"Queues clear, let's dive into All Blues by Miles Davis to keep the jazz flowing. Queues clear, let's dive into All Blues by..."

Each time with a slightly different voice and inflection. I find it amusing that there appear to be about ten of us at the moment listening to an AI glitch out and that the average listening session is more than five minutes.

Let's say a cutting-edge young researcher is making a name for themselves in their field and earning $300k/yr at a company where they're encouraged to publish and speak. You're trying to headhunt them for a company where they'll be forbidden from sharing their work which will likely stall their career and reputation outside of that company. How much do you think you'd have to offer? $600k? $1M? $1.5M?

When faced with the choice to paying significant salaries, hiring lower-tier researchers, or just letting their people publish, many companies conclude that giving away some of their work is the best option. (And that doesn't even include the benefits of boosting the company's profile which makes it easier to attract other cutting-edge researchers.)

However I'm skeptical that any format that compromises the editing experience will gain traction with users. For example, djot requires a blank line before nested lists (at least in the default mode) which requires writing lists in a way that I've never seen anyone write in an email because it groups nested items incorrectly in the raw text.

In general I agree with this, but a lot a lot depends on how "unless proven otherwise" is interpreted.

If a driver is typically at fault when a pedestrian or cyclist unexpectedly moves into their path then it seems like that practically restricts cars to speeds close to biking or walking in many cities.

Similarly, if a cyclist is typically at fault when a pedestrian unexpectedly moves into their path then it seems like that restricts bikes to speeds close to walking in many cities.

This effectively pedestrianizes car lanes and bike lanes which would be lovely in some areas, but it also restricts travel to walking speeds which also has downsides if enforced across an entire city.

Edit: after reading the post at https://www.gov.uk/government/news/the-highway-code-8-change... the guidance seems to strike a reasonable balance:

> People cycling, riding a horse or driving a horse-drawn vehicle should respect the safety of people walking in these spaces, but people walking should also take care not to obstruct or endanger them.

There are a lot of companies and projects that have used the names of real people without that person's involvement or approval: Einstein, Tesla, Edison (besides the ones related to his company), Darwin, Beethoven, Mozart, Newton, Kepler, Galileo, Copernicus, Archimedes, Socrates...

That's a reasonable approach, but I don't understand how it's any more or less sane than autoclosing them with a stale label.

Whether these sorts of bugs are "open but stale" or "closed because stale" seems like it depends on whether the project defines "closed" as "no work planned" or "fixed", which both seem valid.

Either way these bugs will be hidden from developer dashboards but still available in the database so there's no practical difference, you just need to make sure everyone is on the same page about the meaning of "closed".

> It costs nothing (except pride?) to leave "Issues (1)" if there is indeed an Issue.

In our case we omit bugs we couldn't reproduce from the issues list due to practicality, not pride -- our software has tens of thousands of unreproducible bugs and having them show up in reports would drown out planned work.

And it's not like anyone deleted or locked the unreproducible bugs, they are either tracked as "open but unreproducible" or "closed because unreproducible". Either way they're still in the database in case more information comes along, but still filtered out of the vast majority of dashboards.

Conversely, what's the harm in closing the bug? (As long as you don't lock or delete it, I agree that's bad.)

People focused on the work often interpret "open" to mean "requires work" and "closed" to mean "no planned work" in which case keeping an unreproducible bug open is dishonest because it falsely implies that someone might continue to work on it.

Whereas people focused on the problem often interpret "open" to mean "not fixed" and "closed" to mean "fixed" in which case closing an unreproducible bug is dishonest because it falsely implies that it's no longer a problem.

Neither seems right or wrong as long as everyone on the project agrees which interpretation you're using.

Three of the "four ways to lose" described in the article are significant harms inflicted on parties besides the bettors themselves. One cannot avoid these harms by not directly gambling.

The doomsday preppers with a scarcity mindset and a bunker full of tin cans and military surplus make for good TV, but plenty of "preppers" don't look like that.

They also have a well-stocked pantry but focus more on strengthening the community to absorb shocks. Things like mutual aid networks, skill sharing, tool libraries, noodling with GMRS/HAM/LoRa comms, going on camping trips, helping each other out with kitchen gardens, and general community resilience. This approach doesn't cover every disaster scenario but it seems like a more pleasant (and realistic) option for the ones it does cover. And if nothing truly bad happens then at least they got to spend time doing things like gardening with their neighbors.

Being able to have offline Wikipedia, maps, and educational tools would be useful in either case but potentially even more so as a community resource because there are only so many skills each individual can learn.

Whereas many Notes applications were internal so there was no "survival of the fittest" and the UI toolkit was passable at best. As a result, many Notes users never experienced a well-designed Notes app.

From chatting with some of the researchers many years ago my understanding is that it usually wasn't accurate enough for unique identification and the gait shadow was dependent on shoe type and clothing, so a persistent gait shadow database wouldn't have been useful. But it could be correlated with ground-based surveillance for identification, for example person A and B were identified on a ground-based security camera entering a building, then gait tracking could be used to monitor where they went after they left the building even if they avoided ground-based security cameras after that point.

People who loved mixing colors enough to become experts may have been disappointed when their hard-won skills were rendered obsolete by the march of progress.

There are some aspects of my work that are enjoyable on their own and others that I only do because they're necessary overhead to achieve a desired result. I appreciate technology that eliminates the latter but lament technology that eliminates the former.

So when AI obsoletes yet another human skill I suspect a lot of the wildly different emotional responses are dependent on whether someone considers the skill being obsoleted more "enjoyable" or "necessary overhead".

By "excuses for layoffs" I suspect what they meant was that there was an pre-existing desire to reduce headcount and RTO was used under the expectation that some percentage of employees would quit voluntarily so that the company can avoid going through the relatively more costly process of laying them off.

Of course the downside of this approach is that the company has less control over which employees leave, which may result in them losing the employees who have the best alternatives.

But I'm unsure why you feel that my response pointing out that a product's user interface is typically a more important factor in success than the product's underlying technologies was discounting the value of user experience?

> Good design IS technological superiority.

Hmm, I was attempting to respond to someone who wrote "It feels like a big pile of nothing... Big fat database schemas with big fat CRUD atop and layers of snazzy sparklines" which seemed to dramatically undervalue good schemas, CRUD implementations, or sparklines as "nothing". So to contrast those I used "technical superiority" as a catchall for the sort of challenging technical implementations that some developers lionize. Does that make sense? Is there a different term you'd suggest for that? For now I've changed to "(non-UX) technological superiority".

If you're asking why Palantir (and Salesforce, Jira, etc) continue to make money despite not having any novel or complex technologies, my experience has been that these are not prerequisites for solving the vast majority of business problems. Usually network effects, customer relationships, brand identity, user interface, inertia, etc are all more important than the technology.

It is not always easy for a technologist to admit, but companies whose ongoing success is primarily due to some sort of (non-UX) technological superiority are the exception rather than the rule.

I've always liked the idea of a Harberger tax-style patent enforcement fee:

The patent owner declares the value of their patent on an annual basis and pays 1-5% of that declared value per year for the privilege of relying on the government to enforce their exclusive ownership of the patent. At any point, another party can buy the patent at its declared value, which discourages patent-holders from declaring artificially low values. The annual fee discourages artificially high valuations for indefinite periods of time -- as the patent yields less return over time it makes less sense to keep paying a high annual fee, encouraging owners to lower the declared valuation or end the patent protection altogether when it's no longer profitable.

To discourage hoarding patents indefinitely one could either set a hard upper limit (e.g. 60 years) or increase the fee over time, for example every few years the fee increases by 1% until at some point the patent is effectively publicly owned.

If institutions such as courts are trustworthy (in that they will impartially adjudicate contracts and help you enforce their terms) then you are able to work with a wider spectrum of counterparties who you do not yet trust. You just have to document and hedge against the risk via contracts and insurance, as you point out.

If institutions such as courts are absent, corrupt, or otherwise captured then you must ensure that you only interact with counterparties that you can trust or have direct leverage over. Perhaps ones with which you share personal or reputational connections.

It's not whether the state is "richer", it's whether the state has a more stable percentage of student-age children, especially high cost students (e.g. special needs, behavioral issues).

Let's say the median student costs ~$20k per year and an outlier who needs individualized help due to special needs or behavioral issues costs ~$150k per year. The expectation is that each district is able to amortize these costs across a diverse tax base. But families, especially those with higher-cost students, frequently shop between neighboring districts to get the best schools for their kids, which is completely rational. Even wealthy cities and towns can be bankrupted if they attract a sufficiently high percentage of households with students, especially higher-cost students. (If this is not obvious I'd be happy to provide an example.) Because of this, even when administrators talk about improving their schools, behind closed doors they'll admit that there's a limit to how much more attractive they can afford to make their school than neighboring districts, especially with regard to special needs programs.

However, because it is less common for families to move across state lines for better schools, states are more insulated from this sort of adverse selection (New Jersey notwithstanding).

> we intentionally prevent schools from accessing the funding which could obviate concerns over this "fraud" issue entirely.

Exactly. No family or school administrator wants to play these ridiculous games, but our inequitable funding structure forces them to.