and having a long-term affiliation with one specific practitioner is important, but if you’re a yuppie in generally good health where you’re mostly looking for annual physical, and fantastic availability for quick “I’m sick and may need a prescription” visits and std tests and such, One Medical is perfect.

jowiar··on You can't just rename your IT Ops team and call it DevOps
There's a big difference between people specializing and teams specializing. In every organization I've seen, when you take all of the individual specialists with the same skillset, put them on a team consisting of them (and only them), it ends up being an organizational disaster.

The organizational question is whether the ops folks are (physically/organizationally) colocated with developers on dev teams, or colocated with themselves on an overarching ops team.

jowiar··on The Road to Scala 3
Java, Ruby, and ML had a wild night that resulted in some massive scrambling of DNA.

The child was then adopted by Haskellites and raised in a fundamentalist commune.

jowiar··on Working all night is not 'a badge of pride'
FWIW, the resolution for me eventually came when I was able to get a nice feedback loop of breaking off what I thought was a day’s work at the beginning of the day, doing a day’s work, and either succeeding or taking the loss and rescoping for the next day. The sleep deprivation is a cycle from hell, where I can get something done, but it’s at a cost of the next 2 days of productivity, which causes more anxiety...
jowiar··on Working all night is not 'a badge of pride'
It took me over 10 years to overcome this. For the longest time, I needed fatigue to kick in to overwhelm the anxiety and enable productivity (albeit at nowhere near my potential).
jowiar··on Mapping San Francisco's Human Waste Challenge
I’ve lived in SF, NY, DC, and Chicago — all liberal cities. SF is the only city where human shit on the sidewalk is a common occurrence. It’s absolutely the problem it’s made out to be.
jowiar··on Buy Yourself a Latte
Capitalism coupled with a tax and social service regime that hasn’t been torn apart over the past half century, for one.

It’s not all or nothing, and all or nothing thinking by fanatics of “Jesus” and Capitalism has destroyed America.

jowiar··on Congestion Pricing: N.Y. Embraced It. Will Other Clogged Cities Follow?
I'm not sure who drives into Manhattan-below-60th, but AFAIK it's very Uber/Lyft/Taxi-heavy, so this will probably get rolled into fares. It will be interesting to see how that ends up being priced. If it prices more trips onto transit while funding transit improvements, it will be a nice quality of life improvement.
jowiar··on What It’s Like to Grow Up with More Money Than You’ll Ever Spend
It’s not about rich folks Scrooge McDucking it — it’s that if a rich person does a unit of work and a non-rich person does a unit of work, the rich person accumulates more wealth than the non-rich person as a result of the work. “Rich person work” is “decide how to allocate my capital”, which isn’t an option to many, but for those who have it as an option, it’s vastly more rewarding than actively making things.
jowiar··on What It’s Like to Grow Up with More Money Than You’ll Ever Spend
The problem with this mentality is feedback loops. If money flows to those who own things more easily/readily than those who do things, society will be heavily stratified despite any individual efforts to improve one’s lot.
jowiar··on Why Is It So Hard to Build Profitable Robot Companies?
I was at a talk recently where one of the main points was that doing pretty much anything with fabric is exceedingly difficult for robots.
jowiar··on Github restricts public Faceswap repo to logged-in users
The framework for regulation of these sorts of systems will almost certainly come down to “possession of data”.

You can build/host things anywhere, but something centered around “if you generate profits in the USA, and hold the data of Americans, these requirements exist for your system” makes sense. In particular, liability needs to rest somewhere, such that someone gives enough of a shit to do things right.

A civil engineering firm could outsource the design of a bridge anywhere, but in the end, somebody’s neck is on the line if it fails.

jowiar··on You Don't Need to Quit Your Job to Make
“Relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice of the invention to the employer’s business, or actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development of the employer” — for large enough employers, this encompasses a lot.
jowiar··on You Don't Need to Quit Your Job to Make
The one MAJOR caveat I have with this is that, depending on what you have signed with your employer, there’s a pretty good chance that your employer can claim ownership of what you’re doing. And it’s one thing if you’re making art or something in my spare time, but a side-business may well turn into working for free for your employer.
jowiar··on Amazon Pulls Out of Planned New York City Campus
In addition to the pushback against the tax incentives, the cancellation of the L-Pocalypse made a massive expansion in LIC less desireable.

LIC was a perfect location to recruit folks whose easy commutes from Brooklyn to Google were going to be complicated.

jowiar··on Facing opposition, Amazon reconsiders NY headquarters site, two officials say
For some cities 25k is a big deal. For NYC it’s rounding error.

NYC is big enough to have a healthy relationship with Amazon, and part of that is knowing is that you’re the seller, not the buyer.

jowiar··on Jabra: we know our Bluetooth headsets don’t work with laptops
Just googled a bit, and this seems to explain it: http://www.iphonehacks.com/2018/04/heres-why-your-airpods-or...

In short, it's the combination of no walls + lots of signal congestion. Times Square + Oculus both fit this mold.

jowiar··on Jabra: we know our Bluetooth headsets don’t work with laptops
My AirPods work fine in NYC, with the exception of one specific place: The Oculus. I would love to know why.
jowiar··on 50 Years Ago, the Sugar Industry Paid Scientists to Blame Fat (2016)
The general thing that's supposed to stop this is replication -- when an experiment is published, another researcher should be able to replicate the results.

Here's an example of researchers being caught doing exactly this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_contact_changes_minds

jowiar··on Job Promotion is a Trap
Along those lines, though, I’ve always found online dating to be rather fun when enjoying each date for what it is rather than putting any pressure on myself with long term expectations. Interviewing is a whole lot less stressful when you do it often enough at low enough stakes that you are used to the experience. It’s fun to learn how other companies interview, chat with some engineers, and maybe get a salary benchmark.

3x/year is a bit high, but I definitely think running through one full process/year is worthwhile/necessary.

jowiar··on React Kawaii – Cute React SVG Components
This landed in my twitter feed last week: https://twitter.com/kibblesmith/status/1076219616735780870

There's "frustrating", and then "are you fucking kidding me" with regards to cutesy copywriting.

jowiar··on Review: The June oven made me want a camera in every cooking device
It’s up there with using a bazooka to kill a fly, but the best toaster I’ve had is a benzomatic+Searzall. The intensely hot but non-penetrating heat adds a bit of crunch without drying the innards of the bread.
jowiar··on John Giannandrea named to Apple’s executive team
The issue is not personnel — it is data privacy/ethics. Apple has come down heavily on the side of “we aren’t going to do creepy shit with your data”. Google, Amazon, and FB can all pull ahead because they have no such scruples.
jowiar··on New York’s Wealthiest Cut Losses as Manhattan Real Estate Falters
It is an investment, in the sense that you are buying an asset that you may sell in the future. It just may not have a positive return, and you almost certainly want a reasonably diverse portfolio of investments (if a high percentage of your net worth is in one piece of real estate, you don't have a diversified portfolio).
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