rmellow

"documentary" is an interesting way to describe the plot of Idiocracy (2006)...

Ontario uses exactly this system in it's standard rental agreement contracts.

It's more spread out than Vancouver, and might be a nuisance if you live in the downtown core.

You're not gonna personally get yelled at/followed every week, but confrontations are not rare. I know several people including myself who have experienced it a few times.

There's a huge, poorly addressed mental health issue in Ontario, and downtown Toronto concentrates a lot of that.

Tangent: Coming from a third world country, homelessness in North America has a huge contrast with South America: my own anecdata is that mental health issues among the homeless are more common in NA and they're very irate and confrontational. I often wonder why there's such a contrast.

Reading on a fully featured tablet with a browser, apps, notifications vs reading on a special purpose device is a world of difference when it comes to attention for me.

I also have the 85h and I managed to find an unofficial solution:

The Jabra Link 370 usb dongle. The headphones will then pair with the Jabra software on PC.

That said, I haven't had issues pairing the 85h with a MacBook Pro without the dongle.

And finally, it's ridiculous that Jabra doesn't support this or any other solution.

I'm curious, what do you think is a better community nowadays?

> Today, on the other hand, a lot ... of people in CS are probably there because they heard that it's a field where you can make a lot of money... They don't necessarily derive any intrinsic enjoyment from ... technical excellence.

This hits the nail on the head.

How do I cope? I'm very particular about the team I work with. You can't choose everyone you work with of course, but to some extent, you can.

I've interviewed at FAANGs where the interviewers were clearly dead inside and don't give a damn about what they build, and are either coasting or optimizing for promotions/resume.

I look passion in my prospective colleagues attitude towards work, which I find to be a good predictor for whether I'll enjoy the environment. My anecdata suggests this also works towards better product success on average.

Exactly. Thanks for the simpler example.

If it becomes a market standard (due to ancillary revenues, reselling user data, etc), then the only choice consumers will have left are: (a) TV with ads or (b) no TV. "Voting with your wallet" has so many failure cases.

"That would never happen!"

Try buying a new car without touchscreen controls or software that controls the engine. It's still possible, but harder every year.

There is definitely a portion of the market that wants physical knobs, but one-size-fits-all is cheaper to make. Still, this seems like user segmentation that could present a commercial advantage, so I can't really explain this trend.

Related: Physical button on an Audi exists solely to upsell you on a software feature: https://www.thedrive.com/news/44967/audi-owner-finds-basic-h...

Welcome to the future.

> at the time the science suggested that was the best path.

Science is not a monolith. I can find a hundred distinguished scientists who disagree with that statement.

... that is an especially controversial statement for anyone who remembers how (1) SARS was airborne and (2) masks did help, contrary to the public position of the WHO/CDC.

This cognitive bias is something that is really ingrained in the population by pop-sci media, usually ones that start with "Scientists now say that ____". Technically it's correct that "(some) scientists say that ____" but laypersons can easily misunderstand that "(all) scientists say that ____".

Yes, legally YouTube is in the right.

Morally, society needs to solve the problem of the private platforms that are quasi-utility services.

Can you imagine when/if your power company, water distributor decides to cut you off because you disagree with the official record?

I find it very curious that the phrase "None of this matters!" can be simultaneously depressing and liberating, depending on who is reading.

Understanding can't just be transmitted through words, and requires introspection. Congratulations on your epiphany!

I optimize life for happiness. I try shape my life to enjoy the process like you said: good work-life balance, doing something that challenges me just enough on average, that I enjoy, with people I enjoy.

I try to bring that to my teammates and actively contribute to a culture of zest for our profession at my job. Why? You're happier when surrounded by happy people. If you're surrounded by people doing the same, it's less likely for culture to change in a negative way.

I mentor teammates and grad students. Helping others grow makes me happy, and especially during the pandemic it's been a good way to stay connected to others.

There will always be rough moments, but there's no happiness without pain. It requires constant maintenance: keep yourself healthy, your mind stimulated, your body exercised, your social skills challenged. Make time to also stop and enjoy doing nothing.

A bartender could spike it and you'd be none the wiser. Always keeping your drink close and under your eyes doesn't always work.

Let's not forget the value of a reputation system. Both parties have an incentive to be reasonable & avoid getting kicked out of the platform.

Yeah, it's not perfect, and some bad actors abuse the rating system: "the driver wants me to wear a mask? I'll report him for unsafe driving" was one that I heard before.

But ultimately, knowing there's a record of whose car I went into makes me feel safer than riding with an unvetted driver that no one else knows I'm with.

In scientific circles they usually are:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_regression#Assumptions

Poor people can absolutely be corruptors:

Lets look at getting a driver's license in Brazil. It's widely known you can pay to pass your test, and driving instructors near ubiquitously act as middlemen. I know many people who have admitted to paying. They are not rich.

There are many stories I've heard over the years of minor corruptions like this. Paying off cops to ignore irregular documentation, paying off an official to get ahead in line ... this is absolutely beyond rich vs poor.

Making assumptions & cutting down on scope are immensely powerful tools. There is a tendency among engineers to create systems that are universal and work in all sorts of environments, when in fact, this is not what is absolutely immediately needed, or is closer to a "nice to have".

A widespread example of this is linear regression analysis. Mathematically, it only works because we make assumptions about the data (and even these can be relaxed) & limiting the scope of the problems it can solve.

This also applies to delivering projects. A fully engineered & robust project could possibly require a great deal of human, physical resources and time. But if we start iterating over a list of problems your system solves (sorted by decreasing value), the project suddenly costs only a fraction of what it would otherwise.

This doesn't come for free though: your MUST understand the limitations & assumptions of your systems, otherwise you or someone will pay dearly. Look at Zillow & failure to understand its forecasting system. Look at so many other startups applying ML where it has no place.

Zillow's failure is the best case (though catastrophic): the principal paid the cost. But take something like Google, applying a fully automated system to make decisions about banning accounts. These are real world decisions that have a huge effect on people & businesses. In this case, Google saves money on providing human support & offsets the costs to third parties who often can't afford it.

1. Get an Android TV device. This is not actually a TV, but a device that connects to your TV via HDMI. Prices vary, but it's not expensive.

2. Install SmartTubeNext on the Android TV. Now you have something better than YouTube Premium: This app supports SponsorBlock, which not only gets rid of YT ads, it also skips filler segments, self-promotion segments and sponsor segments.

3. You can also install a SponsorBlock browser extension.

Both of these are Open Source Software.

My partner bought some clothing in Brazil and wanted to exchange it at the store for something else. Unfortunately she lost the receipt, and the alternative which is providing your SSN is not available to her (not a citizen). The exchange was denied.

We walked into another store location. They were sympathetic to the foreigner situation, and made an exception.

Takeaway: Computers can't see that a process is flawed and go outside it when it makes sense to do so. Computers also can't provide feedback to the company that the process is flawed.

Aside:

Brazilian bureaucracies, even commercial ones are extremely unfriendly to non-brazilians:

- Poor bilingual support (EN or ES).

- Expectation of a SSN for all customers (this included booking pre-flight Covid tests).

- In many situations a foreign credit card will not work for online purchases (SSN & brazilian zip code will be checked against your card). Fry's "shut up and take my money" meme was extremely relevant here, as many times I wanted to make a purchase, but it wasn't possible to do so.

You might as well say it's not worth interviewing anyone who didn't graduate from an Ivy League school, "heuristically speaking".

Innovation can come from anywhere. Either we can take time to evaluate something on its merits (if you have the competency and resources), or leave it be (if you don't), or we accept to be told what is true by institutions with their own interests, who will use their position to further leverage them. And in this path, knowledge is no longer free.

I will read further, but this paper is attacking a real issue with neural nets.

You should write a blog post about this. I'd definitely read it.

There are private clinics one can become a member of, but this is extremely uncommon and most people don't know it's an option.

Costs upwards of $3,000 annually.

In the US I presume?

Canadians have a harder time...

In Canada/Ontario, you have to convince your doctor to give you a cholesterol test, e.g. family history. It won't be done preventively [1].

Even if you manage to get tested, if you're under 40 the doctor won't care and there will be no followup.

[1] https://exechealth.ca/ontario-drops-annual-physicals/

> We pay most doctors and hospitals based on patient outcomes, not fee-for-service.

Wouldn't doctors be incentivized by this fee structure to walk away from difficult cases, where a treatment is risky but is the last hope for the patient, if they won't be paid for the likely bad outcome?

@iratewizard It's mostly due to insurance fraud and extreme weather, allegedly: https://www.ahainsurance.ca/car-insurance/rates-ontario-high...

For the uninitiated: Auto insurance in Ontario frequently costs more than the car lease itself. At the low end, it costs CAD 250/month, more if you're a male driver with few years of experience (or an immigrant with many years of experience abroad that don't count).

This is not a reliable dataset.

Yes, with a 50k salary, after renting a tiny apartment in Toronto, they would be left with just over $1200. Which is pretty much just enough to feed yourself.

This has very little data, to the point it's unreliable.

"Data Scientists in the USA" gives: No data available.

"Data Scientists in Canada" has:

- Sample size = 1

- Not in a major city (Saskatoon)

- That single data point is not representative either, it's on the very low end of the distribution.

This calculator is doing Canadian data scientists a disservice by misinforming companies on salary ranges.

It's not the only one that publishes lowball estimates for Data Scientists either, Glassdoor does the same, and I suspect others do as well. My personal guess at what happens is that at higher ranges, individuals are not willing to publish their data.

If you need to estimate salaries for Canadian Data Scientists, Levels.fyi has much more sensible data (and a larger sample): https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Data-Scientist/Canada/

nope, JIRA still works for me unfortunately.

At the height of a loneliness epidemic, it's hard to get a personality and talk to people.

Don't get me wrong, your conclusion is spot on. Getting there is the hard part.

Another factor is we live in a period in time where we have so much choice on how to spend our time, products that are personalized to each of our own tastes, that creates sparsity of shared experiences.

No longer is there a movie like Star Wars, that you could throw a stick and find someone who shares that experience. Now unless you're suckling from the teat of mainstream media, you need to go out of your way to find someone who shares your taste in film, music, art, games and ideas.

I'm honestly surprised there hasn't been an experiment adding a social component to Netflix.

> they are just not very security minded (or knowledgeable)

I argue that they are definitely knowledgeable and capable of security. The nuance is they care about their own security, not the users'.

Case in point: Their MacOS installer abuses the pre-installation step to fake a System prompt to obtain root, very much like malware. Before you actually click install, it's already done [1].

In this case it was merely a shortcut to reduce the number of clicks to install, but it clearly betrays their disregard for user control & security.

[1] https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/zoom-mac-one-click-i...

* SEO Bonus: I couldn't find this article on Google no matter what I queried for. But DuckDuckGo found it on my first attempt.

Guess abusing SEO to hide negative press is among their tactics as well.