My personal biggest gripe is the Gmail app on iPhone. There is no possible way to stop it from trying to force you to change your default browser to chrome every 2 weeks when you open a link.
the Mail app has its own massive issues. for whatever reason it is completely unable to just background sync and notify you immediately when you get an email. why is every messaging app able to do this instantaneously but email is not?
also their new default-on email classification system is a fucking nightmare and I was so glad when I figured out you can turn it off
From what I remember, the later years of English class (in Ontario) are more focused on literary criticism than effective communication. This was a frustration for me personally, and my lowest mark in High School. The high 80 dragged my average down enough that I didn't make the cut for Waterloo.
As a (lapsed) English teacher, I must point out that critically examining how others communicate is essential to improving one's own ability.
(Mind you, your teachers might not have approached your classes in that way, and high-end literary criticism tends towards performative nonsense°, so I can understand and sympathize if they were a waste of time, but they didn't have to be.)
°It's exactly analogous to Brain Fuck: huge fun if you have the background, intellectual ability, and are in on the joke. Both are mostly pursued for the opportunities they provide to show off How Smart™ you are.
Maybe dumb question- I've never been in a truck. Wouldn't the distance from seat to window be ~pretty much the same whether it's CoE or conventional?
There's a hood in front of you for conventional, and I guess crumple zone deceleration comes in to play there? But as this article mentioned US trucks have a much higher average/top speed so you're probably just as likely to go through the window.
Interesting that the method for this interface was imagining writing the word, I guess too many random thoughts would enter your writing if it was just based on mental-verbalizing (saying it in your head).
It would be really cool to have a BCI that runs off mental-verbalizing and have a chopper style rapper use it (eg. Busta Rhymes). Imagine people doing transcription learning chopping as skill to get an edge on their job!
My perspective is a manager of a product team on an app with high growth. My team has our own backend and we interface with other platform teams for specific functions in the finance space.
> How do you insure you are working on the most important items for the TEAM?
Push PMs to make decisions on metrics not gut. My contribution is to add engineering and operations toil metrics to our dashboard. Eg. If the onboarding funnel is converting at 90% but our average time to resolve tickets is a week, it's easy to prioritize fixing some bugs over endless A/B tests in the funnel. Have really open and regular dialogue with the team about what they want to work on and where their gaps are, try to put them on projects that help them grow.
I also try to have my team interact with other teams as much as possible- customer support, operations, pm, design, other teams. I find it helps give engineers a more holistic picture of the business, the people and pain behind functions and get in the mindset that delivering business value or reducing toil for people can be more exciting than bringing in a shiny new library to our codebase.
> Whats the thing that drains you the most?
Honestly I have too many direct reports (12). I spend so much time in 1-1s and meetings unblocking people, and despite all my effort the team is not getting as much coaching as I want. I'm an introvert as wells so it's exhausting. I'm working on hiring other managers and organizing us into smaller teams, my goal is to have a 4:1 engineer to manager ratio this year.
> Where do you reach out to get advise outside of your company?
Mostly I read a lot, blog posts and books.
> What is missing from the tools you currently have?
I think my main problem is there are too many tools. JIRA hurts almost as much as it helps, slack is a disaster for focus. I'm trying to cut down on tools lately (eg. move out of JIRA, just have a lightweight planning doc with some tables). It works for shorter cycle projects when you have a strong team.
One tool I would appreciate is something that keeps me accountable for evaluating performance and giving good performance feedback more regularly. I'm good at reflexive feedback but really deep meaningful feedback takes time to craft, and it's easy to let it slip with the barrage of information in the modern workplace.
Unlike the sealed beam headlamps however, this law isn't requiring any particular technology. It's just outlawing a known harmful one.
In some ways this is nicer because a company doesn't need to do specific emission and noise testing certifications to comply with a single municipalities regulations. So people in Oakland can have potentially more choices while achieving a reduction of combustion emissions.
But it's still subject the same issues for the same reason. I can build a gas powered generator which feeds electricity to my electric blower and poof it's legal now. But in terms of noise/emissions/etc the problem is the same.
So the lesson is that Government really shouldn't get in the game of trying to regulate specific technologies rather than whatever harmful side effects are created by the technology. Regulate noise and emissions, and let the engineers find the best ways of meeting those targets.
No one's going to do that other than maybe an insane hobbyist. It would combine the worst aspects of gas and electric blowers. A law doesn't have to stop every possible bad outcome to be worth having.
Right, like auto makers would never put a phone style interface right into their cars, so that people could avoid "distracted driving" by hooking their phone up to their car and using the car's touch screen legally instead of the phone's. Only insane hobbyists would do that, as it combines the worse aspects of the requiring human touch and distraction to operate with the slow technology release cycle of auto manufacturers.
I suppose one could argue your scary example has already occurred. I believe stripe cut off Donald Trump [1]. As a non-American, I don't really care about Trump and may be a bit ignorant here, but I find the big tech companies cutting him off under "inciting violence" a bit of a stretch. To me, it's actually extra scary to cut off a politician's fundraising for disagreeing with their "politics".
This is why I mentioned square, not stripe. Anyone acting more like a utility or common carrier. Stripe is good, but there are many other comparable options out there. But my local coffee shop only uses a single POS systems. The latter seems more sinister to me, especially since they would be taking an action that is potentially independent of the their customer (the business).
For stripe, the example would be refusing to process any CC payments (as a consumer) for registered republicans whatsoever. Beyond it being foolish commercially, it is much more intrusive than a refusing a direct 1:1 contract.
>it's actually extra scary to cut off a politician's fundraising for disagreeing with their "politics"
Except that's not what happened. Stripe didn't cut off the Trump campaign's ability to raise funds. They didn't block access to their bank accounts. They didn't freeze their assets.
Rather, one company (and they aren't even close to the largest player in that industry) chose not to process online credit card transactions for them.
The Trump campaign has many other online payment processors that it can do business with. They can still accept donations via many other means (checks, bank transfers, cash, etc., etc.).
A single company (which is just a group of people) decided they didn't want to do business with another group of people.
Stripe, it's shareholders and employees are under no obligation to do business with anyone.
And the fact that the customer is a political entity strengthens that, as their right to support (or not) any particular political entity, candidate or position is integral to a free society.
>Rather, one company... chose not to process online credit card transactions for them.
I don't see how people can make this argument with a straight face. If you accept that this one company should be allowed to decide to cut off someone for ideological reasons, you tacitly accept that all companies could cut someone off for the same reason. Hiding behind it being "only one" right now is to use a technicality to dodge having to defend the principle you are implicitly advocating. The action isn't more right or wrong because one or more company is doing it--you either defend the principle at full usage or you disavow it.
>I don't see how people can make this argument with a straight face. If you accept that this one company should be allowed to decide to cut off someone for ideological reasons, you tacitly accept that all companies could cut someone off for the same reason.
I'm not people. I'm just me and don't represent anyone else except myself.
As for it being "just one company," that isn't really important. It could be 10 or 100 or 1000 companies and I'd say the same thing.
And not because of the content of the political views being (or not) supported.
It has nothing to do with any of that.
If the government can force Stripe (or anyone else) to support a particular (it doesn't matter which one either) viewpoint by forcing them to associate with a person or group they don't wish to associate with, then they can force me (or you, for that matter) to do the same.
I can't and don't speak for anyone else. For me, it's about specific constitutional rights. I don't and won't support abridgement of those rights for anyone, whether I agree with them or not.
If you believe that it's just fine for persons or organizations to have their freedom of association rights abridged, then you are anti-freedom and stand in opposition to the liberties and ideals in my constitution.
And if that's true, then so be it. But don't try to pretend that your argument is anything other than an anti-liberty, anti-democratic (small d) one.
>If you believe that it's just fine for persons or organizations to have their freedom of association rights abridged, then you are anti-freedom and stand in opposition...
This is utter nonsense. For example, abridging a company's right to not "associate" with minorities/gays/etc, i.e. their right to not serve them, is not anti-liberty. If the goal is maximizing liberty, it takes targeted regulation to achieve the maximal state. Ensuring everyone can participate in the economic and social infrastructure is a feature of maximizing liberty.
>This is utter nonsense. For example, abridging a company's right to not "associate" with minorities/gays/etc, i.e. their right to not serve them, is not anti-liberty. If the goal is maximizing liberty, it takes targeted regulation to achieve the maximal state. Ensuring everyone can participate in the economic and social infrastructure is a feature of maximizing liberty
I didn't realize that I needed to specify that this didn't apply to protected classes[0]. I assumed that was understood, but I guess not.
Yes, there are a number of groups (see link) which individuals and businesses are barred from discriminating against. But in this circumstance, that's irrelevant.
Because political affiliation is not a protected class under federal law, and even where it is (CA, NY and a few other states) that only applies to employment issues, not business-to-business contracts/transactions.
The right to political association has never been abridged, nor should it be. Any suggestion otherwise is, as I said, anti-liberty and anti-democratic.
Political choice is a bedrock principle of our system. And forcing anyone to support a political viewpoint they do not wish to support violates both settled constitutional law and the ideals of a free society.
Nitpick about protected groups if you like, but there's no "there" there.
The law is the law. We are a nation of laws. We are not a nation of "do what hackinthebochs wants."
There you go again, hiding behind technicalities to dodge the interesting discussion. Laws aren't magic; protected classes aren't magic. The laws reflect our understanding that abridging liberty in some narrow cases served the greater good in some manner. My argument is that some restrictions on liberty serve to maximize liberty more broadly. If you want to argue that political viewpoint should not be one of them, you have to actually make the argument. Simply citing the law doesn't make your case.
Political choice is a bedrock principle of our system. And forcing anyone to support a political viewpoint they do not wish to support violates both settled constitutional law and the ideals of a free society.
I'm in management. While the job description always says spend a significant amount of time coding, I tend to eschew that if I can get away with it. I'm only writing code if I need to get in the trenches or things are in a such a good place that I have big blocks of free time.
My workday is 10-4:30. Of that I'm probably doing 3-4 hours of productive work a day (code review, architecture, planning, 1-1s, meetings). I don't have any useless meetings, but the real killer is the 30-60 minutes between meetings where you don't have enough time to do anything productive.
