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America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders is back for its second season! Kay Adams welcomes the women who assemble the squad, Kelli Finglass and Judy Trammell, to the Netflix Sports Club Podcast. They discuss the emotional rollercoaster of putting together the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. Judy and Kelli open up about what it means to embrace flaws in the pursuit of perfection, how they identify that winning combo of stamina and wow factor, and what it’s like to see Thunderstruck go viral. Plus, the duo shares their hopes for the future of DCC beyond the field. Netflix Sports Club Podcast Correspondent Dani Klupenger also stops by to discuss the NBA Finals, basketball’s biggest moments with Michael Jordan and LeBron, and Kevin Durant’s international dominance. Dani and Kay detail the rise of Coco Gauff’s greatness and the most exciting storylines heading into Wimbledon. We want to hear from you! Leave us a voice message at www.speakpipe.com/NetflixSportsClub Find more from the Netflix Sports Club Podcast @NetflixSports on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and X. You can catch Kay Adams @heykayadams and Dani Klupenger @daniklup on IG and X. Be sure to follow Kelli Finglass and Judy Trammel @kellifinglass and @dcc_judy on IG. Hosted by Kay Adams, the Netflix Sports Club Podcast is an all-access deep dive into the Netflix Sports universe! Each episode, Adams will speak with athletes, coaches, and a rotating cycle of familiar sports correspondents to talk about a recently released Netflix Sports series. The podcast will feature hot takes, deep analysis, games, and intimate conversations. Be sure to watch, listen, and subscribe to the Netflix Sports Club Podcast on YouTube, Spotify, Tudum, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes on Fridays every other week.…

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Users Join Threads in Droves

2 years ago

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Original Article: Users Join Threads in Droves Convert your long form article to podcast? Visit SendToPod ---- Last night, by the time I called it quits and went to bed Threads, Meta’s new social network, had hit 2 million users in 2 hours. As I write this, Meta’s Adam Mosseri says the count has now surpassed 10 million in 7 hours, which exceeds Mastodon’s user base. Currently, Threads is a pretty barebones 1.0 experience that was undoubtedly released this week to capitalize on Twitter’s latest troubles. The app is also buggy. I’ve seen posts fail to load, glitchy interactions, and other bugs, but despite the load, the new service has held up under the influx of users, which is impressive, although not entirely surprising given Meta’s scale. One rumored feature that stirred up strong feelings in the Mastodon community and is missing from Threads is support for ActivityPub, the protocol underlying Mastodon and other federated services. Support for ActivityPub has since been confirmed by Mosseri, who said on Threads yesterday: We’re committed to building support for ActivityPub, the protocol behind Mastodon, into this app. We weren’t able to finish it for launch given a number of complications that come along with a decentralized network, but it’s coming. If you’re wondering why this matters, here’s a reason: you may one day end up leaving Threads, or, hopefully not, end up de-platformed. If that ever happens, you should be able to take your audience with you to another server. Being open can enable that. It remains to be seen if Meta will follow through with its ActivityPub plans, and how it will affect the broader universe of federated services is unknown. However, if implemented, ActivityPub support should allow Mastodon users to follow people on Threads without having a Threads account and vice versa. As someone who spends a lot of time thinking about apps, I love the interview Alex Heath of The Verge did with Mosseri, in which he explains why Threads is a separate app: [Alex Heath]: Why do it as a standalone app off of Instagram? [Mosseri]: It was a hugely contentious debate internally. You could be in feed. You could be a separate tab. You could be a separate app. The challenge with text posts in feed is that the post and comment model just fundamentally does not support public discourse as well as the model that Twitter pioneered with tweets and replies. Treating replies as equal as opposed to subordinate somehow just allows for a very different and much more broad range of public conversations. People do post text to Instagram all the time, even though we don’t support it first class, and we’re experimenting with that, too. That’s great, but I think it solves a much smaller use case than public discourse more broadly. Then there’s a separate app versus separate tab. Separate tab is tough. There’s only so much stuff you can shove in the app. It’s already feeling too complicated. We’re trying to actually simplify right now, and so it’s certainly working against that. And generally, when you build a separate tab, you find you want to push all that distribution through a feed invariably in order to bootstrap it. You kind of end up right back in that first problem. Mosseri’s answer really resonated with me. Instagram has shoved a lot of features into every nook and cranny of its app, which is understandable. It’s a popular app, and making something a feature instead of a standalone app is a chance to bootstrap the feature on the coattails of the existing app. The downside, though, is exactly as Mosseri explains. Shaping a service to fit into an existing app risks undermining the new service and potentially harming the existing one. For Threads, I think Meta made the right call by building a separate app, but it still needs a lot of work. I’d like to see iPad, Mac, and web apps added, timeline filtering with a follow-only view, more robust search, a multi-user login option, the promised ActivityPub integration, support for ...

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Users Join Threads in Droves

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published 2 years ago

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Users Join Threads in Droves

2 years ago

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Instagram’s Threads: all the updates on the new Twitter competitor

2 years ago

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Original Article: Instagram’s Threads: all the updates on the new Twitter competitor Convert your long form article to podcast? Visit SendToPod ---- As Twitter continues to flail about under Elon Musk, all eyes are on the newly launched Instagram Threads as a potential replacement. Meta launched Threads on iOS, Android, and the web on July 5th — a little bit ahead of schedule.Rumors about the new Meta-owned platform have been swirling for months, with a March report from Platformer revealing the company was “exploring a standalone decentralized social network for sharing text updates.” In June, Alex Heath leaked the details of a companywide meeting where the app was shown off and shared the first glimpse at Threads. In an interview about Threads with The Verge, Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri explains why the platform wants to take on Twitter. “Obviously, Twitter pioneered the space,” Mosseri says. “And there are a lot of good offerings out there for public conversations. But just given everything that was going on, we thought there was an opportunity to build something that was open and something that was good for the community that was already using Instagram.”Threads is “Instagram’s text-based conversation app” where “communities come together to discuss everything from the topics you care about today to what’ll be trending tomorrow.” The app is closely tied to Instagram, meaning you’ll get to use the same username across both apps as well as quickly follow all of the accounts you’ve been following on Instagram. PinPINNEDWhy Instagram is taking on Twitter with ThreadsImage: MetaWhile Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are still preparing for a possible cage match, starting today, their two companies are officially battling. Meta has released Threads, its standalone Twitter competitor that is based on Instagram’s account system. According to the head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, Twitter’s “volatility” and “unpredictability” under Musk provided the opening to compete. In an interview, Mosseri says that Threads is designed for “public conversations,” a direct reference to how Twitter execs have described the purpose of the service over the years.Read Article >Mark Zuckerberg on when Instagram Threads will get ads.For an example of what success looks like on an Instagram scale, Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg says that the goal is to get Threads on a “clear path to 1 billion people” before figuring out monetization.This mirrors what Adam Mosseri said in an interview with Alex Heath, about the “champagne problem” of making money with Threads:If we are successful, if we make something that lots of people love and keep using, we will, I’m sure, monetize it. And I would be confident that the business model will be ads. Right now, we are not focused on monetization. We’re very, very focused on just trying to make something that people love to use. And then, if we get something to scale, that’ll be a champagne problem.Instagram’s Threads app already has over 25 million registered accounts.Meta’s boss made his last update seven hours ago when it was at 10 million, but more than twelve hours after launch, the pace of registrations (which consists of clicking a button three or four times, assuming you already have one of the 2 billion-plus Instagram accounts) for Threads hasn’t slowed down. The highest registration number I’ve seen so far (visible on the Instagram profile of a linked account) is 26,051,591.Threads hits 10 million users.A very tired Instagram head Adam Mosseri has posted a brief video to announce that a) he hasn’t slept all night and b) 10 million users have signed up to Threads in seven hours. “Lots more to do,” Mosseri says.Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko on what Threads means for the fediverse.Why is Thread’s plan to use the same decentralized protocol (ActivityPub) as Mastodon a “clear victory for our cause,” according to the founder / CEO of Mastodon?A few of the answers given:A server you are not signed up with and logged into can...…

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The Glorious Return of an Old-School Car Feature

2 years ago

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Original Article: The Glorious Return of an Old-School Car Feature Convert your long form article to podcast? Visit SendToPod ---- Metropolis Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens. Buttons are back! The 2024 Porsche Cayenne. The 2023 model had touchscreens on the steering wheel. Porsche You don’t see a lot of good news about road safety in the United States. Unlike in most peer countries, American roadway deaths surged during the pandemic and have barely receded since. Pedestrian and cyclist fatalities recently hit their highest levels in 40 years, but U.S. transportation officials continue to ignore key contributing factors. In a February interview with Fast Company, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said that “further research” is needed before addressing the obvious risks that oversized SUVs and trucks pose to those not inside of them. Happily, there is one area where we are making at least marginal progress: A growing number of automakers are backpedaling away from the huge, complex touchscreens that have infested dashboard design over the past 15 years. Buttons and knobs are coming back. The touchscreen pullback is the result of consumer backlash, not the enactment of overdue regulations or an awakening of corporate responsibility. Many drivers want buttons, not screens, and they’ve given carmakers an earful about it. Auto executives have long brushed aside safety concerns about their complex displays—and all signs suggest they would have happily kept doing so. But their customers are revolting, which has forced them to pay attention. For well over a decade, touchscreens have spread like a rash across dashboards. As with other dangerous trends in car design (see the steering yoke), this one can be traced back to Tesla, which has for years positioned its vehicles as “tablets on wheels.” As a result, touchscreens were seen as representing tech-infused modernity. But cost has been a factor, too. “These screens are presented as this avant garde, minimalist design,” said Matt Farah, a car reviewer and host of The Smoking Tire, an auto-focused YouTube channel and podcast. “But really, it’s the cheapest way possible of building an interior.” Although they look fancy, Farah said that carmakers can purchase screens for less than $50, making them significantly less expensive than tactile controls. As I explained in a 2021 Slate article, the trend toward car touchscreens has been a dangerous one for road safety. Those who drove in the 1990s will remember using buttons and knobs to change the radio or adjust the air conditioning without looking down from the steering wheel. Despite their name, touchscreens rely on a driver’s eyes as much as her fingers to navigate—and every second that she is looking at a screen is a second that she isn’t looking at the road ahead. Navigating through various levels of menus to reach a desired control can be particularly dangerous; one study by the AAA Foundation concluded that infotainment touchscreens can distract a driver for up to 40 seconds, long enough to cover half a mile at 50 mph. “The irony is that everyone basically accepts that it’s dangerous to use your phone while driving,” said Farah. “Yet no one complains about what we’re doing instead, which is fundamentally using an iPad while driving. If you’re paying between $40,000 and $300,000 for a car, you’re getting an iPad built onto the dashboard.” Seeking to address these risks, NHTSA published voluntary guidance in 2013 recommending that a driver be able to complete any infotainment task with glances of under two seconds, totaling a maximum of 12 seconds. But NHTSA’s guidance had no enforcement mechanism, and carmakers have violated it with impunity. In the last two years further evidence has suggested that touchscreens represent a step backward for auto design. Drexel researchers found that infotainment systems posed a statistically significant crash risk even in the early 2010s, before carmakers added m...…

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EP 36 - Marc Andreessen and Steven Sinofsky on AI sentience, ethics, love, jobs , ChatGPT vs Sydney and more.

2 years ago

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Original Article: EP 36 - Marc Andreessen and Steven Sinofsky on AI sentience, ethics, love, jobs , ChatGPT vs Sydney and more. Convert your long form article to podcast? Visit SendToPod ---- “Every kid is going to grow up now with a friend that's a bot.”The gang is back on this week’s episode of The Aarthi and Sriram Show! We have Marc Andreessen, and Steven Sinofsky back to cover AI! Marc has a message for the AI overlords (after at 3:20 he reveals his true TIME magazine claim to fame), AI love and sentience and murder investigations, the birth of ChatGPT vs Sydney, future of MS Word and productivity, AI friends, jobs and more. We also learn how much Marc loves the show Person of Interest.In this episode, we cover: birth of ChatGPT vs. Sydney, hacking Bing Chat, AI and hallucination, future of MS Word, potential winner of the AI race: startups vs. Big Tech, AI’s impact on humanity and the job market, sentience, and more!Listen to the full conversation on: Apple Podcast Episode link.Spotify episode link.Youtube video version.In this episode, we cover:Marc’s message to AI overlordsBirth of ChatGPTWas Bing Chat hacked?Sydney vs. ChatGPTWhy did ChatGPT and Sydney blow up?Should AI be allowed to hallucinate?AI-assisted Microsoft WordAI race: Startups vs. Big TechWill AI take over humanity?Who will win the AI race?AI’s impact on the job marketAI and sentienceNotable Quotes: “There are only two people in the history of Time Magazine that have been on the cover in their bare feet: myself and Gandhi” - Marc Andreessen (MA)“ChatGPT is the most exponential thing that we as an industry have seen in the longest time. That immediately breaks the world into two sets of people: those that can understand exponential and those that sit around and just deny it.” - Steven Sinofsky (SS)“Every startup is going to integrate ChatGPT OpenAI.” - SS“Books of the future are not going to be a static single written thing, it's going to be a book that writes itself as you read it.” - MA“Think about the internet. One of the things that people said about the internet and streaming was that you would be able to enjoy this personalized content that really is based on your inputs and they were like, "No, that's not right. There should only be one ending to a movie" and that whole debate, and now we're all of a sudden presented with it.” - SS“AI will be great, but it's still boring; it's just a grammar checker with a better template.” - SS“You're going to have a sales AI, and the sales AI is going to get trained on all customer communication. It's going to get trained on all email, all text messages, all phone calls, all meetings” - MA“A breakthrough video game for sure within five years, is going to be something that nobody ever designed, it's going to be something that's completely generated on the fly, completely differently than how you make video games today.” - MA“If you're a smart person at one of these Big Tech companies, there's a huge incentive to break out and start your own company.” - MA“It's actually a lot of the creative jobs that are most directly hit by AI, then it's the white-collar jobs that are actually less creative, and it actually turns out a lot of the blue-collar jobs are actually really hard to hit.” - MA“Number one factor people always underestimate the degree to which new technology actually creates new jobs.” - MA“Nobody understands how the human brain works.” - MA“You just have to wrap your head around the idea that the most amazing technological breakthrough of all time is going to just happen magically, accidentally.” - MA“Every kid is going to grow up now with a friend that's a bot. That bot is going to be with them their whole lives. It's going to have a memory, it's going to know all their private conversations, it's going to know everything about them.” - MA—References:Andreessen Horowitz, American VC firmMosaic, internet browserNetscape, web browser and computer services companyLoudcloud, computing, hosting and software s...…

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3 Waves of Successful Generative Tech Startups

2 years ago

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Original Article: 3 Waves of Successful Generative Tech Startups Convert your long form article to podcast? Visit SendToPod ---- Every 14 years there’s a tech revolution. Internet browsers in 1994. Smartphones in 2007-8. Then toward the end of 2022, we entered the Generative Tech revolution. It’s the fast-moving water after a pretty placid decade. And we’re just in the first wave of it. There are at least two more waves to come. Here, we aim to convince Founders to think harder about what you want to do with this short window of extreme opportunity. It’s going to affect every industry. Anything you’re interested in, anything you’re working on is going to be impacted by generative tech and generative AI. It’s not just that you’re going to be able to take what you’re doing and get some productivity gains – it’s that many areas will be completely rethought, and new things that weren’t done before will start happening. In addition to the AI model companies, many unicorns and decacorns will be built, starting now. We’re already seeing three types of winners. 1st Wave: Wrappers Around AI models I wrote in 2022 that Generative Tech would have unusual market dynamics because it is already consensus. There isn’t the level of skepticism we normally see with new technologies. That means everyone gets it and there is a flood of competition from other startups, incumbents, and all the huge platforms like Google and Microsoft. In the first wave of generative tech, you get the fast movers. They are selling the benefits of AI and addressing the more consensus customer pain points. They are repackaging the AI into user interfaces. Companies in this wave can win with speed, sales, knowing their customers, and service. Companies like Jasper are the poster children of this phase. They don’t focus on “having a better AI,” but rather they focus on having a better sales and onboarding process. They have been amazing at sales and marketing and have taken an early lead in this market. From that position, they have many options to build an enduring company as long as they bring excellence to all aspects of their business as larger competitors start to enter the market. This would be the template for nearly any company in this phase. As you can see in the NFX Generative Tech market map, with over 500 companies now listed, we are firmly in the 1st wave right now. A lot of companies have similar ideas. Few have started looking around the corner to the second wave. 2nd Wave: Generative AI Inside In the second wave are the companies that aren’t pitching AI, but rather using it inside their businesses to make them faster, cheaper, and higher quality than competitors. They’ll use it to gain a competitive edge for totally normal businesses like renovating apartment buildings, doing security checks with software vendors, or exchanging legal contracts. In this wave, the customers don’t care that you’re using AI. You’re not selling the AI to them. You’re simply selling something better than other offerings. 3rd Wave: Visionary & Non-Obvious The third wave will be the visionary stuff. The stuff that we can’t imagine yet. When you first saw the smartphone, you didn’t think: “That’s really gonna change the taxi industry.” It took a few years before we got some of the more revolutionary stuff like Sidecar, then Lyft and Uber. 3rd wave companies will be built by visionaries, people who aren’t afraid to reinvent something as native to AI. They will find new transactions that weren’t possible before. They will find new experiences in both consumer and in business settings that weren’t possible before. Think Bigger, Think Radically, Be Bold This is a unique time that only happens about every 14 years. If you can wrap your mind around what is happening with these new capabilities and see the future better than others, there is no better time to build something huge. If you can jump into Wave 2 or 3 type companies, you will have an advantage. Most companies are stil...…

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r/Upwork - Success on Upwork 6th month - 14K earned (Comprehensive)

3 years ago

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Original Article: r/Upwork - Success on Upwork 6th month - 14K earned (Comprehensive) Convert your long form article to podcast? Visit SendToPod ---- Quick back story. I am following up because a user reached out to me regarding the past posts. They originally wanted to ask me some questions but tbh I'm not religiously on here very much. I missed there message for awhile but when I finally reached out (really late after) they replied back: "Finally got myself 2 client. One of them being 4 figure/month Thanks for your success story 😍😍It was my motivation. Reading it every day morning and night" I'm really glad those posts helped out and It inspired me to do the 6 month (ish) update on the trials and tribulations of freelancing. So without delay here we go. (Past posts can be found at bottom of this post) Making it to Month 6 Marking the 6th month on being on upwork was a really big accolade for me. I didn't think I could actually avoid getting a "real job" by sticking to it. Keep in mind I am only on upwork as of right now I haven't even tried any other platform. I had managed to keep one major contract for 6 months going and a few random ones here and there. I wasn't trying to work full time at all I prefer keeping it around 15-20 hours a week at max. I do work elsewhere but upwork income can literally pay the bills. End of a major contract My biggest contract ended at 6 months. This was due to the employer automating my job and it becoming a bit more obsolete. I was honestly expecting it to happen months ago and was more thankful because I was tired of doing it. However that was a big earner for me and I didn't prepare any other backup plan because... laziness. That was definitely something I should have been prepared for but I think I do better under pressure. On a positive note I believe it helped when clients saw I closed a high volume contract with 5 stars but I was only a couple hundred short of being "top rated plus". Apply Pressure There really wasn't much I could do but keep applying for more jobs. Interestingly though I had a client who hired me about a month earlier and was still restructuring or something, basically they said the project wasn't ready yet. That job however was high value and worth a lot. I then put more pressure on that client to give me actual work or I would not be available. This was all diplomatic and professional of course. A high risk strategy but they finally gave me the project to work on although it was short lived. They are still a client but the workload is sporadic. Job Hunting I went back to job hunting and just applying to whatever I could see that I was interested. I still following all my rules from the 1st month on upwork. I vetted clients, denied a lot I just wasn't interested in, had a few invites but overall I just wasn't really getting any interesting leads or responses. It was a lot less than usual but I still kept applying, usually just copying and pasting a 3-4 sentence prefab paragraph related to the specific type of job I was applying for. The major thing was to ensure you never applied and looked desperate even though I was feeling a bit down during this time that I wasn't being hired as much as usual. I made a rule during this time to not work any contract that paid less than my 2nd lowest rate. I knew that would devalue my work and have me racing to the bottom of the contracts. Learning new Skills (And getting paid) You know those annoying ads that are always talking about learning a new skill so you can market it to your next employer? Well I'm kind of going to advocate for that with one exception. I expect to get paid when I learn a new skill. So I started a business sel...…

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Should I go headless on Shopify / Shopify Plus? Pros & Cons of Headless

3 years ago

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Original Article: Should I go headless on Shopify / Shopify Plus? Pros & Cons of Headless Convert your long form article to podcast? Visit SendToPod ---- Headless is no longer the new buzzword in eCommerce (and Shopify). It has been trending upwards for at least the past couple of years and isn’t going away. By this point you will no doubt have read dozens of very similar articles around what it is, and opinions on why it is good or bad, worthwhile or pointless on Shopify - and have seen the word ‘decoupling’ more times than ever before. But a buzzword is still what Headless is. The reason being, it’s not a technical innovation. It’s a well-established software architecture principle called ‘separation of concerns’ - but with a more glamorous spin. What is Headless Shopify itself is built using Ruby on Rails, which is an Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework - meaning it separates the layers for Database management, business logic, and frontend rendering. A Headless architecture is essentially applying this pattern into the way the frontend is structured - so that the data handling, business logic, rendering that usually occur within the theming template files are all working in isolation, and connected via APIs. Data: All of the content being output onto the page. This includes rich content landing pages, blogs articles, product images & descriptions, metafields etc. Business Logic: The functional behaviour on a page, driven by the Liquid coding within the template. An example of this would be displaying product recommendations, and using Liquid to check any Tags or user interactions before showing the appropriate product selection based on those rules. Rendering: The visual front-end development work - styling and layout. Everything you see at a wireframe / design / styleguide stage of planning. The reasons for this change in architecture are the shared reasons any software design concepts are applied - efficiency and scalability. Future-proofing the codebase for what may (or may not) lie ahead on the roadmap & within the team, and minimising the chances of bugs/issues being introduced over time. That can be demonstrated by the following benefits: Modularity: By splitting those front-end concerns apart, you are left with a more modular approach and one which those parts are then interchangeable. For example, switching the layout for a different design inline with a marketing campaign (see the SkullCandy layout completely changed for a new release or campaign), or delivering a different experience to people using devices in-store, to an app or to an optimized storefront for China for example. Distributed Workloads: Multiple people can now be working on that same homepage at the same time without any issues. The content editors can be updating what they need to update, while the layout is being changed. Organisation: Separating these aspects leads to a leaner, more organised codebase. From a long term perspective this means time is saved on staff onboarding into the codebase, due to the easier learning curve; and bringing in additional development resources won’t incur overheads due to building specific project knowledge. It also means that there is a reduced risk of bugs being introduced into a snippet of code or ripple effects into future development tasks, because each snippet should have a single purpose. Independent Releases: It was already touched on that multiple stakeholders can work on a page at the same time - eg content editor & developer working on the homepage. Building on this, multiple developers can be working on completely unrelated tasks with the knowledge that there will be no conflicts in the code the...…

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I Don’t Believe in Sprints

3 years ago

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Original Article: I Don’t Believe in Sprints Convert your long form article to podcast? Visit SendToPod ---- Sprints and backlogs and pointing tickets—the nigh-on universal method for making software today—is stupid. All this junk around the work makes software slower and more difficult to build. It’s form-filling monkey work and the only way we can improve the quality of software is to throw all those best practices away. (Hot take alert!) Sprints don’t help organize things, they’re not a useful organizing tool, and if we were all honest with each other then we’d admit they’re designed for managers who don’t trust their employees (if your manager needs to look at Jira to figure out what work you’ve done for your review or what’s shipped lately then they’re not paying enough attention to the team). Likewise, I’ve never seen a good team improved by sprints and I’ve never seen a crappy team improved by them either (side note: there are no crappy teams, only crappy managers). In fact, every efficient and productive team I’ve worked on has ignored the concept of sprints altogether; people are more focused without them, they communicate better. When you’re on a team like that, then it’s easy to see how everyone else mistakes the bureaucracy around the work for the work itself. But Jira is not the work. Pointing things for an hour is an hour you’ll never get back. It’s an hour lost, an hour carelessly thrown into the void, an hour that could’ve been spent building the next most important thing. Good teams don’t need sprints to get good work done. They don’t need to point tickets or file receipts away once something is complete. This always leads to an endless backlog of crap anyway which is also a waste of time since they too only serve managers who are scared to say “ah yes, we have listened to this complaint and we believe it’s not important.” That’s what a backlog is; a list of useless tasks that makes people feel better. The next most important thing, the thing right around the corner, is all that matters. And that stuff you’ll remember if you’re paying close attention. Discard everything else. Focus! So all of this junk—the backlogs, the sprints, the points—is pure bureaucracy. It gets in the way of productive folks, punishing them for the lack of confidence in their leaders.…

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How to Work Hard

3 years ago

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Original Article: How to Work Hard Convert your long form article to podcast? Visit SendToPod ---- June 2021 It might not seem there's much to learn about how to work hard. Anyone who's been to school knows what it entails, even if they chose not to do it. There are 12 year olds who work amazingly hard. And yet when I ask if I know more about working hard now than when I was in school, the answer is definitely yes. One thing I know is that if you want to do great things, you'll have to work very hard. I wasn't sure of that as a kid. Schoolwork varied in difficulty; one didn't always have to work super hard to do well. And some of the things famous adults did, they seemed to do almost effortlessly. Was there, perhaps, some way to evade hard work through sheer brilliance? Now I know the answer to that question. There isn't. The reason some subjects seemed easy was that my school had low standards. And the reason famous adults seemed to do things effortlessly was years of practice; they made it look easy. Of course, those famous adults usually had a lot of natural ability too. There are three ingredients in great work: natural ability, practice, and effort. You can do pretty well with just two, but to do the best work you need all three: you need great natural ability and to have practiced a lot and to be trying very hard. [ 1 ] Bill Gates, for example, was among the smartest people in business in his era, but he was also among the hardest working. "I never took a day off in my twenties," he said. "Not one." It was similar with Lionel Messi. He had great natural ability, but when his youth coaches talk about him, what they remember is not his talent but his dedication and his desire to win. P. G. Wodehouse would probably get my vote for best English writer of the 20th century, if I had to choose. Certainly no one ever made it look easier. But no one ever worked harder. At 74, he wrote with each new book of mine I have, as I say, the feeling that this time I have picked a lemon in the garden of literature. A good thing, really, I suppose. Keeps one up on one's toes and makes one rewrite every sentence ten times. Or in many cases twenty times. Sounds a bit extreme, you think. And yet Bill Gates sounds even more extreme. Not one day off in ten years? These two had about as much natural ability as anyone could have, and yet they also worked about as hard as anyone could work. You need both. That seems so obvious, and yet in practice we find it slightly hard to grasp. There's a faint xor between talent and hard work. It comes partly from popular culture, where it seems to run very deep, and partly from the fact that the outliers are so rare. If great talent and great drive are both rare, then people with both are rare squared. Most people you meet who have a lot of one will have less of the other. But you'll need both if you want to be an outlier yourself. And since you can't really change how much natural talent you have, in practice doing great work, insofar as you can, reduces to working very hard. It's straightforward to work hard if you have clearly defined, externally imposed goals, as you do in school. There is some technique to it: you have to learn not to lie to yourself, not to procrastinate (which is a form of lying to yourself), not to get distracted, and not to give up when things go wrong. But this level of discipline seems to be within the reach of quite young children, if they want it. What I've learned since I was a kid is how to work toward goals that are neither clearly defined nor externally imposed. You'll probably have to learn both if you want to do really great things. The most basic level of which is simply to feel you should be working without anyone telling you to. Now, when I'm not working hard, alar...…

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Dostoevsky's Pushkin Speech

3 years ago

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Original Article: Dostoevsky's Pushkin Speech Convert your long form article to podcast? Visit SendToPod ---- Dostoevsky's historic Pushkin Speech reprinted here FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY with the permission of its original publisher. Page numbers have been noted at the beginning of each section to correspond with those in the book it was taken from. THE PUSHKIN SPEECH, Page 43 Dostoevsky delivered his speech on the last of the three days of celebration. Turgeniev had spoken on the previous evening, and in spite of his eminence had been coolly received. His assessment of Pushkin had been too detached for the taste of his emotional audience. Dostoevsky, in contrast, gripped everybody from the start with his fervour. A SPEECH DELIVERED ON JUNE 8, 1880 AT THE MEETING OF THE SOCIETY OF LOVERS OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE PUSHKIN is an extraordinary phenomenon, and, perhaps, the unique phenomenon of the Russian spirit, said Gogol. I will add, �and a prophetic phenomenon.� Yes, in his appearing there is contained for all us Russians, something incontestably prophetic. Pushkin arrives exactly at the beginning of our true selfconsciousness, which had only just begun to exist a whole century after Peter�s reforms, and Pushkin�s coming mightily aids us in our dark way by a new guiding light. In this sense Pushkin is a presage and a prophecy. I divide the activity of our great poet into three periods. I speak now not as a literary critic. I dwell on Pushkin�s creative activity only to elucidate my conception of his prophetic significance to us, and the meaning I give the word prophecy. I would, however, observe in passing that the periods of Pushkin�s activity do not seem to me to be marked off from each other by firm boundaries. The beginning of Eugene Onyegin, for instance, in my opinion belongs still to the first period, while Onyegin ends in the second period, when Pushkin had already found his ideals in his native land, had taken them to his heart and cherished them in his loving and clairvoyant soul. It is said that in his first period THE PUSHKIN SPEECH SPEECH, Page 44 Pushkin imitated European poets, Parny and Andr� Ch�nier, and above all, Byron. Without doubt the poets of Europe had a great influence upon the development of his genius, and they maintained their influence all through his life. Nevertheless, even the very earliest poems of Pusbkin were not mere imitations, and in them the extraordinary independence of his genius was expressed. In an imitation there never appears such individual suffering and such depths of self- consciousness as Pushkin displayed, for instance, in The Gipsies, a poem which I ascribe in its entirety to his first period; not to mention the creative force and impetuosity which would never have been so evident had his work been only imitation. Already, in the character of Aleko, the hero of The Gipsies, is exhibited a powerful, profound, and purely Russian idea, later to be expressed in harmonious perfection in Onyegin, where almost the same Aleko appears not in a fantastic light, but as tangible, real and comprehensible. In Aleko Pushkin had already discovered, and portrayed with genius, the unhappy wanderer in his native land, the Russian sufferer of history, whose appearance in our society, uprooted from among the people, was a historic necessity. The type is true and perfectly rendered, it is an eternal type, long since settled in our Russian land. These homeless Russian wanderers are wandering still, and the time will be long before they disappear. If they in our day no longer go to gipsy camps to seek their universal ideals in the wild life of the gipsies and their consolation away from the confused and pointless life of our Russian intellectuals, in the bosom of natu...…

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Plotinus

3 years ago

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Original Article: Plotinus Convert your long form article to podcast? Visit SendToPod ---- Plotinus (204/5 – 270 C.E.), is generally regarded as the founder of Neoplatonism. He is one of the most influential philosophers in antiquity after Plato and Aristotle. The term ‘Neoplatonism’ is an invention of early 19th century European scholarship and indicates the penchant of historians for dividing ‘periods’ in history. In this case, the term was intended to indicate that Plotinus initiated a new phase in the development of the Platonic tradition. What this ‘newness’ amounted to, if anything, is controversial, largely because one’s assessment of it depends upon one’s assessment of what Platonism is. In fact, Plotinus (like all his successors) regarded himself simply as a Platonist, that is, as an expositor and defender of the philosophical position whose greatest exponent was Plato himself. Originality was thus not held as a premium by Plotinus. Nevertheless, Plotinus realized that Plato needed to be interpreted. In addition, between Plato and himself, Plotinus found roughly 600 years of philosophical writing, much of it reflecting engagement with Plato and the tradition of philosophy he initiated. Consequently, there were at least two avenues for originality open to Plotinus, even if it was not his intention to say fundamentally new things. The first was in trying to say what Plato meant on the basis of what he wrote or said or what others reported him to have said. This was the task of exploring the philosophical position that we happen to call ‘Platonism’. The second was in defending Plato against those who, Plotinus thought, had misunderstood him and therefore unfairly criticized him. Plotinus found himself, especially as a teacher, taking up these two avenues. His originality must be sought for by following his path. 1. Life and Writings Owing to the unusually fulsome biography by Plotinus’ disciple Porphyry, we know more about Plotinus’ life than we do about most ancient philosophers’. The main facts are these. Plotinus was born in Lycopolis, Egypt in 204 or 205 C.E. When he was 28, a growing interest in philosophy led him to the feet of one Ammonius Saccas in Alexandria. After ten or eleven years with this obscure though evidently dominating figure, Plotinus was moved to study Persian and Indian philosophy. In order to do so, he attached himself to the military expedition of Emperor Gordian III to Persia in 243. The expedition was aborted when Gordian was assassinated by his troops. Plotinus thereupon seems to have abandoned his plans, making his way to Rome in 245. There he remained until his death in 270 or 271. Porphyry informs us that during the first ten years of his time in Rome, Plotinus lectured exclusively on the philosophy of Ammonius. During this time he also wrote nothing. Porphyry tells us that when he himself arrived in Rome in 263, the first 21 of Plotinus’ treatises had already been written. The remainder of the 54 treatises constituting his Enneads were written in the last seven or eight years of his life. Porphyry’s biography reveals a man at once otherworldly and deeply practical. The former is hardly surprising in a philosopher but the latter deserves to be noted and is impressively indicated by the fact that a number of Plotinus’ acquaintances appointed him as guardian to their children when they died. Plotinus’ writings were edited by Porphyry (there was perhaps another edition by Plotinus’ physician, Eustochius, though all traces of it are lost). It is to Porphyry that we owe the somewhat artificial division of the writings into six groups of nine (hence the name Enneads from the Greek word for ‘nine’). In fact, there are somewhat fewer than 54 (Porphyry artificially divided some of them into separately numbered ‘treatises’)...…

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Heresy

3 years ago

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Original Article: Heresy Try to add your own article? Visit SendToPod Follow me on Twitter to find out more. ---- April 2022 One of the most surprising things I've witnessed in my lifetime is the rebirth of the concept of heresy. In his excellent biography of Newton, Richard Westfall writes about the moment when he was elected a fellow of Trinity College: Supported comfortably, Newton was free to devote himself wholly to whatever he chose. To remain on, he had only to avoid the three unforgivable sins: crime, heresy, and marriage. [ 1 ] The first time I read that, in the 1990s, it sounded amusingly medieval. How strange, to have to avoid committing heresy. But when I reread it 20 years later it sounded like a description of contemporary employment. There are an ever-increasing number of opinions you can be fired for. Those doing the firing don't use the word "heresy" to describe them, but structurally they're equivalent. Structurally there are two distinctive things about heresy: (1) that it takes priority over the question of truth or falsity, and (2) that it outweighs everything else the speaker has done. For example, when someone calls a statement "x-ist," they're also implicitly saying that this is the end of the discussion. They do not, having said this, go on to consider whether the statement is true or not. Using such labels is the conversational equivalent of signalling an exception. That's one of the reasons they're used: to end a discussion. If you find yourself talking to someone who uses these labels a lot, it might be worthwhile to ask them explicitly if they believe any babies are being thrown out with the bathwater. Can a statement be x-ist, for whatever value of x, and also true? If the answer is yes, then they're admitting to banning the truth. That's obvious enough that I'd guess most would answer no. But if they answer no, it's easy to show that they're mistaken, and that in practice such labels are applied to statements regardless of their truth or falsity. The clearest evidence of this is that whether a statement is considered x-ist often depends on who said it. Truth doesn't work that way. The same statement can't be true when one person says it, but x-ist, and therefore false, when another person does. [ 2 ] The other distinctive thing about heresies, compared to ordinary opinions, is that the public expression of them outweighs everything else the speaker has done. In ordinary matters, like knowledge of history, or taste in music, you're judged by the average of your opinions. A heresy is qualitatively different. It's like dropping a chunk of uranium onto the scale. Back in the day (and still, in some places) the punishment for heresy was death. You could have led a life of exemplary goodness, but if you publicly doubted, say, the divinity of Christ, you were going to burn. Nowadays, in civilized countries, heretics only get fired in the metaphorical sense, by losing their jobs. But the structure of the situation is the same: the heresy outweighs everything else. You could have spent the last ten years saving children's lives, but if you express certain opinions, you're automatically fired. It's much the same as if you committed a crime. No matter how virtuously you've lived, if you commit a crime, you must still suffer the penalty of the law. Having lived a previously blameless life might mitigate the punishment, but it doesn't affect whether you're guilty or not. A heresy is an opinion whose expression is treated like a crime — one that makes some people feel not merely that you're mistaken, but that you should be punished. Indeed, their desire to see you punished is often stronger than it would be if you'd committed an actual crime. Th...…

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The iPhone 14 Pro Isn't as Big of an Upgrade as Apple Thinks

3 years ago

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Original Article: The iPhone 14 Pro Isn't as Big of an Upgrade as Apple Thinks Convert your long form article to podcast? Visit SendToPod ---- It's nice that you don't need to swipe down on the Notification Center to quickly access these live activities; like the name, it's just playful and fun . It's worth noting that not every app works with the Dynamic Island just yet. YouTube Music worked perfectly well, whereas Google Maps did not. I expect this feature will feel a little richer in a year's time. Next, there's the always-on display. It's been a staple feature on Android phones for years, but it's now finally an option (if you want it!) on the iPhone. Apple says it saps very little battery, since the screen runs at a power-sipping 1 Hz, and that seems to track. Put the phone upside down, in your pocket or bag, and the screen shuts off, so you never have to worry if it's drinking your precious battery's juice. Speaking of the buttery smooth 120-Hz screen, it gets brighter than ever before. Honestly, I'm not sure it's necessary, as I've never found the iPhone's screen lacking in brightness, but I will say that at these extreme brightness levels, the iPhone 14 Pro maintains really fantastic colors, whereas some phone displays tend to wash them out. In an unusual move, these are the only two iPhones with the latest and greatest A16 Bionic processor (usually the whole range gets the new chip). My benchmark tests show that they are indeed some of the speediest mobile chips out there, and that's reflected in every task, especially gaming. I had flawless performance throughout a 45-minute session playing Oceanhorn 2: Knights of the Lost Realm and Rocket League Sideswipe with my BackBone One controller , and the iPhone didn't get uncomfortably hot. However, are you going to notice a dramatic difference day to day over the A15 Bionic in the iPhone 13 or iPhone 14? Probably not. OK, it's time to talk about the eSIM . In the US, all iPhone 14 models ship without a physical SIM tray, which means you'll have to set up an eSIM to connect it to your carrier's cellular network. This tech has been around for some time, but this is the first phone that completely ditches the physical SIM system. I'd never used an eSIM before, and I found the process very simple. When I was setting up the iPhone 14 Pro, it asked if I wanted to transfer my number from my iPhone 13 Pro. I obliged, and within a few minutes, my number was on the new phone. No little SIM tool needed! I transferred the number to the iPhone 14, iPhone 14 Pro, and iPhone 14 Pro Max one after the other with no issues. Until … I decided to transfer my number to an Android phone with eSIM support—the Google Pixel 6 Pro . I wasn't able to get far, because the Pixel just asked me to scan a QR code from my carrier, which I didn't have. That inevitably meant I'd have had to call my carrier if I wanted to move my number from my iPhone to the Pixel. How this is supposed to be easier than just popping a physical SIM in and out, I have no idea. (You're likely not switching to multiple different phones all the time, so this is more of a headache for me.) Yes, eSIMs are more secure . But here it introduces a substantial amount of friction for anyone who doesn't want to stay locked into Apple's ecosystem. I really hope this experience will get better over time with improved interoperability between devices.…

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What If Russia Uses Nuclear Weapons in Ukraine?

3 years ago

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Original Article: What If Russia Uses Nuclear Weapons in Ukraine? Convert your long form article to podcast? Visit SendToPod ---- Updated at 11:30 a.m. ET on June 21, 2022 The 12th Main Directorate of the Russian Ministry of Defense operates a dozen central storage facilities for nuclear weapons. Known as “Object S” sites and scattered across the Russian Federation, they contain thousands of nuclear warheads and hydrogen bombs with a wide variety of explosive yields. For the past three months, President Vladimir Putin and other Russian officials have been ominously threatening to use nuclear weapons in the war against Ukraine . According to Pavel Podvig, the director of the Russian Nuclear Forces Project and a former research fellow at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, now based in Geneva, the long-range ballistic missiles deployed on land and on submarines are Russia’s only nuclear weapons available for immediate use. If Putin decides to attack Ukraine with shorter-range, “tactical” nuclear weapons, they will have to be removed from an Object S site—such as Belgorod-22, just 25 miles from the Ukrainian border—and transported to military bases. It will take hours for the weapons to be made combat-ready, for warheads to be mated with cruise missiles or ballistic missiles, for hydrogen bombs to be loaded on planes. The United States will most likely observe the movement of these weapons in real time: by means of satellite surveillance, cameras hidden beside the road, local agents with binoculars. And that will raise a question of existential importance: What should the United States do? President Joe Biden has made clear that any use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine would be “completely unacceptable” and “entail severe consequences.” But his administration has remained publicly ambiguous about what those consequences would be. That ambiguity is the correct policy. Nevertheless, there must also be open discussion and debate outside the administration about what is really at stake. During the past month, I’ve spoken with many national-security experts and former government officials about the likelihood of Russia using nuclear weapons against Ukraine, the probable targets, and the proper American response. Although they disagreed on some issues, I heard the same point again and again: The risk of nuclear war is greater today than at any other time since the Cuban missile crisis. And the decisions that would have to be made after a Russian nuclear strike on Ukraine are unprecedented. In 1945, when the United States destroyed two Japanese cities with atomic bombs, it was the world’s sole nuclear power. Nine countries now possess nuclear weapons, others may soon obtain them, and the potential for things going terribly wrong has vastly increased. Several scenarios for how Russia might soon use a nuclear weapon seem possible: (1) a detonation over the Black Sea, causing no casualties but demonstrating a resolve to cross the nuclear threshold and signaling that worse may come, (2) a decapitation strike against the Ukrainian leadership, attempting to kill President Volodymyr Zelensky and his advisers in their underground bunkers, (3) a nuclear assault on a Ukrainian military target, perhaps an air base or a supply depot, that is not intended to harm civili...…

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What If Russia Uses Nuclear Weapons in Ukraine?

3 years ago