tsmarsh

I work for Novartis. We did cure a couple of cancers using bespoke technologies that don't scale particularly well. The prices are ludicrous ($250-500k), but then it does take a team of scientists weeks of time per patient and its a single treatment... but it doesn't cure diabetes.

The Apple-ifying of cancer treatment has started.

It is. There is a focus on standards, pushing the technology forward then sharing that with other browsers. Rapid updates. A focus on security and performance. And Chrome is the product, not the operating system its running on. Arguably, you could say that Chrome is actually designed to push you towards the Google Search and Gmail. But its a soft nudge in comparison to IE6 and Windows.

I'm sure we'll find that a Pareto Distribution is an unavoidable market phenomenon, but I still believe its healthy for technologists to remain skeptical when one client massively outperforms others.

You missed charging the Apple Pencil on the ipad pro.

Arrow keys being disabled in Safari iOS

3D Touch

Removing the 3.5mm Jack...

Here is my list:

* Its ridiculously ugly. * The layout seems designed to amplify the wind and somehow manages to do it in all directions. * Building restrictions that prevent affordable housing from being built. * They're happy to hike prices on parking to reduce cars, but the Red Line is unreliable which forces people to use cars. * Central * They managed to make bike lanes that are more dangerous than roads * Northbound Longfellow Bridge * Try turning on to Technology Square from Broadway * Mass Ave in general

Seems like a really good way of creating a niche for plasma proof viruses.

I would like to hear your thoughts on why a tactile device, the keyboard, is better when tactile feedback is replaced with visual clues. And why a device you touch and don't look at is more aesthetically pleasing when you remove the bits that the way you use it more pleasant.

For my money the innovation we're missing is more tactile feedback. A device that allows you to modify the click of a key, the amount of force required, the position and shape of those keys.

The irony is that I do have capslock mapped to escape, but my fingers frequently rest where the esc key should be, so I catch it when I wasn't expecting it.

Sure, this is my problem, its just only my problem on MacBook Pros.

No touch bar is a win IMHO. I'm not against it per se, but a soft `esc` was a mistake.

They are, but they're basically 80s/90s technology.

I work in emacs with lisps (mostly clojure) on x86, usually via a terminal emulator. Old tech is stable, fast and cheap. I know that, you know that, Bloomberg make their billions off of it... but they're calling out Cities for it. Just weird.

Pivots and trees. Long skinny tables to wide sparse tables used to be something we did a lot, now we return a JSON Tree... we were always parsing the sparse table into a tree anyway.

Says the company that runs on the Bloomberg Terminal.

You do get that boron smell though. Kinda dirty smelling.

Parent of two kids that have used swim diapers. I would be very surprised if those diapers were even 10% effective. Out of the pool they're basically 0% effective.

And yes, I've read the instructions, and spoken to the folks who run the pool.

Mostly I think they're just there to keep the poop in long enough to get the kid out of the pool.

As far as driving OSX from the keyboard... yeah, it doesn't go out of its way to teach you how, but there are some pretty deep keyboard shortcuts. Of real note is readline, which is built into every text box. You can use emacs/readline shortcuts everywhere, and because of the ctrl / cmd separation it doesn't interfere with the basic shortcuts.

I've been using Windows 10 more and more over the last 2 years. Its fine. For the first time in a long time I don't feel like Windows is slowing me down, especially now it has sub-system for linux. Its still annoying that processes can lock access to files... but thats small potatoes.

I’m a year in to having less social media no: facebook, twitter, instagram.

I mean, I quit them because they were irritating me, so perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that removing an irritent from my life feels like a relief.

The one remaining dreg of reason I might want to get back is local sales and sports groups which seem to be on Facebook exclusively. But thats about it.

> preparing CAM data — export 2d vector art for a waterjet machine or laser cutter; or generate STEP or STL, for import into third-party CAM software for machining

Thats been my experience with all of the OSS CAM: g-code for 2.5D, or STL so that a 3rd Party can do the really heavy lifting.

I got into CNC milling about 9 months ago. SVG to 2.5D problems are easy, and get you to a lot of cute solutions, its about as close to the work flow of 3D printers as you can get.

But the really interesting stuff is when you get to CAM. Multiple tool paths, genuine 3D cutting. Moving the work between paths etc. Its like going from juggling 3 balls (2.5d) to 5 balls (3D).

I haven't seen any competitive opensource CAM products, and its the main reason I continue to use Fusion 360 instead of OpenSCAD or SVG for my designs.

Lock in AND provide a low friction way to generate models.

As a developer the learning curve and life cycle of OpenSCAD sang to me and I picked it up very quickly. I have still modeled more things with OpenSCAD than I have with Fusion.

But...

Fusion is the better tool in a lot of places. Meshes being the most obvious, then CAM.

I still find Fusion weird to work with. Not only did I have to spend hours learning the basics (as opposed to minutes with OpenSCAD and Sketch-up) it falls out of my head faster than Ruby AND I found the only way to be really productive with it was to invest in a 3D mouse (which is a lot of fun).

Hey, I think you jumped to another conclusion. I'm not a smoker, vaper or toker.

And I did read your links. I'm even reading your quotes, and I don't reach your conclusion. The language used here is defensive and deliberately vague: Using X in adolescence can harm the parts of the brain that control attention, learning, mood, and impulse control.

X could be almost any activity and be true. Without quantification it even applies to water and O2 consumption. Its the sort of languages our scientists at work use when they not ready to make assertions and would like more money to do research.

> These potential harms of nicotine are particularly worrisome in view of soaring rates of e-cigarette use in U.S. teenagers

This is an appeal to demonstrate that the research should happen soon, not a statement that harm is happening now. Its a sales trigger not a statement of fact. They would like money now, to do research on a topic that I agree, should get significant funding.

I am worried about soda and e-cigs. I'm not sure I'm not more worried about soda, than e-cigs and that seems contrary to social norms at the moment. e-cigs _might_ trigger addictive personalities, and the _might_ marginally increase blood pressure. Soda will rot your teeth, and it will put pressure on your insulin system and it does cause obesity - all in very short order, especially given my families genetics.

I'm not sure how you get to the statement "ruin lives" from our interaction at all. Quite the opposite.

New things are inherently risky. We drank milk for generations without research. It literally killed children who couldn't digest lactase, but also saw the average height and muscle mass of adults increase dramatically in adults that could. If we'd have had science, would we have banned milk? Would we have delayed people from enjoying milk until we reached scientific consensus? Should we ban milk now that we know that 85% of the global population is still lactose intolerant and that its strongly linked with heart disease?

If I'd been similarly on the fence about milk 10k years ago, would you have accused me of ruining lives then as well?

Getting dosing right has also been an issue. Even opiods have safe, non addictive dosing levels for the vast majority of humans. JUUL Pods sound like everclear being marketed as shandy. That needs to be addressed, not necessarily banned. There is a reason whisky is sold at 40% and its not because thats how it comes out of the barrel. We probably need legistlation that marks JUUL as different similar to how we split liquor from beer.

I'm also concerned that we're very good at figuring out how to make a product addictive. And whilst I'm happy to point fingers at big tobacco as they engineered tobacco plants that cigarettes more addictive, we should also look at nestle, kraft and coke cola. Ever wondered why, even though you probably don't like it, Kraft Macaroni Cheese is so compelling? Or why Skyrim and WoW feel so compelling even though the rewards are so sparse?

I wouldn't limit this to tobacco.

Advertising to children is real problem. Adults may be equipped to deal with the psychological games advertisers employ, children are most certainly not.

If children must be exposed to advertising, they shouldn't be the target.

Thank you for the links. I did read them, but failed to reach the conclusion “pretty far from “harmless””.

It sounds like an understudied but potentially very safe mechanism for nicotine delivery. The big issue seams to be poor behaviour from companies like JUUL, and large quaestions around dosing for adolescents.

I honestly couldn’t tell you from those links if I should be more concerned about nicotine, sugar, caffeine, THC, or alcohol.

At this point I suspect that I should be more worried about soda than vaping.

Is this more serious than the sugar epidemic?

Or exposure to traffic pollution?

Or reduced freedom to roam?

It would seem that there are many social threats to my children, and vaping is maybe in the top 10? Should it be higher?

I'm still not sure of the history there. I remember one of the selling points of the early OS X was that it was a "Certified UNIX" and I remember that no one I tried to sell one too cared.

Was it just the cost of maintaining the certification? The fact that no other OS went down that route?

I really enjoy have openbsd on a server that I ssh into.

OS X and Windows are better GUI, OpenBSD is a better place for a lot of my work... basically anything that I’d use emacs for.

Yeah, it does that. Its not just emacs lisp, clojure, clojurescript and CL2 all have tight integration.

The difference is what it means for your repl. You can trivially attach your repl to a running process. So you change an expression, tell emacs that you'd like that to be sent to the repl, and because the repl is attached to your running process everything updates immediately.

I put this together years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2NJppeLsN8

It does a pretty terrible job of demonstrating what this might mean for something like web development where the feedback circle is usually as bad as it can be.

I had a weird experience where I was offered an interview at a company I respected, but who used ruby a lot. I explained that to everyone in the chain that I'd want to try and work to change that, and eventually got rejected because I didn't like ruby.

It was a weird experience. But I got a nice lunch out of it. I'm still not sure what they got out of it.

I miss walking in a room of books.

My parents had bookshelves that filled walls that I built with my Dad before they moved. I, and most other people that visited the house, would spend a fair amount of time just looking at the books on the shelf. Comparing notes on what they'd read, and asking to borrow books. Looking at the books, and being reminded of the experience you had with them or wanted to have with them was a vitally important part of the process that I fear we've lost.

Whilst your core point about books aging is absolutely true I think thats mostly the mass market publications designed to ease entry than actual papers.

Similarly, anything writen about an implementation is short lived. The Idiots Guide to Windows 98 is less useful today than it was in 1998 and is getting less useful with time.

Lovelace, Babbage, Turing, McCarthy et al are still seminal. But these are academic papers that focus on what is possible to compute and how one might construct an implementation.

There are some interesting edge cases too. Is the Gang of Four Design Patterns still relevent? Its not embarassing, but its not as applicable as it used to be.

Farming, at least for your family and not commercially is not all that labor intensive. There are daily chores, a few peak seasonal activities, but outside of harvest its much easier than say an office job.

Baseball and cricket exist to fill the empty days of summer where bees, sun and the occasional down pour automate the bounty. You basically have the whole of winter and most of summer to trip balls.

Its a short book with a delicious twist at the end. I think the pay off was somewhere in the last 10% of the book.