gavinmckenzie

Amazing. There was a time, nearly 20 years ago, that I was let go from Adobe. My colleagues assumed that because of my position/tenure/knowledge that I was layoff-proof. I told them that I was just a number in a large organization, and that orgs of a certain scale don’t do layoffs in a way that looks at each individual. Sure enough I was let go and after 16 years at the same company, that was acquired by Adobe where I spent 5 years, my overall feeling was “meh, I knew the end was nigh”. Since then I’ve been a contractor, and I couldn’t be happier. The relationship between me and my client is simple: I work, and they pay me. Sure there’s no stock option perks, but on the other hand I never have to deal with HR processes, submit quarterly objectives, etc. I work, I get paid. I know when the contract will end, and either the client renews the contract or I go somewhere else. It’s all fine.

For me, reducing my work life down to such a simple transactional level has been incredibly freeing and stress reducing, and allowed me to focus even more clearly on the work.

Oh wow, you just managed to describe me completely. I'm inattentive-type ADHD (diagnosed as an adult), and all of my thought processes are super visual; constructing visual mental models in space is how I problem solve and a lifetime ago in school I was top of the math class when I could construct visual models of the problem but struggled when I couldn't.

My diagnostic ADD testing was inconclusive because I was able to excel at working memory and shape tests because I am able to hold onto a ton of information if I can write it on my mental blackboard etc.

When I'm listening to a conversation, what I'm hearing often produces a stream of involuntary visuals representing related information and subjects, like I have a mental background process showing me flash-cards of possibly useful information.

I also have the issue where someone will talk to me and there's this delay where I often appear to be non-responsive for a moment or two until my brain spools-up and then I mentally lock into the conversation.

Anyway, if you have any references or additional learnings you've found related to this topic, please share.

Unless you own a dog, and then it can be a huge risk. It doesn’t take much xylitol to kill your dog, and I’ve watched a friend lose their dog due to this. I’ve had a scare where my dog ate a piece of a popsicle on a hot day that, unknown to me in the moment, was sweetened with xylitol; thankfully not in a fatal concentration but we still had to stay up all night to keep an eye on our dog and were hours away from the nearest animal hospital. Allulose won’t kill your dog.

I find it interesting that lucid dreaming has an impact on your feeling of restfulness. I can't say I've experienced the same, but I'll try to reflect on this more given that almost 100% of my dream states are lucid and have been for almost all of my adult life. As an adolescent, I would lucid dream only occasionally.

My personal experience with lucid dreaming is that I am almost always aware that I'm dreaming, and most of the time I'm content to let the dream play out. Sometimes I do intervene and become an active participant in the dream, rather than letting it happen like a cut-scene in a game. And, on occasion, I will rewind a scene that I'm unhappy with or I want to revisit.

I'll also sometimes find myself in a dream location and suddenly remember all the prior occurrences that I've visited the setting. It's the weirdest feeling because I'll have what feels like years worth of memories from experiences in that dream setting that come rushing back to me. Memories that I can only vaguely grasp when I'm conscious, but as soon as I'm back in a particular setting all those prior experiences are remembered -- things that happened in the environment, character interactions, etc.

It's a bit unsettling when I wake up because for a moment I feel like I have these parallel life experiences from different realities stored in my head, mostly partitioned from each other.

A discussion around the numbers of medically-assisted death and what can be done to reduce those numbers through better treatments and services would be a worthy discussion.

But it’s inaccurate and needlessly provocative to say that the government is killing people through euthanasia. The government made it possible for people to seek medical assistance in ending their own lives.

Nope, not true. I’ve been contracting for 15 years and regularly encounter leetcode interviews.

When I can, I’ll outright ask if the client intends to do this kind of interview. If they say yes, I’ll explain my objection to the process and if they aren’t willing to modify their interview approach for me I will decline the interview.

I have on occasion had this sprung on my without warning halfway through an interview and I’ve declined to do it; most of the time I get hired anyway.

Whenever I can I try to convince hiring managers (and I’ve been one myself) to ditch leetcode nonsense for future interviews.

This strategy of not focusing on growth is key to my interests. For example, I’ve been a customer of Fastmail since they launched maybe 20 years ago. And I’ve got my family and many colleagues using Fastmail. It is a paid email service.

Could I use any of the “free” email services like GMail (or back in the day, Yahoo)? Of course. But Fastmail does one thing and they do it well, and I don’t have to worry about them analyzing my emails and selling ads to me. I am willing to pay for that.

Please stay focused. I just tried Kagi today and I’m incredibly surprised at how fantastic the search results are. I never thought I would pay for a search engine but here I am.

My daughter went to a Montessori school here in Canada from 18-months old until high school. About the class size...

As a Montessori class has students in three different year levels together (e.g. a Casa class would have children aged 3, 4, and 5) and part of the philosophy is for the senior students in a class to assist in teaching the junior students, the class has to have a sufficient number of students in order for this approach to work. Small class sizes don't have enough students to support the learning model.

In my experience 27 children in a class is very typical and not at all an over-populated class. I've seen larger classes work just as well.

The Montessori school my daughter went to would have a director/directress and an assistant in each class.

Also, if you weren’t aware, Prospect started out as one of the early Kickstarter-supported indie short films, and it’s great:

https://vimeo.com/90049558

How do you sync your Apple photo library to your Syno, given the Apple library is a package file containing a maze of machine-generated nested folders and many nearly duplicate image files (at least for those images you’ve edited)?

Deakins has also said the same thing about Skyfall — that for the most part what we see on screen is what he saw from behind the camera. And Skyfall also has scenes of super bright colours, although those bright saturated scenes do have a limited palette.

There was a recent comparison of the very different look between Deakins’ Skyfall and Van Hoytema’s Spectre.

https://twitter.com/sadhilldevan/status/1458863501015851008?...

Very cool, but as a Canadian, I am disappointed that a more detailed view of North America as a whole (Canada+US+Mexico) wasn't included.

Yes! Signing (albeit with a small vocabulary) was surprisingly successful with my infant daughter, over 20 years ago. I was initially skeptical, but it worked really well. Not sure if it reduced my infant daughter's communication frustrations, but it certainly helped her parents feel less frustrated.

As a 100% introvert who enjoys presenting and being in front of an audience, I completely understand the behaviour the Croatian chef described. It's not that unusual.

I can't find the original source, but long ago in an interview Mike Myers (comedic actor, formerly of Saturday Night Live, and a string of over-the-top movies) described himself as a "situational extrovert". If you are aware of Mike's work, you might too be surprised to learn that he's an introvert.

It looks very interesting, but the first thing I noticed as a macOS user, is the shell has a built-in command "open" which I expect will conflict with the standard macOS command "open" and I haven't found any docs that describe how to deal with this.

I had the pleasure of flying the Concorde, almost by accident, in the 90s. Yes, I was flying on business, but for some reason I couldn't get a flight on KLM to the Netherlands at all that week and my creative travel agent mused "Hey, do you want to take the Concorde?"

The cost was $3500, which at the time was within a couple of hundred dollars compared to a business-class seat on KLM. Yes, that ticket price wasn't something I'd contemplate for personal travel, and it was a bit discounted at that; but for business travel it certainly wasn't exorbitant.

I love Interstellar despite some of the liberties it takes. For me the number one thing Interstellar did so well was communicate clearly that the universe does not care about us.

We are infinitesimally small and insignificant. I felt the scale of space and the unforgiving progress of time, as characters dealt with the emotional impact of time dilation on them, their colleagues, and family. And we, as viewers, get to experience it as we see minutes pass from our POV only to return to Endurance and realize Romilly has aged over 20 years in orbit, all alone; and Cooper’s kids have suddenly grown up without us noticing.

And as others have noted about the film before, it also relates to the phenomena we experience as we age and our perception of time accelerates. If you’re a parent, you feel yourself slipping farther and faster away from your children with each passing year. Chances are if you watched Interstellar as a parent, you felt the film deeply on another level.

For anyone old enough to have watched the original 1987 Verhoeven RoboCop, surely the word glitch is permanently associated for the hyper-violent scene where the enforcement droid ED-209 is demonstrated as a massive fail, only to be summed up by the project owner as a “glitch”. A scene that was outrageously violent in the theatrical release and even moreso in the director’s cut.

I know Verhoeven’s perspective was to use violent satire to speak about fascism, and the increasing militarization and technology-adoption of police forces — themes that are even more topical today.

I think your description of how glitch is used today, as a folksy (and ultimately dishonest) non-threatening way to describe a failure while stressed-out engineers scramble to prop-up a half-finished system, directly captures the ED-209 scene — where people seek to mislead about the true situation through the use of the word “glitch”.

In the past decade I have politely declined to answer leetcode style questions in interviews. I’ll offer to discuss how to solve coding problems in general terms, and I’ll happily whiteboard diagram solutions, but I will not code on a whiteboard or on a computer set up for the purpose in an interview.

While interviewers are initially surprised at my unwillingness to answer such questions, it often starts a short discussion about interview practices, and my observations about fantastic high-performing colleagues who have been passed over because they failed at interview coding challenges.

Thus far I haven’t lost an opportunity by declining to do coding exercises. In contrast, the couple of times I’ve played the leetcode game, I’ve lost the opportunity despite doing very well in the other interview phases.

I realize I have an advantage of being in this business for 30 years, having a lengthy and robust CV, and having been a hiring manager who can talk about my own experiences of being the interviewer rather than the interviewee.

One way for me to rationalize the possibility of some UFOs being alien tech is the possibility that they are drones — unmanned. Popular culture consideration of UFOs as alien craft seem to assume there are sentient beings inside, possibly due to the history of reported abduction experiences with little green or grey beings.

But arguments against alien craft that question why they move so quickly with abrupt unnecessary direction changes, and lack of interaction with humans, to me could be explained by imagining that they are “unmanned” craft. No need for “inertial dampers” or other tech to deal with the hyper fast direction changes if there’s no beings inside.

To me this is analogous to the incredibly common practice of applying scanned grain from 16mm or 35mm film stock in digital cinematography workflows, making the result “feel” more like film — or our expectations and perceptions of cinema. Sometimes high fidelity media isn’t what we really want.

I can relate. I have a handful of recurring dream worlds that I visit. Sometimes I'll have a series of dreams over a few days that all take place in the same dream world. Months or years can go by and then I'll find myself dropped back into a dream world that I had forgotten about. Sometimes the world has progressed since my last visit, and sometimes I'm put back nearly where I left off last time.

The weirdest thing for me is that I swear I have a separate set of memories in these different dream worlds; a personal history exclusive to that dream world, where once I'm in that dream world, I suddenly remember previous visits to that world, places I've visited, events that took place. It's an incredibly strange feeling that can momentarily make me question my sense of self.

I should note that I nearly always dream lucidly. Not sure if that plays a role in this phenomena.

I've owned six Mazda vehicles over the past 30 years. Current owner of a 2016 CX-9. The stock behaviour was that the touchscreen doesn't accept touches unless the vehicle is stopped -- though it doesn't require you to put the vehicle in park.

Also, the vehicle has a heads-up-display projected on the windshield. The original HUD included a graphical tachometer so you could see the revs which has limited value except it looked cool and gave you some indication on when you were in boost. In a future update Mazda removed the graphical tach in the HUD citing safety as they felt the constant animating tach in the driver's field of view was a distraction. But, the tach remains displayed if you had it turned on before the update.

The voice command functionality is okay, including for the mediocre built-in navigation, once you learn the specific phrases and commands.

Last fall I upgraded to Apple CarPlay and the behaviour is the same. Touch input only works when the vehicle is stopped. There was a rumour that one of the reasons why CarPlay took so long to come to Mazda vehicles was because Mazda wanted integration with it's rotary command nob, back button, and other function buttons around the knob and on the steering wheel. Not sure if it's true, but I will say that navigating CarPlay with the knob is just fine when driving, and the physical back button allows me to navigate to the previous screen regardless of whether the previous screen is a CarPlay screen or one of the Mazda screens, which is really great.

I know some Mazda owners were upset with these limitations, complaining that it prevented the passenger from operating the screen, but that seems like a corner case.

In contrast to the other comments about how 2049 was slow etc., let me say that I took my wife and daughter to see 2049.

We watched the original "Final Cut" Blade Runner a couple of weeks before 2049 and both wife and daughter felt that the original was slow but they respected the movie.

After seeing 2049 my wife said she enjoyed the movie better than the original but wished it could have been an hour shorter.

My daughter was ecstatic and said that 2049 could have been another hour even longer and she would have been happy. But my daughter is a cinematographer, so possibly that's partly why she loved it.

It feels very close to the weapon in the Schwarzenegger film Eraser.

As if planning for a baby wasn't stressful enough, choosing a name feels like a huge responsibility. Especially when you have a small number of peers who either changed their name as adults or choose to be known by a middle name rather than their first name, underlining that sometimes people dislike their names enough to take the matter into their own hands.

My wife and I divided up the responsibility when we were expecting 20 years ago: she would choose a boy's name, I would choose a girl's name. Coincidentally we both ended up choosing Arthurian names: Tristan for a boy, Morgana for a girl.

Clearing firstlastname.com domain names was straightforward, and ultimately we had a girl, so Morgana it was. Unfortunately Morgan was a common enough name that people initially try to pronounce it as Morgan and then get stuck when they see the vowel on the end, but this problem went away after the BBC show Merlin happened.

One additional unplanned bonus was that her full name is alliterative, given both first and last name starts with "M". I do think there's nice stickiness bonus to alliterative names, as evidenced by comic book and other fictional character names. It's just one more factor to consider.