Yes, though they have other types too. We’ve been thrilled with ours. I’ve never done Christmas lights because I don’t do ladders, so having a permanent fixture is attractive. Plus we can use them on big holidays too.
I have big reservations about ‘smart home’ stuff, and it’s only the second such device in our house. But I’m clearly losing that battle, and will be looking into some ways to mitigate the privacy concerns. But gosh, it sure is nice to pick from a gazillion light patterns.
Genuine question from someone on the outside watching all of this: then who are these things for? Apparently not me, nor GP, nor my mum and dad. Are we waiting until the Smart People sort out all of these complex details to make this stuff accessible for regular people?
I'd say something like this: the average person isn't doing anything that complex with money. They can use cash for instant, real-time payments (with good counterfeit prevention), and can generally rely on their banks. But this is less than ideal because their assets can easily be seized, inflated, frozen, and their banks could fail. The blockchain could offer superior piece of mind or something of an insurance policy. Though the problem with that is most of the world runs on regular money so there would still need to be ways to buy/sell those assets.
To talk about the more specialized use-cases: there are some truly novel things that can only be done with the blockchain. To give you a direct example -- 'provably fair' gambling enables someone to place bets and know for certain that the result will be fair. This is accomplished by having outcomes enforced for a network of computers instead of trusting some shady website to stay fair. It's basically fully transparent. I know there will be people saying that this grasping at straws but the list of use-cases is quite long. I don't have time to research and list all the interesting ones here. But if anyone is interested in the subject I promise you that learning more about it won't be a disappointment.
It's just not easy to explain in short-form posts.
When I was 16 years old I took a job at a travelling carnival that was in town for a long weekend. My job was to run a helicopter ride for little kids. The green button started the ride, the red button stopped it. And if it didn’t start, I was instructed to give the control unit a moderate smack. It worked.
This was in Canada, ~1990. Awhile ago admittedly, but I haven’t looked at travelling fair rides the same way since.
Funny side story about this publication. I worked at a company that sold a network monitoring appliance that was ‘reviewed’ by them. We found the review… surprising, prompting us to inspect the demo appliance that they’d sent back to us.
They hadn’t even fired it up. The review was, as far as we could tell, entirely fabricated. We brought this to the editorial team’s attention. They responded by adding a few points to our scores.
Some people will respond well to this - I'm one of them - but many (most?) won't.
> tact is simply a form of dishonesty
Maybe it is, but our primate brains tend to get very attached to our ideas and opinions. People aren't rational. Tactfulness is one way to get the other side to see your argument without making them feel threatened. Is it manipulative? Sure. But in many cases it's the only path that will get results.
Yeah, I hate playing that game. I kind of like playing the one where you lead someone to an answer instead of just telling them, so that it is their idea. It can be seen as teaching instead of manipulation.
I didn't know about this, thanks. I wonder if the origins of this version of the site go back to 9/11 - I remember specifically that CNN had to switch to a text-only website because they were getting hammered with traffic that day. Maybe they kept this around in case another similar event takes place.
They're much more recent than that, dating to about 2017.[0] CNN's main website in 2001 wouldn't have needed a text-only site because it was already so lightweight.[1]
BMI of 19 with severe sleep apnea checking in. Never woke up gasping, never struggled staying awake, but I did feel like I enjoyed the occasional afternoon nap, and my partner reported snoring.
It’s worth getting checked out. I ended up going the dental appliance route because CPAP machines feel like a torture device to me. Anecdotally it’s made a noticeable difference. Haven’t had a nap in ages.
Same. When I was 28, I presented with terrible TMJ pain. Turns out my sleep apnea led to grinding my teeth at night, putting horrible strain on my TMJ all night. Got a mandibular advancement device (MAD) and fixed both issues in like day. Changed my life, slept great, felt great. But, these devices only work for 8-10 years before your jaw permanently changes and your bit starts misaligning your teeth. So I slowly transitioned over to CPAP when I felt my teeth no longer snapped back into place in the morning. After 3 years of CPAP and no MAD, my jaw is 95% back to normal. So keep that in mind. I'd also recommend getting a back-up dental appliance in case yours breaks, or learning how to use CPAP now while you don't need it. Some of the worst stress of my life was when my MAD broke and it took months to get a new one...ugh, I still have latent traumatic responses thinking about that point in my life. I had moved jobs and insurance so finding someone who would do it required significant searching. Medical insurance hates paying for MADs, you gotta make sure you have a solid TMJ disorder diagnosis from an MD and then find a dentist that will do it.
Pulls your lower jaw forward to make room at the back of your throat. I had the Somnodent Air [0] for several years, but switched to a CPAP when my lower molars started to cant forward.
> Sell something that sells. Sell what other people sell because that is what sells.
Agreed. I tried for ~3 years to sell ‘general development services’. Got tangled up in mobile apps, SharePoint, web development, basically anything that I didn’t consider to be “IT”.
It was a financial and professional disaster. The solutions all sucked, because I didn’t have deep expertise in anything and there was never enough budget to “do things right”. There was no opportunity to develop any kind of reputation for anything. It is insanely hard to sell “well, I can build things”.
As soon as I started focusing on a single, well-understood, boring business problem (“we need a good website”) everything changed. I started getting good at it, margins became healthy, referrals started to happen. Try getting a referral when the problems you solve are too vague to describe.
> There probably is someone who might buy that. You are unlikely to find that person because there are not enough days in the world for you to meet them and close the sale.
If there’s a market for CTO-as-a-service, or anything really, you need to be able to reach it. A hyper niche service can be OK if you can reach the people that need it. Broad markets can be just as hard because you tend to need to reach lots of people (think advertising). For me, the sweet spot turned out to be “small to mid-size regional companies” because you can identify them and sell to them as a freelancer.
Is this the nugget of gold? “As soon as I started focusing on a single, well-understood, boring business problem (“we need a good website”) everything changed.”
It’s the generalist vs. focused part. Many of us who have been successful in tech have done so because we are good generalists. But, that doesn’t transfer well as something that you can market. So there is great power in narrowly focusing on some skill that has demand you can meet.
It's also important to identify the thing that people request first, such as a good website. Plenty of work is done after that problem is solved or in addition to that problem.
The person who solves the "we need a website" problem gets to solve those additional problems if they want to.
I have big reservations about ‘smart home’ stuff, and it’s only the second such device in our house. But I’m clearly losing that battle, and will be looking into some ways to mitigate the privacy concerns. But gosh, it sure is nice to pick from a gazillion light patterns.
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