I've noticed that OpenAI modifies faces on a regular basis. I was using it to try and create examples of different haircuts and the face would randomly turn into a different face -- similar but noticeably changed. Even when I prompted to not modify the face, it would do it regardless. Perhaps part of their "safety" for modifying pictures of people?
This is a silly piece of legislation written by Republican partisan hacks in the Michigan House. It has no chance of clearing the Democratic-led Senate (19–18 with one vacancy) or the Governor’s desk. Even if it did, it wouldn't pass First Amendment scrutiny. They are trying to criminalize ASMR, written erotica, or depictions of trans people which is unconstitutionally vague. At best, this is a messaging bill meant to rally the GOP base, not a serious attempt at lawmaking.
B:It's exactly this kind of disrespect shown to lauded members of public office that is tearing this country apart. We need a great moral correction if we want to succeed as a nation. What good does pornography do for our nation other than alienate wives from their husbands, girls from their boyfriends, brother and sisters? The left has trampled on free expression for so long now that such a backlash will be tolerated by the courts.
OP was being a bit hyperbolic, but driving in Mexico (and most of Latin America) is much different than in the US. I lived and overlanded with motorcycles in Mexico, Guatemala, Colombia, and Chile for the last 12 years and could talk for hours about how the mentality of driving in the US doesn't translate to Latin America.
Blinkers can mean something different at different times, depending on context, while traffic lights and signs are treated as a suggestion. Speed limits and their enforcement are non-existent (outside of expensive toll road), and lane lines aren't something that have meaning. Pedestrian traffic (or hell, animal and farm traffic) is unexpected and unexplainable, as are public transportation options (imagine giant school buses flying through roads, playing leapfrog to get in front of one another to be able to pick up the next people waiting for a ride).
The consequence of these differences for self driving cars will be a very, very difficult problem to solve unless the majority of the vehicles are self driving, which is not a solution that will happen anytime soon in Latin America.
+1 If you've never seen or riden a camionetas it's hard to describe!
I go (or used to) Guatemala a lot and the Camionetas are so insanely scary! Going over huge mountains, roads with giant holes in them, tipping this way and that, filled 3x per seat or omre with mounds of carrots and cargo on top. lots of times the money guy hangs out the front entrance while it's driving!
They go SO fast it's super scary to me I'm surprised I haven't seen one tip over on those corners or bust a brake and run off the mountain.
The one-tap feature only works on iOS (<15% of cellphone market), although I would assume that it's higher in the enterprise space. There are also conference room telephony systems where there is no one-click solution.
As an engineering manager, this is what I expect my top performers to do and encourage my junior folks to do the same. It benefits the IC, the delivery team, and the company at large.
You can't heads-down slam out code for 8 hours a day 5 days a week. Be responsible with your time and use it to push forward the vision & mission of the company by taking your professional development into your own hands.
Continuing education in software engineering has always been a challenge for me. While my current employer allows for 20% time to learn new things, I find that I'm just unable to. Many employers (not all) place constraints on what one can do with that time. Typically the biggest constraint is that it must relate to the business in some way. As such, it can be hard to justify why you're spending your 20% time learning how load balancers work in nitty-gritty details since it's unlikely you'll be writing one from scratch or helping the company with it.
Not only that, but if you choose to learn on your own time, finding a lesson to fit in your daily routine is also tricky, especially if you're caring for a family or have other commitments. Couple that with uncertainty about what to learn next, it can become overwhelming just to get started.
Very recently, I started working on a project[1] to address this exact issue. The project is to help established software engineers progress their careers, learn new concepts, and refresh their existing knowledge with daily bite-size software engineering lessons designed to fit in their daily routines.
> Typically the biggest constraint is that it must relate to the business in some way.
This is so short-sighted, because it means you can't learn anything unless your boss is 100% sure it will be immediately useful (at which moment, someone else is probably already assigned to do it). Most things I learned in my life were not immediately useful when I learned them, but many became useful later. Programming itself is a good example of this; when I was a kid, computers were considered just an expensive toy. By this logic, I should have never learned programming in the first place.
These constraints do not allow you to explore. If there is a new framework or a new programming language which MIGHT improve your productivity, but also MIGHT be a useless fad, you are not allowed to find out which one it is. No one in your team is. Thus you get stuck with the old technologies forever (or someone breaks the rules, or someone studies the new technology in their free time).
"As such, it can be hard to justify why you're spending your 20% time learning how load balancers work in nitty-gritty details since it's unlikely you'll be writing one from scratch or helping the company with it."
Unless you use load balancers in non-trivial ways at scale and really need to understand the ins and outs of how they work to utilize them effectively.
Well, you know that, and I know that, and OP knows that. But it’s likely that OP’s boss not only doesn’t know that, but is mentally incapable of comprehending it. And even if he does (my boss is actually a sharp developer who does understand what’s going on), remember that we all have 8 bosses at any time.
You can't generally predict how that knowledge will be useful, load balances don't exist in a vacuum, he might learn about packet structure, fail over and all kind of other stuff directly applicable
I think we're lucky that many companies have this attitude.
I've experienced the polar opposite in a Japanese bigco where we were given extensive material to learn (generally about the industry, or certifications), and it was very clearly understood that we were to learn the material off company time. As an American naturally I had an allergic reaction to this culture.
I guess the W is to differentiate it from Systems Engineer?
We use SE here in Japan for both software engineers and system engineers. How are they difference? The latter is older and seems to have originated from people doing architectural, consulting type of work.
Fun fact, consulting/contracting businesses here and also known as SES, System Engineer (as a) Service.
Yes we negotiated, received discounts, and have a dedicated person working our account since we're growing into new countries and adding lots of offices.
It's still much more expensive than the competition (and absolutely worth the increased expense).
It's been fantastic for our fast-growing SaaS startup. We've been able to spin up offices in 4 international cities in the last 18 months with very few issues, and our teams are productive and happy with the spaces.
I manage one of the new offices and have LOVED the responsiveness of the local WeWork team, the facilities, the infrastructure, and it's lightyears better than the previous office we were occupying. I don't have to worry about office-related issues any longer.
That is, if WeWork stays solvent and doesn't go bankrupt.
It's really too bad because their core business (renting office space) is done really well. Maybe a bankruptcy and restructuring would be good for their business, or maybe it will cause them to explode.
It seems like the value that they are offering is just outsourced-office-management then. Am I wrong in thinking that? It's hard for me to parse what WeWork was "trying" to become. A real estate company that manages offices? An office management company that also does real estate?
That's kind of exactly the point. IMO there are a lot of unicorns out there that have pretty decent business models (Uber/Lyft, WeWork, delivery services, etc.) The problem is they are probably worth much less than their investors paid for them, because everyone is discovering that once the VC subsidies go away after the "growth at all cost" mentality, these are actually pretty low margin businesses that don't warrant their "tech" valuations.
Yup. Other issue for many of them (which WeWork actually should be less exposed to) is that, most of it hardly being rocket science, "blow money until monopoly" seems to forget that customer subsidies
A. aren't r&d/infrastructure,
B. will have to be earned back, and not just 1:1 either...
So even if whatever competition is knocked out, anyone entering the space after that, and not saddled with legacy funnycost, won't need your efficiencies and economies of scale to manage an edge in pricing.
And market dominance can't negate lack of friction for eg drivers and riders to run a second, third, fourth app all at once.
But the sun appears to be settling on bizarro cargo culting Amazon being seen as a viable business model.
The bet behind WeWork is that there's a ton of value currently being left on the table in outsourced office management; that everyone's doing it wrong, and doing it right is worth untold billions of dollars.
I'm not sure I can get behind that bet, but it's not an inherently absurd idea. Imagine explaining to someone in the early 70s why Wal-Mart is going to grow from a Southern department store chain to the largest company in the US.
That's a big part of it. But their scale and presence also means they get to do things that have been invaluable for us, like being able to book meeting rooms in and have access to other WeWork premises with low effort.
Management, location, and community. Hospitality. Basically, Wework is a hotel for awake business-focused people, with all the tweaks needed to make that work. It's kinda why Arlo SoHo NYC (hotel) reminded me of one. The real estate line never made much sense to anyone who ever was in one, I think Bloomburg started it. (Though real estate was the business that Adam used to screw everyone so, maybe that was his personal business lol)
Precisely this. I'm an expat and have lived abroad for the last 10 years. Uber has made my life more simple and less stressful when traveling. No longer do I have to figure out how to book a cab at an airport after landing, or how much it really should cost me. I no longer have to hail a taxi on the street and be charged 5x what a normal fair would be because of the color of my skin or the accent in my speech.
Uber has revolutionized transport in all of the areas it has disrupted. Bad comes along with the good, but for consumers, the good outweighs the bad (at least for now while the prices are VC subsidized).
I highly recommend 'The Managers Path' as well. It really helped me wrap my head around the changes I needed to make for my transition to Engineering Manager, and also the types of things I need to work on for the next move to a Manager of Managers.
Reading every path also helped me build empathy in what difficulties my boss (VP) and boss's boss (CTO) are going through. Easy ready, highly recommended.
