Recent submissions

Comment · 3 years ago
Just dropping a comment to say congrats for getting something up and running and that it's nice to see somebody doing something for the elderly and those less technically proficient.

Here in the UK the same problems exist regarding general ease-of-use, scams, and ability to navigate tech in general: and we also have a signficiant (and growing) problem where government services and support are all being moved online, with seemingly little support for those who find modern tech difficult to engage with.

Though my gut feeling says you may struggle to build a viable long-term business around this: I really do hope you succeed!

Personally I think governments and institutions need to radically improve things for the non-techies amongst us and those who find it difficult, whether cognitively or physically, to engage with tech in the first place. Right now it seems that the default assumption is that everybody is perfectly fine using a website or app, and if you're not, you're out of luck!

Comment · 3 years ago
The 'tailored music' scenario suggested in this paper doesn't require any kind of NFT, let alone an 'iNFT'.

If ever there was a solution looking for a problem, this is it.

Comment · 3 years ago
This is great and all, but the merge process is still messy as hell
Comment · 4 years ago
Very timely post for me - as this is exactly what I'm trying to achieve at my own place :P I've forwarded it to several people to help bolster my argument, so thanks!
Comment · 4 years ago
We also scrutinise every aspect of how we work; it doesn't mean that there's a viable remote-only replacement for everything a team might need to do.

Your anecdote is not data - it's just an anecdote.

Comment · 4 years ago
> C'mon - if we can make it work then you can make it work.

If this was a reasonable argument, nobody would ever have any issues!

Comment · 4 years ago
I think it largely depends on what the work actually involves. For me - I personally don't like working from home. I need the separation between my place of work and my place of rest, but I fully appreciat that this is my own personal view and not everybody shares it.

However, my actual job requires a lot of communication - some of it is perfectly ok to do remotely via calls etc, but a significant portion of my job involves ad-hoc discussions, whiteboarding, throwing ideas around and coming up with a solution to a problem that is highly specific to our domain. This is the problem area, for me - I've found no combination of tools that adequately plugs the gaps that remote working has left in our ability to have those kinds of conversations / design sessions - and certainly no combination that everyone 'gels' with.

For me, it's a major issue. Productivity in those area has absolutely tanked. Pre-planned, pre-determined work is generally ok, but the more informal side of things - which is actually probably around 50% of what we actually need to do in order to keep things moving, has gone to hell, which now means we ask people to come in at least a few days a week to try to plug the gaps.

Comment · 4 years ago
The 'bare minimum to not get fired' is the expectation of any job.

If the employer wants to increase the expectations levelled on employees, then they should write it into their contracts. No contract? No expectations.

You can't hold people to some abstract set of expectations that are never written down anywhere; and if you try - well that's why they have to invent a stupid term like 'quiet quitting'.

Comment · 4 years ago
I recently set up NextCloud on a Raspberry Pi and found the process a little more convoluted than I would have liked - but that was mostly because the linuxserver.io image for MariaDB seemed to have some problems during database initialisation which I couldn't figure out. I switched over to use the yobasystems/alpine-mariadb image and that worked flawlessly. I haven't tried syncing contacts or calendar yet but that wasn't really my primary motivation - I just wanted self-hosted files with a nice interface. The NextCloud UX is a little clunky imo but I'm not complaining - it's a great piece of software especially considering the price tag! I also am trying to do open-source everything so it is very attractive in that regard.
Comment · 4 years ago
If banks simply refused to implement stupid and ineffective rules, no government is going to shut them down.
Comment · 4 years ago
Nice organisational simplicity would be to simply not have any special rules for the unvaccinated in the first place
Comment · 4 years ago
It's not black and white; a lost year of education is a terrible thing on its own in terms of future prospects - but kids need to be around their peers for reasons that go beyond academic success. Lengthy periods of isolation are normally considered a punishment for a reason. It's not supposed to last indefinitely or be a constant threat based on factors they can't control, and appeals to the greater good can only be justified for so long (and only when the effects of the restrictions put in place are actually effective and not overridden by other harms they may cause).
Comment · 5 years ago
I don't think a cover letter is necessary - but being able to demonstrate that you can write thoughtfully and clearly is always going to be a plus imo, whatever the job entails. There are very few roles in which decent communication skills have no value.
Comment · 5 years ago
Politics aside, I wonder how this will impact China's game industry in 15-20 years? Though I do think game addiction (particular in the era of microtransactions etc) is something which we should be wary of and try to assist people with; I also think the route from 'kid playing games' to 'adult making games' is one in which 'They played lots of games for hours throughout childhood' is likelt a universally safe assumption.
Comment · 5 years ago
I've experienced this before; my recommendation would be to pitch an alternative tool to the PM based on how that tool would make the PM's job easier / more effective. It's probably true that almost anything would be better suited to the development workflow than an Excel spreadsheet - but in this particular use-case, Excel is fulfilling your PM's requirements: it's keeping track of issues.

What Excel won't do, without significant work (which will almost certainly fall to the developer and not the PM):

Track issue history / comments / activity against a repository. Wouldn't it be better for your PM to be able to identify, at a glance, exactly which branch & commit a particular fix or change is in?

Integrate with your CI / build system: Wouldn't it be better for your PM if issues were automatically marked as 'ready to test' when the relevant build is completed?

Provide a workflow against the list of active issues. Wouldn't it better for your PM to rest assured that any incoming issues are easily triaged & assigned within a well-defined workflow that tracks an issue from first-report to completion & sign-off?

Don't fight them - sell to them. Explain why a different solution will be better for them and you.

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