ska

If it was only about this, personally I find org-mode is better than markdown.

There is a big gap between a book and informal notes, docs, comments though. At least big enough to drive several tools into, or they wouldn’t exist.

Time is important. How much would it have cost them to keep looking?

Huh. Ok - that really doesn’t match my experience , but that’s path dependence for you.

The “and still obsessively digs crates” was important I think. DJ’ are not even close to fungible (hell, I’ve even met a couple who don’t like music much)

All music recommendation engines at this time still aspire to be mediocre, they aren’t even playing the S.A.,e game as a human who is good at it.

Unfortunately, such humans are unevenly distributed.

I’m not sure what you are looking for a reference to exactly, but segmentation as a preprocessing step for tracking has been one of, if not the primary, most typical workflow for decades.

Computer scientists and similar have never liked it, so this isn’t surprising.

If you are actually that good, opportunities will tend to appear. You may not realize or pursue them, but they often do.

That wasn't meant as a logical and. Each of these things alone can lead to opportunities.

Two tried and tested methods, neither guaranteed of course.

1) Be better than the overwhelming majority of your peers, and be noticed for this. You are quite likely to find interesting opportunities come your way. I do mean overwhelming though - small fraction of a percent.

2) Specialize in something most people can’t or won’t do. This includes difficult, obscure, and unpleasant work.

In both cases some of the biggest $ comes from independent consulting, once you’ve built up a network and a reputation for fixing a particular pain point corporations have (bill for value, of course).

That certainly can be true (not universally) when a company that might give you an offer is saying it.

If it’s coming from a peer, especially one whose been round a few more blocks than you, may just be an observation about life.

If it was sharp, they would be identical. The “blurriness” is doubling, where the lines are not quite aligned. Red text there show you content that is in one and not the other.

Overall, the productivity numbers in US have been pretty robustly growing - but there is a multi-decade tendency for this to be achieved by raising the prod/employee. In other words, it's achieved either by reducing headcount to do the same thing, or increasing the output per person. The "low hanging fruit" was all done decades ago, jobs where you cant really automate your way out and need cheap labor. It's inevitably climbing into more and more technical employees, and as you not the relative strength in the dollar makes this pretty compelling.

Sharpe ratio is fairly useful in roughly apples to apples comparisons, e.g. investment opportunities, and basically useless when it’s applied to broadly to human endeavours. Mostly because people are a) not economically rational in any pure sense and b) not primarily motivated by financial factors.

That’s opening a can of worms. Fundamentally, the real number system is larger and weirder than “we” mostly think it is (and hence its extensions to higher dimensions). If you start trying to remove objects it easily becomes a game of whack-a-mole; some of your nice, intuitive definitions elsewhere become muddy. Colin alludes to this in the article (e.g. should all sets be measureable, etc.). If there were easy and satisfying fixes for this, it would have been sorted out long ago!

This isn’t just aesthetic. Although probability is one of the oldest areas of mathematical thought, dating back millennia, it took measure theory to put it on a really solid basis, several decades ago. These approaches are powerful and useful, but some of the corners are certainly counterintuitive.

> and streets are dangerous.

In most places I've lived, streets are objectively less dangerous than they were a few decades ago in all aspects except traffic density, which is a mixed bag. In places with poor urban design, I can see the argument that street (crossing, particular) is high risk for say 6-8 year olds. In places with better design, the idea that a 8 year old, let alone a 14 year old, shouldn't be able to navigate a reasonable distance by themselves seems pretty crazy.

What you are thinking of operates at a different level of abstraction. Energy functions are a general way of structuring a problem, used (sometimes abused) to apply an optimization algorithm to find a reasonable solution for it.

FAST is an algorithm for efficiently looking for "interesting" parts (basically, corners) of an image, so you can safely (in theory) ignore the rest of it. The output from a feature detector may end up contributing to an energy function later, directly or indirectly.

Historically, we often call something AI while we don’t really understand how it works. After that it quietly gets subsumed into machine learning or another area and called X algorithm.

Thanks for chasing down the details! I knew about the split and vaguely remembered that one of them had bought Trader Joe's a while ago.

Doesn’t one of the Aldis own trader joes?

> Take your time with it, but do read it.

And do the harder exercises. Really do them, not just read and tell yourself you understand how to do that one and move on.

No snark was present :)

That’s what HR will do.

Most companies don’t constrain an individual employee from providing a recommendation. People might not want to do it, but that’s a different issue.

It’s used in some movies also, but the idea predates movies by millennia :)

This sounds crazy to me. I’ve seen products with a first year or more shipping target of far less than 100 work through a comprehensive spares strategy - at multiple companies. It’s entirely manageable.

The serial ports might have been easier (depending what was on the machine already and what you have on hand) but it's not obvious. The real problem was the lack of functioning floppy drive. Most of the modern "normal solutions" wouldn't help.

Years ago I had a (much older) colleague who seemed to obsessively copy data onto newer media, including transcoding file formats sometimes. I'm pretty sure it was to avoid this sort of dance and avoid thinking about what they might want to keep. They had a nightmare story of recovering data off an obsolete-ish tape format, after all...

To me this is completely orthogonal to "micromanagement", which is a real problem whether or not you understand the system your team is building.

You absolutely will be a better engineering leader if you a) understand deeply the system your team is working on (though perhaps not all the corners) and b) maintain enough technical knowledge to keep up with changes.

To my mind though micromanagement, on the other hand, is the art of making decisions for people when they don't need it, and leaving your team unable to progress without you hovering over the work.

In this view micromanagement is always a poor choice, even worse if you don't know enough to make good choices for those team members.

I suppose the steel man version is that in an effort to avoid making that mistake, inexperienced managers back off too far and don't understand enough about the work anymore. This is in my experience a real problem, but needs a different name.

It's often the case where a good senior technical leader/manager could do the work most or all of the team members, and in the case of more junior ones, probably do it much more efficiently also. But they can't do that and be effective at their own role. Group velocity of the team is highest when they mostly coach from the sidelines.

Nice to meet another "ska". It's derived from my name also, and I've used it as a login and more for ages. Usually when people comment on it they assume I'm a big fan of the music style :)

I think the difference between “luxury” and not is a red herring here. The real wisdom is to spend enough to get really serviceable versions of the things you use everyday. That doesn’t mean “luxury”, per se. but it does mean if you e.g. spend 6+ a day in a chair at your home (or work) , make sure it’s a good fit for you.

Get a decent mattress and pillows. Replace your pot from college with the handle that falls off. Paint the room you hate the color of. The ROI on such things is huge.

> Are you able to organize that on company time? Are you guys clocked in during your meetings?

I've approved or started (or both) this sort of thing on company time before, at more than one place.

For context, this was typically early stage R&D, and many/most of the employees had some academic background, though that ranged from "decades ago" to "we just hired you after a masters degree".

In this setting, it's a pretty natural continuation of the common "journal club" approach in academic research groups. It spreads the effort around, helps the team stay on top of new work, and generally improves professional development - if done well. It does take a bit of effort to keep fresh.