491 karma · joined May 3, 2012
Last year over 300 bills were introduced, and 29 were signed into law (still far too many).
https://www.hrc.org/press-releases/human-rights-campaign-wor...
https://www.aclu.org/news/lgbtq-rights/how-the-aclu-tracks-a...
When I was around 12 years old and friend and I were camping and staring up at the stars and a meteorite took a path very close above us. I remember hearing it (almost a crackling sound) and I swear even feeling a slight heat on my face momentarily.
And then we lost sight as it went below nearby tree line.
I’ve always been curious about how close it came to us. I guess it’s possible that my memory of noise and heat isn’t accurate and something I’ve imagined in the years since, but it was a very beautiful moment.
It astounds me how many companies I’ve witnessed that loose sight of this and end up building feature after feature without even knowing if it’s having a positive (or negative!) impact.
I really like this approach, but a challenge I’ve encountered is successfully trying to measure that outcome and attribute it to the changes (outputs) that your team is making- either because their might be some lead time between output and outcome, or because you’re in a large organization with so many other teams making changes that might also be impacting the outcome you’re aiming to achieve.
I always ignore spam text messages, but got a phishing attack message made to look like a USPS update about 2 months ago they almost fooled me because I had a legitimate package that was missing. I clicked the link, and even entered my email address in the landing page form and was about to enter credit card details for a $2 ‘redelivery’ charge - which I was also primed for because I’d recently paid USPS a similar amount to redirect my mail after moving.
I was creating a one-time use virtual card to make the payment when my thoughts caught up with me and I realized it wasn’t a legitimate page.
I wondered if it was some sort of expectation that when you ordered food at a restaurant that there was always excess you could take home in a ‘doggy bag’ which seems to be fairly common in the US but not typical in my experience in NZ or Australia.
I’ve definitely become accustomed to it and I can now eat that full American sized serving :(
Funnily enough, most of the time the cheeseburgers are smaller here in the US than NZ!
AirNZ is a Sabre customer, and their travel agents used it directly for years, but had such a steep learning curve that they built a wrapper for it - still a command line system, but divided the screen into quadrants to display different colors information, and some macros that automated some common tasks.
Despite the simplification, it still took 2 weeks full time training before agents could use it, and even then the first week was as a buddy system where you had someone helping you for a week (most of that time was learning the system, but also included time to learn all the three letter airport codes and other acronyms used for reservations).
Some old timers would switch down to Sabre for complicated tasks because it was faster than using the wrapper and it was amazing to watch them interact with the system.
One colleague I worked with had been with the airline for nearly 50 years and remembered pre-computer days where the ‘booking system’ was just a big shared blackboard.
> GDS systems, however, did not adapt with them.
Air New Zealand was one of the earliest airlines to experiment with different fare classes (premium economy, ‘saver’ fares with no baggage etc) and better tools (flexible date search), I remember being involved with RFQs with Sabre and competitors to enable a flexible date search of +/- 3 days the quotes coming back for sometime like 9 months of development for a crazy amount like $2M. Maybe doesn’t sound like much now, but back in 2000, revenue from online sales hadn’t yet even crossed $1M per year, so that single feature cost more than 2 years of online revenue.
This was the incentive for AirNZ to invest early in their own internal software development which was a very smart move- as it allowed us to experiment and give customers features that even our larger competitor (QANTAS) couldn’t match.
I’m so happy I got to experience all of that- definitely the highlight of my career to date.
One of my no-gos was going to weight room/area of the gym (I could tolerate cardio area) and one of the first homework activities things my therapist gave me was going to weight room and sitting for 5 mins to do some stretches. It was awful, but within a few months I slowly progressed to the point I was even confident enough to work with a personal trainer.
Slow but consistent incremental exposure to my triggers absolutely made a huge positive impact for me.
I think she’s savvy to be able to use it to her advantage, but I get the impression that if she could change her history she wouldn’t choose the path that she experienced.
When it aired I was a big fan of The Simple Life (and later Paris Hilton's My New BFF) so I guess you could say I was a fan.
In TSL so much focus was on the comedy of Paris and Nicole being put in ‘everyday’ situations, but what strikes me was how she treated every person she met with respect and (IMO) humility and without any sense of irony. Despite the persona, I think we saw a lot of who Paris is, which I think makes TSL unique in the genre of reality TV.
Or does this technique rely on having access to the original digital image, and too much information is lost over the analog gap?
I guess it comes from the fact that when we are speaking IRL we have more senses available to us, while in written form we have just that single channel.
Anecdotally, I often find myself reading and notice a word I feel is familiar, but wouldn’t be able to give a clear definition. Majority of the time I will just skip over it and continue reading. I guess there is a level of redundancy there. After moving to the United States I had a manager who would use the word “Pollyanna” at least once a week in conversation and look me over a year of that before I finally looked it up to see what they were meaning.
From a cognitive & neurological point of view it’s pretty interesting that we can learn such a large written word vocabulary with these words that have such a low frequency of occurrences.
I look around me, and there are hundreds (thousands!) of human-made objects around me, and many of the more complex objects are made of multiple simpler complements themselves (like the projector in the video) and each of these objects likely involved a large group in their initial invention and then even more in their mass production. The invention also relies on previous discoveries.
Every single made object is probably the cumulative effort of hundreds or thousands of people- and even the most simple made object likely has a network of technological advancements and associated people that would be too complex for any single person to comprehend or map.
I would love to watch a documentary of someone picking the most ‘boring’ or simple made object and try to uncover the people and technology required to make it- would be a fascinating watch!
The outlier I remember being when McDonalds started doing breakfast and they offered pancakes - I think I got them once when I had a super early flight at the airport and they were almost inedible- thin and rubbery! Easily the worst pancakes I’ve had in my life.
I’ve sometimes wondered what became of them all, were they able to recycle some of the materials, or are they in a bunch of landfills?
This was my first real job after graduating, and one of my roles was industry research and putting together a weekly newsletter of interesting technology to keep an eye on and when ITA released Matrix we loved it.
Long story short, we wanted to do a lot of things like this, but our airline (and most others) were not developing our own tech and instead using some technology from the major GDS companies (Amadeus, SABRE, Galileo). One project I was on was working to try and implement just a basic fuzzy date search (eg +/- 3 days of your preferred date) and our GDS was quoting us something like $3M and 12months to deliver.
Luckily we had an exec who understood business, technology, and design and got resources to build out internal technology team and we started building our own technology that freed us from some of the constraints of GDS to great success!
Instead it’s that you set targets in the various key results, normalize them to a 0-1 scale, and if you’ve achieved an average of 0.7 over all of the key results, then that would still be a measure of success.
Main idea is that human brain has two halves, abs consciousness arrived from auditory hallucinations formed in one half of the brain, and acted on by the other half.
I think one of the arguments here is how humans centuries ago heard voices of gods/angels etc. He argues that this was the bicameral mind in action. I think he has another linguistic analysis that argues that human consciousness emerged around the time the Iliad was composed.
If anyone is interested, this afterword where he covers some criticisms of his ideas is a good entry point: https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~drkelly/JaynesOriginsConsciousne...
> The Elves do not imitate nature, they let nature do its magic and try to help it as best as they can. Allowing nature to solve a problem is extremely effective and efficient. The only downside is that it usually takes a lot of time - precisely the thing that the immortals have plenty of.
https://www.nytimes.com/1976/07/10/archives/queen-warmly-rec...
Probably not related, but worth mentioning the coincidence just because it was such a good article https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/08/09/the-big-money-...
I’m with you and agree that it’s an unforeseen side effect.
I’d even take it a step further and suggest that along with being unexpected, that the majority of our leaders in the world are oblivious that this is even occurring since they are typically so far detached from most peoples lives.
Windows 95 must also be one of the better marketing campaigns for any software product.
As I was reading this I had flashbacks to their TV commercials showing the start menu and started humming “start me up” to myself :)
Can you do this with keyboard shortcuts or do you find yourself switching between keyboard and touch screen for some interactions?
I find this idea of using a keyboard super appealing but don’t like the idea of switching between keyboard and screen all the time. At least a virtual keyboard is on the screen!
I get that problems can have constant/linear/polynomial/exponential complexity to solve so I (think) I understand ‘P’.
Over at NP I get confused around what constitutes a test/validating that a solution is true in polynomial time.
For example, a problem, “what’s the shortest path between two points” I get that a brute force breadth-depth first algorithm is going to rapidly take longer as more branches are added, but what constitutes verifying the solution?
In that example does verifying a solution mean having access to some prior list of all possible permutations and sorting them to find the shortest path, and because sorting is easy then this is an example of easily verifying?
In my mind I’ve always categorized tech debt as being broader, and including pretty much anything that doesn’t have a direct benefit to our end users. So this can include things like moving our repos from Bitbucket to GitHub, updating a dependency that has a breaking change (e.g. migrating from one version of Bootstrap to another) or even something more significant like changing from a legacy authentication model to something more modern like OIDC. But I wonder if with this mental model I’ve taken it too far.
For some reason I’m better at getting triangles to form. I’m also the same as you- no migraines or anything that’d I’d consider a negative symptom.
The other optical-related illusion that someones happens with me is that if I’m focusing on something, occasionally everything else may ‘dim’ and that object will ‘feel’ subjectively closer/zoomed in, but a couple blinks and everything goes back to normal.
Edit: I’ll also add that I consider myself to have a terrible visual imagination. If I try and imagine a face (even my parents) I basically don’t get anything. If I concentrate very hard I can imagine something basic - like the wireframe of a cube - but requires a lot of effort to maintain.
A tip I stole from someone else (can’t remember who otherwise I’d credit) when asking a question in research interview is to stay silent until you’re feeling uncomfortable, and then count slowly another 3 seconds before asking a follow up prompt.
The majority of the time, people do have useful things to say if you are willing to give them the space to speak.
Seeing my home country (New Zealand) rank higher in how important religion is I’m wondering how people are interpreting religious.
I’m thinking of friends and family in NZ who (outside of some weddings or funerals) never go to church or (I assume) pray or have a strong personal spiritual life. But these same people would classify themselves as ‘Christians’ simply because they put up a Christmas tree each year.
The same applies to all my Jewish friends I can think of, except that maybe a dinner with friends on a religious day that is more a reason to socialize than for any religious purpose.