passive

An initial cost of 16 million, and yearly maintenance of 600,000, for a city of 2.5 million? Per person, $5 initially and $0.25 per year.

That seems incredibly cheap for the benefits. Colombia looks to have a GDP per capita about 1/10th of the US, so if we scale it up 10X...

I live in a relatively cold climate, and I would still be delighted to pay $2.50 a year for this kind of infrastructure development. Heck, even scaling it up 100X seems like it would be worth considering.

Maybe there's a cost I'm missing here, but for a hot city, the AC savings alone seem like they would be worth it, not to mention the 40% reduction in respiratory infections through increased air quality.

The lack of a battery kills this for me. Minimal power usage is one of the benefits of these kinds of displays, so it seems a very strange omission. We have too many cords running along walls as it is, and it makes the placement a lot harder.

Neat idea though.

This tracks.

15 years ago, I bought the cheapest laser I could find, which was a Brother. Put two cartridges in it over the years, and last year it died. Some devices couldn't print to it due to driver issues, but it was easy enough to send to another device to print. Otherwise literally no complaints.

I did some comparison shopping, and while Brother was no longer the cheapest, it was still pretty cheap. I'm not sure most of my family even remembers it's a different one, other than it printing more easily from every device.

I replaced one grey box with another, but I mostly get to ignore it, and that's wonderful.

It was a frustrating thing to witness, because it was clear there was still so much potential in the situation. I've spent a long time since studying what makes companies successful at scale, and culture seems to be the key piece.

Not even a specific kind of culture, just one that most people at the company feel part of. Many people together can accomplish a great deal more than they could alone, and culture forms the basis of the communication network that allows them to figure out how to work together. Basically, people who trust each other have a lot less communication overhead.

Culture alone doesn't make a company scale, there's a lot of process you usually need, but you can't successfully implement those processes without a shared sense of culture. RIM did a lot of this, where they brought in process experts to improve efficiency across locations. But Waterloo itself was successful, so it was left alone until well into our first round of layoffs, and at that point the culture there had fragmented a fair bit.

I'm very sorry to hear you are going through a similar situation. It may be too late, but I do have one cultural silver bullet to offer:

Storytelling

Companies (or really any group of people) that scale successfully almost always do a fair amount of storytelling. Both in the myth making around their origins, like Steve Jobs and Apple, and in day-to-day employee experience. Storytelling is one of the oldest methods of sharing culture with someone, and throughout human history, the primary one we have relied upon. Telling someone a story helps them know what you care about, both in the content of the story, and the way you choose to tell it, which builds empathy, which is key to trust.

This why some companies fell apart completely when they went remote, because usually people who like each other will tell stories when they are in a room together, but they won't start a zoom meeting to tell the same story.

While I do have some specific processes I've adopted related to storytelling, I've become more and more convinced that ANY way you facilitate storytelling will help you build culture.

So if you have the opportunity, make time for storytelling with your co-workers, and encourage your leadership to do more of it.

I think we're describing aspects of the same problem. The Waterloo core of the company was generally very successful with what it was focused on, so if you never got your head out of that bubble, you might assume things were going just as well elsewhere. There was definitely a lot of cockiness in the executives at the time, but it takes more than that to sink a company, as modern times have emphasized heavily.

I can promise you that internally there was a ton of energy directed at competing with the iPhone. But RIM would have floundered against Android in the same way, because the company culture never scaled out of Waterloo.

I worked for BlackBerry, then called RIM, for 3 years starting just before the launch of the Bold 9000. I implemented the automated test harness for our first touch devices.

It wasn't the iPhone, or a lack of a desire to respond to the iPhone, that brought us down. It was consistently poor execution at scale.

RIMs success grew out of the work they did when they were a couple hundred people spread around a neighbourhood in Waterloo. That group had excellent culture and good habits for execution, which failed to scale beyond that region.

When I joined there were about 10,000 of us, spread in offices all over the world. I only visited half a dozen, but the vibe in every single one was notable worse then the HQ. People didn't understand the plans, were constantly duplicating work happening at other locations, and had very little ability to communicate with leadership.

Dang, I hope these make it to Canada. I had been considering picking up an older Leaf to supplement our SUV for short trips, but having something that would charge itself via solar would be nice step up from that.

This is some disgusting, fearmongering, copaganda.

The only actual trend of significance that has meaningful data behind it is an increase in police killings, which is still presented in a mostly useless way (8 over the last 6 months vs 133 from 1961-2009).

Everything else seems to be one-off stats like "a 53-percent spike last week".

Not surprising that this is in the Post, and from what I can see of this author, he's a better dressed version of Rebel Media.

It's slow and I'm getting 500s sometime. Nova Scotia, Canada

I think a key thing here is that they are only doing releases every other week.

So when changes skip a code review, they are still subjected to a good amount of peer testing before they ever reach a customer.

I think that's a reasonable approach in the situation, and I can see why they have gotten good results from it.

Do you want (pictures of) ants?

Because that is how you get (pictures of) ants.

Neat, I've got time, so I booked us a spot. :)

Looks like they have an integration test engineer position: https://jobs.lever.co/astranis/2e6871a1-89d5-404f-b8e1-32817...

I think data portability is the most obvious value proposition for most people, especially between potentially hostile services (Facebook and Google Photos could easily inter-operate, but that's not something either company wants to invest in). For someone like me, who has moved a streaming music "collection" between 4 services over the past decade or so, it would have been real handy.

It also, conceptually at least, dramatically lowers the barrier to entry for new services in the same space, since they can use the existing data models and persistence layers.

The privacy aspects are secondary, at least to start, though I think the last few years have helped establish more context for them. Providing granular controls for data access in a common format across services seems like a big win, at least compared to my experience hunting through preferences/settings/account details/etc menus in Facebook and other places.

Finally, I think there's significant potential value in this being used as way to authenticate the source of media. As deepfakes are getting better and easier to create, having all the video and audio of you connected to a known identity seems like a necessity. Letting Facebook or Google be that identity provider would be very bad.

Location: Halifax, Nova Scotia (US/Canada dual-citizen)

Remote: 10+ years experience

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Python, and whatever else is needed

Résumé: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_WnpbIncnlpHkS9ECAjxxmPf...

Email: on résumé

Manager of engineers with a focus on optimizing tools and processes to make the delivery of high-quality experiences simple, rewarding, and high-confidence. Looking for something in the engineering manager/director of engineering/CTO track, with a company taking DEI seriously. As a cis white man, I'm over-represented in tech, so if you find a good candidate who isn't, please consider them first.

If this were to take off, I would expect to see some governments offering it to all citizens, both to support whatever digital services they provide, and as a tool for helping users manage their privacy.

The hosting story is still a little messy, but in my version of this, I think it needs a trusted third-party to offer hosting, along with an open committee to manage the data specifications.

The advantages of separating data storage from usage are similar to those in application development. If you have a robust model for defining and retrieving your data, the tools for working with that data can be iterated on independently from the data itself.

So let's say your photos are in Google Photos, because your phone backs them up there automatically, but all your friends who you want to see the photos are on Facebook. Theoretically, "Solid" could be pulling those photos into a standard data specification, and provide easy tools for automating how they get shared into Facebook.

Then let's say you wanted to edit some of those photos, so you open up PhotoShop Solid, and get editing.

But then you join Instagram, and you want to quickly show off your Photoshop skills. All you need to do is connect Solid.

The key aspect here is that you can use as many different tools as you like to work with your data, but it's the same data, and if Facebook goes belly-up tomorrow, or you just don't want your photos there anymore, Solid has your back.

One thing that I don't think is well defined yet, but really should be, is how services will request access to your data. This needs some kind of standard interface, very similar to how phones let you customize app access. It should make it very clear what data you are "selling" to the Facebook, and what they are providing in return for that data.

Lovely to see this come up again. It's really a great time to promote Solid, with the evidence of shady practices at the big corporations mounting, I know lots of folk would like a way to reclaim some of their data.

That said, I feel like the big starting point for Solid is exfiltration/syncing of data between services, and that appears to be missing, for the most part.

Give folk an app that will pull their music preferences from Spotify, and let them try out Amazon or Apple music with the same collection. It's a very simple data set, and a fairly common and comprehensible use case.

Doing photos from Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/etc would be a bigger lift, but not too much different in concept, and I think very compelling in terms of selling the value of the service.

Postman is the real player in this space. They did a great job collecting the low hanging fruit in terms of engaging all types of users in working with APIs. They've been a bit slow since then to build out their full API design and verification functionality, but they are making steady progress, and it seems like UI in 8.0 cleans up a lot of the rough edges they've accumulated over the years.

They also make it simple, if not necessarily easy, to use your collections in other places, either through Newman, API access, or direct export. I know Blazemeter, for example, allows you to build load tests from Postman collections, and it's relatively trivial to have Newman running as part of your CI.

So having worked in this space for the past two decades, and quite recently felt a lot of those same pain points, I'm skeptical of any solution that doesn't either challenge Postman head-on, or build around it.

Without significant financial backing, it will be very difficult to get traction otherwise. That said, I'll certainly take a look at your project, should you share it.

It was really about them being an underdog, more than anything. Challenging the big dog and occasionally forcing them into more consumer-friendly behaviors. That said, I still ended up owning mostly Intel CPUs (a lapped Celeron 300a running at ~514mhz in the K6 days).

The Pentium 4 to Core 2 Duo leap was based on architecture, not fab tech. It was a very significant shift in chip design philosophy. Intel being ahead in fab tech didn't hurt, but it's far from their only strength. There's no reason to believe M1 will open any sort of gates for Arm on PC. It's not like other Arm CPUs will be running Mac OS, or M1s will be running Windows. The whole pre-Intel period for Mac OS didn't do anything to diminish x86 on the desktop.

Now, Chromebooks are something of an argument for ARM on the desktop, as they at least seem to provide identical behavior regardless of ISA, but they aren't putting up the necessary numbers quite yet. x86 still owns PC gaming, and has a pretty solid hold on console gaming. I'm not going to be worried at all for Intel until that shifts too.

Yeah, exactly this.

Intel has really stumbled on fabrication the last 2-3 years, but the idea that they won't correct that ignores decades of precedent.

I'm an AMD fanboy from the K6 days, and I love what Lisa Su has been able to deliver for them, but if it wasn't for Intel's stumbles, they would still be single digits at best in most markets.

Look at their progress from Pentium 4 to Core 2 Duo (makes me feel real old to see that was 15 years ago). We probably won't see quite as dramatic an improvement over the next 3 years, but I'll be stunned if AMD still has the performance lead at that point.

Apple's a wildcard, but they aren't going to sell their chips, and they represent a fairly small part of the PC market. No other non-x86 chips have made even a tiny dent in the PC market, and even in the datacenter, it's still mostly x86.

The absolute worst I can imagine happening to Intel over the next decade is that they no longer define the CPU market. But that's a long, long, way from dying, and will probably be good for the market and good for Intel in the long run.

Key bit seems to be:

"..batteries are exhibiting high levels of sustained health. If the observed degradation rates are maintained, the vast majority of batteries will outlast the usable life of the vehicle."

Now when are they going to stop it auto-refreshing on desktop Chrome, making it functionally useless?

SageSure | Software Test Engineer | Remote (but must be able to work in the US)

It's not up on our careers page yet, but we're adding to our QA team at SageSure (https://www.sagesure.com/). We're a technology company in the property insurance business, growing steadily with lots of nice, smart folks.

Our team focuses primarily on UI automation with Selenium, using a python BDD framework. We work closely with the development teams of the apps we are testing, so you will be expected to learn the apps and assist in manual validation as necessary.

I'll add the link to the job as soon as it is available, but in the mean time you can reach out to me directly if you're interested. (alec.munro @ SageSure)

Yeah, I was worried there for a moment, because MFP is a pretty great app for tracking what you eat, among other things.

I do software quality assurance, and it wouldn't surprise me if this was put in by request of their QA department. I don't know if a human looks at every PCB, but however many they sample to QA, this would be a quick way to check an important feature of the hardware.

Nothing wrong with your argument theoretically, but the Surface with a 5/10 score is 3.4 lbs, while this 1/10 Macbook is 4.3 lbs.

At least this is in the article too:

After the interview aired, the Uber head tried to disassociate himself from it, saying he had misspoken. “I said something in the moment that I do not believe,” Khosrowshahi said in a statement Monday. “When it comes to Jamal Khashoggi, his murder was reprehensible and should not be forgotten or excused.”

What's most exciting to me is how the new processors seem to do particularly well in less optimized benchmarks. From my experience these are more representative of day-to-day PC use, and I feel like the last decade of CPU releases has focused more on identifying which well optimized applications perform well i on which processors.

Ryzen 3 seems like a very strong improvement to general computing.