adenverd's comments

> That sounds a lot like work.

Correct. This is why the Product Manager role exists - to define "what problem are we solving, why, and for whom?" by engaging with the market. But if you already know what problem you want to solve (for yourself, or for fun), don't bother. But also don't expect others to pay for a solution to a problem they don't have.

> agile poker and code commenting and stuff

These are tools for team collaboration and business planning, i.e. when there is more than one person involved in a project. You don't _need_ them for solo projects (although I do think code commenting is still a good practice even for solo projects).

> If you've listened to NPR or watched PBS, you know they're about as neutral as you can get while still covering both mainstream sides.

NPR is about as far from neutral as media gets, both in topics they choose to cover and in editorial bias.

Side note/feel good moment: the author Raymond Chen is an OG beyond-super-engineer at Microsoft, and is an incredible person to work with. He assisted me with my intern project many years ago, and was amazingly eager to share his wealth of experience with a green-eared intern from outside his org.

Thanks Raymond! I decided to go the startup route instead of returning to MSFT, but you were an inspiration all the same.

And just using the phrase "performative erudition" is itself an example of performative erudition!

I'll add that real world sensors (including cameras) are noisy in ways that are difficult to model 100% accurately in simulation. Same thing with aerodynamic effects, especially when the drone gets close to the ground or other objects, or y'know...it's windy outside. Dealing with these types of noise and unpredictably and building in resilience to them is a big part of testing and validating systems like these, and can only happen in the real world.

I'm pretty confident the drone linked in this article doesn't have high reliability. I'd be shocked if they managed to get >70% critical without significant real-world iteration.

The US DoD already has drones with these capabilities for recon in contested buildings and caves:

https://vimeo.com/316222669

https://shield.ai/products/nova-class

https://www.wired.com/story/shield-ai-quadcopter-military-dr...

AFAICT they are. You can't find a GTX 3060, 3070, or 3080 for less than 4x MSRP right now.

> developers control the cryptocurrency issuance because despite the issuance is (usually) determined algorithmically, developers have the power to change these algorithms...If we compare this system with the US dollar system governed by the Federal Reserve, the Supreme Court of the US, the Congress, and the US government (in different ways), I’d say that the blockchain developers are at least as likely to become corrupt, coerced, or influenced by the system beneficiaries than the Fed and the Government officers and judges because the latter are 1) older on average, and more senior people tend to act more independently; 2) much better protected, physically and financially.

Don't miners and nodes then have to adopt those algorithmic changes though? It's essentially voting by adoption - if a majority of miners/nodes don't adopt a set of changes (e.g. increasing the supply cap or rate), then they aren't propagated to the blockchain.

This seems a lot more decentralized than the US/Fed monetary system that the article compares it to, where citizens have effectively zero influence on policy.

Sleep Cycle [0] does this with "Intelligent" wake mode, and has a standalone app for the Apple Watch.

I'll also be shocked if this isn't a native feature of Apple's Sleep app within a year.

[0] https://9to5mac.com/2020/05/12/sleep-cycle-apple-watch-app/

"Noob gains" doesn't have anything to do with setting goals or quantitatively measuring progress. It refers to the speed at which unadapted athletes are able to progress (e.g. add weight to the bar, run farther) each workout when they first start training, compared to athletes who have been training longer, are more adapted, and progress slower.

Most professional and highly adapted athletes are extremely quantitative about their training programs, much more so at the advanced stages than in the early stages. They just progress much slower because it takes more training for their bodies to continue adapting.

One of the engineering teams I work with is building an image pipeline to correct rolling shutter distortion from a robot camera. I still have no idea how they're generalizing a solution to different types of movement and angular velocities, but at least now I understand the problem and a taste of the math behind it.

Thanks for sharing!

Video games will become a much more powerful force at sparking kids' interest and creativity in a subject, which will lead to better educational outcomes. In my experience, video games are a fantastic way to learn the initial 50% of a new subject, and to appreciate and enjoy it. Some anecdotes from my life:

- I learned programming through an in-game (Star Wars Galaxies) scripting language. That little bit of experience automating repetitive tasks set me up to excel in high school and college programming courses, which led to a career in data engineering, and now AI and robotics.

- I was introduced to game theory by a prisoner's dilemma situation in a video game (KOTOR).

- I learned economics and market forces by trading on Runescape's Grand Bazaar, and how to model and optimize a production system by managing a little island kingdom.

Not only did I learn new subjects from these experiences, but learned that I could excel at and have fun giving them my attention, on my own time and for my own purposes, without the external pressures of grades and tests. This gave me the confidence and energy to pursue them more deeply in school.

One thing that's interesting about all of these experiences is that they were all multiplayer and extremely social games (KOTOR, while a single-player RPG, was played with siblings and friends). I suspect that the social aspect was a primary motivating factor, and wonder if that principle holds for the broader population. I certainly wasn't the only kid in my class trading on the bazaar to get some extra GP.

Don't know if I agree with "never" punching down, but I wanted to share a poignant example of what punching down poorly looks like:

https://twitter.com/davejorgenson/status/1269288466493341696

Wayne Brady and Aisha Taylor handled this extremely well, but I'm glad he stood his ground and didn't smile and laugh along, despite the situational pressure to.

This is one the most important jobs of product managers, if you have them: building out a backlog of shovel-ready high ROI work aggregated from customer requests, user analytics, and strategic engineering efforts.

If PM is doing their job well, engineers can build and ship multiple times within a sprint without significant delays waiting to gather feedback.

GIMP's UI/UX has been garbage since long before 18.04. Not contradicting anything you're saying, just noting that it might not be the representative example you're looking for.

Amazon effectively leveraged investment capital to do exactly what they said they would do - innovate, learn into the market, and improve iteratively. From investors' perspectives (and probably consumers' perspectives as well), Amazon has succeeded brilliantly.

Not backwards. The point he's making is that hard problems attract talent and capital, which makes them easier to keep going.

Optimism is arguably a form of error, just as pessimism is. And yet it is one of the most valuable qualities you can have when undertaking ambitious projects.

I'd love more info how Netflix propagates schema changes to downstream stores. How do you apply migrations to heterogeneous databases? Applying binlog messages only works if downstream stores are the same flavor database as the source. And common message formats like Avro don't have a guaranteed migration strategy like protobuf.

I suspect it's more of a process solution than a technological solution. Are non-backwards-compatible migrations scheduled in advance, and broadcast to dependent teams? Are downstream consumers expected to have a replay/dead-letter queue?

Came here to suggest Streaks, I've been using it for a few months now. My favorite features are:

- Streaks that track Apple Health data. Really nice job with the integration. I use this for tracking daily calorie, macronutrient, and workout goals.

- "X times per week" streaks. I take rest days from working out, so it's nice to have an abstraction that doesn't treat them as failures or breaking the streak.

I guess I should go give you guys a good app store review now. Thanks for making this!