In my experience, the business use of retaining years-old metrics is overvalued, because changes in the system tend to prevent any kind of long-term apples-to-apples comparison. You’ll have changed your metrics engine, or your collector, or your tagging strategy, or your hosting strategy, or your containerization, or your deployments, or etc. etc. Even if you can find the like metrics from last year, you can’t trust that they meant the same thing then that they do now.
We didn’t make software engineer money when we didn’t have “engineer” in our titles. I would be perfectly happy to be a “senior systems administrator” or similar if it didn’t impact my earnings potential.
Are you suggesting that it might be just coincidental that companies stopped putting chalk dust in milk at about the same time that doing so became illegal?
Amazon is a huge e-commerce site that operates with brutal efficiency. It started out as a book seller but it is now a place you can buy pretty much anything, with zillions of third parties selling merchandise of dubious provenance through them.
As it grew from a book seller to what it is now, Amazon took a huge amount of business away from both the small booksellers that this book discussed in this article is mostly talking about, and the larger chain bookstores that were crushing a lot of those small booksellers underfoot at the time.
Hence, the irony: the first link is to buy a copy of this book about the virtues of small bookstores on Amazon, the company that ate a huge percentage of American retail stores, starting with books.
Fine, you pedant, it’s ironic that a textually sympathetic review of a memoir lionizing the virtues of secondhand brick-and-mortar bookstores, while fretting about their continuing viability as a business model, would link to the book on Amazon, a online-only store commonly considered to be the primary disruptor to that business model. Happy?
I changed jobs at the end of 2020, my new job has better pay and better work-from-home arrangements, and I don’t regret a thing.
My hypothesis is that a significant chunk of the people who changed jobs circa 2021 are people who would have changed jobs in 2020 if there hadn’t been a pandemic, but held off for about a year while things shook out.
On the contrary, Twitter’s users generally seem to believe that Twitter’s moderation is abysmal, and they have clamored for years for it to be better than it is, on a variety of axes.
People largely haven’t moved off Twitter because the people they want to follow haven’t moved off Twitter; the people they want to follow mostly haven’t moved off Twitter because why would they move away from where their audience is?
>On the contrary, Twitter’s users generally seem to believe that Twitter’s moderation is abysmal
If that's the case why would anyone move to a platform that has less moderation?
Twitter is the bottom of the list when it comes to MAU among social networks (FB, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, Snapchat and Reddit all have a higher MAU). Sure Twitter is overrepresented in the tech world, but it's not that captive. There are larger audiences elsewhere. And, to be fair, almost every other platform has a heavier hand when it comes to moderation than Twitter. Twitter still allows porn!
Twitter, is probably the best product you can build when it comes to a text based, real time, social network. If there was a better product people would have moved. When it comes down to it, most complaints come down to "I wish the Twitter moderation rules applied to everyone else but me".
On Twitter, little guys with benign accounts will get randomly suspended over essentially nothing. And yet, you can get spammed by people constantly creating new/alt accounts calling you the N word in your replies and Twitter does jack shit to them even after multiple reports (happened to me personally). Meanwhile the big names, for the most part, get to say whatever harmful nonsense they want and have immunity.
I think the issue is that English rhyme requires a near-match of the last stressed vowel and of all following sounds until the end of the word. So you can sometimes just match the last syllable and get a rhyme, but not always, depending on where the stress falls.
For example, "example" rhymes with "sample" but not with "people" because the stress is on the second-to-last syllable.
But "redact" and "exact" rhyme, despite only agreeing in the last syllable, because that's the last syllable that's stressed.
"Takesies" and "backsies" are both stressed on their first syllables, so they would need to match from that vowel on in order to be perceived as a natural English rhyme, and they don't.
Are you intending to say that there is a transitive property of rhyming? And that if that if A does not rhyme with B then there may not exist a word C that rhymes with both A and B?
If so, your ideas are intriguing to me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
The core point about people systemically underestimating the complexity of any field outside their own is well taken. Joseph Conrad writes: "Men earning their bread in any very specialized occupation will talk shop, not only because it is the most vital interest of their lives but also because they have not much knowledge of other subjects. They have never had the time to get acquainted with them."
However, if I were to decline to speculate on any matter on which I lacked an expert-level understanding, the number of subjects on which I could hold a conversation would dwindle to virtually nothing, and I'd be much more boring to talk to at these cocktail parties. So, I intend to continue to spitball blindly, just for fun.
It's okay to not be well versed in a subject outside of one's area of expertise. You can still carry on a conversation and ask engaging questions to have an intelligent conversation. If one is unable to engage in a meaningful manner outside their area of interest/expertise, then that's an entirely different situation. And probably another interesting subject up for discussion if it can be handle delicately an non-hostile.
> ask engaging questions to have an intelligent conversation
Read a book once which outlined 30--40 occupational areas and two or three interesting questions in each of these areas -- to serve as reliable conversation starters.
Found it on my shelves! Closer to 100 main categories! [1]
Random example: Talking to Kitists. Do you fly a traditional or manueverable Kite? How big is it? .. (If maneuverable: How many lines does your kite have?) .. Do you have trouble finding enough open space to fly your kite? .. Have you ever been dragged by your kite? .. Do you anchor your kite, or do you hold onto it. .. Do you fly your kite in competitions? .. Do you do any kite building or kite painting?
[1] By Leil Lownes How to talk to anybody about anything: Breaking the ice with everyone from accountants to zen buddhists 1993
Offhand I am seeing no match on archive.org or Amazon. Worth hunting down. Thanks for the prompt to look for it!
This is fascinating, but it seems like a specialized profession in and of itself to remember all of these questions. Maybe you can look it up a during a bathroom break...
I don't believe it has to be about rote memory or repeating any questions verbatim, necessarily. Rather, as with learning from converstation, from the half-conversations in this book one's imagination and knowledge of another person's perspective will already have been sparked to some degree. That, plus having some hint of what is of open interest in different fields, is part of the value.
