oddlyaromatic

Normally I'd agree with this sentiment: language changes constantly, usage is king. However we're in an era where people (often in the course of marketing themselves or a product) intentionally move the goalposts of word meanings in a way that's generally unhelpful to users of that language. So we describe there is something called X that sounds very impressive and powerful. And there is something else kind of like the existing idea we called X, but it's more mundane ... it's close enough that salespeople can get away with calling it that, so they do, and the definition of X is now hopelessly muddled. I don't know what to do about it, but this does not strike me as being the same as the natural evolution of word meanings over time. I guess really it is still one form of that. But maybe it's one that as a society we should be more careful of - you can't, for example, call one medication by the name of another for marketing reasons.

Maybe AI is not the worst example. But with most buzzwords that are not legally protected, they just get marketed into meaninglessness in a way that harms non-expert consumers.

Wow I like your blog! The landing page is really nice. I did, though, get very distracted by the text-shadow on the headings and links. It makes me feel like I have something on my glasses or something. Everything else looks beautiful to me and the projects look awesome.

> which means Veterans can schedule a mental health appointment on their phone.

It all comes down to this. Well done. It's so easy to get stuck in the weeds and forget the real goal.

Google Apps Script is great for tools like this: I have used some at work for a while to manage gig listings for a musician... just the tiny bit of automation happening at midnight let's them add shows via a Google form and forget all about them, knowing that geocoding, and removing of old shows, and other funny business, will all happen without them needing to maintain it. BUT if they ever do need to modify a show, they are dealing with a google sheet, which they understand.

Last year I lead a project called Paratransit Pal to enter AT&T's Civic Coding Challenge in Atlanta ... the project was all about improving accessibility and clarity of information about trips for users with cognitive disabilities. But it was still basically a hackathon project, which doesn't help many people unless we actually roll out a full production version. (We're working on that!). The twist is that we won the competition, and the whole team had agreed in advance to donate any winnings. So our prototype app for people with developmental disabilities generated $34,000 in donations to organizations in our area who DIRECTLY HELP those people (and another $6,000 towards programming tuition in Mexico, where one of our team members was from).

We have written this up here: https://medium.com/paratransit-pal/paratransit-pal-won-40-00...

Right now we are trying to find our niche and cater specifically to those who are left out of UI solutions that target the general user. But even if, like most projects, this does end up fizzling out, it has already done some good and not just been a dead end.

>The best bit about being a developer I've found is when working directly with the customer who is in some distress and the look on their face when you solve the problem and make their life easier, even if it was easy to solve. I'd love to find something where every day was like that!

AGREED!

I used a fundraising tool recently with this kind of passwordless workflow. It's a tool that you only use once a year for about 30 days, and your authenticated session can last about that long. Which means you do the process once on each computer you use, and then you never have to remember the password the next year. It's great.

I would not have noticed that one chart in each set of 4 has a different scale, so things that are the same height aren't actually the same number. It certainly looks nice and tidy but it is indeed misleading.

They specifically referred to the "deterred subset" ... which is much smaller then "everyone".

In any case, the parent's point seemed pretty empty.

> Who's to say that the current deterred subset of the population won't begin to commit crimes if our style of punishment is changed?

This is what research is for. We may never know what is optimal in an absolute sense, but we can figure out some relative costs/benefits of different approaches to problems and choose our tradeoffs appropriately.

"It's your time, and if people are willing to pay, you can charge whatever you like."

Yep! It also helps, for those of us who feel bad charging "high" prices for work we like to do, to not think of ourselves as being paid for "the work". I know a lot of artists who are lovely people and could sometimes be persuaded to do an event for a low fee because they are doing something they love. Then one of them got the advice to think of what they are being paid for - it's not that you get paid to spend an hour on stage in Utah one Saturday. It's all the BS around doing that - traveling their, committing in advance no matter what comes up you will be there and do a good job, having to ignore your family and other responsibilities to get good at your craft. The general disruption and unevenness that it brings to your life to be a freelance anything. If people value your work enough to pay you what you will accept for ALL THAT BS just to have you there, great, you have a career now. But, as they say, the performance is free. It's all the other stuff they have to pay you for.

This is a big thing people don't always get at first with Grid. It only replaces Flexbox where Flexbox was being used in a convoluted way to imitate what Grid does. It doesn't replace the more "natural" use of Flexbox to control the direction, spacing, and sizing of what for want of a better term I'll call "things in lines that may wrap".

Not an app, but I have used ifttt recipes for this in the past, where I call the number and leave a message, then receive an email with transcription and link to audio in case the transcription was bad. Then I was automatically tagging those emails in Gmail to be able to go through my notes. The IFTTT number was saved in my contacts with an easily pronounced word. So when driving I could tell Siri "call Bender" and then not have to worry about any launch/navigation etc, just start talking

> I see so many great technical people who are unable to communicate effectively and suffer badly from this.

I learned a lot of my communication skills studying the arts, and staging plays, musical performances, etc. My best teachers about clearly communicating expectations and deadlines, and giving meaningful feedback in a respectful way, have been people in the arts.

At my first hackathon, I got the same vibe I often did in the last few days before a play or concert. Then when I started running a civic tech project, more and more patterns with working in the arts became apparent. Lots of volunteers, everybody has day jobs, you need to provide people with opportunities to do work they care about, but not pressure. And you need to provide leadership without being a dictator, and meet external milestones with a "show must go on" attitude when the time comes.

It is already much cheaper to import services and hire people who don't live in SV. But somehow companies continue to locate themselves there. Presumably the opportunities for profit outweigh the costs imposed by the high cost of living etc. Unions might reduce profits a little (or not, depending on the impact on worker productivity) but these companies have shown they will pay big premiums to attract the most capable workers.

But unions must of course think about these things and understand their ACTUAL bargaining power. Detroit sounds like that mark was missed.

I'm with you. The company who wants to exchange capital for labor benefits from being able to negotiate separately with each provider of that labor to get the lowest price possible from each person. SOME of the people providing the labor do well out of this too (the good negotiators) and would perceive a union as harmful to them. Employers can exploit this by, say, keeping salaries as close to secret as they can so that more people think they are doing better than average. But it's weird to me that this hoodwink works so well. I have been in both union and non-union roles. I'd go for union every time. All of the labor might as well negotiate with all of the capital, otherwise the power differential has an outsized effect.

MuseScore is great, I have used it to produce lead sheets professionally on several occasions and it does not disappoint. I grew up on Sibelius but prefer MuseScore for simpler tasks. They have done a great job.

Something that helped me a lot was somebody pointing out that it's OK for code not to be 100% DRY - sometimes things are the same at a given point in time only by coincidence, not by some inherent logical connection. It's a mistake to refactor and remove these "redundant" parts because they are not truly redundant. This helps me chill out when deciding when it is useful to add an abstraction or a separate helper function or whatever.

Wow, there is a lot of stuff there. About a year ago I looked for some contrast based syntax highlighting for Atom and didn't find anything usable, but maybe it's time to look again.

Oh cool, thanks for the response and explanation. For me, real time is a big deal: I work with adults with developmental disabilities, and anything that helps with having fun jamming with me and my musician friends is really interesting. I had fun combining imitone (or other inputs) with loops created on iOS with Figure. It's a really interesting space, and thank you for sharing your work.

I use grayscale when I'm finding I'm too distracted by all the stuff on my phone or computer. It helps me focus on what I'm doing sometimes and is a visual reminder that, for whatever reason, I need to try harder than usual to avid distractions that day.

This has been a little trickier since I have started programming more. I really like syntax highlighting.

The fella behind imitone (https://imitone.com/) has been grinding away at the details of this stuff for a while. I haven't checked in on it for a while but I was a kickstarter backer. The last version I loaded up and played with was pretty great.

I saw an enjoyable talk recently about snapshot testing. I don't know too much about testing generally but it seems like it could be relevant: https://facebook.github.io/jest/docs/en/snapshot-testing.htm... is the general idea but it doesn't have to be confined to jest/react

Edit: Slides from the talk I saw: http://slides.com/bahmutov/snapshot-testing

>Is this demonization of opposing viewpoints a new thing, or am I just noticing it more in the last two years?

I think it's more in recent years. Especially in the US where things are highly polarized and every issue seems to have a "Republican" take and a "Democratic" take. So points of view on specific situations are taken to reflect much more about a person's overall position than they actually do. And we have more echo chambers reinforcing our conviction about being right in the first place.

Finally I think there is also something legitimate about connecting viewpoints to consequences and evidence where possible, and discussing higher level concepts with the low level consequences in peoples' lives, in order to understand the tradeoffs that each point of view entails. I do think certain viewpoints are tightly linked to certain outcomes, and it wouldn't be demonizing to say "If you are for policy X you are accepting the likely effects Y and Z".

Looks like I missed that point in your original post. Seems about right. I think I was led astray by your last sentence about the skills.

>much of your experience from 10+ years ago isn't very relevant today

>you're not more qualified than someone less experienced who has that skill.

I'd gently disagree with this. An extra decade or more of working and navigating the relationships of a workplace, and honing a sense of professional judgment and problem solving is worth something. An employee does far more than implement a specific skill. You need some of that extra stuff too.

On the management side (non-tech) I initially felt awkward managing people older than me too. After some time I figured out that it is not that hard to have a relationship where their experience and knowledge is a good part of it. Their expertise is valued and I often ask for input when making decisions. I learn a lot. But also, they don't mind getting instructions, feedback, and training from somebody 20 years younger. We all get how the roles fit together, and my job is both to make the final call on stuff, and serve the people I manage so they have what they need and know they are doing a good job. I used to feel bad saying "good job" to somebody 20 years older than me (like who am I to say it?). Again, though, I figured out how to give more specific feedback and thank people for how hard they work and the impact it makes.

This all took a while to get right because of my own hangups. I could see some people preferring to manage younger employees because the authority relationship is more "natural" but that's surface level bs at the end of the day I think.

It has more to do with chargebacks than verifying at the time of the sale, as far as I know. If I claim I don't recognize a transaction, the business can defend themselves a little if they have my signature recorded for that transaction.

>If everyone started sending marketing emails like this, then they would start looking like advertisements, they would feel less personal, spam and "promotional" filters would adapt, and you'd be back to square 1.

True, but this is the case for every other marketing technique also. There will never be one permanent "best" way to get the most attention from readers for exactly this reason. The article does seem to miss this aspect. Plain email is currently probably a reasonable move in certain cases, in the ongoing dance of trying to get things read.

I do agree, though, that using plain email to avoid being filtered as a promotional message is not a respectful out very useful angle. I'd prefer to receive lightly formatted newsletters that work fine on mobile and were identified as marketing on my devices.

> In addition, if it was so easy to obtain how come my credit card bank still constantly begs me to update my income information?

I suspect this one has more to do with trying to engage you so that they may sell you more credit.

> So I can understand that Mozilla might want to keep themselves off mailing blacklists

So can I, but the desire/need to do this does not imply a "right" to track the opening of messages in the manner initially planned. The reader does however have a right to privacy, whether they link know about a 1x1 image and its effects or not.

Email deliverability is a giant pain to have to deal with, of course, so the motivation to overlook this small sacrifice of privacy is pretty high.

The whiteboard thing is different. Candidates of all backgrounds can practice that and thus make it less effective as a tool to filter out bad applicants. But diversity quotas, for example, are harder to game because most people can't change much about themselves to meet diversity criteria. So instead you are presumably talking about people who use their background to get an advantage in the hiring process and end up in roles a role for which they are not competent. But this is also fuzzy, because if the company is seeking diversity, why shouldn't people apply and let the company decide if their skills are sufficient? How are they "gaming" something by showing up and being hired? That's a failing of the company, not the candidate.