There's also another unusual way - the Caisson lock.
Its design is TERRIFYING.
The boat is floated into a tube that get sealed at both ends and then (in the dark..) that tube is winched down into a completely flooded chamber until it (hopefully) lines up with the egress port at the bottom. The tube with the boat in is unsealed and the boat floats out.
Typically you don't work straight till 23:00, you just might log back on later in the evening (perhaps after putting the kids to bed) to finish up something when you know you'll get quiet time, or to align with colleagues in the AMER or APAC regions etc.
If pushed, I get my developers to give estimates in jumps of ~5x.
Their options are
2 days
2 weeks
2 months
10 months
Then I triple the estimates before sharing with the business.
We don't estimate individual tickets/bugs at all, just overarching projects.
I also ask the business to estimate the commercial/user impact of the projects too, and we track and report the reality against their estimate, to hold a bit of a mirror up to them and as a way of pushing back on doing pointless work. Those estimates we use similar orders of magnitude for - £1k, £10k, £100k, £1m, £10m.
Fermi estimations like these really help avoid protracted negotiations and the lack of precision is a feature that makes clear they are estimated.
Hi. I have wanted something like this for YEARS, but have never had the motivation to hack something together.
A few questions:
1. Is the dev edition hardware different?
2. If not, it possible to upgrade to a dev edition later, ie. Is it just a config thing on the server end?
3. If I have multiple trmnls how do I manage them? Is it possible? Do I need multiple accounts? Do they show the same stuff etc? Is "dev edition" for my account or per-device?
4. Using multiple apps - is it a split screen display, or do it cycle through the apps every x seconds? Is there a button to advance to the next one?
5. What's the resolution in real terms? Ie. Can I get a full month calendar to show and still be able to read entries? How many lines of Todo-list items can I have? What happens to over-flowed items?
6. how does it get updates? does it connect to my phone via Bluetooth or to my WiFi? Can it store multiple WiFi networks, for if I want to take it places?
As someone who has worked in ecommerce for decades, Shopify is fantastic.
It's not the cheapest, nor is it the most expensive. It's not as powerful as some systems, but it's not weak. It's not the easiest system to work with, but it's also not the hardest.
What it is is right in the goldilocks zone, and it allows businesses to DO BUSINESS, not end up having to worry about or even think about many decisions.
Day-to-day I work across 4 ecommerce platforms and Shopify is the one that doesn't keep anyone awake at night and "just works". Sure there's a ton more stuff some of the other platforms we use can do, but we also have a LOT more meetings, dev tickets and headaches with those platforms.
For like 80%+ of 0 to $50m+ online businesses it is by far the best choice because it means the team can focus on connecting with potential customers and selling stuff and not have to allocate nearly as much time or headspace to the Storefront system.
Fundamentally, you can't use the same data to both generate and validate/disprove a hypothesis.
Srgmenting and data dredging is fine provided you run a new test with fresh data to validate if there is a causal relationship in any correlations found.
But presumably you're talking about a modern automatic car?
What about a manual car, where you need more understanding of the mechanics, and will stall or roll back on a hill if you don't? Or a manual car without synchromesh, where you have to double de-clutch to match the input and output shaft RPMs? Or a car without antilock brakes? Or without tire pressure sensors? Or automatic headlights? Or automatic wipers? Or lane assist? Or auto braking? Or cruise control? Or indicator blinkers that auto cancel? Or auto dimming headlights? Or warning messages that tell you about everything from seat belts to service warnings or blown bulbs?
All these are driver safety and convenience innovations that people take for granted so it is as simple as "press pedal car go vroom"...
Also, think about drones and model planes. With computer aided support they now have full autopilot, return to base, auto land etc. and can be operated by a kid! Why can't some of these types of support, safety and convenience make it over to light aircraft?
Just set up another user on your phone and switch to that for work stuff. I have a whole seperate user area with work stuff installed, emails, teams etc.
It's good as it means I can access work stuff when I need to but there's no risk of me getting notifications or seeing work stuff outside of work hours unless I specifically switch into the account.
It's a big canvas that multiple people can use at once, with SQL and Python, text annotations, comment threads, shapes and drawing etc.
Connects into the regular cloud database / warehousing systems.
It's great because it allows you to get the flow of data quite literally visualised on a big board and it exposes the underlying SQL so that, over time, non technical users can learn by exposure and osmosis, as things aren't super hidden away "behind the scenes".
Reminds me of the jaywalking law in the US, brought about by the auto industry.
This law that sets the default of it being illegal to be in the road doesn't exist in much of the world. It's really up to the self driving cars to respect other road users at least as well as a human driver would, not expect to be able to mould the laws around the world to fit their limited capabilities.
>For the Brits who have previously heard of this scandal, did you know about it prior to January of this year?
Yes, I've been aware of it for about 10+ years, it's been covered on-and-off in the mainstream media for years. I think the (excellent) ITV series was well-timed to coincide with the current investigations and has improved understanding of the industrial scale of the injustice.
Thinking about all the mistreated sub-postmasters and mistresses and how for some of them it ended, ruined, or dominated their lives is heartbreaking. To be honest, even just thinking about those shunned by their communities and neighbours because everyone was told they were criminals is awful, never mind the lives cut short.
I do hope that now there is such clear evidence of the injustices available that people can be compensated properly and have their reputations restored.
There's a couple of options in this space for "timer gadgets" - smart physical objects that link to an app and use their physical orientation to count against a particular timer.
I think the problem is that building out chat flows, sitting down with customer care and figuring this stuff out, iterating and improving the "if this then that" logic within a flow builder tool isn't particularly sexy work. "LLMs" and "AI" is though.
The cost of using generative AI to answer questions is orders of magnitude more expensive than using flows. Plucking a company out of thin air - Landbot [1] offers both flow and generative chats. For $100 per month you can have 2,500 flow chats, or 30 "AI" chats. That's nearly a 100x difference in cost. The risks are much higher too - with the flow builders if there's a sudden policy change or whatever then someone can just go into the system and edit it - with AI you'd have to retrain the model somehow. There's also no risk of hallucination with a flow based builder.
I'm not saying that Gen AI customer service chatbots don't have a use - what I'm trying to say is that in the real world, business would probably be better served day-to-day with just setting up decent flows in rules based bots. That's unsexy though - it doesn't attract tech talent, it doesn't get people promoted and it doesn't get shouted about in the press. It is, however, probably much better for the environment and the company's P&L (but possibly not their valuation if they're trying to ride the hype train).
How much of it really requires AI though? I bet the majority, if not all of the support that the AI offers could have been done with some of the non-AI chat flow builders if a handful of smart people got together and actually worked the flows out properly to handle the scenarios.
Its design is TERRIFYING.
The boat is floated into a tube that get sealed at both ends and then (in the dark..) that tube is winched down into a completely flooded chamber until it (hopefully) lines up with the egress port at the bottom. The tube with the boat in is unsealed and the boat floats out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caisson_lock