gavinmckenzie

Well done. As a colour blind person (and iOS developer) I am thrilled anytime an app doesn’t rely on colour cues alone. I’ve used Hack and Octal but I am going to give your app a try.

Putting aside the greater variety of physical traits that you describe, dogs generally are more adaptable than cats. They are estimated to have twice the number of neurons and are much more malleable whereas cats feel more hardwired into a set of cat behaviours.

I’ve assumed that this greater learning capacity and malleability is both the best part of a dog and a vulnerability that can lead them to become highly anxious and dependent animals.

I’ve had both cats and dogs, and loved them both, but my goodness they are so wildly completely different animals.

I admit to invoking the phrase “Where we’re going, we won’t need eyes to see” at least once a year when something feels like it’s going horribly wrong.

There are many motivations for shooting jpeg with film sims, from just not wanting to expend the effort editing photos to my motivation as a colour-blind person who simply cannot see colour well enough to manually adjust photos. For me, it’s incredible being able to choose a film simulation and be happy with the result even if I know that the colours I’m seeing aren’t quite the same that others will see. It’s the entire reason I bought into the FujiFilm system.

What my doctor has told me, after attending a urology + prostate cancer conference, is to think of the prostate as a sponge that absorbs testosterone. And once the sponge overflows, prostate cancer can be triggered.

But once cancer has occurred, adding more testosterone doesn't matter because the sponge is already super-saturated.

In fact, doctors who have this perspective will permit men with prostate cancer to continue testosterone therapy.

I thought the accepted explanation of Annihilation was a metaphor for cancer. The slow seemingly unstoppable spread. Mutations creating new things that mimic the familiar but in often grotesque ways, mechanistically expanding to destructively consume everything in its path into a new form of life.

Wow, that's a throwback. I remember when my Ontario high-school in '84 or '85 got a whole room full of ICON computers. It was a total miserable nightmare for the teaching staff as each computer class had at least a couple of students with the skills to elevate themselves to root privileges and cause constant mischief.

The ICONs were way more fun from the aging Commodore Pets that had populated Ontario high-schools, and the big trackballs felt futuristic.

I agree that truthfully we're not talking about excluding those users, but only preventing those users from upgrading to the latest version of the app. But for lots of businesses those two things are viewed as effectively the same, because they believe they are adding value to the new version of the app that will result in greater user stickiness and direct or indirect revenue opportunities.

Honestly I'm thrilled anytime I'm working for a client that has a iOS(-2) rule versus an iOS(-4) rule.

If you're a business with a consumer facing app, you don't want to exclude 5% or 10% of your users. Most of the client projects I've worked on had a requirement to support iOS(-4) which is super painful from a development standpoint and usually the number of users on a device with iOS four versions old are in the range of 2%. But I get that it's tough for a financial institution or a streaming media company or a telco to exclude potentially 2% of users.

Very true. And I’m an iOS/macOS/tvOS developer who has all the toys, yet even I had trouble coming to grips with paying a premium for AirPods over a good pair of wired buds.

Hopefully the troubles with Siri are understood enough in Apple that they won’t make that mistake, because Siri is truly awful on my HomePods for thinking I’m talking to Siri when I’m not.

Thankfully many of the people in the demo videos were people of colour, so I’m fairly confident Apple has gotten that bit right and hopefully their gesture detecting cameras have IR or dot-pattern emitters to work in the dark as well.

100%. I thought the same thing with my Apple Watch and I resisted spending what I considered to be an unreasonable amount on earbuds as I didn’t care (or so I thought) about having wireless earbuds. But eventually so many colleagues had them and talked to me about how great they were that I caved and bought a pair. Wow was I wrong about how wireless earbuds was something I didn’t need. Then I started evangelizing to people about them, and the cycle continued.

Thankfully it does pair with a Bluetooth keyboard and trackpad for the scenarios where you want to use it to do “work”.

This is interesting. I've had both cats and dogs, and with the theory "they don't have fingers" I wonder why do dogs understand human pointing? Dogs of course communicate with a direct gaze (looks at empty food bowl, looks at human, looks back at empty food bowl) and can understand us communicating back with a directed gaze, but at the same time my dog definitely understands me pointing at something.

I love using the knob to navigate CarPlay, but I admit the Music app is nearly unusable with the knob and IMHO only marginally better with touch. The music app in CarPlay just generally sucks and appears to intentionally limit how deeply you can browse your library.

That said, in my experience Siri works well for music selection. I just hit the voice button on my steering wheel and ask for the playlist, album, or artist I want to hear.

Yes exactly. The children at that age in a “Casa” classroom cycle through self-chosen activities every day and may not choose the same activities consistently. If a child is observed to be avoiding a particular learning activity over a period of time, it’s the role of the teacher (director/directress) to nudge the child back to that activity and understand why they might be avoiding it.

Plus given there are three years worth of children in the same class, seeing the “senior” children operate at the higher levels of activities helps with incentive for the younger children who want to emulate them.

That said, anyone can open a “Montessori school” and not adhere to any particular Montessori pedagogy. I’d argue the schools with the purest interpretations of Maria Montessori’s teachings are often just as problematic as those who are Montessori in name only. There are two tribes in Montessori: AMS (purists)and AMI (more flexible).

Thankfully the school my daughter attended was AMI and I watched the school adapt their methods to children who needed more structure than classical Montessori advises. Ultimately, it’s not for everyone.

My daughter went through a Montessori education from 18 months old through grade 8. As part of her Montessori experience, starting at age three, she began to learn to write. They trace "sandpaper" letters with their fingers; moving their fingers along the strokes of letters pre-printed on cardboard in a rough texture. From there they learn to write the letters and words, speaking the words aloud. Thus the focus is on learning to write before reading, with an implication that this process will help with word recognition.

I have no idea whether this method is better, but as a parent it certainly seemed like a very novel approach. Seeing my three-year-old daughter learning to write was (like many Montessori things) surprising.

Yes, my understanding is that some people present with anxiety (and/or depression), and that anxiety will become the focus of treatment by their doctor or psychologist, when in fact the anxiety stems from the undiagnosed ADHD. For these people, treating the anxiety alone isn't very effective, compared to getting an ADHD diagnosis and treatment plan that also has a positive impact on the anxiety symptoms.

Anecdotally I've seen this scenario play out in my own family.

A need to multi-task is 100% ADHD. Our (inattentive) ADHD brains are like a car engine that will stall if it's allowed to idle, and so we have to keep the revs up in order for it to keep running. For us inattentive ADHD people, the meds have the effect of raising our engine's idle speed so we don't have to keep our foot on the pedal through multi-tasking just to stay engaged.

It's easy to rationalize this behaviour, and it can feel amazing when you're on top of everything, but it can take a toll and end up in burn-out or disaster when all those (to mix metaphors) plates you've kept spinning eventually fall.

I was diagnosed ADD (or what would now be called inattentive ADHD) in my 30s. But the testing results were not clear, in part because I'd developed a lifetime of coping mechanisms and skills that allow me to behave in non-ADHD ways through force of will. If I look back at my primary school report cards, they are a mixture of both gifted and below-average performance with teacher comments like "Does amazing work when he applies himself".

That sudden lack of motivation or drop in performance on tasks that we previously excelled at is also classic ADHD.

Anxiety is often a comorbidity, stemming from a feeling of inconsistent failure and lack of control. Though my understanding is that anxiety may be more present in women sufferers of ADHD where the disease manifests differently than in men.

All of this to say that you may feel like a DSM definition of ADHD doesn't map onto your experience, but that may be because you're an adult who has a lifetime of adaptation.

Oh man, I got this for Christmas when I was 13 and spent nearly all of the holiday playing it. It was absolutely amazing, for 13 year old me.

While my game is long gone, I still have the little metal figurines of the dragon and the treasure chest.

Takes me back to the days of dBase, Clipper, and my favourite FoxPro which was acquired by Microsoft and continued to exist in the 90s. Access definitely destroyed the market for these other products by combining aspects of Visual Basic and database tech.

Ha, yes our Gen-X “slacker” generation (LOL) started out with a potentially different worldview.

I think you’ve described the challenge 20-somethings face when it comes to resisting the tribal messaging from their employer pretty well — coming out of school many people want to continue that sense of belonging. People develop close friendships, and romantic relationships, and they connect that to their work experience. Employer messaging around being part of a family and striving to a higher purpose is meant to foster loyalty and better productivity.

The flip-side is when layoffs happen the employees who have bought into these team/family ideals feel betrayed, and I’ve seen people struggle with coming to terms how their employer could let valuable people go after being told how special and important they were.

And to be clear, lots of these people are special and important; but that’s obviously not a protection against big businesses looking after their own selfish interests first.

It’s definitely not for everyone, and certainly living in a locale without social safety nets like healthcare would add to the stress.

This is very true.

Though it’s really tough for most employees (especially the 20-somethings) to resist the internal tribal messaging from their employers and instead see their employment relationship as just transactional.

Historically, yes. Post-pandemic, not as much. When the pandemic caused a migration to work-from-home and companies increased their remote-hiring efforts, I expected that the move to “work from anywhere, hire from anywhere” would push contracting rates down.

Oddly in my experience in the mobile (iOS) development space the opposite happened, and rates increased significantly. Those higher rates have held steady for two years now and appear to be permanent. Plus I’m increasingly taking contracts with U.S. clients.

Of course a full-time FAANG employee with stock options etc. will have a higher total compensation compared to me, but overall I’m making more than I ever have and I’m much happier compared to when I was a full-time employee.

In the first couple of years I would worry about this, but I haven’t in a very long time. The only occasions when I’ve had a gap between contracts is when I’ve chosen to take a break. I manage my finances to ensure I have several months of equivalent income saved.

My process is that 60 days before the end of my current contract, whether my current client has said they intend to renew or not, I start seeking other contract opportunities. If my client finalizes the renewal, I halt my job search. If they don’t, the 60 day window has consistently been long enough to ensure I have my next client lined up before my current contract ends.

Most of my contracts are 12 months long. I don’t take contracts any shorter than 6 months.

I should note that I’m in Canada and so I don’t have to worry about healthcare coverage.

Amazing. There was a time, nearly 20 years ago, that I was let go from Adobe. My colleagues assumed that because of my position/tenure/knowledge that I was layoff-proof. I told them that I was just a number in a large organization, and that orgs of a certain scale don’t do layoffs in a way that looks at each individual. Sure enough I was let go and after 16 years at the same company, that was acquired by Adobe where I spent 5 years, my overall feeling was “meh, I knew the end was nigh”. Since then I’ve been a contractor, and I couldn’t be happier. The relationship between me and my client is simple: I work, and they pay me. Sure there’s no stock option perks, but on the other hand I never have to deal with HR processes, submit quarterly objectives, etc. I work, I get paid. I know when the contract will end, and either the client renews the contract or I go somewhere else. It’s all fine.

For me, reducing my work life down to such a simple transactional level has been incredibly freeing and stress reducing, and allowed me to focus even more clearly on the work.

Oh wow, you just managed to describe me completely. I'm inattentive-type ADHD (diagnosed as an adult), and all of my thought processes are super visual; constructing visual mental models in space is how I problem solve and a lifetime ago in school I was top of the math class when I could construct visual models of the problem but struggled when I couldn't.

My diagnostic ADD testing was inconclusive because I was able to excel at working memory and shape tests because I am able to hold onto a ton of information if I can write it on my mental blackboard etc.

When I'm listening to a conversation, what I'm hearing often produces a stream of involuntary visuals representing related information and subjects, like I have a mental background process showing me flash-cards of possibly useful information.

I also have the issue where someone will talk to me and there's this delay where I often appear to be non-responsive for a moment or two until my brain spools-up and then I mentally lock into the conversation.

Anyway, if you have any references or additional learnings you've found related to this topic, please share.

Unless you own a dog, and then it can be a huge risk. It doesn’t take much xylitol to kill your dog, and I’ve watched a friend lose their dog due to this. I’ve had a scare where my dog ate a piece of a popsicle on a hot day that, unknown to me in the moment, was sweetened with xylitol; thankfully not in a fatal concentration but we still had to stay up all night to keep an eye on our dog and were hours away from the nearest animal hospital. Allulose won’t kill your dog.