bkandel

Another underserved group of users is people with ADHD. I think a "minimize distractions" mode at the OS level would be very welcome by a lot of people.

Spintronics! It's a puzzle game where you build mechanical equivalents of electrical circuits. It has capacitors, transistors, inductors, etc. Just got it this past weekend (bought it after the Kickstarter ended) and it's really cool.

If you're interested in historical fiction, I'd highly recommend Mary Renault's The Persian Boy. The book is all about the interaction between Hellenic and Persian cultures and the influence they each had on the other. She does a great job of making ancient cultures seem real and current without making them feel artificially modern.

For me a lot of it is in the eyes and face. There's almost always some weird deformation or artifact that doesn't look quite right. It also happens in most other pictures if you look hard enough but with eyes and faces it's really unnerving.

> chop your own veg

Is there a way to avoid this? I can get some chopped vegetables at the grocery store, but the vast majority of vegetables are only available whole.

The FDA would beg to differ: https://medicalfuturist.com/fda-approved-ai-based-algorithms...

Without the snark: There has been real progress made on devices that integrate machine learning and have passed the bar of FDA approval. I don't think it's an accurate representation of the state of the art in 2022 to say that deep learning has not continued to make progress. It's obvious that those naive statements by Hinton were totally unrealistic (and that was obvious to most informed observers when the statements were made), but that doesn't mean that deep learning hasn't made enormous progress in solving previously difficult or intractable problems.

I don't think that's a comprehensive list, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyrannosaurus#Resurgent_intere... mentions that 42 skeletons have been found in western North America. I don't have the page number, but I also remember reading in Steve Brusatte's "The Rise and Fall of Dinosaurs" that there are some areas where T. rex's were so common that you can find teeth relatively easily.

Agreed that findings this well preserved are incredibly rare and fortunate.

I read that as "frozen foods that are high in fat and salt".

I have a physical folder of important vital documents (passports, birth certificates, Social Security cards, etc.). Other stuff I usually just take a picture of on my phone and email to myself with a heading of some words that I know I'll think of in the future (e.g. for a car repair "Sienna lock stuck repair car Pepboys" or something like that). Works pretty well for me!

I'm not following here. If they bug high-stakes customers when given freedom to operate, why should any country trust anything they build to operate as described? "We'll behave as long as you're looking over our shoulder" doesn't inspire confidence.

I love the book, but honestly who sleeps with a bowl of oatmeal on their nightstand?! Never understood that.

Abagnale says himself that "Catch Me If You Can" is mostly fiction:

> I was interviewed by the co-writer only about four times. I believe he did a great job of telling the story, but he also over dramatized and exaggerated some of the story. That was his style and what the editor wanted.

ETA: It's not like the version on his website is likely true either, just saying that questions about the veracity of the story have been around for a very long time and have been strong enough that he's backed away from a lot of the claims in the book.

https://www.abagnale.com/comments.htm

> Bucking a major trend, company speaks out against the age-old practice.

Next sentence:

> Microsoft is finally catching on to a maxim that security experts have almost universally accepted for years

So ... they're not bucking a major trend?

FWIW I get almost no spam on my email at all these days. I use disposable addresses (via Yahoo) for all stores and aggressively filter emails from listservs and stores, but after that I get next to no spam. What spam I do get is picked up nearly perfectly by Gmail's spam filter. Agreed about phone spam though, it's pretty terrible.

Yes, and I would add to this the (nearly) complete lack of IDE support makes working with Spark SQL quite painful.

I usually think these "Google is the worst" posts are over the top, but I genuinely find Gmail's mobile interface bewildering. There are two three-dot/ellipsis icons when you read an email and after using mobile Gmail for years I have no idea which actions are in which. "Move to Inbox": upper icon. "Add star": lower icon. "Mark important": upper icon. "Mark unread": lower icon. I'm sure there's some explanation or at least mnemonic but I'm lost.

The loan example comes up because of a long history of explicit discrimination in the US against Black borrowers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining). Because of that history, people are justifiably skeptical when someone says: "I know that this industry discriminated against you in the past, but trust me, this new and completely opaque system is TOTALLY not going to discriminate against you anymore." Especially when the new systems have demonstrable racial bias (https://www.realtor.com/news/trends/black-communities-higher... among many many other sources).

Python is 30 years old, SQL is ~45 years old, Java is 30 years old, C is 50 years old. There are newer developments obviously but 60 years is not really all that much of an outlier for a programming language.

Yeah same in Philadelphia, the rivers (Delaware and Schuylkill) used to be so polluted they didn't support life, but now there are people catching 45-inch muskies in urban rivers (https://patch.com/pennsylvania/norristown/30-pound-muskie-ca...). The revival of the river has been well documented (e.g. https://whyy.org/articles/the-death-of-the-delaware-river/).

I don't think we're disagreeing, and I agree that profits rather than human benefit drive pharma's research agenda. I'm just saying that if a paper from Big Pharma says a factual statement like "Reference X says Y" or "X% of patients had blood pressure of Y", I would expect Big Pharma research teams to have done a thorough job of checking to make sure they got it right.

> It’s not Big Pharma that’s responsible for most retractions

This is not at all surprising to me. Big Pharma has teams of professional statisticians, writers, copy-editors, fact-checkers, etc. and have much more rigorously enforced standards than most academic research institutions. Their bias comes out more in how they frame the study and in the choice of things they study, but I think in general I would trust Big Pharma to be more accurate in reporting their study results than academic labs.

I'm struggling to understand your comment about books. There are many thousands of very high-quality books written about lots of different subjects. Is it possible your book recommendations are all too similar, like only reading novels written in the past ten years or something?

So in America in the 21st century, white Jews are treated pretty much like any other white person. I would say that there are some subtle cultural things that make me feel a bit "other", though. For example, sports teams called the "Crusaders": In the Jewish collective memory, the Crusades were an awful time. Crusaders rampaged through many Jewish communities, murdering many thousand of Jewish people and destroying the Jewish communities in several cities (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhineland_massacres, among others). There are historical records of Jews committing suicide in anticipation of the Crusaders reaching their cities. Hearing about basketball teams called "The Crusaders" really surprised me -- did these people not know what the Crusaders did?

So I agree with all the comments about needing a lawyer as to the specifics of your situation.

As far as being unreasonable: The sense I get from reading your narrative is that from your perspective, because you wrote the code for the software, you are responsible for a large proportion of the total enterprise value. I think that in general, engineers tend to discount the contributions of the business side of things. Reading between the lines (and correct me if I'm being uncharitable here), your partner is responsible for the idea and overall business strategy, all capital and expenses(!), marketing, branding, sales, contracting, and customer support. So even though you wrote the code for the product, there's a very large gap between that and creating a competitive and profitable product. He probably views you, with some justification, as more easily replaceable, which is why he perceives you as having less leverage. So while you should certainly try to get as much as you can out of the situation, this description of events doesn't strike me as being particularly unfair to you.

So this has happened at more than one company that I've been at, only difference is that these were AWS keys and used to mine bitcoin. AWS was actually pretty good about it, we rotated the keys as quickly as we could and they dropped all the charges.

Two that did it for me:

- The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt. Really deepened my understanding of how Western and other cultures think about moral and ethical issues.

- The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan. It's a feminist book that is very non-ideological, and helped me, as someone born in the 80's, appreciate some very real and practical issues that feminism has helped us address.

I think it's a bit more nuanced than this -- even within the "name-brand" national parks, like Yosemite or Yellowstone, the sacrificed part has the hotels and other facilities that cater to humans, but there's still a ton of land that is actually preserved and is ecologically significant. E.g. 90% of Yosemite is preserved wilderness with much more limited access to humans than in the valley (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yosemite_National_Park#Nationa...).

It depends on the field. In the sciences (especially biosciences), professors typically have to get money from grants to pay for their labs, and sometimes part of their salary. Being able to get grants depends on their publishing record, and losing grants and having to shutter or at least downsize your lab is a very real possibility. So in these fields, although your position is secure, your lab and your salary are actually quite precarious.

I think the biggest difference between academia and industry stress is that stress in academia is so personal. Your entire career is building up your own personal brand of research, which has to be novel, interesting, reliable, etc. If something goes wrong, like you don't get a grant or you find that you made a mistake or a paper gets rejected, you can't blame your company's leadership for poor decisions, so it's a much more personal reflection on your abilities as a researcher. The rejections are also typically much more often along the lines of "this was a bad idea, I don't know why you spent the past two years doing this" and less like "could you fix your code formatting to match our style guide." And because nearly everyone who does a Ph.D. does it out of their love for the field, feeling like a failure at philosophy is much more personal than introducing a bug or whatever into your code.