HN user

njloof

643 karma
Posts0
Comments257
View on HN
No posts found.

Google Glass specifically prohibited using the camera for facial recognition —- but let you silently take pictures and video and post them to Google+.

They literally blocked a useful feature (recognizing people you have already met) and promoted a feature nobody wanted (posting pictures of people without consent).

[dead] 9 years ago

It's damage if it drives good engineers out of the company. By firing him the company is attempting to reduce the damage by indicating that this memo does not represent Google nor is it even under discussion.

Montreal has been a revelation to me since I moved here from the US. My daughter came as an infant and enjoys conversing with her friends in French and with us in English. Working in tech, English is inescapable in programming contexts so I can understand the subject of conversation in French once I tune in to the accent.

I really like Mango for two reasons: it has Québécois French (since I'm in Montreal now) and it has a feature where you can compare your pronunciation to a native speaker. It's really helped me learn the unvoiced consonants that lurk at the end of French words.

Also, iPads have become a vector for bringing new tech into the cockpit, since it's not physically installed in the plane and therefore doesn't require certification. You can pull up charts, set courses and upload to the autopilot.

In the context of Curtis I also like to point out James Burke's original "Connections" series. It's a deconstruction of history that is about ideas, rather than places and dates, and the first season is structured around the development of arguably the 20th century's most ambitious achievement (no spoilers:) The last episode is the most Curtis-esque in asking questions about managing human progress.

Rationalization is a powerful tool for explaining behavior that has nothing to do with the post-facto rationale.

I fear that we select for this in the tech industry. I have worked with brilliant programmers that are emotionally unstable. Some of them have developed self-awareness, some have not, but they uniformly lack tools for dealing with the instability.

Communities start with who's invited (or permitted) -- with Twitter, tech movers/shakers/early adopters; Facebook, students at elite colleges; Usenet... well, students and faculty at connected colleges.

Once the community expands, it loses some of its initial intimacy and collective mindset. Perhaps we should invent social networks that keep people in little collectives of positive feedback, rather than subjecting ourselves to the negativity of warring fiefdoms.