extragood

Congratulations Zapier team!

I've been an active Zapier user for the past 6 or so years, and my teams have adopted it for various simple integration projects.

I'm excited to see what more we can do with Zapier's new Natural Language Actions.

Frasier, the TV character played by Kelsey Grammer, uses an exaggerated Mid-Atlantic accent.

General rule of thumb for 1080p video streaming = 8 Mbps

720p is half the size, so it should be half that rate = 4 Mbps.

I have no doubt that modern image compression algorithms can bring that down a bit further without too much impact on quality.

So with a median of 7.2 Mbps, that's probably enough for 2 users to have an acceptable video conferencing experience. But if that's the median, then half of their customers have a lower upload speed than that and may only be able to get away with a single user streaming at a time.

In the same boat. 15 minute walk to work. I miss having coworkers around, but I also understand that their commutes are much worse in many cases. I still prefer the office, even without the coworkers, because I don't want to turn my home into my office.

I'd guess cost of labor is a major factor.

If you buy any California wine, for instance, it was picked by a migrant worker. Times haven't changed much since Grapes of Wrath, other than it's typically Latino workers rather than Dust Bowl refugees.

From my perspective: there are some things you fundamentally can't measure.

One of the teams I manage is technical support (B2B SaaS). Support's core functionality in an organization is to prevent churn. If a customer reaches out to support, they have some issue that is blocking them from using your product effectively. If you are unable to unblock them, then you risk them switching to a competitor. The problem is that not every support ticket/interaction will result in churn so we can't really directly measure how effective we are at our core function. So instead we measure the number of tickets raised, customer satisfaction, adherence to SLAs, etc, which is as good of an approximation as we can get with the resources we have available to us.

In my case, those numbers all look reasonably good, so I'm treated as an effective manager, even though we don't (and maybe can't) really know how much churn we've prevented. I wish we could though - it would make my arguments to executives on behalf of the support team that much easier to say, hey we retained $XXXXXX in revenue over this period.

They don't mind us reading critical works, but they do prophesize the end of the world.. hmm

This post got me wondering whether baseball players in the early 20th century earned enough to live by playing the game. Apparently not.

> In 1906 Chicago Cubs pitcher Mordecai “Three Finger” Brown won 26 games leading the Cubs to the National League pennant. Despite his stardom, he made just $2,800. He took a coal-mining job at season’s end to help pay his bills. Fellow all-star Christy Mathewson pumped gas at a service station. Walter Johnson dug postholes for the Idaho Telephone Company while Lefty Gomez removed sludge from refinery tanks for Union Oil.

https://www.splicetoday.com/sports/when-ballplayers-had-offs...

A co-worker who was laid off recently reached out to see if I had any room on my team. It broke my heart to say that we're not hiring for the foreseeable future either. I liked him a lot and thought he did good work, and otherwise I'd certainly have considered him. I told him as much.

We made plans instead to meet up for coffee and catch up next week. I wish I had something more concrete to help him out. This feels only slightly better than the empty platitudes mentioned in the article.

I'd heard of something like that at a city government level around 2009 when cash was tight. A friend of mine had a 4 day week every other week. I think they called it a mandatory furlough in that case

Not quite related to the article's content, but the title reminded me of the time I cancelled my internet subscription with Comcast. The poor representative on the other end of the call decided that impersonating artificial speech as she read through her scripts was the best way to get through her day.

Finally some content to which I can relate

If you don't spend it, it's not a currency

I've also found some relief with breathing techniques for Crohn's flare ups. Other than that, I can only take acetaminophen (which does next to nothing) and not eat for a couple days while I wait it out.

This post made me curious about which plug type is used in Antarctica. Looks like it's type C (same as most of Europe)

http://www.bergadventures.com/v3_main/trip-preparations/elec...

This is going to be a nightmare. It's hard enough to keep track of which state is in which time zone even with them (mostly) grouped by geography

That's the worst. Fortunately (unfortunately?) none of them has been a huge success in my case

I relate very closely with this.

I do have a couple exceptions though. I'm close with my brother and sometimes run across something that I know he actually needs, and buy that for him. My exes have all really loved receiving flowers spontaneously.

The difference is that expectation of reciprocation feeling that you mentioned. I hate scheduled gift-giving. It feels so insincere.

One of my favorite questions from my take home interview is:

> I just turned 1 billion seconds old. What day was I born? > Show your work. Bonus points for precise second.

Most people would do it the hard way - determine the number of days in 1 billion seconds, and then work backwards to get the date.

The approach that I look for (and surprisingly few people thought to do) was to get the current unix timestamp, remove the leading 1 (billions) and get the datetime for that timestamp.

This article hits on some very good points.

I'd like to add another from the perspective of the hiring manager, now that I've had a few years experience in that role.

It's been my experience that people generally produce their best work after the first year. It takes a while to get to know any business: what its strengths and weaknesses are, and it's only with that understanding that someone can identify areas to make meaningful contributions.

If someone's tenure is consistently around their one year mark, it's unlikely that they've really ever expressed their full potential in a professional setting. They leave before things get really good.

Hiring is an investment - less what the candidate can do today, but what they can contribute over a more substantial period, given the right encouragement.

I'm pleasantly surprised to see so many diverging with Paul on this point.

“Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick”

My take is: don't let language get in the way of expressing yourself. Language is one of our most important social constructs. Restricting yourself to simple language has the side effect of losing precision and/or meaning in communication.

It was commented on frequently when I was online dating, to the point that it got annoying. I've had a few friends mention it and jokingly tell me to give in and get an iPhone. I'm mid-thirties.

> The lesson I learned from that is to always create relationships outside of your team and respect what came before you got there.

Very valuable lesson there. I'm "old guard" at my company now. We've grown 10x since I started, and I've observed a fair number of new employees come in and try to instigate change before adequately understanding the business, whether that's the product, tools used, or the people involved.

I think it comes from a good place - they're the newbie and want to contribute in some meaningful way early on. Really show that we made the right decision to hire them. But it can come across as arrogant or condescending if you ask people to disrupt the way they work or what they're working on before having a good understanding of what the effects will be.

I can't speak for all companies, but from what I've observed at my past few employers, recordings aren't generally analyzed in that way.

This comes from the context of Sales or Success at B2B SaaS, but I've seen recordings used in the following ways:

  * Keep a record of what was said/agreed upon during a meeting for future reference e.g. we will deliver X on Y date to Z contact
  * Share with someone who should have been there, but was unable to attend the meeting
  * Share a relevant snippet with people outside of the meeting attendees. e.g. product feedback, services opportunity, etc.
  * Capture customer praise so everyone feels good about themselves/the product

The vast majority of recordings are never viewed again to my knowledge.

Emulation of a device is totally legal.

For instance, I run qemu all the time to emulate various android devices.

I suspect that you're thinking specifically of game emulation though.

Running software on an emulated device is fine legally as long as it doesn't violate copyright law.

For instance, you can legally backup software that you own in the US [1] - that extends to games as well - and because emulators themselves are legal (although you may also need to backup the device's BIOS), you can have a completely legitimate archive of copyrighted games to run via an emulator.

That said, it's unlikely that most people archive software themselves, and it is not legal to distribute backups in the US, even if both parties have legitimately acquired copies of the source material.

[1] https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-digital.html

From an early age, My view of Shatner was heavily influenced by my mother's conviction that he murdered his wife. With the benefit of the internet since then, I've been able to investigate it further and found that the general consensus is that he wasn't present when she drowned in their pool and that the rumor that he killed her was started by a tabloid.

It's a little terrible, but it's still hard for me to escape that prejudice when watching him speak.

I'm not spiritual at all, but I did resonate with the Buddhist principle to acknowledge your emotions, rather than to react (or avoid) them. Something I'm trying to apply in my own life.

Kinda along those lines. What works best for me is to start with high level comments in plain English after thinking about what I'm trying to achieve for a bit. Then I make a skeleton of all the methods and classes that that will require. Then I'll comment each method (if not trivial) in plain English and only then actually begin development. The development phase seems to go by pretty quickly that way.

And as another plus, that makes my code very readable for others. I leave the comments in.

I use this project by Don Melton to get a Blu-ray video down to an 8 - 10 GB file size: https://github.com/donmelton/video_transcoding

It uses HandBrake, FFmpeg, MKVToolNix, and MP4v2 with some custom tuned settings and has really good results from my experience.

Sleeping Beauty actually looks really good: https://thismoviedoesnotexist.org/movie/sleeping-beauty

Edit:

Worst (best?) tone clash: https://thismoviedoesnotexist.org/movie/stalked-by-a-friend