pipio21

I think it’s worth asking why anyone in their right mind should care about mid-century handwriting recognition algorithms in 2016.

Lots of people care, specially in Asia(Chinese and Japanese). It is just that the problem is incredible hard.

We put 5 very smart people working for a year on that, and it was totally impossible meeting people's expectations, specially people like doctors taking notes fast(and ugly).

We thought that the market was in creating mindmaps or something instead as people could write slower and better.

But people write a double u and expect the computer to see an "m". With deep learning is possible but extremely flimsy.

I have been doing that for years form me and for others(managing people) so they do not procrastinate with the team like they will do if alone. I do that without telling them I am doing that.

I will add some things I consider very important:

Use paper, write things down. Dividing a big task means nothing if you have no external memory you could trust to free the brain short term memory but you could recover it later. Paper today is the cheapest and more advanced external memory there is.

You could also use a tape recorder if you prefer audio memory.

After creating small sub task(tactics) from your general strategic thinking, put a checklist square near it. When you finish the task, check it.

Every hour of deep work, mark it on a calendar like a prisoner does with sticks. This provides visual feedback for your brain of your accomplishments, specially with hard tasks that takes months to complete.

The word for managing to do dread task is "reframing" into something that is important and positive for you.

Of course if you have money and power you could delegate most of the dreaded task, like googlers do with most of their domestic chores.

There are more things but the important thing is that you need practice, practice and practice until you get it. And like in anything else you will learn it much much faster if you personally know someone who "gets it" and learn from this person directly.

I have met some "naturals" of this processes in my life but I am not. I developed this skill over a long period of time, making me super productive compared to when I started.

Ohh, yeah!!

The value they add is called "money". They give you it every single time(you work with them), not sometimes.

If you expect them to babysitter you, mentor or friendship, from my point of view it is your expectations that are wrong.

You should find emotional support elsewhere. I recommend masterminds.

I am friend and colleague of old VCs of mine. But I did not expected from them in the past more than a professional relationship.

This is probably what makes a good friend or a lover , not being too much needy and dependent.

You could not compare apples and oranges.

In particular you could not compare injuries created by explosives in a war with advanced use on gunpowder with injuries made by stones, arrows and spears.

Gunpoder and canon shrapnel was extremely deadly because x-rays were not invented and doctors could not see were those fragments were in the body.

They were blind until Madame Curie started using X-rays in WWI and suddenly people started surviving. It took the Curies getting too much radiation though.

You don't need reason, you need fast reaction times slowing the car and avoiding obstacles.

The same happens with humans. Reason is extremely slow. Pilots are trained to act fast training the subconscious, not the logical mind.

If someone works for me 18 hours instead of 8 consistently I will fire him immediately.

We do not want overworked and burn out slaves, thank you very much.

Making more than 6 hours of real deep work every day is extremely challenging. Someone who tells me he is working 18...

We have some Indians that work for us, on similar terms than Europeans or Americans, living in Europe. Good workers and have earned their place, like the rest.

Remember that even the first serious cinematographers, like Lumiere brothers considered cinema just a "toy" with no practical applications.

From my perspective AR applications in the future will be huge in all areas as it means a new way to interface with 3d editing on real time.

But having said that, I do not believe Magic Leap will be the one who bring this to the table. I see magic Leap as the Altavista or pets.com of the Internet, burning investor money like crazy and trowing things to the wall expecting something to stick.

It was good while it lasted.

We will have to start migrating our software there into a more neutral platform.

I don't like the consolidation in Software in which there are only 5-6 huge players. It means politics and private interest of the conglomerate take precedence over everything else, like competence, and freedom.

Those oligopolies can just send their lawyers against competition or just buy them to stop the threat.

I have a high definition monitor and TVs. It looks gorgeous on them.

No, dogs only eat their own feces when they lack nutrients on their diet.

Concussions are accumulative and most of them are not macro evident. Lots of micro concussions could be worse than a single big one.

So I do not think your data means what you believe it means. There is a reason they call NFL "Not For Long".

I would not let my children play either American football or rugby, existing options like basketball or tennis. Luckily most of the world plays soccer.

Fighting fascism, supporting Stalinism.

Good thing that they were betrayed and a very good thing would have been all of them being killed in the war. He who lives by the sword, dies by the sword.

Those guys that wanted revolution should have started it in their own house first.

I feel sorry for this man. He is a perfectionist.

He believes everything has to be perfect or if not he does not do it. Because of that at the end of the day we have nothing.

With a company you need to compromise. Probably you can no use glass, but you can use polyethylene and paper (tetrabrick).

Step by step you could do a lot. We take lots of technical debt, if we make something that is not a perfect solution but it is better than anything that exist on the world, we ship it. The world improves.

Yes, it is not perfect, but if the product success over time you could pay your technical debt and make it perfect. If not , it just means that people's pockets is not where their mouth is(which is common by the way).

I have devoted my professional live to manufacturing automation.

From my point of view, what Musk tries to do is very hard, but if someone could do it it is him.

There are differences between the 1880 and the 2018, in particular AI(artificial intelligence) today is "out of this world" tech compared to 1880s. Today you could solve things just by brute force AI that was simply impossible in the past. And Musk will probably do just that. If I had hundreds of millions of dollars I will do too.

The great thing about automation is that once you solve something, it works forever. It takes way more work, of course getting it to work in the first place.

Musk has as his best gift his total lack of doubt like young people that believe that nothing is impossible. It is very typical for this young people to crash over walls as they repeat the mistakes others have done. At the same time, it is young people who change the world when conditions change(and making the same mistakes do not yield the same output).

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

Today with chemical laboratory analysis you can get the ingredients of anything. So what Coca Cola uses is not that secret. Your point one is not valid.

The secret is making this product economically in enormous quantities. It is about providers, contracts, supply warrantees, dealing with those that bottle your concentrates, water supplies to mix your concentrates, and so on.

There are people that study illnesses data at least in Europe and USA, and there is a clear relationship between sugary carbonated drinks in general and lots of illnesses.

There is a clear relationship with diabetes an sugary drinks in particular.

In the past Coca Cola used Coca, and hence cocaine, but it does not anymore.

When you travel to a new place you fall in love,everything is fantastic, not like the shitty place you come from, but if you live in a place long enough you start seeing the failures of the new place (and the good things of your native country).

I was born in Spain, and had experienced this effect multiple times, living in San Francisco, Boston, London, Shanghai, Tokio, Berlin...

Right now I value a lot more Spain and Europe at its culture than I ever did.

Living abroad gives you perspective and lots of options. When I started I thought it was risky. Now I think what is risky is living in the same place all your life.

This is a complex issue that takes days of careful analysis to take a decision.

Long story short we implement something ourself if:

1.It is a differentiator for our company because 2.

2.We can make it better than available libs and 3.

3.Making it better represents a real change on our company or the world, changes like "It will make possible what was not possible" or "will halve the cost of X, because Y".

4.We need to parallelize-make it on hardware.

Implementing something inside is extremely expensive as requires salaries of highly paid people, makes those people unavailable for doing other things, and takes always more time than planned.

On the other hand with your own code you could do magic. You can hardware accelerate(with electronics and FPGAS) it to use 10.000, 50.000 less energy, or GPUs to make it 100-200 faster. You control everything to suit your needs.

We normally start using standard libraries and replace then slowly with our own code if it will make a difference.

We do the same with parallelization: we start with multiCPUs, then GPUs, then FPGAS. Then we can even think on offering investors the option of making ASICS if functionality is proven and very well tested.

Disasters? Yes of course. It is part of experience, they happen like great successes. When you risk you risk disaster, but you give yourself the option to success greatly too.

When I was a kid I learned to ski probably faster than anyone around. But it was because I did not play safe like most did and keep falling(at great speed) until I did not.

In life you could do the same.

I believe it is JSON what is broken.

I do not understand the article at all. We created our own GUI development using Dear IMGUI. It is probably the simplest GUI in the world. For text we use our own rasterizer library.

But it comes at a price: It just continuously draws the screen, 60 times per second, which makes the battery of laptops last very little.

Now our software uses a fork of Dear Imgui that does not update the screen but just when necessary.

Before Dear Imgui, we tried Qt, GTK, Web, Win32. Making your own widgets with hardware accelerated fonts that you control is extremely complicated in those GUIs.

The complete history is that we had a drought in the Iberian Peninsula that made electricity cost skyrocket last year.

Now last two months we had an abnormal rain season with lots of snow and rain, so dams and water reservoirs are getting more water, and rivers Tagus and Duero-Douro could carry more water to Portugal as the dams upstream are getting full, like it should for this time of the year.

The complete history is that in the Iberian Peninsula there are three months with almost no rain: June-July and August because of the Azores high and you can not depend on hydro generation there.

Vikings, who “were brilliant” despite popular perception of them as brutes.

Well, you can be smart and brutal at the same time. Vikings had a brutal culture because they needed it for survival, as they did starve over some periods of the year without it.

Even in Spain, with a much mild climate, Romans reported local people in the mountains pillaging the valleys in Winter as they got short of food. Romans forced those people to live in the valleys and gave them land to work.

Traveling.

It is one thing to study English in a country that does not speak it, and a completely different thing when you need it to survive. Being surrounded by people speaking English(French, German,Chinese) and feeling totally stupid as you can not even communicate the basic means you have to learn or have to learn.

I recommend "fluent forever" book and Gabriel Wyner stuff in general to learn as fast as possible. ALWAYS START BY PRONUNTIATION,like kids do, or else you will have to unlearn what you learned badly.

In order to polish it, I joined Toastmasters.

One of the great things about self driving cars is that we are going to start "debugging Roads".

From my point of view all accidents until this time could be attributed to the civil engineer that build the road as much as the driver of the car.

You make a pedestrian pass between roads made only for aesthetic purposes so you put a sign forbidding the pass and call it done. But people of course use it and get killed.

You put concrete barriers between roads but make it so people could crash frontally against it, something you won't find in any European high speed road without deflectors that will make vehicles not crash against concrete.

Self driving will give us scientific evidence of what creates accidents like black boxes did with airplanes. Thanks to that we know that what looks like insignificant details like the color and placement of buttons, turns out to be essential.

This should be "Eating out in industrialized fast food American food chains increases levels of phthalates in the body".

A restaurant is a different thing. In places like Spain, France or Italy when you say "restaurant" you never refer to "MacDonnals", "BurgerKing" or "FostersHollywood".

Not really.

$500 SLAs gives you LCD SLA printing with medium resolution.

You will need at least $1300 for a Moai kit(with Laser Galvoes):

https://peopoly.net/

Or at least a $1500 DLP kit with a good resolution for creating small parts.

Fo really small parts you need the strength of steel or titanium. But you can made then in plastic, metalize the plastic and use something like EDM(electrodischarge) to make your parts.

Remember Apple bought Qualcom Mirasol displays.

From my point of view, they did it to port the Mirasol technology to watches. It just makes sense that they want to have watches with battery that last at least a week or so without charging.

Mirasol is just so great with color and outside light. But it requires an entire wafer per screen. It is an expensive process, but Apple has so much money it is nothing to them to jumpstart production.

If they do it, they will have a product that has no competitors at all, at least until those patents last.

I had worked as an European engineer in China. I worked European hours and days.

IMHO the secret of success of China, if there is one(China is way poorer than EU or USA), is accepting capitalism after centuries of stagnation with systems that worked very bad for most people(worked for Emperors, communist dictators and people in power thought).

To say that working 996 is the secret to success is just manipulation of the wsj, which does not surprise me coming from this newspaper.

Not accepting patents in practice like US did with England could be the secret of China industry advancing very fast but working too much is not.

Chinese spend a long time in work, they even sleep there but the energy they have most of the time is very low precisely because of that. European system is far superior.

Specially in America, with only recent History of course family recipes are adapted from books.

On the other hand my family(in Europe) holds recipes that are more than one hundred years old. Most books recipes came from taking the knowledge of grandmas on villages on places with culinary History.

Those books serve as text books over which modern cuisine has evolved.

But is a kind of food that most Americans will consider strange. They are sophisticated stews that take forever to make or have flavor that they are not used to.

When I went to China the hardest thing to get used to was all the flavors of their food, which is very rich, but most Westerners do not know it(note:Chinese restaurants have very little to do most of the time as real Chinese food is not commercial in the West).

We have worked with LLVM a lot for own own compilers and DSPs.

LLVM Intermediate representation in practice is C++, AST is C++. LLVM do not support many languages,many languages support LLVM, which is different.

That is many people, or languages' designers, have made the necessary work to make their languages compatible with LLVM IR. If the language is similar to C++, this is a simple task, if it is very different, it is very hard.

LLVM does not support other languages, in fact, codebase changes a lot making maintenance painful.

I had the same experience, but also expat, love traveling.

For me making new friends is easy, probably because I am used to it. It is not that hard unless you are desperate.

It is like money, when you don't need it, it way easier to make money than when you need it.

The best way to make friends it to find an indirect way of being in close contact with other people, an help them.

For example I have made incredible friends helping people on drugs. After months or years of pain, when those people get out of drugs they are your friends for all your life, because you were there when very few people were.

I also made lots of friends volunteering teaching(poor) kids 3d printing and engineering in general. When those kids become men or women they surprise you.

From my point of view, you make friends when you don't need to make friends, because you have more important things to do than focusing in yourself.

While it is obvious that everything decays, it is equally obvious that you can repair it.

For me eternal youth will happen sooner or later, probably 100 years in the future,50 years,200, but it will happen when we understand biology and could repair tissues, something that we could not do today. Today we don't heal a bone fracture, we let nature do it, because we really do not control or understand the process deeply. The body knows how to kill viruses, we do not. Only bacteria after copying nature with antibiotics is under our control but we do not control or understand the process again.

This is not being immortal, people will die in wars, or accidents, or being killed, but they will be young all our lives.

For this people will probably have to go to a place that resembles the uterus and spend some time there as the body repairs itself:

https://pm1.narvii.com/6320/0940afb810563b4c4b67c4efb773adc0...

After that you will be 20 years younger. Not different from repairing a car.