Curation is solid. Depends on who they pick as the subject matter expert, but for example, their Shakespeare biography recommendations are themselves from one of the best living Shakespeare biographers. [1]
I find "Five Books" picks better than Amazon recommendations, and faster than Google/Reddit searches. Example: search "wine book" on Amazon and it's all wine textbooks and pretty-but-vapid coffee table books. Meanwhile, Five Books will suggests Kermit Lynch's fantastic cult classic wine memoir [2].
Personally, I think Amazon’s recommendation quality has declined precipitously over the last year or so. I find the way they do the recommendations page now to be totally worthless. Often, more than half the books recommended are different formats of books I’ve already purchased from them. The old format, by genre etc., was much more usable. Goodreads does a better job, but it’s far from perfect, e.g., mystery recommendations under science, etc. In reality, I frequently get better recommendations by searching books on Hacker News.
Covid-19 is linked to AKF (search). As an older hacker (not a Boomer), I can tell you that the kids who setup microbreweries back in the day first tried to escape into project management and then wound up...not-in-tech.
I did a mystery murder on Zoom yesterday where only the organizer/host had audio. It had the feelings of an IRC chatroom but with video. More people could actively talk (30+) than on a regular Zoom call, which are rife with interruptions in even very small groups.
I'm really interested in this, as we are building something to enable more people talking in different groups: joinvoiceplace.com
Would you be available for a couple of questions:
- Are you planning to repeat it?
- Did you use one or many rooms?
- Do you know about break-out rooms in Zoom?
- Have you thought about how giving attention/directing speech would work in "IRC + Video" ?
Yeah, gonna repeat it next weekend! Everyone had a lot of fun. TO answer your question: we did indeed use multiple (break-out) rooms. As for speech/voice... I spent a lot of time on Omegle as a teenager, so video + no audio is natural to me but may not be for some people. Feel free to ask me more questions via email: cbswishes at gmail.
Like it or not, male technologists are privileged beneficiaries of SF's broken social order. They might not be individually responsible for what's broken, but if there is "really such a tragedy" in the city, it is certainly not the fact that some guys are being stereotyped and mocked on Twitter.
Agreed, that is a better article, but even so - every time I read about this space I get more confused. I get that very smart people are throwing large sums of money at it, so there's obviously some logic that I'm not getting.
For example, the Medium piece says that Uber has a lucrative monopoly, but then goes on to say that it loses 700M per quarter. How is that lucrative?
And self-driving cars are held up as the solution to thin margins but to me it seems that the only saving grace for these companies is that they get drivers to bring their own cars, do their own maintenance, pay their own insurance, etc. Considering how expensive driverless cars will inevitably be when they first appear and the sheer number that these companies will require to actually replace their contractors/partners/whatever they call their drivers, 2030 seems a very optimistic target for profitability.
But then I'm just some schmuck - surely the VCs have all had those thoughts and are ploughing on regardless because they know something else?
More detail and more examination of the difficulties but their concluding paragraph is still optimistic:
> In the emerging food delivery wars, the stakes are high, the margins are slim, and the competition is vast. Some will fail. Others will quit. But a few of them might just end up delivering the billion-dollar goods.
I doubt it. I think food delivery is something that can only work where the food makers are in control, not the food deliverers.
It's enjoyable to listen to (audiobook-wise) after a tall glass of scotch. Not unlike, say, Gertrude Stein. The euphony and cadence of sentences, the unlikely word pairings, the stark impenetrability of it—it gives it the pleasure you'd get from an abstract painting. Certainly not everybody's glass of prune juice, but in those strange moods you can get yourself into, it can sometimes hit the spot.
Definitely not required reading for your moral (or even literary) education, though. It's a madman's backflip of a novel; something you'd write for a lark once you knew you had nothing to prove.
Just imagine writing a program with the most perfect, functional, well-documented code.... but obfuscated and self-referential to the point of total unreadability. That's what Joyce did with FW.
Okay so this isn't totally related, but there's something about the mélange between pirates and techies that just makes my heart sing. I get that this course is just supposed to be fun/a joke... but the cultural kinship between pirates and technologists is actually strangely similar. Maybe MIT isn't structured like a pirate ship, but startups most certainly are. Great read:
I have an iPod touch and (perversely) like not having data when I'm out. I can still use Google Maps and connect to WiFi when necessary, but prefer when my psychic default isn't always "plugged in".
Of course, I'm a market of one. I imagine the real reason the iPod touch still exists is for kids too young to have phones.
