alaskamiller

Joined 19 years ago

Karma
6,139
Submissions
1,895
Member since
Sep 6
New is everything old. Not better, not worse, just different.
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Recent submissions

Comment · 2 years ago
Operated with food delivery robots for two years in a major downtown city area. City councils were excited but they can't accommodate as much as school councils though.

Also fun fact, the robot companies are usually contracted and dealing with the food service providers to the college than to the college themselves.

Comment · 2 years ago
Glad I'm not the only one
Comment · 2 years ago
What's cool also is that this is from the West African tech scene.
Comment · 2 years ago
I found a book teaching HTML at a library somewhere in 1995. It was in a visual format explaining what the markups do.

My favorite was the one that made words blink.

I typed things into Notepad, meticulously tabbing and aligning the little tags to make sure it's okay.

Next year I stumbled upon a Taiwanese website somehow, with a call to action for submissions to their design contest.

I made something and sent it. For some miracle I won. They called my jr. high school for it too for some reason and got confused when I answered thinking I was a student in a fancy college in the Americas.

For the award ceremony my mom had to go accept. She was on the way home grocery shopping and didn't understand what the Internet or World Wide Web was. They congratulated her with her shopping bags in hand.

What a wild 30 years to the whole world getting connected.

Comment · 2 years ago
Microsoft grinds constantly and consistently though, sprinkled with some monopolistic tendencies now and then to clinch a win.

I think the grind from Windows CE to Windows Phone is just a blip to them for now.

Comment · 2 years ago
That's Bing Copilot and it's still not that impressive, it's just search engine with Clippy then.

Google can't change for now, in doing so they undermine all the AdWords accounts, the real customers to Google, paying six figures to stay on top of SERPs.

But the other competitors can and will.

So it goes

Comment · 2 years ago
In short: a chat bot is not AI.
Comment · 2 years ago
Xbox, Surface. Holo didn't go far. May return back to mobile in some form soon.

Services, and their sales team, are still Microsoft's strong point.

Apple seeing its services grow and is leaning in on it now.

The question is whether Apple eats services faster than Microsoft eats into hardware.

Comment · 2 years ago
Airbnb hosts do this.

An engineering friend of mine has documented and labeled every aspect of his vacation rental in Hawaii.

The only thing is, it's styled the same as the 1980s terminal systems he worked on down to the embossed black tape labels that gets attached to every switch, knob, and dial.

Treat your house like a black box.

Comment · 3 years ago
You built Patreon, even that stock photos carousel you have above the fold is ripped from patreon.com but the rest of isn't even built out.

So yeah, you niched down to say creators and IRL tasks, tossed in some sense of community activism.

Well, this is an example of how it really is about ideas and not just execution to reach success.

This is a great idea. Who hadn't thought of some utopian altruism in the middle of a global crisis?

But it's not a good idea. Because you don't have the means to get traction because it's a two sided platform play that without critical mass will not lead to further utility. And because it's merely but a singular use case out of multiple for the larger entrenched competitor.

You need more usage to even build your way into success and you don't have usage because... while this is a great idea it's not a good idea.

But now we're here.

You want to know what to do?

1. Highlight user stories.

Find the most interesting one, make content, share. Segment on a morning infotainment news? Blog articles on guest writing platforms? Sappy robot voice TikTok videos? Reddit?

2. Quit and add this to your portfolio.

Your friends and families don't want to be spammed with this. Don't be weird about it.

Comment · 3 years ago
Health insurance is a coupon code you subscribe and pay for every month.
Comment · 3 years ago
Did Google culture in 2011/2012 then again in 2022/2023.

2011 was watching them recruit and hire everyone smart enough to sit around to just make stuff and eat each other's dogfood. There were posters for little experiments to try at the elevators or lobbies. Good times! Will we release this Dropbox clone or not? Should we drop this dorky AR glasses or not? Anything is possible in the quest to organize the world's information and free food!

2022 was watching the new cohorts come in and realize the game is now just throwing stuff against the wall, clinch an exec to back you, get to google scale, and get your bonus so you can finally buy a house in a post-G+ landscape. Oh, on top of that you're really just a pawn in a corrupt game of keepaway from the other companies.

Now everything scaled back, a lot of projects get scrutinized, then boom, someone else is taking Google R&D and productizing it better than Google PMs can and we don't know what to do anymore. But we still do leetcode, and if you pass then just press that space bar so you can buzz in during the standup to say all good, no updates.

This new silicon valley era is weird.

Comment · 3 years ago
I know much more about this. You'll have more luck building relationships with VCs that focus on dual use military tech, with partners that have prior military service experience, or you'll need to find a consultant that knows how to get you into the SBIR process, knows how to look up grants, write for lots of grants, and apply for grants.

It's a small world, prior military experience gets you far since everyone would rather pull someone up like that, not necessarily just the tech.

Comment · 3 years ago
The website reads fine, there's even three FAQs to answer your questions at the bottom of the page you referenced.

Job Corps is a training program for 16-24 year olds as an alternative or supplement to high school or college. Your first touch to this would typically be your high school guidance counselor. Your second touch might be your community college counselor. Your other pathway might be through your parole officer.

It's free. It's listed multiple times on the website.

They learn welding, manufacturing, automative tech, construction, hospitality, healthcare, and the best one is probably forestry. It's listed multiple places on the website.

How long is typically 1 to 3 year stints.

Job Corps centers are located in almost every major city in almost every state. It's a government program since the 1960's. There's an entire program finder on the website.

Comment · 3 years ago
Started web dev five years prior but went through the same trajectory in the 00s. This is rather clever and reminds me of ajax. The a11y focus is great, definitely modernizes this. I don't think the script kiddies these days are going to appreciate this as much though.

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