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belril

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Product marketer & ex-journo. Avid home cook. Occasionally awesome.

my public key: https://keybase.io/belril; my proof: https://keybase.io/belril/sigs/uFQB-6Aa-5cYMV5k4jQ7CUEe39-8MLz0wjfPrSFtCUI

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To take this a step further, P&T's reveals often highlight and celebrate the complexity of pulling off a given trick. Sure, you understand how the cups and balls can be done after watching them do it, but good luck trying to replicate the smoothness of their performance. They actually make a point of celebrating the complexity of the method, even if it's revealed.

As someone who once competed with him for stories: Cade is a very strong writer with a robust pedigree who really gets the current state of play in ML, and has the chops to write about it for a general audience. At his best, his articles are able to help non-experts understand the stakes and wonder that make up this corner of the tech world.

As a fellow ex-Ingresser, I think there are some truly fascinating stories that will eventually be lost about all the effort that has gone into that game globally. I’ve seen heroic feats of software engineering, physical effort and project management, all in the name of some mobile game that’s a much bigger game of capture the flag.

First off: Diagnosis and medication access is one thing, but maintenance is another key — find a psychiatrist or physician who you get on with well and can work with for a good long while.

Other tips:

* Use hyper-focus when you have it, to the best of your ability. I think of it like a gift from my brain, and I try to get the most mileage out of it as possible, even if the task I’m working on isn’t top priority.

* Focus on building good habits. I find it’s a way to trick my brain into doing things that are good for me.

* For meetings, have someone(s) who you can check in with about what’s been discussed. Ideally, someone who you can say “hey, I didn’t quite follow what happened — what are the key points?”

* Strong agreement with other folks on using task management systems. My general recommendation is to find one you like (Getting Things Done is my favorite, but there are no shortage of others) try it out for a good long while (2+ months), and slowly adapt it to your personal needs.

* Talk to your people manager about work you’ve been assigned to that you’re not interested in. Sometimes you’re really needed in a particular area and other times you’re not. If you express your preferences for particular types of work, you’re more likely to get it.

I learned a fair bit, but I also learned that in the college team project atmosphere, folks are gonna get carried and you’ll be graded on the total possible output of four people.

I think this is basically in keeping with non-college group project environments, broadly speaking. It’s easier for managers in an employment environment to judge output in group scenarios because feedback is often less structured than assigning grades in an academic environment, but the end consumer (whether internal or external) of a work product evaluates that product based on its result, not individual contribution. Ultimately, that all-up judgment ends up being more impactful than evaluation of individual contribution.

There's a third option that you're not considering: these companies receive significant scrutiny from the press because of their size and power, especially as it relates to our daily lives. That scrutiny leads to the disclosure of wrongdoing and controversy where it's found. In my experience with journalistic outlets, they're not writing stories out of a cynical desire for pageviews, or because of some massive conspiracy, they're writing because they believe there's an important story the public should be aware of.

In order for a media conspiracy to work, you would need to convince dozens if not hundreds of individual, competing journalists (who are not exactly known for their conformity) to go along with a scheme. I don't believe that should pass Occam's Razor for anyone.

Ex-journo perspective: One of the reasons why you'll see a flood of negative news about a company is that once one well-reported piece comes out about potential wrongdoing, more reporters will take a look at a person/company to see if they can find something wrong. Negative reporting on Tesla, especially its labor practices, is nothing new. (See Caroline O'Donovan's work for Buzzfeed News.) Part of the reason for this is that investigative work takes time, and you have to know where to look. Barking up the wrong tree too much is costly and unproductive.

In addition, you'll often see more negative reporting come about after one story as people who have inside knowledge choose to share their stories after initial reporting. I had people reach out with additional information, unsolicited, to both my former colleagues and me following the publication of a piece. It's generally along the lines of "oh, you think that's bad, have a look at this."

All that happens because it's very rare to see isolated incidents of bad behavior inside an organization. When there's smoke, there's usually fire.

Happy to add clarity where I can -- it is my job, after all. Suspicion and skepticism are healthy, and I totally hear the criticism that the piece feels marketing copy-esque.

For what it's worth, the Evernote team seems genuinely happy with the way the transition went, along with their interactions with Google.

Hi! Author here. (Nice to meet you.) I can tell you that Evernote, not Google, pitched this story to me. While the Google Cloud PR team was aware of its existence, they did not contact or attempt to influence me when it came to its content. (Literally, all that they did was confirm the on-site presence of their engineers, and that an engagement of that sort wasn't a one-off favor to Evernote.)

Unfortunately, a technical deep dive on the exact parameters of the transition wasn't really in scope for this piece. I tried to include detail where I could, and Evernote has a really wonderful 5-part blog series that goes into many of the details of the transition. (It's now linked in this post.)

To provide some additional details on the transfer: Evernote was going from data centers in California that it owned and operated to Google, not from S3. Technically speaking, the migration isn't 100% complete, as Evernote is still finishing the transfer of its attachment files to Google.

Evernote did not disclose the exact details of how that transfer was executed on the record, and thus it did not end up in my piece. Thanks for reading!