mathewsanders

I was one of the supporters for the first remarkable and pre-ordered with a bundle with case for $350 (I think) which seemed pretty expensive but I really wanted to support businesses developing these larger scale e-paper tablets.

The battery life was really bad in the first software versions but seems to be a lot better now.

I use it for recipes (I like to write my own version out even when working from a cookbook so that I can modify), UX sketches, and most recently I’ve joined a bookclub and has been great to highlight passages and write notes in the margin for discussion.

Overall it’s been useful, but the early bad experiences with battery life/power management really turned me away from more consistent use (after a couple meetings where it powered down and had to go back to my desk to grab a paper pad).

Would be curious to hear from anyone who got RM2 after RM1 and what their battery life difference has been!

Along with looking really cool, I think there were some other benefits as well.

Having a self contained case, and a pretty small size that can easily fit in your palm was pretty practical. We’d go on road trips and it was nice to be able to eject a cartridge and just put it on the dash or whatever.

Same as with a tape, making a recording was sort of time consuming because you couldn’t just drop files and burn to disk). Unlike a playlist that has infinite capacity, when recording to disk you had limited capacity so needed to make more careful editorial choices in your mix.

It was really nice giving or receiving a mix that a friend had taken the time to make :)

The article mentions the Portia jumping spider. Children of Time is a novel that explores descendants of Portia spiders who evolve to become a complex technological society and it’s a really enjoyable read :)

Do you know if the Lynn Conway talk was recorded and available online?

That surprises me as well! Particularly if it includes departments like ICE and FBI within that definition of policing.

I tried to search for the original source to see if I could find how they are calculating theses costs but didn’t have any luck.

I mention this because NYPD budget is often referenced as $6 billion, but that’s only operating costs, and the actual amount is closer to $11 billion (including fringe benefits like overtime and funding the NYPD pension).

With a 2020 GPD of $20,936 billion Then 0.8% of that is $167 billion

If we assume that policing costs are more closely tied to population rather than GDP we’d expect that NYPD costs to be about 2.5% of national amount. That’s approximately $4.2 billion.

But NYPD costs are $11 billion, which is 6.5% of estimated national policing costs (for 2.5% of the population).

Admittedly, I can imagine that there are reasons why a big city area might have higher than average costs, but 6.5% makes me feel that the 0.8% of GDP might be either underestimating how much US spends as part of GDP, or calculating national costs using different methods for different countries.

Stora Skuggan is a Swedish perfumer that has tried to recreate the scent. From their website:

> There were many attempts to cultivate Silphium, but they inevitably failed. It would only grow wild in a limited area of the north African coast. This, in combination with its qualities as seasoning and medicine made Silphium the most valuable spice in the world, outshining both saffron and cinnamon. The demand for Silphium eventually became so overwhelming that it was harvested to extinction, and the taste and smell of the once greatest spice in the world were lost in time.

> Our rendition of this historical plant is created by researching surviving assumed relatives of Silphium, using aromachemicals (the molecular building blocks of scents) to create an accord that we feel represents what descriptions remains. This is set against a background of ancient incense, woods and leather.

I only wear perfume maybe a few times a month, but when I do this is one of my favorite fragrances to wear because it’s not strongly masculine or feminine.

Here is a scent profile for anyone curious: https://www.basenotes.net/ID26151758.html

+1. I’ve not seen it for 10 years (since I’ve lived in the United States) but growing up in New Zealand, looking up at the Milky Way with your naked eye, it’s definitely clear the increased density of stars. Doesn’t look anything like photos, but very beautiful.

I worked at Monster.com (job posting service) ten years ago and this was essentially their business model: HR departments would be locked into a long term contract of 2-5 years, which was (anecdotally) a longer period than typical HR manager role who would approve a contract like this, so they would often not even be around for a renewal and whoever replaced them would be sucked into signing another long term contract.

I also used Altavista and Hotbot (although I don’t remember why I could choose one over the other for a certain search).

I do remember one point of difference was Google’s “I’m feeling lucky” option that just sent you to the first search result.

I really liked that feature, but I’m guessing was removed in favor of growing impressions and ad revenues.

It’s pretty cool that from the very first step that they are introducing how to use accessibility modifiers to improve support for voice over.

> My cats not only sleep through the night, they insist I go to bed on time (no later than 11) or they start getting upset.

My boy Dudley is the same. It’s so funny I’ll be in the living room watching TV and at a certain time he’s like “okay good night” and wanders off to the bedroom. He sleeps through the night, but will be up at dawn to watch the birds outside through the window.

“Agile teams that truly iterate with the customer can often avoid these problems because the customer is there the whole way through and the team continuously pivots to close gaps discovered by the customer throughout the project, thereby building something the customer actually needs and wants.”

I‘m 2 years into my first role as a product owner (made the switch from design) and working at a fortune 100. The thing that’s struck me most since starting this role is that as while the company has invested more to our transition to agile teams (hiring external agile transformation companies, everyone goes through scrum training etc) we seem to have distanced ourselves even further from the customer.

I report to a product manager, who I think in turn has had zero hours interacting directly with our customers or our users. Our roadmap seems completely driven based on whatever features seem to be flavor of the month (or quarter since we do roadmap planning quarterly) and it’s been a struggle to even try and get buy in to having our customers represented in some way by proxy (e.g. through personas, or setting product metrics that attempt to measure customer value). Features that we do release have no expectations around what is considered successful usage (usage will be measured, but without context, so if 5% of customers use a feature there’s no interpretation if this is really low, or really high).

The puzzling thing is that when I talk to my manager (or managers manager) about this disconnect, they seem to agree in principle, and that we should be doing these things but no one ever does.

I’ve been told that someone in leadership described me as being too “black and white” in this area, but I consider myself both pragmatic and flexible to alternative ideas.

Because I’m still new to this role, I wonder if I’m being naive or idealistic around how we approach our feature development, or if this is just how most companies operate.

There a few options for virtual cards. Ive been using https://privacy.com/.

I’ve been using this not only for subscriptions, but also when I’m making an online purchase at a store that I think may not have the best security in place.

> I ended up tokenizing Wikipedia for a blacklist and still missed a lot :(

That sounds like an impressive project in itself :)

Update: I fixed a mistake on how I was calculating R0 (I think it's correct now) and also adding some basic smoothing with moving average options.

With this approach the R0 estimations are always lagging, so the most recent estimate I have for NYC is for 4/4/2020 with an R0 hovering right around 1.0 - at that date growth was steady linear.

As new data on fatalities comes in, hopefully will see this decrease.

This uses data on confirmed deaths from NYC department of death in the included data.csv but you can easily switch that out to whatever region you have the data for.

Uses confirmed deaths, estimates for mortality rate and mean number of days from infection to death are used to estimate the cumulative number of deaths.

Then using the serial interval (estimated time between infections) uses the estimated number of cases to estimate the R0.

Finally, uses the most recent estimate for R0 to project forward to see how long it may take to reach a certain number of new infections.

I'm pretty sure I've messed up somewhere in my logic here because the results are really positive for NYC (too good to be true) so any feedback where might have gone wrong is appreciated!

I also got a firm IKEA foam mattress (MATRAND) a couple months ago and I was sleeping better from the first night, and a couple more nights and the knots in my shoulders were gone.

Also, at least in NYC it’s flat rate $50 for home delivery. I ordered on a Wednesday night and was delivered to me that Friday afternoon :) very happy with my cheap ikea mattress.

> Fast forward ten years and the Apple Watch team offered me a job working on SwiftUI in 2015. (The project started on the Watch team).

That’s an interesting nugget I’ve not heard before about history of SwiftUI!

I agree, and like the right click, force touch options were always accelerators for more confidant users (rather than being the only way to complete some task).

Personally I loved force touch and a few months on iOS 13 I’m still struggling with transition to long press gesture instead.

The problem with long press as an accelerator is that it’s triggered by a deliberate pause. It might just be a few hundred milliseconds but the perceived time is very frustrating.

I get the point of being able to measure success by something quantifiable, but the emphasis on individuals needing to prove the impact they’ve made strikes me as an odd setup.

I’ve never worked at a FAANG but currently at a F100 in fintech, and as the product manager for our team, part of my role is to make sure our team is doing work that has quantifiable value.

But for ICs on the team they’re not penalized if I make the wrong decisions and lead the team down a negative path (however part of my role in being successful is making our team goals transparent to all the team so they can help course correct if my thinking is way off).

I’d never heard of Hungarian notation, but searching for info I realize that I’ve seen this pattern so often but never knew it had a name :) TIL https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_notation

I think AR has potential to be the most impactful new type of technology, but I don’t have any idea if wide adoption is 1 year away, or 10 years away (or more).

At the moment most of the focus is around overlaying some virtual world in the real world, but I think that technologies like U1 chip being added to new Apple devices could be really interesting to allow objects in the physical world to better mesh with digital world.

Experimenting with live filters for Instagram could be an easy way to dip your toes into AR: https://sparkar.facebook.com/ar-studio/

A few years ago I was in a T-mobile store (making the switch from AT&T) and the sales guy kept trying to get me to include add-ons to my base contract (e.g. unlimited international calls).

He kept trying to convince me, and I kept saying “no I don’t want that”. At the (final?) step when reviewing the contract I saw he’d still included some of the add ons.

I asked him to remove them, and he started the spiel about why I should include them again.

This is the rudest I’ve ever been to a salesperson, but I didn’t even say goodbye: I just walked out, went home and ordered a sim online.

I’ve often wondered if he was just new/poorly trained or actually intentionally trying to trick me.

> They mapped how the neurons in the ADN circuit fired as the animal’s head changed direction. Together, these data points formed a cloud in the shape of a simple and persistent ring.

Am I the only one who moved my head around and imagined my network activating to stay in sync?

It would be fascinating to know what inputs this network is using to determine current position (inner ear? sight? feedback from next muscles?) and doubly interesting to see what associated networks this ring is feeding into (I assume among other things it will be considering inner ear and head position to help maintain balance while walking)

> Further analysis revealed that the ring acts an attractor. If neurons stray off trajectory, they are drawn back to it, quickly correcting the system.

I’m at least a decade behind in neural net research, but have we gotten any closer to replicating this sort of system where a neural net can self correct over time? My mental model of an artificial neural net is fixed input/output equation that doesn’t have a function over time.

The 40 year lifespan caught my eye because for a long time I’d always had this idea that in our near past old people were rare. I recently learnt that in historic context that it’s skewed by a lot of infant mortality.

So if you lived over 2 years old you were probably likely to live to be a lot older than 40.

I’ll try and find a source, but at the moment I can’t remember where I read this.

I’ve had to act on this consumer protection act (at least New Zealand’s equivalent which I think is very similar) when my MacBook trackpad stopped registering taps and Apple were very reluctant to follow their obligations as required by law.

It took a lot of handholding to even educate Apple about their legal obligations to consumers in New Zealand.

Eventually after threats of sending copies of letter to consumer protection office they agreed to pay for materials, but I had to pay for labour costs for the fix.

Legally, they were required to pay for everything but I gave in because the labor cost was pretty cheap (I think around $80).

I hope I wasn’t the only person here who thought of the egg man scene in Pink Flamingos when they read this :)

This recent article on the Atlantic is more interesting read: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/05/the-tro...

Covers both lack of evidence-based science in dentistry, and also culture (thankfully doesn’t seem to be the norm) of over treatment.

This article is such a mess. It’s talking about 1950’s 80’s and early 2000’s (with reference to “but 15 years on”) so is basically generalizing half a century in a few paragraphs.

Across all these periods of time large parts of Manhattan had relatively cheap property. Soho/Tribeca were probably favorite spaces for studios compared to other parts of Manhattan because they included non-residential buildings with huge open spaces with higher chance of natural light.

15 years ago the greatest density of NYC’s new artists were probably found in Williamsburg for some similar reasons, today they’ve been priced out and are probably more likely to be found in Bushwick. In 2035 they’ll probably be centered in some other neighbourhood.

What the author fails to mention is the enormous number of artists that died during the AIDS epidemic.

I know this is just fluff to provide something in between advertising of the NYT magazine, but this is exactly why I’ve cancelled my subscription. GAH!

Your math anecdote resonated with me, but with Chemistry instead. I was a Chemistry/CompSci major. I only did a Bachelors degree, but for Chemistry I never really had to study or memorize much because I could generally figure out just by imagining the structure of molecules and feeling how they might interact (this was for organic, materials science and inorganic chem wasn’t so intuitive).

Same with algorithms on data structures- I would imagine a toy data structure and play around with how algorithm would interact with it.

The compulsory first year Math papers on the other hand were impossibly hard to follow, even with a lecturer who happened to specialize in mathematics education I was always lost about 20 mins into a lecture and always struggling to catch up.

I don’t feel like I can picture things as clearly as some people describe in this thread, but it’s not a total blackout either. Something in between.