mindways

Gods, yes, this. The FitBit app is like someone said "Let's use a wonderful asynchronous architecture so we won't block on retrieving data!" and then completely ignored all the ways that might lead to terrible UX if implemented poorly.

My steps stick at 0, then suddenly are the total of the last 3 days' worth. I log food, and it re-populates the "quantity" field with the old value after I edit it, sometimes up to 8-10 times in a row. My sleep data takes a roulette-spin amount of time to go get processed in the cloud and redownloaded, and even once the main dashboard has the info, the "Sleep" detail page will refuse to admit that I slept last night for another 3d20 minutes.

It's like someone connecting the pieces of a car with Slinkys instead of bolts because they're more flexible. If I didn't like the hardware so much I'd have switched ages ago.

I glanced at their latest code push a few days back, and some of the bugfixes/updates were related to presentation on mobile, so it's definitely something they're paying attention to and improving over time. (They're not blazing-fast, since the ratio of codebase-size to programmer-time is high, but they're persistent.)

In addition to the public-health issues of heart attacks and car accidents, the time-swaps are also a huge PITA for parents of young children. Kids between half a year and three years old have sleep routines that don't shift just because someone says the clocks have changed.

Fall back an hour? Congrats, your wake-up time just went from 5:30 AM to 4:30 AM because that's when your kid's still getting up. Spring forward an hour? OK, you just lost an hour from that shining window between when your kid goes to sleep and your own bedtime when you can actually get other stuff done.

A couple ways:

1) By thinking about them in other modes. I have an internal monologue, but it's not so much "the only way I can think" as "a thing that happens that comments as I think, and can be used to talk through things in my head". Eg: I'm also a pretty strong visual/spatial thinker, I can recall scents OK, and I'm reasonably facile with numbers; all of these sorts of thinking / recollection feel different as I do them.

Some may involve the inner monologue in an assistive role - eg, for math, my mental voice will often either narrate or speak key numbers as I complete steps, which allows me to use audio-memory as well as visual-memory to keep track of all the things I'm operating on.

2) Dynamically created neologisms that refer to particular not-easily-describable thoughts. Though in many cases, my brain may not create an actual word but just think "THAT thing" where "THAT" is accompanied by the concept in question, or some association/shorthand of it.

I'd wager because strong emotion tends to result in strong memories, and waiting for a needed ride that isn't showing up is stressful, particularly if you have no insight into where the right might be or if/when it's arriving.

I have memories of several times I was stood up or unreasonably delayed by bad taxi service / rideshare service, and the higher-stress ones (e.g., when I was trying to catch a plane) are the most vivid. One's from over a decade ago - I can't remember where I was going, but I remember the room I was in, pacing back and forth, calling the taxi dispatcher for the 3rd time.

Agreed. At one point I looked up their APIs, planning to do something pretty simple... and it just wan't even possible.

They also blew a lot of time tinkering with minutae / fringe features while fairly basic functionality was sub-par.

Still, on balance I've found G+ both useful and fun, and I'm annoyed it's shutting down. I'm growing more + more wary of relying on any Google services to be around in N years' time.

FWIW, I'm pretty sure that "tearing someone's work apart" doesn't require "tearing the person apart / humiliating them"... and I suspect it's the former rather than the latter which is, in the right contexts, useful in learning / improvement.

If you see something stupid, call it out. If I’m doing something stupid or say something wrong, call me out!

...but that can be done politely, or not(†). In my experience, being polite doesn't add a high cost to calling someone out, makes the person being called out less upset on average, and generally improves the quality of ensuing answers/discourse (because those involved aren't burning emotional energy on pushing their anger to the background). Both of those latter two things are good.

Sure, there are some people who can take a flaming load of unfiltered criticism to the face and remain unfazed, but assuming that that's the _norm_ doesn't seem especially realistic.

(† = Or in between - "polite" is not a boolean. It's not even a numeric measurement; one can be polite/rude in different sorts of ways.)

Yeah. I worked a 3-day week for 6-7 years, and overall it worked really well for both my employer (who got a more productive employee) and me.

From my side, the biggest drawback was that it was a sort of golden handcuffs - I almost certainly stayed there longer than I otherwise would have because getting an equivalent setup elsewhere would have such a pain.

My impression was that the biggest drawback on my employer's side (after hashing out the initial bureaucracy/paperwork) was my more limited availability for meetings.

As someone who went from working a 5-day week to a 4-day week, I feel like a 4-day week is a 'sweet spot' - I'm just as productive as I was working a 5-day week, but when I work any less than 30 hours a week (e.g. when I take a day off), my productivity always goes down.

Perhaps - but I suspect it depends on the person and the details of both job and workplace.

I spent about 6 years working a 3-day, and it went really well. However, it was more vulnerable to constant-cost outside factors like "unneeded meetings".

Yes, this. And also to keep in mind what the article says - that passions can be developed.

From what I've seen, the truth is more like, "Following a passion of yours for a living is likely to take some amount of fun out of it, but the hit's usually pretty small; just realize that doing something as a profession tends to have some fundamental differences from doing it purely for fun / fulfillment."

Or perhaps the size of the hit varies - for some people / passions it's small or zero, for others it's big, with the peak of the curve being "some but not too much"?

Insightful!

(Growing up, my classmates were mostly in the "sufficient positive influences" camp, and yeah, the teachers who had big impacts tended to be the really bad ones who destroyed momentum/interest in a topic for one or more of us. There were also high-impact inspirational teachers - but they were more of an "alter the trajectory of what someone wants to do in their life" sort of thing, which isn't really measured by standardized tests.)

Not remotely recently, but my friends and I played a lot of NetHack back in the 90s. I Ascended once or twice with no cheating (and with low-to-no use of Elbereth), and had a couple of good runs that could plausibly have worked out but didn't due to either bad fortune or (in one memorable case) very poor life choices involving a Ring of Conflict.

IIRC, we didn't even really read up on anything spoilery until we were getting down to the castle occasionally. Learning to survive the early-game was a journey both fun and frustrating.

"Free speech means arguing against messages one disagrees with, or ignoring them, but not trying to suppress them."

Agreed, but "I won't provide a platform for this speech" is not "suppressing". If I put up a bulletin board in my front yard and encourage my neighbors to post things there, in general it's eminently reasonable for me to decide that certain things can't be posted - even if my bulletin board becomes the most popular one in town.

(But if it's made "the official town news source" and local government makes certain posting certain things illegal, that's an entirely different kettle of fish.)

Tangentially, there's a 4th option you don't mention for messages one disagrees with - censuring them. (As in "actively and visibly disapproving" - not "censoring"!) For some types of message, the most appropriate response is a firm, unmistakable "That isn't welcome here" / "That's a terrible thing to say" followed by no discussion whatsoever. (Eg: when arguing lends a platform / legitimacy, but ignoring implies acquiescence.)

I hope my own state follows suit.

Before I became a parent, I found the shift to and from daylight savings time a mild annoyance.

By the time I had an infant and a toddler, I was roundly cursing whomever decided that arbitrarily slip-shifting our clocks twice a year was a good idea. Kids' sleep schedules don't adjust instantaneously, and when they're too young for explanations to mean much it means it's a twice-a-year festival of not-enough-sleep.

Yeah, those thresholds got set way too low. But worse, they don't really provide much in the way of actual _information_, as several people above have noted.

An article I read about this whole coffee thing mentioned that

"The state Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment adopted new regulations last year that will require more specific warnings that list the chemical consumers may be exposed to and list a website with more information. Parking garages, for example, will have to post that breathing air there exposes drivers to carbon monoxide and gas and diesel exhaust and warns people not to linger longer than necessary."

(From: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/26/coffee-sold-in-california-co...)

...which should hopefully make the warnings more useful - though I've no idea whether their overall usefulness will outweigh their overall cost.

For me, it really depends on the type of task. For things requiring high concentration or pinpoint mental focus, music gets in the way. For things requiring flow or invigoration, music can help me get/stay in the zone; and if something requires raw mental stamina (ie, it's something tedious or that I otherwise have to force myself to do), music can help me persist.

So, eg for programming: if it's a problem that's new to me or of notable complexity, music gets in the way. But if I'm hacking together a quick script that's just variations on easy/known problems, I can do it faster with music, and if it's something I'd rather not be working on music can up my productivity by lowering the number of brain-breaks I need to take.

In a completely different direction, for many forms of creative-artistic work, I find music helps massively.

<nod> I've read "The Happiness Hypothesis", which explores the same concept - the analogy it uses is that our subconscious mind is like an elephant, our conscious mind its rider. If the elephant doesn't have much of an opinion about where it should be going, the rider can guide it. But if the elephant wants to go one way, the rider can't do much about it.

(Though the rider can, slowly over time, train the elephant in certain things. But that's not in-the-moment control.)

IIRC - it's been a while since I read it - part of the book's point is that the whole system of elephant + rider is "us", even though the conscious POV is just the rider.

https://www.amazon.com/Happiness-Hypothesis-Finding-Modern-A...

I've had friends, linguists, and linguist friends all tell me that Sapir-Whorf has been disproved (at least in strong form), but I find it really hard to believe them, because it contradicts my own experience of the world. I'm by no means perfect at introspection, but I can notice the effect learning new words has on my own thought processes, and it seems about as obvious as the effect of, say, my mood.

When I learn words for colors - what "fuchsia" or "teal" or the like actually mean - I mentally distinguish them from similar shades in day-to-day life whereas before I didn't. (And it's not just "hey, new word, let's use that!"; I learned both of those colors about halfway through my life.) When I learn a specialized term in a field that chunks a bunch of complex concepts together in a particular way, I can think about that topic more fluently (letting me go further with those thoughts), but only if I accept the particular chunking of that term.

Sure, I have some thoughts which are more visual or spatial or musical and don't involve words as semantic pointers-to-structures-of-meaning. But not _all_ of them.

(It's also possible I'm simply fundamentally misunderstanding Sapir-Whorf.)

[Edited to fix italics.]

If my bag of potato chips is demonstrably and deliberately harming the lives of many real live people, you are welcome to crush it.

(Not that all corporations harm people. But some combination of "the way we tend to structure them" and "human behavior in large groups" seems to make them a lot more cavalier about collateral harm and negative externalities, particularly as they get big.)

What polarization is there in Washington?

Lower frequency of compromise and bipartisan bills. I've seen it just from reading the papers and staying semi-aware of politics. My mother-in-law worked in DC for decades, and it was glaringly evident to her even when she retired a decade or so ago.

The two parties are close together on almost everything.

Along certain axes, sure. They're both broadly corporatist, for instance.

But overall? Not even close, particularly since the rise of the Tea Party. I read through my House Rep's notes on the legislation each side advances / endorses / votes for, which makes their actual legislative priorities pretty clear. Not to mention knowing people whose health, environment, and/or job are impacted by those ideological differences.

Most of the time I see "there's no difference between the two parties" asserted, it seems like it's either being used as a justification for apathy, or as a rallying cry for a third party.

I don't get any of that from the memo. Neither did the woman developer who made me aware of it's existence.

If we're going with anecdote, the memo sure read as a hostile dropped-bombshell to every female Googler I've talked to on the subject.

Regardless of whether it was the author's intent to do harm, or to be antagonistic, he absolutely did - both to individuals and the company as a whole.

"Note: I find it interesting/disturbing/sad/telling that I've been sitting here for a long time contemplating if I should even submit this message since I use my real name here. The fact that we, as a society, have come to a point where we are afraid to even have this discussion really makes me sad. I respect every one of my colleagues deeply, male and female alike. The idea that someone could twist my words and paint me as a misogynist is beyond troubling."

The difficulty is that "this discussion" can be - and usually is - conducted in a way that is harmful to women, either on a broad scale (specious arguments / failure to understand systemic bias) or an individual scale (wrecking someone's day / making a formerly welcoming environment feel hostile).

Those real consequences are on the line every time someone hits "Post" in this sort of discussion, and are a really good reason for any thoughtful person to pause and contemplate before doing so... perhaps do some additional self-education, or take the time to pose genuinely explorative-questions rather than rhetorical-questions or flat-out conclusions. If more people did that, I think you'd eventually see a lot less fiery refutation and much better discourse.

"If the numbers are true and the gender distribution in STEM graduates is 80/20, and you are intent on increasing your number of female employees, you have two choices. You either lower the bar on the 20% or you raise the bar on the 80%. In the end, the net effect is the same. The employees from the 20% group had a granted advantage against the 80% group."

This logic assumes that the 80% and 20% are functionally equivalent? (Which can be so if there's, eg, no systemic bias, but seems rather less likely when such is present.)

Another option would be to realize the the 20% already had to overcome substantial hurdles to get where they are, and to factor that into your decision-making.

...except when it kicks you to the curb, and forces you to fight over what they'll cover while your family's in the middle of the hardest time of their life and has negative energy to spare.

Our healthcare/insurance system is miles better than nothing, but that's no reason to stick our heads in the sand and insist that it's especially good by modern standards.

...even if we take this not-quite-equivalence at face value (note: 650 < 979 and 20% < 25%), most life expenses don't scale linearly with housing values - not even close.

Groceries may be more expensive in the big city, but not 10x more expensive. You're not paying 10x more for a car, or a plane flight. And insurance premiums / deductibles sure aren't 10x cheaper in a less expensive part of the country.

Plus, the "$300K in expensive place" household has the option of moving to the less expensive place. The reverse is hardly true.

it is arguable that 30k in MO would actually be better off

1. No. 2. Even if we were to accept that $30K in one place went just as far as $300K in another, "better off" ignores that higher property costs are likely to indicate a more desirable place to live. (For whatever reason: access to jobs, lower crime rates, pleasant to live in, what-have-you.)

My life since age 30 has been a slow odyssey away from a tech career.

After many years of software engineering, I switched to part-time in order to dabble in board game design on the side. It was fantastic - enough money to live comfortably, lots more free time - but also a little bit like golden handcuffs: in order to switch tech jobs, I'd have had to find another place OK with me working 3 days/week.

After doing that for 6-7 years, I talked it over with my wife and quit my tech job to do househusbanding instead. It got her more time (fewer chores) and me even more time (household work didn't take nearly the 30 hours/week that 3 days work + commute had), which let me ramp up the board game design. My wife works in tech, so one income was more than enough for us, even socking away plenty for retirement. It took some psychological adjustment on my part, but she was really good about vocally appreciating the work I did, which helped a lot with the transition. (Plus, I got to give a big middle finger to gender stereotypes, which was a source of satisfaction. :)

Then we decided to have kids, and I became a stay-at-home dad. Help from family and babysitters means I'm still able to spend some time pursuing game design (note: this is not cost-efficient - either "I parent full-time" or "daycare" would be cheaper - but it works for us, for now), and parenting is fantastic. Also frequently exhausting and frustrating - there's a heavy tradeoff of immediate-gratification happiness for life-arc happiness - but very rewarding, and the sound of my kids laughing together is pretty much the best thing in the world.

I still love programming, I just don't do it much. (Little side projects for fun every once in a while, or simple tools supporting my game design.) And I think I enjoy it more when I do, because I'm doing it intermittently of my own volition. Once both kids are in school and I have a little more time, I'll probably start messing around with mobile development - I find it slightly disconcerting to look at a computing device and not have the bone-deep certainty that if I chose to invest the time, I could make it do just about anything I dreamed up.

With financial reasons as your main barrier to quitting the industry, much of my experience won't apply to you - my wife's salary is the only reason things work as they currently do. But if you can fix your budget so that you can live (and save!) on 40-80% of your current income, you can try to find/make opportunities to switch to part-time work. I found that when I did, the benefits of the extra free time made me more focused during my working hours, and happiness with my life situation made me more excited about my job in general.

.... if they're a good fit for your team, have good work ethic and can get the job done.

I'd modify that last to "and can get the job done well". Most of my co-workers have been fantastic, but there have been one or two who absolutely got the job done... in ways that eventually cost so much dev time (on maintenance / refactoring) that it would have been better to have someone else build the thing in the first place.

(Which is also presumably easier to discover from sample work than from a whiteboard interview. :)