I'm older now but been playing games since I was younger. In the years of playing games, I can't place why certain games gave me motion sickness while others didn't. One of the worst games I played was Silent Hill on the PS, the fog or something in the game was so bad, I couldn't get past the intro level. Another game was Half-Life 2 and the boat levels, again, it felt like the rest of the game but that level was awful.
Recently as I'm up in age, I have noticed I do better with third person games and having the monitor further away with a high refresh rate. Certain games like Counter Strike 2, since it plays so quickly and feels fast, doesn't have that feeling, and Fallout4, isn't bad but I couldn't play it for hours.
I recall Flickr before was free up to a certain resolution, at the time it was something very low like 800 pixels or less than 2mb. During Marissa's CEO days, they pushed Flickr and introduced the unlimited storage for all users. I believe after it was sold to Smugmug, the storage was back down to being limited again.
The sad part to ponder is most likely the team on the ship knew the sub was gone right when the communications was lost but kept the information to themselves.
From what I read and watched the company didn't take safety very seriously at all.
A former employee claims they were fired after brining up concerns about safety. The glass apparently was not rated for the depth required to see the titanic.
Which begs the question why there were no additional safety measures put in place after so many "skin of the teeth" trips making it back.
IMHO this was a get rich scheme the two founders spun up that went sideways. They spent the absolute minimum on safety and repeatedly cut corners on the sub in order to get it up and running, then charged people a ton of money to take a trip down deeper than the sub was clearly capable of going.
Perversely, a bunch of near-disasters can reduce people's concern and make them less likely to demand fixes because "it did that last time too and everything turned out okay" is a powerful rationalization.
A good real-world example of the consequences of this normalization is British Airways flight 5390 [1]
This problem extended far beyond this one individual, who was merely a symptom. The entire Birmingham maintenance facility, and perhaps British Airways more broadly, had a singular focus on “getting the job done.” If doing the work by the book took longer and jeopardized schedules, then doing the work by the book was discouraged. The shift manager who used the wrong bolts stated in an interview that if he sought out the instructions or used the official parts catalogue on every task, then he would never “get the job done,” as though this was a totally normal and reasonable attitude with which to approach aircraft maintenance. This attitude was in fact normalized on a high level by supervisors who rewarded the employees who most consistently kept planes on schedule. That a serious incident would result from such a culture was inevitable. The shift manager believed it to be reasonable to just “put on whatever bolts came off” and make a quick judgment call about what kind of bolts they were — not because he was personally deficient, but because he had been trained into a culture that didn’t consider this a flagrant safety violation.
Very few industries are safe enough to actually capture the "That could have been bad" events, that's what ASRS https://asrs.arc.nasa.gov/ does for the Aviation industry (there are equivalent agencies in various other wealthy countries e.g. CHIRP in the UK)
In the absence of a proper means to report "That could have been bad" as you say it can cause normalization. But it's understandable that you don't implement something like ASRS when you haven't solved most of your "That was bad" problems. If you regularly have CI failures due to the code not even compiling, "We need more unit tests" isn't top of the list of your problems.
Meanwhile, smart organizations have decades-ago stopped tracking (primarily) "Time-Lost Work Accidents" and replaced that with tracking "Close Calls".
I've seen prominent signs for "N Days Since a Time Lost Accident", and more recently "X Days Since a Close Call".
Sadly, it is so obvious that this CEO clown was doing everything possible to avoid experienced people ("not as inspiring to hire 50yo white guys as hiring young upstarts") so he could overrule any safety or redundancy concerns, firing people as soon as they raised things like "this porthole window is only rated to 1500m and we're going to 4000m", using cheap scrap scaffolding as ballast, and completely ignoring any kind of redundancy in case something went wrong. He seems to have gotten a just end, but his deceived customers didn't deserve that.
I mean the CEO of the company is one of the fatalities so it's not like he thought and understood the sub was dangerous but was still willing to sell tickets to other people. We thought what is was doing was safe (obviously he was wrong) but he did have skin in the game.
I honestly see the company as a startup in idea. They couldn't afford to build a proper deep sea sub so they used the idea of new tech in the form of carbon fiber (which I'm assuming is way cheaper to form vs a titanium hull) and billed this as next gen. Everything that I read almost fits in the idea of "fail fast".
yes I believe in one interview the CEO said carbon fiber provides buoyancy but is much cheaper than syntactic foam, which other similar such vessels have used
I believe this is the way many companies are going, even if they don't need to reduce the headcount, they can scoop up hungry workers cycling them out for average performers.
I keep sharing that many companies have not defined the remote policy. It's up in the air and they simply haven't said anything about not working remote. My fear is it will all end in two weeks, asking all non-dedicated full time remote workers to be in the office.
I'm not sure if this is the same as the DJ apps that remove vocals and other instruments but there seems to be a surge of apps that have this feature. It's impressive how well some of these work and I believe they are mostly based on an open source project (I can't recall the name).
There's a neat trick you can do with songs that don't have much reverb. If you load a track. Clone the channel into a second one and then just "flip" the wave form it will remove all the vocals.
I used to be a huge fan of Evernote, but a few things made me look at other solutions. One issue is the capturing of code was automatically formatted and I was burned a few times keeping my code snippets for reference.
Been using Notion for a few years but I prefer the tree view and there's not many note apps that work well with this method.
I learned a bit of Perl from authors who focused only in Perl, great videos and books that allowed me to understand Perl how it worked differently from Python (at the time was taking over learning media).
But using Perl in the real world was much more difficult. Posting to Perl Mongers about a simple question of some block was often met with equally difficult answers. Many Perl scripts used at my past work places were written by very well versed Perl developers, using every possible shortcut to make the code smaller (and more confusing).
I can speak on this owning a pair of Technics 1200 mk2 I bought new in 1995 and a pair of Reloop RP8000mk2 I bought two years ago. What might be confusing is many DJ turntables are made by the same company now, and are reffered to as "super oem", so the small things are changed, like logos, but they come from the same factory. My Reloops weight close to the same amount as the Technics but the base allows for more rumble through the feet. If you tap the body, you can clearly hear this compared to the Technics.
The tonearm on the Reloop has bearing that have a small amount of play, on my Technics, they are extremely solid after 100's hours of play time. But the biggest issue is the Reloop has the flutter at 0.5%, while the Technics at 0.05%. Doesn't sound like a huge issue, but when playing a song on Reloop, the beats per minute will fluctuate from 100 to 100.5 to 99.5, non-stop. The Technics has the same flutter but at a much lower tolerance, so you don't see this appear. Performance, they both do well on startup and stop, and of course improved RCA jacks.
Uh, speaking as a mere human, can you actually hear the music shift in tempo from 99.5 to 100.5 bpm? Or does this become apparent when using tools/mixers/whatever to work with the audio stream?
I just quickly tried this on Google's built-in metronome widget (TIL) [1] and I can't hear the difference between 99, 100 and 101 bpm. However, the switching is discrete (the audio stops and restarts) which probably makes it much harder to detect change, of course.
Just curious, not trying to question your comparison of course.
I personally cannot tell, if I was mixing vinyl I honestly would never have known about this. But using a digital vinyl system like Serato which displayed the bpm as 100.0, it's very apparent the tracks will fluctuate. The other issue is since your turntable is keeping time, two of them playing the same BPM, say 100BPM can drift 1BPM in theory. That's a large number when playing slower songs like hip-hop, and easily cause drift within 15~30 seconds. It's not a big deal, most dj's ride the pitch fader but it's worthy of a mention that the Technics 1200's are just over engineered.
If you're trying to beat match 2 tracks, and they're playing together for more than a few seconds, this becomes frustrating. A test I do is play 2 copies of the same record simultaneously and see how long it takes to noticeably go out of sync, given all other variables matched as closely as possible.
Wasn't most of the Amazon issue on fake items related to the UPC barcode issue they ran into with books? I recall they only stored the UPC code of items and pulled from their own stock or resellers (who had fake copies with the same code).
One of the big wake up calls I had during that time was a friend telling me about Webvan. At the time I was younger and not investing so the conservation was mostly around how great the food was, cheaper than up scale stores and they delivered. The echo that reflected much of the dot com era was as he mentioned "how do they make money doing this". The wild part is the wages they paid was higher than other delivery drivers, I worked in a warehouse at the time and frequently heard of seasoned UPS and FedEx drivers leaving to drive for the company.
Funny that webvan is always cited as an example of a startup that could never work, but really just an early example of do something that doesn't scale and just keep doing it until you somehow make money. But VCs weren't yet ready for the unicorn burn.
Juicero was the mirror product, then: An overpriced orange juice machine, with little packets that you can only buy on subscription, but can’t suspend while on holidays, with a QR code to prevent you from consuming after your holidays. It is also down if it can’t reach the Wifi. It showed that you can overcharge and make everything become a cloud subscription, because money was unlimited on the consumer side this time.
Surprisingly, it didn’t work outside of the Bay area. Some entrepreneurs have difficulty seeing the world’s situation beyond their local horizon.
While I can see luxury food delivery kind-of working (wealthy workers in the office ordering lunch, wealthy home workers ordering lunch, fitness nuts who want calories and good food without cooking), Juicero was just plain ridiculous.
Competition from local supermarket is too strong. I can get freshly squeezed juice from the store machine anytime I want for cheap.
Plus juice is kind of a crappy high sugar project that’s bad for you?
Relatedly, I have no idea how “Joe and The Juice” stores remain in business. They’re in super valuable real estate in cities across the country and as far as I can tell never have anyone in them.
Do they? How long have the same ones been around 5 or 10 years yet?
On other their products likely have such margin it might be possible with enough sales. The components aren't too expensive, there isn't massive number of labour and equipment isn't that big of investment either likely...
I keep hearing this, but I don‘t really think fresh orange juice, for instance, is as bad as sth like sunny delight or soda. I do not have a source though.
> Competition from local supermarket is too strong.
Honest question: Do startup millionaires still go shopping themselves? I imagine when you are between the area where you have a gardner for time-to-time tasks and don’t have “un majordome” yet to serve you at any time, there’s an entire higher-class-market-but-not-elites who would be interested in Juicero?
You, and everyone that responded to you, have no idea what Juicero was. It wasn’t orange juice at all, or any type of fruit juice. It was green juice. The founder made millions selling his chain of green juice stores on the east coast so he short had a history of success.
I have a friend that worked there so I even tried the product. I thought the idea was vastly overpriced, but it definitely had the chance of working. Lots of people are into green juice vs fruit juice and they were trying to create a new market.
> It wasn’t orange juice at all, or any type of fruit juice. It was green juice.
This is a distinction without a difference. It doesn't matter what the juice is called. It doesn't change the fact that it's idiotic to pay hundreds of dollars for a machine that just squeezes bags of fruits and vegetables, and needs an Internet connection to ensure you're locked in to only squeezing the company's pricy bags.
What it shows is people who criticize the company don’t actually know anything about it. If you’re going to criticize actually take the time to understand instead of throwing rocks thinking you’re so smart because you read a headline.
"Green juice" is fruits and vegetables, FYI. Look at their marketing material. The bags listed the ingredients on the front and they included things like apple and pineapple.
The problem wasn’t the real world part it was the internet. I was there at the time, it was clear there was some value in all the delivery services and so on the issue was that it was so painful and tedious to dial in with a modem and wait for photos to download and navigate the catalog on a 56k (or 128c or whatever) connection, often losing your cart and having to start over.
And that was for those of us that were literary in digital stuff and comfortable with the internet. A lot of people just hadn’t gotten around to using it much yet.
It just wasn’t time yet. And there wasn’t any massive network effect or lock-in to capture like there was with something like a social network.
Recently as I'm up in age, I have noticed I do better with third person games and having the monitor further away with a high refresh rate. Certain games like Counter Strike 2, since it plays so quickly and feels fast, doesn't have that feeling, and Fallout4, isn't bad but I couldn't play it for hours.