Recent submissions

Comment · 1 month ago
While interesting from a technology stand point I get disheartened each time I see this sort of news.

I am particularly disappointed that it has influenced how people play the game.

The joy comes from the journey and the experience.

Look at competitive chess and Go and how they have fundamentally been transformed. It's not better and now the box is opened, it can't be closed.

Comment · 1 year ago
MOTs already have a decibel limit. I don't understand how these vehicles can be road worthy considering how loud they are.

This technology feels like an engineers solution to a trivial legal issue.

Comment · 2 years ago
Does the app give any benefit over the web? Asking customers to use the browser over the dedicated app doesn’t seem unreasonable.
Comment · 2 years ago
I went on holiday for 2 weeks. Came back to find the team had spent a week on a 5 minute task that had been clearly documented. Nothing had moved forward. Spoke to my manager that day and from that day forward it was clear what my value was. Eventually lead the team and helped the team develop processes and initiative so they could be productive in my absence.

Up until that point I knew my value but I don’t think anyone else quite got it.

Comment · 2 years ago
I like the article and I have been promoting a blameless culture for most of my career. To respond rapidly to failings, we need transparency about what has happened. The same is required to ensure it doesn't happen again.

I have seen a lot of incidents and I cannot think of one where a single person was to blame. Sure, one person ran a command or made a bad commit. However, someone else granted them access, someone trained them. A manager either reviewed the process performed or never considered a process was required. A lot of company cultures do not promote proper risk management in technical processes.

I get a lot of satisfaction from technical post-mortems. There is always something that could have been done, a process that could have been in place or a software/infrastructure change to mitigate the problem.

A couple of companies have worked for have had individuals that did not subscribe to this culture. They would want a name. I never knew why exactly. Maybe it was to block a pay bump or defer a promotion. As the tech lead or dev manager any team failings are my responsibility and in companies where bullets are fired I take them. I find this protects the team and helps a blameless culture thrive amongst engineers.

Generally, I find this culture leads to fewer incidents and problems as the openness when things are going wrong allows for faster response times and software/process changes in review.

Comment · 2 years ago
How does reliability work? How do I know that what I store today will still be there tomorrow? What guarantees do I have that a machine executing a task will exist until completion of that task?

How are you handing security? What controls are in place to make sure hardware owners can’t access data being hosted or processed?

Comment · 2 years ago
On these smart fridges, I struggle to see how these are anything but gimmicks undermining the device's lifespan. Most cooking requires items from many sources. You can check your milk but what about the flour in the cupboard? AI reminders. Is that a subscription service or are advertisers being given your data?

How long are these manufacturers promising to support the hardware? If the fridge is internet-connected and support ends, at what point is that a security risk? This generally applies to most purchases these days...

I was looking in my garage and I found a cassette player my grandad gave me that still works. When I look around shops and at many things I own I see planned obsolescence everywhere. Personally, I find it really demoralizing.

Comment · 3 years ago
I am sure there are numerous services costing $5-10/mo that would cover this and I would certainly consider that to eliminate the hosting and maintenance cost.

If I had to build it, I would expect using Lambda, DynamoDb and S3 would likely bring the hosting cost to down to a couple of a dollars a month max.

Comment · 3 years ago
Has the author really learned that Gmail is a better fit than Outlook? Who is paying for this product? There is a fair chance that Outlook would open up more sales opportunities to businesses, that appears to be the most obvious way to generate some income.

Secondary, a lot of clicks came from India, Kazakhstan, Costa Rica and Argentina… is this the target market? Probably not.

It is an interesting experience for the author but it is unclear if they really learned anything. It looks to me like they have been potentially misguided by poor market research gathered by a bad ad campaign.

Comment · 3 years ago
Twitter killed a lot of third party apps and it just grew and grew. I suspect there is a vocal minority complaining about these changes. Most sub’s are going dark for 2 days. Time will pass and Reddit will continue to have a highly active user base.
Comment · 3 years ago
The sample size of thirty people is going to be too small and the two year duration is too short.

I expect that participants will be happier than average and feel more secure. On the flip side they will continue working and their lives will not change much because they can see the payments will be terminated reasonably soon.

Even with the small sample size they are splitting the trial between two locations and trying to make it representative (whatever that means). This seems to raise the risk of a lot of anomalies.

I struggle to see how any meaningful conclusions would come out of this.

Comment · 3 years ago
I use it at work and it clearly has strengths and weaknesses. My two use cases are initial research and generating prototype code.

I find it very helpful to ask a series of questions and see a number of examples to get a primer on what to expect with something. The main benefit over Google or going straight to the docs is I can start with my specific requirements. I then dig into the documentation to deepen my understanding. I can typically move forward with ChatGPT generating some code as a starting point.

It can be incorrect or out of date but combined with my experience I find myself being more productive with it.

A weakness I see is complex code requirements. It knows what it knows.

I note that you seem a little frustrated with vague or incorrect responses. It helps to tell ChatGPT the role it should play. It helps as well to instruct it to ask questions of you to improve the response. Personally I prefer to tell it keep its answers brief, I get less walls of text and I can narrow in on the specific answer I am after more quickly.

Comment · 3 years ago
I recently cancelled my membership when I realised that shopping elsewhere allowed me to save money the majority of the time. I had already become disillusioned by the number of dubious listings on Amazon and the volume of fake reviews.

I find it far less stressful shopping on sites with curated lists of products.

Comment · 3 years ago
What is mind blowing for me is the ability for ChatGPT with limited context to generate content. "Write me a letter informing X about issue Y" will draft 3 paragraphs which typically articulates the problem very well. Asking it to make the response more or less formal or to focus on a specific point will instantly rewrite it as requested.

I haven't delved too deeply but it is pretty good with code generation as well. "Write me a docker image that does X". "Let's use B instead of C." "I also require Z." It does a really solid job.

With the OP's article. It is very impressive how it generates ideas and then is able to drill down and expand on them as more detailed questions are asked. Perhaps something already can do this.. it is first time I have seen it. My experience so far is that ChatGPT is generations ahead of current assistants. For a number of tasks it is faster and more useful than Google.

Comment · 4 years ago
The Euro has a single monetary policy. The benefit is less trade friction. The draw back is that monetary policy may not fit well with the general economy. This is what Greece experienced, the loss of currency control made other European businesses a lot more competitive.

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