Gods, yes, this. The FitBit app is like someone said "Let's use a wonderful asynchronous architecture so we won't block on retrieving data!" and then completely ignored all the ways that might lead to terrible UX if…
I glanced at their latest code push a few days back, and some of the bugfixes/updates were related to presentation on mobile, so it's definitely something they're paying attention to and improving over time. (They're…
In addition to the public-health issues of heart attacks and car accidents, the time-swaps are also a huge PITA for parents of young children. Kids between half a year and three years old have sleep routines that don't…
A couple ways: 1) By thinking about them in other modes. I have an internal monologue, but it's not so much "the only way I can think" as "a thing that happens that comments as I think, and can be used to talk through…
I'd wager because strong emotion tends to result in strong memories, and waiting for a needed ride that isn't showing up is stressful, particularly if you have no insight into where the right might be or if/when it's…
Agreed. At one point I looked up their APIs, planning to do something pretty simple... and it just wan't even possible. They also blew a lot of time tinkering with minutae / fringe features while fairly basic…
FWIW, I'm pretty sure that "tearing someone's work apart" doesn't require "tearing the person apart / humiliating them"... and I suspect it's the former rather than the latter which is, in the right contexts, useful in…
> If you see something stupid, call it out. If I’m doing something stupid or say something wrong, call me out! ...but that can be done politely, or not(†). In my experience, being polite doesn't add a high cost to…
Yeah. I worked a 3-day week for 6-7 years, and overall it worked really well for both my employer (who got a more productive employee) and me. From my side, the biggest drawback was that it was a sort of golden…
> As someone who went from working a 5-day week to a 4-day week, I feel like a 4-day week is a 'sweet spot' - I'm just as productive as I was working a 5-day week, but when I work any less than 30 hours a week (e.g.…
Yes, this. And also to keep in mind what the article says - that passions can be developed.
From what I've seen, the truth is more like, "Following a passion of yours for a living is likely to take some amount of fun out of it, but the hit's usually pretty small; just realize that doing something as a…
Insightful! (Growing up, my classmates were mostly in the "sufficient positive influences" camp, and yeah, the teachers who had big impacts tended to be the really bad ones who destroyed momentum/interest in a topic for…
Not remotely recently, but my friends and I played a lot of NetHack back in the 90s. I Ascended once or twice with no cheating (and with low-to-no use of Elbereth), and had a couple of good runs that could plausibly…
"Free speech means arguing against messages one disagrees with, or ignoring them, but not trying to suppress them." Agreed, but "I won't provide a platform for this speech" is not "suppressing". If I put up a bulletin…
I hope my own state follows suit. Before I became a parent, I found the shift to and from daylight savings time a mild annoyance. By the time I had an infant and a toddler, I was roundly cursing whomever decided that…
Yeah, those thresholds got set way too low. But worse, they don't really provide much in the way of actual _information_, as several people above have noted. An article I read about this whole coffee thing mentioned…
For me, it really depends on the type of task. For things requiring high concentration or pinpoint mental focus, music gets in the way. For things requiring flow or invigoration, music can help me get/stay in the zone;…
<nod> I've read "The Happiness Hypothesis", which explores the same concept - the analogy it uses is that our subconscious mind is like an elephant, our conscious mind its rider. If the elephant doesn't have much of an…
I've had friends, linguists, and linguist friends all tell me that Sapir-Whorf has been disproved (at least in strong form), but I find it really hard to believe them, because it contradicts my own experience of the…
If my bag of potato chips is demonstrably and deliberately harming the lives of many real live people, you are welcome to crush it. (Not that all corporations harm people. But some combination of "the way we tend to…
> What polarization is there in Washington? Lower frequency of compromise and bipartisan bills. I've seen it just from reading the papers and staying semi-aware of politics. My mother-in-law worked in DC for decades,…
I don't get any of that from the memo. Neither did the woman developer who made me aware of it's existence. If we're going with anecdote, the memo sure read as a hostile dropped-bombshell to every female Googler I've…
"Note: I find it interesting/disturbing/sad/telling that I've been sitting here for a long time contemplating if I should even submit this message since I use my real name here. The fact that we, as a society, have come…
...except when it kicks you to the curb, and forces you to fight over what they'll cover while your family's in the middle of the hardest time of their life and has negative energy to spare. Our healthcare/insurance…
Gods, yes, this. The FitBit app is like someone said "Let's use a wonderful asynchronous architecture so we won't block on retrieving data!" and then completely ignored all the ways that might lead to terrible UX if…
I glanced at their latest code push a few days back, and some of the bugfixes/updates were related to presentation on mobile, so it's definitely something they're paying attention to and improving over time. (They're…
In addition to the public-health issues of heart attacks and car accidents, the time-swaps are also a huge PITA for parents of young children. Kids between half a year and three years old have sleep routines that don't…
A couple ways: 1) By thinking about them in other modes. I have an internal monologue, but it's not so much "the only way I can think" as "a thing that happens that comments as I think, and can be used to talk through…
I'd wager because strong emotion tends to result in strong memories, and waiting for a needed ride that isn't showing up is stressful, particularly if you have no insight into where the right might be or if/when it's…
Agreed. At one point I looked up their APIs, planning to do something pretty simple... and it just wan't even possible. They also blew a lot of time tinkering with minutae / fringe features while fairly basic…
FWIW, I'm pretty sure that "tearing someone's work apart" doesn't require "tearing the person apart / humiliating them"... and I suspect it's the former rather than the latter which is, in the right contexts, useful in…
> If you see something stupid, call it out. If I’m doing something stupid or say something wrong, call me out! ...but that can be done politely, or not(†). In my experience, being polite doesn't add a high cost to…
Yeah. I worked a 3-day week for 6-7 years, and overall it worked really well for both my employer (who got a more productive employee) and me. From my side, the biggest drawback was that it was a sort of golden…
> As someone who went from working a 5-day week to a 4-day week, I feel like a 4-day week is a 'sweet spot' - I'm just as productive as I was working a 5-day week, but when I work any less than 30 hours a week (e.g.…
Yes, this. And also to keep in mind what the article says - that passions can be developed.
From what I've seen, the truth is more like, "Following a passion of yours for a living is likely to take some amount of fun out of it, but the hit's usually pretty small; just realize that doing something as a…
Insightful! (Growing up, my classmates were mostly in the "sufficient positive influences" camp, and yeah, the teachers who had big impacts tended to be the really bad ones who destroyed momentum/interest in a topic for…
Not remotely recently, but my friends and I played a lot of NetHack back in the 90s. I Ascended once or twice with no cheating (and with low-to-no use of Elbereth), and had a couple of good runs that could plausibly…
"Free speech means arguing against messages one disagrees with, or ignoring them, but not trying to suppress them." Agreed, but "I won't provide a platform for this speech" is not "suppressing". If I put up a bulletin…
I hope my own state follows suit. Before I became a parent, I found the shift to and from daylight savings time a mild annoyance. By the time I had an infant and a toddler, I was roundly cursing whomever decided that…
Yeah, those thresholds got set way too low. But worse, they don't really provide much in the way of actual _information_, as several people above have noted. An article I read about this whole coffee thing mentioned…
For me, it really depends on the type of task. For things requiring high concentration or pinpoint mental focus, music gets in the way. For things requiring flow or invigoration, music can help me get/stay in the zone;…
<nod> I've read "The Happiness Hypothesis", which explores the same concept - the analogy it uses is that our subconscious mind is like an elephant, our conscious mind its rider. If the elephant doesn't have much of an…
I've had friends, linguists, and linguist friends all tell me that Sapir-Whorf has been disproved (at least in strong form), but I find it really hard to believe them, because it contradicts my own experience of the…
If my bag of potato chips is demonstrably and deliberately harming the lives of many real live people, you are welcome to crush it. (Not that all corporations harm people. But some combination of "the way we tend to…
> What polarization is there in Washington? Lower frequency of compromise and bipartisan bills. I've seen it just from reading the papers and staying semi-aware of politics. My mother-in-law worked in DC for decades,…
I don't get any of that from the memo. Neither did the woman developer who made me aware of it's existence. If we're going with anecdote, the memo sure read as a hostile dropped-bombshell to every female Googler I've…
"Note: I find it interesting/disturbing/sad/telling that I've been sitting here for a long time contemplating if I should even submit this message since I use my real name here. The fact that we, as a society, have come…
...except when it kicks you to the curb, and forces you to fight over what they'll cover while your family's in the middle of the hardest time of their life and has negative energy to spare. Our healthcare/insurance…