loudouncodes

I don't expect amazon to have my best interests at heart. To the contrary, this entire post is about how their actions dont have their best interests at heart. When I pause a purchase because of this crap, I might not ever return to pick it up.

I never expect a faceless company to care about me. I do expect that when I willingly align my interests with theirs, things should get easier.

I spent 11 years working as a contractor for the U.S. State Department. During this time I:

- In 1996 built and deployed a system to keep track of the removal of landmines in Bosnia. In 2015 I met someone who knew my work as a child in Sarajevo, producing the maps they’d give out to schoolchildren.

- I managed a project with over 30 team members to build a system to help former Soviet Union countries manage their import/export control policies.

- I helped create a system for generating some annual reports for Poland that was a requirememnt for them to join NATO.

I realized I should clarify “I could find”. I’m in the Washington D.C. Metro area, but I spoke _at least_ once a week everywhere from Richmond to Philadelphia, and occasionally as far as Ohio.

Networking and Marketing.

For 10 years I spoke at every conference, user group, etc. that I could find. I sustained a 9 person consulting company finding gigs through the network of other speakers and attendees that would come up and ask me questions. Every question can be rephrased as “I have a problem you can help me solve”, but you also have to qualify to make sure there is a company with a budget for solving that problem. That takes a little business development.

For conference attendees, you have to have some free giveaway to keep a connection… like a free 2 hour code review of your existing project, or “I’m willing to do this presentation for an in-house user group as a lunchtime thing if you’re interested”. Those little giveaways get you closer to the management and the confidence you know what you’re talking about.

This is ridiculous.

1. Pseudocode should be typeable in an email.

2. You should be able to write pseudocode on a whiteboard without worrying about syntax.

3. Pseudocode should be loose enough that it suggests a domain-specific language that it might inspire.

4. If your pseudocode requires a mechanism for comments, you’ve lost the plot. In their example, they comment ‘v1’ as ‘variable holding candidate 1’s tally’. Then name it that! ‘tally_can1’ would be much better.

I use and love pinboard.in

Let me get my pdf highlights into readwise and let me orgazize my notes as a zettelkasten in obsidian and i’ll get in lline to pay you.

I started watching it, but the whole thing turned me off because they took two fantastic women involved at NASA - Margaret Hamilton and Poppy Northcut, and combined them into one character that in the several episodes I saw was trending towards being a love interest.

For a show that should have accuracy at the start, this was unforgivable given the need for strong women role models in tech.

This alsp pissed me off. He is totally ignoring Benoit Mandel brot’s work in the 1950’s and John Conways work in the 1970’s. He sounds like a petulent child who takes himself too seriously and expects others do the same. It distracts from an otherwise interesting classification paradigm.

I do not see much difference between his 4th paradigm and a breadth-first search through an np (nondeterministic polynomial) problem. I’d love to know what other mathemeticians that work on dynamical systems (Dr Krieger, anyone?) think of his work…

Beautiful, but why this design trend of breaking the semantics of scrolling?

Um, he starts in 1976, then says ‘21 years later’ and he’s talking about today? He’s 20 years off in his opening premise...

Wow! A webring! Haven’t seen one of those in a zillion years.

Fully functional?

I have expectations...