Hey, if you are a tech worker, UK has a very good tech worker visa called Tech Nation. Happy to answer questions about it, look it up online and email me!
If you're interested in historical buildings, go ahead, visit Bletchley Park. But expect most of the exhibits to be buildings, living quarters, offices etc. and mundane descriptions of day-to-day life there, not exhibits about the technical/cryptological aspects (although they do have some of those too).
If you're interested in computer history and Bombe/Colossus, visit the much lesser known National Museum of Computing at the same site. https://www.tnmoc.org/
I spent way too much time at the the boring parts of Bletchley Park and as a result didn't have enough time for the Museum of Computing.
I'd recommend starting at the Museum of Computing, then if you have time left, the 1-2 buildings inside the official Bletchley Park museum that have the crypto exhibits.
There were some cool mosaics we saw last summer in Ostia Antica. I can't recommend that place enough. Where Rome is crowded and super busy, Ostia Antica was relatively calm and low-stress. We had plenty of time to wander around and check out all the things.
Most importantly though, since the city was abandoned at roughly the same time, it's still an intact city, so you see how everything was connected, rather than just a ruin here and a temple there. You see it as a complete entity.
"It seems to me, that if we love, we grieve. That’s the deal. That’s the pact. Grief and love are forever intertwined. Grief is the terrible reminder of the depths of our love and, like love, grief is non-negotiable."
"Grief, I've learned, is really just love. It's all the love you want to give, but cannot. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go."
Jamie Anderson
Felix Revello de Toro - Woman, 1965
If you really want to start from the beginning, get “Build Your Own Metal Working Shop From Scrap” by David Gingery.
Quoting the description from Amazon (link below)…
“[It] is a progressive series of seven projects. Beginning with a simple charcoal fired foundry, you produce the castings for building the machine tools to equip your shop. Initially the castings are finished by simple hand methods, but it is not long before the developing machines are doing much of the work to produce their own parts.”
Comparing the App Store listings, it looks like this app has a much simpler interface and far fewer features than Draw Things. Some users might prefer the simplicity of this app.
(Draw Things is by far the most advanced app that supports on-device Stable Diffusion on iOS devices and Apple Silicon Macs. It had a non-standard UI, but otherwise is really good.)
The latter looks absolutely filthy, while the former, although uncleaned for 150 years, still look nice.
I do not buy the efficiency argument given by Adolf Loos at all. What you gain in labor time by removing ornamentation, you will loose in renovation work and (urban) living quality.
As someone coming from a culture with T-V distinction [1], I always wished we dropped one of the branches like English did in the past.
The informal T vs formal V causes confusion in conversation with semi-strangers. Eg. At work you never really know which way to speak to someone at a watercooler. If you choose the informal T you make them your equal. Ehich might be perceived as insulting to them, since they might want to keep a perception of superiority to you for eg. being older, more tenured, etc. Often you'd rather choose not to even engage in a conversation and just keep your thoughts to yourself. Better than ending up in a inferior position when choosing the safe V, or risking insulting someone when using the informal T form.
This felt to me like one of the reasons why English became the dominant language for business over time. Together with simplified morphology (you only need to learn the plural by adding 's' at the end, vs. 5+ other tenses of each word) it just ended up being much easier to pick up and less risky to engage in conversations and therefore higher chances of adoption by non-speakers.
A great reference for further reading about data visualization is "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" by Edward Tufte, a classic book originally published in 1983 with enduring relevance today.
This reminds me of John James Audubon and his seminal work, "The Birds of America."
Audubon dedicated much of his life trying to paint every American bird. He basically crowdfunded the work by getting people to pay in advance for bird prints.
"The Birds of America" is a book of 435 images, portraits of every bird then known in the United States – painted and reproduced in the size of life, with original copies being incredibly valuable collectors' items.
If you want to go down a rabbithole read up on his biography.
I don’t think so - I’ve written parsers using flex/lex yacc/bison, antlr, a bunch of functional combinator libraries and maybe others I’ve forgotten but now would never consider anything except hand-written recursive descent with an embedded Pratt parser for expressions and precedence.
Simple to write, debug, recover from errors, provide decent error messages, unit test, integrate into build systems, IDEs etc.
I also believe that nearly all the popular compilers these days do something similar - gcc was rewritten a few years ago in this fashion because of the technical benefits I’ve listed above.
I'll never forget the first time I had to restore a massive sql dump and realized that vim actually segfaults trying to read it.
That's when I discovered the magic of spit(1) "split a file into pieces". I just split the huge dump into one file per table.
Of course a table can also be massive, but at least the file is now more uniform which means you can easier run other tools on it like sed or awk to transform queries.
Ron Chernow's biography on him is really excellent. It's so good that I think it's actually a disservice to mention that it inspired the Broadway play.
Creative Selection by Ken Kocienda is the closest, modern look inside Apple's product development that I've found. Focus is on the development of the software for the original iPhone and is a great book.
For what it's worth, scaling the freestanding Mt. Kilimanjaro volcano is about as intense as a 4 day backpacking trip up up up to high altitude, little to no watch-risky technical climbing required for the common routes.
There's a wonderfully blunt saying that applies here (too): you are not in the business you think you are, you are in the business your customers think you are.
If you offer data volumes, the low water mark is how EBS behaves. If you offer a really simple way to spin up Postgres databases, you are implicitly promising a fully managed experience.
And $deity forbid, if you want global CRUD with read-your-own-writes semantics, the yardstick people measure you against is Google's Spanner.
I forget where I found the quote, but the older I get the more I apply it: "Don't expect people to change their minds, expect them to lose."
As a corollary, everyone knows they should change their minds based on new information, but shockingly few actually do or they only do it after it's too late. So if you find yourself working with/for someone who consistently and successfully changes their perspective based on new information, heavily weight keeping that person(s) around in your future plans.
"The first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. This is OK as far as it goes. The second step is to disregard that which can't be easily measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading. The third step is to presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't important. This is blindness. The fourth step is to say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist. This is suicide."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy
The company is all hot air. They have a board full of retired military figure heads that have no experience in medical devices or retail services. Additionally, they do not have any products to show. Look at their patents. They are all very general and broad. There has been NO FDA CLEARANCE for anything they are doing, which raises legal questions. Speaking of legal, search for lawsuits they are involved in. Their core technology is not even theirs. They stole it from someone else.
“Isolation is the gift” - Bukowski. This quote has given me the reassurance to continue down my own unique path “less traveled” (a quote from another great poet).
This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety.
Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals–sounds that say listen to this, it is important.
So I write with a combination of short, medium, and long sentences. Create a sound that pleases the reader’s ear. Don’t just write words. Write music.
As counterintuitive as it seems, the book actually recommends buying stocks in a bear market since they are priced reasonably. Warren Buffet's famous quote comes to mind: “Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful.” The book also talks about the importance of long-term investing and discipline.
