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ethbro

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Working on enterprise automation, one company at a time

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You'd think people would look at the initial healthcare.gov mess and make some conclusions.

One of which should maybe be "Don't strictly isolate teams, with unowned space between their output and the next team's input, and no method by which post-delivery failure reflects back on them."

Yes. The gist was that your brain gets caught in a loop in which your perception of time was continuously skewed, leading to a constant feeling of hurrying / lacking enough time.

Spending time in nature essentially jumped your brain out of the loop, even after you returned from nature.

Think it might have been a summary of this: "Awe Expands People’s Perception of Time, Alters Decision Making, and Enhances Well-Being" (2012)

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2083257

The opportunity of company towns is the opportunity of dictatorships: with fewer decision makers, longer-sighted decision can be rammed through.

For example, California could presumably make better housing decisions if existing property owners didn't get a say.

That said, the weaknesses of dictatorships obviously apply equally. A benevolent dictator leads to great happiness; a terrible one leads to hell that can only be overthrown by revolution.

Used to live down the road from Avalon. I'd say it's better than a mall, but still too profit-first to be when I'd hope we're pivoting towards.

As context for others, Avalon is a mixed-use development, with restaurants and shops on the first floor (of ~3). Definitely still anchor-tenant focused (movie theater, larger clothing retailers) & restaurant weighted.

IMHO, the type of place you visit to do things, then leave. Not the type of place you live.

But then, my opinion is that Atlantic Station should be nuked from orbit for the sin of isolating itself from the transit grid, so I'm probably on the get-off-my-lawn side of the planner/developer split.

If you don't need a decent school zone, can confirm.

38 minutes from downtown. 3 acre wooded lot. 1900 sq ft house (currently refinishing full basement). $135 when I bought, probably $200 now. In the process of selling a much more expensive intown house, because there's no point.

The biggest things suburbs need to do these days is revolutionize malls. Tear up all the parking and retrofit empty store space into community-centric things people actually want.

Big box -> co-working space, as new anchor tenant.

I think a few things aren't hammered into young people enough today.

1) Any action is greater than no action. It doesn't matter how much you suck at something. Do it. Congrats, you've beaten everyone who never started.

2) Finish things. No matter how ugly it is. Even if you have to half-kill yourself to drag it that last inch over the line. Congrats, you've beaten everyone who never finished.

3) Your worst effort is probably better than average. Stop obsessing about the 1% best. That's not who you're competing against. You're competing against the pool of real people a company / project could afford to hire, who are available to hire.

4) Everyone starts off terrible at everything. No movie covers the 10,000 hours someone is learning: that's why training montages are a cliché.

5) Forgive yourself. It's okay not to be spectacular every minute of every day. Consistency of effort is more valuable than cyclical manic-depression. The key to becoming better starts with accepting and being happy with where you're starting from.

Isn't that the whole security / obscurity point? That true security only comes by being exposed to active, intelligent, informed adversaries for a sufficient amount of time?

Or, another way: each exploit and oops only improves the system, rather than being a signal of its failure.

And let's be honest, the competition is still "Oops, I accidentally sent $900M to the wrong party." [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24222045

I spent a while on word choice, as nothing seemed to fit.

The best I can describe the alternative is (most of this via conversations w/ kids in the 12 and 18 age ranges) essentially as you've said: "adhoc" or "reality" (in the post-Instagram, staged-but-effecting-effortless sense).

Perhaps a better dialectic basis is "desire" vs lack of same.

It seems innocuous to say you can have more and less edited media creation styles. But the distinction I'm groping for is more in intent of the creator.

What do they want? What is your average YouTuber trying to get across via their creative choices?

It feels like democratization of publishing has resulted in Facebook for the arts: consumption driven primarily by catering to baser human neurological ticks, rather than via an author's studied intention. And the latter being drowned out by an infinite mass of the former.

And worst of all, audience / consumers being re-baselined with the expectation that creators aren't actually exercising intent in their choices, and so lose the ability to recognize it when it does exist.

As an older millennial and prolific fiction reader (more so when I was younger and had time), there seems to be a 1:1 correlation between lack of consumption of... "intentional" creative media and lack of hope.

Zoomers and younger millennials don't (as an aggregate class) seem as interested in working through challenging material, given the infinite fire hose of more easily consumed alternatives.

I've shown Kurosawa, Leone, and Tarkovsky films to the demographic, and it was literally like they didn't possess the capability to focus for the requisite durations.

I try to avoid being alarmist from limited sample sizes, but it honestly worries me about what "app-ification" is doing to a generation's brains.

Read it on the basis of recommendation here (along with Skunk Works), would highly second.

The fascinating thing about successful, lean, scrappy defense projects is there are almost no incentives for them to be such. Consequently, if they are, it's because wilful and powerful decisions were made by engineering / management team.

Decisions we could probably all stand to learn from (and do our best to repeat!).

Good lesson for organizational engineering. Longer tenures in a job tend to increase risk aversion and technical conservatism.

So unless there's a mechanism to blunt that (and select for lifelong learners), you end up with a tyranny of outdated architects, opposed to any and all changes.

Ham radio (the human component) seems to suffer from the DnD 3.5 problem.

A lot of people invested considerable effort into obtaining knowledge.

Once obtained, they were free to coast. I take it there's no true continuing ed requirement to maintain a license?

Now, protocol / technical change threatens to render all their existing knowledge outdated. And furthermore, require additional effort.

Unsurprisingly, they're resistant. Said without malice, because that's just human nature.

Continuing ed requirements are usually a gimmick or BS, but in this case it seems like they might be healthy for the hobby. Demonstrating growth / trying new things? A nice process to gently nudge those not still actively learning back into the lower classes.

This device is intended to help with social anxiety issues.

In real-time, while you're currently interacting with someone, it can offer a helpful "WARNING! YOU SEEM ANXIOUS. CALM YOURSELF. OTHERS MAY CURRENTLY BE PERCEIVING YOU AS ANXIOUS."

Problem solved. Thanks, technology!

FAQ on Tone component: https://blog.aboutamazon.com/devices/a-new-tool-to-help-you-...

"Once you’ve opted-in by creating your voice profile, Tone will run passively and intermittently in the background so you don’t have to think about it. Throughout the day, it will take short samples of your speech and analyze the acoustic characteristics that represent how you sound to the people you interact with. This gives you a simple way to reflect on your interaction and communication throughout the day."

Aka "Look, Amazon found a reason it needs to record your voice all the time. For science."

Facebook must be fuming.