Ah, you are right, I've been misinformed this whole time! Not created by Cal Academy.
I am a little unclear on what you mean by not science. The secrecy around their models certainly makes them not open, but are you saying that any research based on the data is not science?
I am a huge fan of iNaturalist and the concept of citizen science. I am into herping, birding and scuba diving and I post pretty much all of my photos there. I have about 5000 observations and am approaching 2000 species. I have a private "project" with some good friends. Some of my observations are incredibly rare and one of them was even featured on their social media.
While I started using iNaturalist initially to satisfy my own curiosity about the animals and fungi I was seeing, and then expanded my usage to contribute to science in some small way, a huge unexpected benefit has been having my photos catalogued and findable by species, family, date or location. If I want to show a friend the monitor lizards I saw fighting over a huge fish in Thailand, I can find it no problem even if I don't remember exactly when that was. If I want to show someone all the cool frogs I saw in Indonesia, easy. If I can't remember where it was that I encountered a gray fox casually strolling down the trail, I can find it. Google photos and other AI tagging solutions are never going to be accurate and detailed enough to be useful in this way.
It is really an amazing tool with a shockingly friendly, welcoming and helpful community, in stark contrast with the eBird community which I find is quite unwelcoming to beginners. For example, if you make a questionable ID on iNaturalist, folks from the community will suggest what they think it might be. If you claim a rare bird on eBird you can expect a gruff email demanding evidence, or you may have it removed from your list pre-emptively. That experience may not be universal, but I have seen it multiple times. Telling people on the internet they are wrong is a favorite activity of many so I really think it's commendable the culture that iNaturalist has been able to foster.
For those who don't know, iNaturalist was created by and remained a part of the California Academy of Science until relatively recently when they were spun off into their own nonprofit entity.
For a while now the long term vision, product and engineering decisions they are making have been a bit questionable to me. The web version feels like abandonware and has some very clunky experiences. The iOS and Android apps function differently and have separate longstanding bugs, don't support all the functionality of the web version, and are also mostly abandonware while the eng team focuses on a new app that is a rewrite. Seek feels like it's trying to be Pokémon. iNat next, the new version of the iNaturalist app, has a nicer look and feel but seems like it will be released missing functionality both from the old apps and from the website.
I am not sure how important my own gripes are as a power user, perhaps in the end it will be better for new users, but it sort of feels like iNaturalists goals as an organization may not be as aligned with the original charter as they once were. For the purposes of financial stability it is probably most important to grow the user base. For the purposes of supporting citizen science initiatives it's probably more important to grow geographic distribution and the number and diversity of observations submitted, so a more balanced approach to growing the user base and supporting power users (and converting new users into power users) would probably be the approach more aligned with their original goals.
This is the norm at large tech companies and, IMO, a huge problem and major detriment to productivity within organizations as the cost of that added complexity is paid by everyone.
BUT, at least very occasionally I have seen people get promoted for simplicity, I've even successfully made the case myself. With a problem that was itself so complex that it was causing fires on a regular basis, and staff & principal engineers didn't want to touch it with a ten foot pole. When a senior eng spent a couple of weeks thinking about the problem and eventually figured out a way to reframe it and simplify the solution, melting away months of work, making the promo case was actually quite easy.
The problem is, the opportunities to burn down complexity like that don't present themselves nearly as often as the opportunities to overcomplicate a thing, which are pretty much unbounded.
I had a neighbor who mounted his TV directly on the shared wall to my bedroom in violation of the lease terms. The wall was hollow and seemed to not only conduct the sound into my bedroom but act as a natural amplifier.
I offered him a nice speaker system I wasn't using but he said he didn't know how to connect it to the TV. I offered to do it for him but he refused. I offered to pay a professional and he still refused. I was forced to move my bed into the living room so I could sleep through the night as he started his day by watching the news at full blast at 3am.
Naturally, in response I propped those speakers to the same wall and played whale calls at a low volume any time I wasn't home.
My hot take is that AI is shaping up to be a tax on big tech.
Yet another round of layoffs being blamed on AI. As with last time, this is not due to productivity gains from AI, rather it's due to wanting to reallocate budget towards investing in AI. (and maybe an excuse for something they already wanted to do)
I think some productivity gains from AI are real, and I've experienced some firsthand, but reductions in force being ENABLED by AI are not, and I don't think we will see much of that for a good while still.
AI is attracting a lot of investment dollars because it's seen as disruptive; the capabilities it potentially unlocks for people are enormous. The problem is that general intelligence is still far away (fundamentally cannot be reached with the current approaches to AI, in my opinion), and the level of investment required is so high that the only way folks are getting that money back is if it does enable a level of layoffs that would be crippling to the economy.
Additionally, there is not a huge difference between the top models, and thanks to the massive investments the models are incrementally improving. It seems obvious from the outside that AI models are going to be a commodity, and good free models put downward pressure on prices, which they are already losing money on. So I think it's going to be a race to the bottom, and is very unlikely to be a winner-takes-all situation.
I think this means that the reward for big tech companies pouring insane amounts of money into AI will be maintaining their current position, or maybe stealing a bit of business from each other. That's why I think AI is more of a tax on big tech than a real investment opportunity.
Completely bootstrapped online counseling platform focused on affordability ($25/week!), accessibility and doing the right thing by clients and therapists. Currently only available in NY, FL, TX and Singapore with plans to expand as budget allows.
Gemini has the annoying habit of delegating tasks to me. Most recently I was trying to find out how to do something in FastRawViewer that I couldn't find a straightforward answer on. After hallucinating a bunch of settings and menus that don't exist, it told me to read the manual and check the user forums. So much for saving me time.
I wish articles like this would engage in a bit of critical analysis of the studies they are reporting on. It's no wonder people are confused as hell about the latest science about what foods are healthy when there are seemingly new contradicting studies coming out all the time and the news about them just parrots the contents of the study with no critical analysis why this new understanding might be better, or worse, than what we had before.
That said, I hope this is right. As someone who is allergic to dairy it would be nice to know that the substitutes I'm consuming aren't significantly worse for me, and it would be great to see more dairy free options for foods although the trend seems to be going in the opposite direction (for example, the amount of "dark" chocolate with milk in it is astounding, and brands that were reliably true dark chocolates have started adding milk too)
I think every team needs a TL. If the EM isn't filling that role, then another team member should be, and most of what you're talking about falls on the TL (with some sanity checking from the EM by talking to other team members about these things as well)
Ex-Dropbox manager here. I also built BetterHelp (sorry) and I was the VP of Engineering Grooveshark.
Dropbox was the first job I've had where managers are not expected to code although they still go through a small ramp up where they can fix a tiny bug or make a hello world commit and deploy it to production to show that they understand how some of the systems work. Due to some crazy circumstances with the team I took over, I never even got to go through the ramp up. I was thrown straight into the deep end leading a team dealing with an urgent crisis that could end the business.
It was scary as hell, going from what in hindsight had been a "TLM with extra responsibilities" in my previous jobs to a full fledged EM role with all of the same accountability for quality and timely production, but none of the direct control. But I quickly realized that I was surrounded by people who were at least as capable as I was and usually more brilliant.
I think my greatest technical strength was always in eliminating technical complexity, making systems more robust and maintainable. It turns out you can still spot the blinking red lights of unnecessary complexity just by talking about the systems from a high level and asking the right questions, and when you help other talented engineers see those problems, they will naturally want to fix them. No need to jump in and do it yourself.
Once I knew I had a team I could trust and understood the strengths of the different players, I had to shift my focus to learning how to be a real manager. Managing people is a wildly different skillset than writing good code or building a good product, and I realized that I had never really been a manager despite leading teams of people. My apologies to everyone who ever worked for me before this point. Without realizing it, I had always treated the human factor as an annoyance and I probably hindered the growth of past teams a lot by stepping in and doing the high stakes, high urgency stuff myself.
When folks grew under me, especially at Grooveshark when I was young and immature, it was a happy accident and not something I was very intentional about. At Dropbox I really learned the importance of investing in people, giving them opportunities to grow and creating space to allow them to make mistakes. I didn't touch a line of Dropbox code or ever commit a thing, but my teams were high impact and many of the engineers who worked with me told me I was the best manager they've had.
Now I'm a co-founder at my own startup and, of course, I'm writing code again. Yeah, I'm a little rusty with some of the language specifics but I've been talking to brilliant engineers about their work for the last 7 years, when it comes to robust system design I'm probably a better engineer than I was the last time I wrote production code that was used by tens of millions of users. I will of course be in the hybrid role of building and managing folks for a while, but I hope I can keep my manager chops honed and support my team properly as I build and grow it and, eventually, stop writing production code again.
I had a desktop that would so something similar occasionally ~15 years ago. I am impatient, so rather than leaving it off for a while I would unplug, hit the power button, plug it back in and turn it on. Usually the fans would even spin for a fraction of a second, there was so much residual power in the caps.
I was on Gabapentin for a long while after a tendon surgery. It made me feel dumb as hell. Worse, the effects took over a month to wear off after I stopped taking it. One dose occasionally for insomnia is probably not bad but I personally won't ever touch it again
Oh wow, I had never heard of that. I already have a CU on the other side of the country that I still use for loans because they've always had the lowest rates. I'll have to see if they participate.
Is there a bank you recommend? Mostly I use online banks but every now and then you just need to go to a physical bank. I am a bit nomadic so one with branches all over the country would be good, although I know those are the most likely to be terrible
Does anybody remember Eudora? Not the Thunderbird version, the one before that. It was fast as hell with cool shortcuts (eg Alt-clicking on from groups all the emails from that sender) and therefore super easy to find stuff and organize your email even if you had way too much of it. My M1 MBP is probably 2000x faster than last computer I had running Eudora, but modern email is still slower and clunkier. A web based email service that is blazing fast and makes sorting/filtering/searching my email easy is something I would be happy to pay for.
Another email service I want would be one that I have to authorize the sender before their mail gets into my inbox even if it's not classified as spam. Sure, that email can be routed to some dumping ground so I can sift through it if an expected message is missing, but by default nothing goes to my inbox unless I've routed the sender there. And when I "accept" a sender it should be trivially easy to route them to any mailbox or make a new one. And it should be trivial to manage those routing rules later. All this is already possible with existing services, but enough of a pain that I don't maintain it.
The last thing is a tough one: a way to port my existing email into the system and a guarantee that I won't lose my email if you shut down in a few years. Trying other email providers is not worth it if I won't be able to find anything from the past and I might be at risk of losing them in the future.
Ponta De Ferraria was such a unique experience. Clinging tightly to the chains/ropes crossing the channel waiting for a wave to come in. The water coming in from the open ocean is so cold. Just when it starts to feel like you're about the freeze to death (I am a wimp when it comes to the cold), the incredibly hot water which has been heated by the spring comes rushing over you. And just when you're about to overcook, it stops. Repeated over and over again. Very invigorating. I imagine it's kind of like alternating between a cold plunge and hot plunge, except I can never force myself to get into a cold plunge.
And if you are on the island anyway, there are dozens of other natural hot springs worth visiting too.