In a 2008 speech, Mr. Miller summed up with uncharacteristic seriousness what had led him - as well as ski bums and heads of state and corporations - to head for the mountains.
"It's our search for freedom," he said. "It's what it's all about - man's instinctive search for freedom."
I stopped using a smartphone 2 months ago, switching to a flipphone with wi-fi calling. When I made the switch, the employees in the mobile store acted as if they had lost one of their own and outwardly displayed the 7 stages of grief for my old phone as I returned it for something without a touch screen...
1. Shock & Denial - ...I was asked if I was 'sure about this' more than 10 times during the transfer and repeatedly dissuaded from making the "down"grade.
2. Pain & Guilt- ...I was told that no one had done this before, that it was not recommended for any customer, and skeptically prodded as if in attempts to uncover that I lacked the qualities and smartphone use cases that make one human.
3. Anger & Bargaining- ...As one of the employees started setting up the phone for me, another came over, asked what model it was, and snickered loudly before saying how sh&@$#y the outdated messaging system was on the phone. I begrudgingly sat through spiels on several other models that didn't fit my requirement of 'just no apps'.
4. "Depression", Reflection, Loneliness- ...The 4 employees started talking amongst themselves in a ring about the old days, before any of them had a smartphone. There were noticeable pauses and head tilts throughout the conversation. I had been here an hour at this point.
5. The Upward Turn- ...They handed me the phone and one even said he envied me and wished me good luck.
6. Reconstruction & Working Through- ...I signed the contract and they showed me how to do wi-fi calling, cellular, and send messages, the only features I had wanted in the first place.
7. Acceptance & Hope- ...The employee who originally helped me said I "just had" to email him back to tell him what it was like on the "outside".
It was the most surreal experience, a basic exchange of products and services that from the perspective of everyone around me was akin to renouncing my citizenship.
I would really like to do that, but honestly, I don't think I could get by without google maps and either uber or lyft. Looking through my smart phone, those are seriously the only applications I need. The other 60+ apps I could do without.
No. Throw the baby out with the bathwater; they said.
I've deleted and re-installed Facebook countless times. It doesn't make me any holier, but having the choice of it there and choosing to go without seems like a stronger fight.
I've told this to a lot of people around me... unfollow everyone on Facebook.
This does two things:
1. No more facebook feed
2. No more facebook ads
You still get to keep messenger as an extended contact book, people can still tag you in stupid things and pictures, you don't have to have that awkward conversation telling people you're no longer on facebook. I guarantee you'll never feel like you miss your feed. Nobody even has to know you've unfollowed them.
I've quit facebook twice and they didn't last. But I've had no feed for months now and I don't see myself going back.
I too have done this. It's great, you still have access to everything, I use the events quite a lot. But the easy mindless discovery is gone, I spend much less time (1/100th) on it as i used too, I also don't have the app on my phone (just messenger)
> I guarantee you'll never feel like you miss your feed. Nobody even has to know you've unfollowed them.
I just have messenger on my phone, right now. It's a nice solution to most of these problems for me. But most of my facebook tags happen directly in Messenger vs. someone's post that I have to go look at.
The good news is after having no feed for well over a year I can now imagine just deleting Facebook and never coming back. Only reason I don’t is because it’s a decent way to reach people, but once that’s no longer the case, it’s gone.
That's true, the general recommendation for drug addicts is to keep their drug of choice in their home and within an arm's reach, so that they can exercise their willpower for the sake of the stronger fight. Someday you'll be strong enough to break free! Keep at it!
> the general recommendation for drug addicts is to keep their drug of choice in their home and within an arm's reach, so that they can exercise their willpower for the sake of the stronger fight
Is that really true? Where did you get that from?
It's exactly the opposite about I've learned about how to help drug addicts.
There is, however, the advice that for drugs which can't be quickly reduced to zero for medical reasons, those should be stowed by a close friend (depending on the situation), who then ensures the dosis is reduced over time in a proper way. The advantage is that the reduction of dosis is enforced by other person, and that if the addict temporarily needs a higher dosis for specific reasons, they might get it, but first have to discuss another person.
If you're addicted to the phone, mine is obviously the wrong recommendation. If you're addicted to one specific service or industry of the phone, then perhaps it's a better solution.
I bought a burner phone for my startup. Barely use it and it runs me $3/mo. When I do use it, it's phone calls only (and text but I don't use that). I use wifi when I'm at home or at work. (old SGS V)
It's really lead me to wonder why I have my two normal phones that run me ~$80/mo just to have access without wifi. (SGS VII and iPhone 8)
What device did you switch to? I tried making the same switch a couple years ago but couldn't stick to it, mainly due to missing GPS/maps (and secondly due to dumbphones making lousy mp3 players, and not being able to serve as wifi hotspots for mobile data on the rare occasions that I do want to do internet stuff on the go).
The Kyocera DuraXV (https://www.kyoceramobile.com/duraxv/) has navigation and I believe can act as a wifi hotspot, but goddamn, they want $260 for it which feels like a hell of a lot for a basic phone. Also I'm on AT&T and I think the DuraXV is Verizon only.
What phone did you get? I've been considering exactly that switch myself, but finding a flip-phone which can do wifi/4G calls (some older designs are at risk of having their compatible cell towers shut off soon) and navigation (that's one convenience that's mighty hard to give up) has been a challenge. I've only found one or two suitable phones and they've all been over $300 which seems ludicrous for something that simple.
They were actually grieving their company's (marginal) lost profits from your decision not to use a smartphone, so it was not as irrational as you think.
Yes it's pretty crazy. They ship it to the US to be refined. Then they buy it back. Sounds like a huge bloated organization with little regards to efficiency.
Excerpt: "Some might say that ag and ripgrep and any of the other tools I list on beyondgrep.com are competing projects, but I think that way of thinking is wrong. It’s only a competition if you see it as a competition. I’m not competing against anyone for anything: Clicks, dollars, popularity, etc. If someone uses ripgrep instead of ack, it doesn’t hurt me. It’s the difference between an abundance vs. scarcity view of the world. I choose abundance. I think most of us who work in open source do, too."
I never thought I would see the confluence of the "woo-woo" space abundance mindset and a blog post about an open source command-line utility. I must say I am intrigued.
If this explanatory medium doesn't substantiate the reasonability of a mindset of abundance in the minds of programmers, I don't know what ever will.
I don't read that as a name-it-claim-it spell. I read it as an accuracy claim. That the competition is a self-fulfilling prophecy. I don't know what's "woo-woo" about that.
I’d wager they’re talking about the whole “The Secret” abundance mentality thing. “Believe and you shall receive... somehow”. That sort of interesting New Age stuff. I put no credence in it myself in terms of their stronger claims, but hey, CBT reminds me of it in a lot of ways and helped cure my depression.
Author here. I don't know about "The Secret" other than it being an Oprah thing, what, ten years ago?
Abundance vs. scarcity has nothing to do with “Believe and you shall receive... somehow”.
Scarcity thinking means that you fear giving people credit, and letting others have success. You fear that praising others makes you seem weak. You think that if someone uses a different open source project than yours, that you or your project suffers. You might not even be aware of the thinking. You might just feel it reflexively.
Abundance thinking says that there is more than enough praise to go around. It says that your success doesn't hurt me in mine (unless in some tangible way it does). It says that you can use ag and I can use ack and Susan can use ripgrep and it's all good.
In this specific case, abundance says that I, as the creator of ack, don't need to own the "market". In fact, the creation of other tools only helps ack. It gives the ack team ideas for things we can implement in ack. Who am I to think that I'm the only one with good ideas?
It gives our users a wider choice of tools. I put my work out there publicly to help people. Why would I not want them to have a variety to choose from?
Your view on the world shapes how you perceive the world (yes I've learned that in the tautology club) and as your reality is only what perceive, your view on reality shapes how you see it.
I've experienced something like this programming in a room in the basement of a hospital at a medical imaging device for 8 hours, where notable project progress came in the course of days, not hours. With the absence of light, external stimulation, voices, or people, which would traditionally alert the mind to refocus on another stimuli and contextualize the stimulation against the time of day, the only alert is progress. To be clear, there is no mistaking the long period of time spent during the day whilst performing the mechanics of the task, but at the conclusion of the day, if there was no milestone of progress hit, and were it a day where there were literally zero interruptions, it would feel like I had only been down there 3 hours.
My office at work is on the other side of the building from everyone else and has no windows (I chose no windows over having people nearby). If I don't have a clock displayed on my taskbar the only sign I know it's time to eat or go home is the siren for the people who work in the factory on site.
It's a productive programming environment (for a certain type).
The constant distraction environment of cubicles severely hampers my productivity. I work from home as often as possible, but even then I'm no longer accustomed to being able to focus on one thing for so long that I feel like I'm becoming more ADD.
People complain about the social impacts of social media etc... I wonder if anyone has tried to identify/quantify the impact of cubicles/shared workspaces.
I've worked in several "open" office layouts for several large corporations and they're horrible. At one, it was so loud and distracting, I barely could get anything done due to all the interruptions. When one person would get sick, it was a chain reaction. Within days, half our team would be out sick. It was a miserable place to work. Both places abandoned the open office concept and went back to cubicles with additional "collaboration" spaces instead. Needless to say, it was much better.
The funny thing is the company I currently work for went back to this "open office" concept and call it "hoteling" now. They have desks with monitors and a dock everywhere and you just plug in your laptop and go. There are no more assigned seats. It's the same thing with predictable results though. People are constantly sick, they complain about the interruptions (I had a guy doing his kettle bell workout at his desk across from me) and the struggle to maintain concentration. The problem is, they've gone all in on the concept. The company dropped millions of dollars in renovating the building so I don't see a change any time soon. I just work from home now as often as possible.
I've seen some cubicles that are higher and appear to provide more privacy, but I've never actually worked in one/for a company that uses them.
The company I work for now has the short cubicles. Noise isn't contained, and a large number of people work with remote teams/employees and are constantly on calls. Its a complete PITA.
I WFH as often as I can get away with, but my previous habits/skills of focus and concentration have significantly deteriorated in all aspects of my life. I'm actively working on ways to combat this, but I fear without a more comprehensive lifestyle change my success will be limited. (thankfully the one thing I can still do is disappear into a book for hours)
One company I worked at had a bunch of octagon tables, pushed together and your monitors would face each other. Another one, I had cubicles like the ones you referenced and we were told it was an open office concept as well.
Another company I worked at had super high (like 8' high) cubicle walls for their customer service people and other people (sales team, account managers) who were on the phone constantly, which would be awesome for privacy and noise. Ironically, all the developers sat at long picnic like tables, shoulder to shoulder working, it was the worst. I only last a month before leaving since it felt so much like a sweatshop.
I've been working on ways to combat this. Taking on longer tasks/projects at home, and requiring myself to pace myself/go slowly and focus on details. Also got back into reading more which can take my attention for hours without too much effort.
I'm getting to the point where I want to shut all personal notifications, social media access etc.. off for 12 hours a day (mid-late evening to morning) to remove distractions and interruptions, and try to do things that require focus and concentration during those periods (also sleeping, and staying in bed/not grabbing my phone if I can't sleep)
Me too. Measured in lines of code output, my optimal distribution of interaction probably looks like a Laffer curve. Too little and I distract myself often, too much and I spend all my time interacting and not much on code.
Put me on a job where interaction is also beneficial (pair programming, XP, working with a newbie, supporting QA at the next desk over) and I'm fairly sure I'm much more productive overall in a moderate-to-highly collaborative environment. Silent solitude sounds miserable. Completely miserable.
Agreed but I love it however I usually have IRC open on a different workspace in one of the channels I've hung out in for years so if I want to shoot the breeze with someone I can talk to them - I work for a manufacturing firm and I'm the only programmer so I can't really talk about my job in any depth with non-programmers anyway.
When doing my PhD, I was working in a research center which was open 24/7.
I would go to work at 14, starting with a lunch at the cafeteria. Then hopped to buy some groceries. By 17 a lot of people were gone and I could start to really work through the evening and the night, until about 5 am when the sun was raising - which was the signal to go to bed.
I felt like a vampire, had zero social life but did fantastic work.
The main thing was that I knew it would be temporary and not sustainable, which also made me very happy (it was a fun experience, au from family and friends, and I knew I would be back to normal life soon).
Cache/RAM always looks like basically solid colors because it’s so densely packed with a repeating structure.
How would you know it’s not the green stuff? I don’t know, perhaps by size. I would imagine the green stuff is some other kind of cache or memory (op cache? TLB buffers? patchy SRAM).
This is what I know from seeing these shots online for years. I’m no expert by any means.
The green stuff might have been the VMX register files - those things were pretty huge (128 registers per thread, each register 16 bytes, so 212816=4 KiB per core). While the L1 cache was higher capacity (32 KiB) as a general rule of thumb faster memory uses more die area per bit.
But I seem to remember being told that the green areas were the VMX pipelines. I don't remember clearly, and the hardware people I asked at the time were uncertain - they were too far removed from that aspect of the hardware.
The other reason to assume that the blue is the caches is because it is closer to the cross-bar and the cross-bar is what connects the cores to the L2. Incoming data from the L2 goes first to the L1 caches so they would logically be on that side.
For those wondering why do they have to go to Chile?, I presume it's for the same reason as given here for the ELT (extremely large telescope, to be completed in 2024): The location was chosen because of its high percentage of cloudless nights and low light pollution [1] and (notably but with a lower weight of importance) the temperature is cold enough that there will not be differences in temperature between the interior and exterior of the telescope which could cause the rays of light to defract (ever so) slightly [2].
My Mrs is an astrophysicist and has been to Chile about 10 or so times over the last 8 years. She says the Atacama desert is ideal because of Chiles political stability as well as stability of the atmosphere. A high and dry western coastline is good for great “seeing” conditions because highly stable sea air is less prone to fluctuations in temperature which is the bane of any astronomer (this is what creates twinkling of stars). As it happens she was working on the data reduction pipeline for an instrument with adaptive optics (AO) on the Gemini South telescope. AO helps reduce atmospheric disturbances even further so they are now getting better results than Hubble from a ground based telescope.
I would think this is Jana's move and CalSTRS is just a pawn. Rosenstein is scrappy and happy to stir the pot to invoke a stock price spike (see PetSmart sale and Whole Foods).
Jana is raising a fund for activist socially responsible investing, so that's clearly their motivation [1]. CalSTRS is $1.3B of the combined $2B so I doubt they're "just a pawn".
Instead of indexing the geofences using R-tree or the complicated S2, we chose a simpler route based on the observation that Uber’s business model is city-centric; the business rules and the geofences used to define them are typically associated with a city. This allows us to organize the geofences into a two-level hierarchy where the first level is the city geofences (geofences defining city boundaries), and the second level is the geofences within each city.
What about Uber's business model impacted this choice of algorithm?
I'm not quite sure what you are referring to by strict background checks. But here's I think the service is used. A user initiates a call to the service requesting a ride. The service takes in the user's location and first finds the city (first tier), then the service searches and returns the georeferences in that city for ones that contain that user location. These georeferences might attached to drivers, and those drivers might be analyzed to find good drivers to send that ride request to, or they could be something like neighborhoods, where Uber would search that neighborhood for drivers. I'd guess that city specific requirements could be associated with georeferences in either tier.
