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pluckytree

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Magic Mailboxes 6 years ago

Thanks, Wowfunhappy person. :) Much more to come. The long ones are too tiring.

We were proud of it given the circumstances. I'll edit the quote below to make that more clear.

"So, we shipped the product and introduced it at the show as planned. Despite a long list of warts and terrible performance, I thought it turned out well given the schedule and the circumstances. I continued to use it as my primary photo app, even though I’m not a hard-core professional. Others on the team were too bitter, such that they refused to use the final product."

- cricket

Apple File System 10 years ago

Or perhaps concern with having to deal with 3rd party iMessage/Facetime clients while at the same time trying to maintain a high level of security. Apple doesn’t want anything to tarnish the security reputation of these products.

What happened was he tried to get in and the one security guard told him he dad to be escorted by an employee, just as the sign said. Hundreds of people do this every day, thinking they will be able to see the campus on the inside. The only people that get escorted out are protestors who storm the lobby.

Related teams tend to sit close to each other in any case, so this is a worst case scenario. Which isn’t really that bad anyways. It’s good exercise and a rectangular building holding 14,000 people would also require a lot of walking. Sure, it could be many, many rectangular buildings which everyone else does, which would require even more walking. Not to mentain there’s a huge benefit in productivity for 14,000 people to all get abundant natural sunlight, which is available to only a fraction of the people in a standard campus. Vitamin D is deficient in many people and engineers typically don’t get out much. I’d say it’s a win-win for everyone. Finally, the campus is pretty compact, leading to a ton of open space, which, combined with natural light, will likely lead to greater productivity and also be a great attraction to new employees who value the look and feel of their work environment very highly.

"Plus, there are thorny issues like how to dispose of radioactive waste and how to decommission old plants."

The fact is, we're creating tremendous amounts of potentially dangerous waste and we have no long-term plan, much less the technology to pull it off. We don't know what the political situation will be in a country 500 years from now. If we put 1/100th of the money that we put into dangerous technologies and subsidizing fossil fuels and put them into renewables, we wouldn't even be having this discussion. Germany is on track to be 100% renewable by 2020. Including solar. And they are not exactly known for their excess of sun.

Ayn Rand Lamp 10 years ago

I think most people just don’t care about the personal life of a creator when evaluating its content. Even deplorable people can have good ideas. Why reject the ideas because of the source.

Ayn Rand Lamp 10 years ago

So I’m a fucking moron if I read something in its entirely that you didn’t actually completely read? Got it. And benzos aren’t amphetamines. They are in the neighborhood of being the opposite.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benzodiazepine

Please provide links to your easily found research. Thanks. Also, many great authors artists are/were on drugs. I don’t see how that’s relevant.

Why can’t it be leaked? The software needs to be created and installed on the device. Even if it’s entirely in Apple hands, there’s no guarantee it will ever be leaked.

It wouldn’t need editing. It’s intended to disable the timeout when brute forcing passwords. It’s incredibly dangerous software to even exist. And also insanely valuable. Even more incentive for someone to leak it, even at Apple.

People think Steve was arrogant, but this guy takes the cake. Steve would always thank the whole team and everyone involved when a product was introduced. I believe at Pixar (couldn’t find a reference) that he pushed for everyone at the company to be in the movie credits, right down to the janitorial staff. This guy is all about taking credit for the work of a very small number of people and comparing himself to Steve. Plus, this is just poorly researched and frankly just lame, for lack of a better word. Some snippets:

- I’ll call him Steve (Everyone called him Steve. Employees still refer to execs by their first name)

- "I worked with Steve Jobs" can mean, "I saw him in the elevator once when I was at a meeting at Apple" …… I actually worked with the guy, and I'm realizing that perhaps I worked with him more closely than almost anyone (Who cares? Where are the stories about working with him? You should have more stories than anyone)

- I was employee #40 (No one cares. Employee #1765 could change the world more than you)

- We called it Interpersonal Computing, but nobody paid attention until 5 years later when the WWW became more mainstream. (We were so ahead of the curve that what we worked on wasn’t even given a name. WWW? I was around then and I don’t remember many people calling it that)

- We were done ahead of schedule, as it turned out (No you weren’t. No one who works in software, especially a 1.0 product, believes you)

- I think it was October or November of 1998 (Try using the WWW to look it up. It was October and it was actually 1999)

So far, that covers 2/3rds of the article. Still no mention of what it’s like to work with Steve.

- What he was passionate about was, I think, quite simple: he liked to build products. I do, too. This we had in common. (Incredible, it’s like you were soulmates)

- So I think that in some very real sense, I had a better understanding of Steve and how he worked, and what motivated him, than almost anyone in the world. (You should really write an article about what Steve was like to work with. With lots of stories since you were so close to him.)

- It sounds kind of self-serving to say this, but he and I were a lot alike in that way, and in that process. (The whole article is self-serving. It’s far more about you than Steve. That’s right, even I call him Steve from outside the secret cabal you were part of.)

So, in summary, Glenn Reid is amazing, almost Steve-like, and what it was like to work with Steve consisted going into rooms with whiteboards and throwing out ideas and debating the details of a product.

Arrogant engineers don’t make great products. Oh, you didn’t mention your engineering team. And the team that made the hardware. Or you EPM that kept you on schedule so you could ship early or something. What about people that wrote the low-level software your app depended on? Did you write everything from the kernel on up to iMovie? You have very little in common with Steve other than you were in the same room with him a lot and apparently have no actual stories to tell.

If this article is completely true, it’s sad to hear he would never pilot a train again even if exonerated. That sounds like how teachers are treated if a student accuses them of impropriety and their careers are over even if they are innocent. Is that a uniquely American thing?

Saying "Paleo is Stupid" will definitely get more people to read your article. Which is apparently about educating people about saving the planet through food choices. So, educate people, don’t insult them.

Read the TPP 11 years ago

I think the positive benefit of this effort will likely be undermined (and it’s already underway) by reactionary comments from uninformed people. They'll play well to people that already know the TPP sucks, but not from those on the fence or really wanting to learn about it.

I’ve seen a lot more success with the "hire smart people and get out of the way" methodology of managment. If you allow people the freedom to work together and make their own decisions in a mature manner, you don’t need these childish techniques for making decisions. In practice, this probably makes people feel like they are in some bizarro world than that they are an adult entrusted with real responsibility.

A manager’s role can be reduced to keeping people on track and helping settle contentious decisions, whether by mediating or making the decision themselves.

If I was interviewing for a company and I found out they used techniques like this, I would get up in the middle of the interview and walk out.

I agree that part of the motivation for people supporting zoning is to preserve or increase their property values. But I think that people that spend a huge chunk of change on a house should care about preserving the neighborhood they bought into. As an extreme case, without zoning, what if each home lot on your street were turned into a high rise residential or commercial building? I don’t think any homeowner expects nothing to change, but they bought a house hoping that it continues to have a similar quality of life going forward. It’s not all about money. Peace and quiet is important to people, for example. Lack of traffic is important to people. Having one neighbor on each side rather than 100 is important to people.

Inflation is good for debt holders, because they can pay off their debts with devalued money. Inflation is bad for those that save and invest because they have to earn a higher rate of return to offset inflation. Traditional economics tells the right story that inflation is not a good thing. Political economics (which is why economics is nowadays) tells you what fits the situation, so don’t work about it, eh?

Look at deflation pre-WW1 and not that not only was this a period of growth, but also one where downturns were sometimes severe but over very quickly. You have the Panics of 18xx, but not any panics that last years.

I had trouble getting past the first sentence. That NYC has the finest skyline in the world is a fact? Well, I think it’s ugly and uninspiring. And that’s not a fact. Also, seems extremely odd to not just ask developers why they don’t build skyscrapers in the middle of the island? They would be able to tell you whether it’s lack of feasibility or that no one has asked them to do it.

Economic Inequality 11 years ago

Why is that more offensive? What if they were all startup founders or created companies that made profound and positive change? At what point is the cross-over between being reasonably and unreasonably wealthy? If they have too much money and give most of it away, is that better than continuing to create new ventures that could make a difference?

This economic inequality feels similar to racism. Why should a very wealthy person be pre-judged to be worse than others without knowing the whole picture? You seem to be singling out startup founders as being OK, it’s just the others that are bad?

Sure, income distribution is unequal, but it doesn’t have to turn into villifying those at the top of the heap.

I’m so excited to have a new acronym in any room. I could read the article to find out what AR stands for, but since I don’t know what it stands for, how would I know the article is worth reading?

You give up some control of the company or enough control that shareholders own a majority stake, which is likely the case with the companies you mention. You also are subject to a boatload of new regulations and reporting requirements. Going public is a way to raise lots of money. It doesn’t really give a company any tangible benefits. Especially recently, companies that have gone public have ended up being valued at less than their last funding round.

Agreed, but the article is focused on why these companies that have done significant things to protect users with encryption technologies haven’t been a lot more vocal like Tim Cook has. This issue is so important to them and to everyone that they could spare a little time to speak their minds. Otherwise it just looks like that "kooky Apple" going against the grain. Who cares, they are going out of business soon, right?