It's obviously sad that an animal was killed in an accident, but the outrage towards Waymo and media coverage definitely seems disproportionate given statistical context, and I was pleasantly surprised that the article made efforts to point that out rather than dogpiling on Waymo.
Valve / Steam presumably has good data on what controllers and peripherals people are using, so I'd imagine their port choices are based around that. Here's a June 2024 post talking about Steam Input and controller market share: https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail... . At the time of the post they say "59% of sessions are using Xbox controllers, 26% are using PlayStation controllers, 10% are on Steam Decks"
This is one thing I've been wondering about AI: will its broad training enable it to uncover previously covered connections between areas the way multi-disciplinary people tend to, or will it still miss them because it's still limited to its training corpus and can't really infer.
If it ends up being more the case that AI can help us discover new stuff, that's very optimistic.
room presence detection has been a long standing challenge in the smart home / home assistant community. it's cool to see home assistant used and adapted for this use case.
It's been somewhat surprising Twitter has remained as highly available as it has been despite all the firings. It makes me wonder what the cause of this outage was, for being a relatively short one. Is it a sign of things to come, or just unusually high activity related to the ongoing Israel/Palestine crisis?
I thought it was an interesting read and it would be interesting to hear a summation of why you left the industry.
It also made me consider the possibilities for a sort of vertically integrated debt collection company. Someone that's had a debt sent to collection is possibly a good candidate for financial literacy education, credit rehabilitation, debt consolidation and refinancing etc. Can debt collection serve as a sort of loss-leading subsidiary for a bigger business that provides financial literacy and services to people that need it?
CA will make money if home prices increase from current highs due to supply constraints and if owners sell triggering the capture IIRC. CA now has a +$300m financial stake in that outcome. $300m is probably peanuts compared to the upside of addressing the CA housing crisis and enabling more CA GDP growth but it's also not nothing.
It reads like a summer disaster movie, entertaining but mostly forgettable. What was interesting about the book was as a thought experiment about the use of plastics in critical infrastructure and how much of a nightmare plastic-eating anything could be.
Yeah, I'd imagine in many respects he's unqualified to be a good CEO since he, as far as I can tell, essentially stumbled sideways into the role as co-founder. There's the upside of the CEO being a creator themselves but the downside of not having a background in business or necessarily the other qualities a good leader possesses.
Patreon has a great mission though and I can see how it would attract creator-focused team members. There are some impressive Patreon alumni in their own right.
I always thought it was awesome that a company to support creators was creator lead. I came across Jack Conte in 2010 before Patreon existed. He was a music creator on YouTube that made what he was calling Video Songs, songs with each instrument part video'd and mixed together, and selling his music collection through e-junkie at the time. He was one of the first creators I ever financially supported. Some of the videos are still up on YT: https://youtu.be/D2PwVkQBp5o
Despite not knowing Jack personally pretty much everything I've seen from him over the years has reinforced my generally high opinion of him. In this case as well. As lay-offs go Patreon seems to be trying very hard to do right by their employees.
I would never self-host email based on what I saw during the portion of my career as a web hosting Linux sysadmin. At one point I half-seriously offered to pay for Gmail for Business for all our customers out of my paycheck.
Email is THE crucial link in the internet identity chain. It NEEDS to both work always AND be secure. Two things that frequently weren't the case in web hosting.
I relatively recently read a biography on John D. Rockefeller and this reminds me of some of the things Standard Oil did with rail companies to gain a market advantage.
I relate to a lot here which is why I wondered about a support group. I've come close to self destructing a number of times but lucked out. I also struggle with depression, anxiety, and substance abuse.
By 7th grade I would ignore whatever was happening in class and read escapist fantasy fiction instead, while I was still bothering to attend school. The same year I decided school wasn't for me and refused to attend. My mother (single parent) didn't really know how to handle the situation, but after a lengthy conflict between us we eventually came to an agreement where I would be dual enrolled in high school and the junior college where she worked. I think roughly half way in to my first year of high school I walked off campus and never came back, and ended up enrolled in junior college full time. I ended up wasting years failing half the classes I enrolled in at the junior college, basically incapable of engaging with higher education. I was fortunately able to launch a career in tech. It began by working as a student assistant in the computer lab and working my way up from there.
I feel fortunate that I was born in the era I was born in and ending up in tech. I can't imagine what my life would have been otherwise without the internet or the tech world. Tech keeps me somewhat engaged and provides financial security which is such a blessing.
Tech also seems to be disproportionately populated with hard working and intelligent individuals, so it's easier to find others to befriend, relate to, and converse with. I've also come to value raw intellectual ability less and value outcomes more, which has been a useful lens to self direct how I engage with others. Telling someone their ideas are bad because $REASONS turns out to be remarkably counter productive, regardless of any factual basis. Unsurprisingly a lot of people don't want to work with someone that thinks they're stupid. I still struggle with how to engage with others though. I've tried acting as an educator but that seems to come off condescendingly, ending back at the same place of no one wanting to work with someone that thinks they're stupid. More often I find myself not engaging, hoping that some people might learn from experience, and otherwise just doing my own thing.