I agree with mostly everything you’re saying; but it’s not uncommon to be processed via your local consulate, even if you are already living in the US.
This is usually just for the final issuing of the GC, and where USCIS approval has already happened (for instance, on an EB1A).
People frequently do this so they don’t have the travel restriction. Source: I just did it.
The darkest UX pattern I have ever hit is trying to cancel Google Workspace; whereby they disable the scrollbar on the page so you cannot actually get to the cancel button.
maybe productive isn’t the right word - more like satisfying and constructive. Right now I might play blitz chess or end up checking the news or X. But when I’m in the middle of a good book or some long form content, I’ll use that time to read and it’s much more fulfilling.
And I think breathing meditation is an excellent idea! I didn’t only mean phone-specific activities at all! Thank you
- Your brain has been trained extensively to recognize faces / people. Even very small babies can do this.
- Your brain processes a large amount of mostly noise, and sometimes mislabels noise as objects, which trends towards face-like things (see: seeing faces in clouds, people in shadows etc.) Various classes of substances make this effect more noticeable (even stimulants, including caffeine)
- The jump from that to 'elves' is largely just cultures have some form of small magical person.
It’s a shame because people forget how good IBM research was back in the day. I do wonder if they still have great people in those r&d labs, or if they all left.
The way Gemini (which is incredible) has been haphazardly shoved into gsuite products seems devoid of any kind of common sense. Even very basic obvious things via Gemini in Gmail fail. It’s ironic because it’s the one place I’d love a decent model.
I got a nasty one of these recently. Attacker had my wife’s CC, and made purchases they knew would flag our bank and look sus and pop up on the app. Then I get a call from my “bank”, correct number, I ask them to verify and they say look at the number. All they ask for is the customer support code in my banking app to cancel to fraudulent transactions. At that moment I insist on calling back and they hang up, but I was very close.
I feel like the opposite is also true. People view Java as enterprise Java from 2008; a clunky outdated language for bad, verbose spaghetti code.
In fact, a lot of the most interesting plt and compiler r&d going into real world applications is on the jvm (project loom, graal etc), and the features of modern Java (pattern matching, records, etc) make it a great choice for lots of projects that aren’t legacy enterprise apps.