neilobremski

I can't say I agree with this (besides how silly it reads). Outright avoidance as a periodic tact sounds like jarring panacea. One day I wake up in a flood of sensations and the next day I stick my head in the sand? Where is the adaptation, the learning, the evolution?

This is really what I'd suggest to the OP, not necessarily THESE services but SOME form of out-sourced support. You can add technical redundancy until the cows come home and some bug is still going to stop things, probably with the worst possible timing. Until they've figured out enough AI to solve this issue (which would be expensive anyway, I'm sure) then I suggest adding human redundancy.

Holy shit this is scary. I must have been living under a rock but I didn't realize that FULLY-AUTONOMOUS self-driving cars were even LEGAL yet.

> The self-driving car was fully autonomous at the time at the accident, though it had a human driver at the wheel. An internal camera caught the Uber worker looking down and away from the road moments before the accident, unaware of Herzberg’s presence before it was too late.

Uber worker ... employee? Were they doing a live test?

> ... the team at Uber Advanced Technologies Group has adopted critical program improvements to further prioritize safety ...

I certainly hope this means having their terminator vehicles on a closed track instead of out and about. What the hell does "prioritize" have to do with "common sense"? If you throw an unhandled exception ... STOP THE CAR

Big Tech paying/obeying Regulations is their version of Certifications. It costs them a bit of money but it also appears to the customers that they're "doing the right thing" (akin to buying integrity?). Unfortunately, while the ideals may be correct behind regulation, I don't think the results match the intent. Humans are too good at gaming things.

Also, the "regulators drawn from their ranks" phrase in this article is quite apt. We tend to think of companies and governments as distinct, exclusive entities when in fact they movement of people between them is fluid. I see that all the time even from my neck of the woods.

I'd enjoy a timelapse video of this with a timer at the bottom and an occasional pauses or slow-downs to show specific parts.

Fun stuff. My first thought is the time I was installing Windows 9x from floppies and one of thirty-something were bad...

Considering how much I fresh install things, I really had no idea that you could upgrade all the way from 1 to XP.

I agree that "this law is hurting the web" but I don't see how shifting that from the website to the application is going to solve the root issue. Prompts like these are annoying speed bumps that I have a hard time believing are in anyway effective -- paranoid people already deeply evaluate the software and services they use whereas the casual user is likely to just to "yah yah, get this out of my face" click it.

Man, I still drop this line as a bad joke into conversations sometimes. I remember it saying "That is incorrect" (it sounded so final!), "The correct spelling of <WORD> is ...". The way that it would say each word was always preceded by a slight pause and looking back now I'd imagine it was due to having to find the word data and load it. Back then I simply thought the damn thing was mocking me. I loved it. Mine had a flat face though, so it must have been a later model.

This is just lovely. I'm the lead of a company's data warehouse project, having inherited it from someone who was a DBA that read a book and then made the whole thing ...

I tend to joke that I'm a digital janitor and now I'm a big data janitor. Well, things are going well enough, but cleanup on a live system with users and zillions of reports is incredibly difficult. Part of the issue is isolation and size: too many have too much access to too much data. It's overwhelming and it also leads to a lot of high cost because queries aren't understood and they're run against massive datasets.

I've been educating myself as well as I can between fixing errors and this book is just the thing I need to calm my nerves. It totally makes sense how the stages are set and even just this blog post overview has given me ideas of how to carve some things up.

Kudos, cheers, and all that. Happy Halloween!

I need a zen curtain on the front of my phone, my television, my laptop screen ... heck I need some zen everywhere

This reminds me of another rising sentiment: "feeling disconnected while everything is connected". Perhaps a loss of ownership in all things also means trading in pieces of identity?

If everything is a service then is everyone a consumer?

I have never used Tcl but this headline truly intrigued me. It sounds like the antithesis of JavaScript's "everything is an object". An object is very abstract whereas a string is very ... literal? I know many generic operations I can already do with a string but then inspecting its contents (which would be a generic operation) may reveal other capabilities, restrictions, what have you. Hmm ...

This was fun but really short ... I must have missed the part where it explained the correlation between the color and the noise pattern. Why is it "pink" versus "chartreuse"?

Sometimes when I'm at the edge of sleep and a loud noise occurs, it may jolt me without immediately causing me to open my eyes. A pattern then appears in my vision that is invariably white on black (or seems to be) and usually looks like a splash. The title of this article led me to think there might be some discussion of that how a noise affects our visual/color receptors in the brain because there must be some overlapping wires in my head ...

I wonder how my younger self from twenty years ago would have responded to me now: I'd prefer to PAY money for software once rather than being suckled by subscriptions, annoyed by ads, frazzled by fingerprinting, or prickled by privacy problems. Give me a nice over-sized box to stick on my desk for fifty bucks and some clean, well-developed software.

Of course in the meantime Firefox and Brave are doing well enough. I still feel as though I'm being towed along and probably the browser makers feel similarly.

Software developers hate working for the pointed-haired boss too. Agile is just a name for a process which is a meta "tool" for a company to get its work done. We're always going to hate working in an environment where management doesn't understand what goes into the sausage and what's important to do now that won't cause problems later. And we can all agree that hard work and code quality are key but I will push to do THOSE under any methodology. If a company isn't doing them then maybe it's not the process -- maybe it's the company/culture.

This brings to mind the phone ringing in the middle of the night. You pick it up and add mumble into the receiver and the conversation begins. But no, now the phone rings in the middle of the night (assuming it isn't text / Slack / email / etc.) and you pick it up and then try to focus your eyes on the screen to figure out WHAT is happening and then HOW to answer. It seems the massive leap forward in the CAPABILITY of our phones has actually caused them to stumble backwards in PRACTICAL usability.

Inevitably the goal of a project like this is going to start the fiery debate around artist compensation, free content, and advertising in general. BUT this is a great way to really see (or rather hear) ML work.

It reminds me a little of some TiVo competitor back-in-the-day where you could hit a "skip commercials" button and it would try to get back to the show by some visual or audible change/gap. Since then, somehow we've lost interest in being able to skip commercials but I still remember fast-forwarding on my VCR and how it hurt that DVDs prevented even that.

This is solid progress on one side of the fence because you know the other side is working on new things too.

I think it's great that Apple is attempting to design an OS for a specific form-factor and the use cases that go along with that. I worked on Windows 8 and the idea of putting the same UI on every device regardless of its size or inputs was really abhorrent to me. (If I've got a keyboard and a mouse connected to a big screen then I want something keen to that.)

This makes sense to me and maybe I'm reading this wrong, but it explains why I can't find my keys when they're in my hand.

Whether or not you love/hate ORM, I think the advice at the very end is still applicable: "If you’re using an RDBMS, bite the bullet and learn SQL." This knowledge will help you write SQL if that's what you're doing or debug the SQL that the ORM writes for you. Either way ... learning SQL is a good thing!

It may sound strange but the focus of my interview questions is to encourage the candidate to express an OPINION which I hope becomes a STORY. To that end I'll ask questions that at a glance seem to be objective through a lens of sound bites on "best practices" but are really subjective. What is good code? What is good data? (And bad, of course.) Skills can be learned quickly to produce A result but experience gained over time will have wrought something more interesting.

What does a viable alternative look like?

I've been using Bing for the past few months; it's not great or terrible but is it "viable" enough for people to shift to over time? Or is it not viable because it's backed by a major corporation?

I'm sure there are search quirks with each engine but I've seen issues with Google too and yet it's the "devil we know" ... so people unconsciously work around them.

I started reading this link and this sentence popped out at me:

> It’s a phenomenon that’s been used to explain atrocities from the Holocaust to the Vietnam War’s My Lai massacre to the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

This sounds an awful like the sentence in the Lifespan of a Lie:

> It has been invoked to explain the massacre at My Lai during the Vietnam War, the Armenian genocide, and the horrors of the Holocaust.

We seem to be using a lot of these experiments to explain the same things ...

Do people really crave silence? I always seem to crave quiet over pure silence (where the hissing of my tinnitus can become too distracting). There's a hum and a rhythm to a busy room that doesn't need to be loud: the chatting at a coffee shop, the rattle of keyboards in the office, the laughter and splashes at the beach, or of course the sound of a rain storm in full swing. I crave the peace of those moments and the gentle lull of their sound waves.

I send tech books and articles to my Kindle for later reading but these often include HYPERLINKS that are easily / accidentally tapped when trying to turn the page. For that reason alone I miss the hardware buttons on the side. Were they that expensive to add?