For the vast majority of my life, I didn’t read any books. Reading for me is a painfully boring experience. I simply lack the ability to read and comprehend at a speed that keeps me engaged.
Then, I realized I assimilate information very differently based on the medium. For me, math is a very visual thing. Graphs and plots make mathematical concepts immediately understandable. For general learning, hearing someone talk about a topic is most effective for me. This is when I decided to give audiobooks a go. This has been transformational for me.
Any good audiobook app will allow for faster playback. I’ve trained myself to listen to books at 2x speed (or faster). This is easily 5x the speed I would comprehend the material if I physically read it. So it’s super effective for me. I listen to these books in my car during my commute. Audiobooks convert my commute from a time waster into probably the most valuable time I have in my day.
So why are books worth it? For me, books end up performing like the repetitive learning system of Anki (https://apps.ankiweb.net/). A good book is somewhat repetitive as it goes deep on a focus area. Spending 10+ hours over the period of a week or so consuming a topic and having time for my brain to stew on it is incredible. I can’t get this from pod casts or blog posts and other online content.
I only listen to non-fiction books, typically on topics around human psychology, business, and topics I hope to give me new insights.
Bottom line: books are worth it because they offer depth that I can’t get anywhere else. That depth is the value.
1.25x? Aim to get accustomed to 2x+. So much time savings. I have a friend who’s blind and super proficient on his laptop using screen readers. He runs all the speech at 3x+. It sounds like gibberish to me, but he’s crazy productive. He inspired me to learn how to understand and follow significantly sped up audio. Saves so much time.
He’s describing a recorded marketing video. It was deliberately produced and edited to contain that specific message. Comparing that to an off the cuff error during a live discussion is disingenuous.
Since it was "deliberately produced and edited", presumably by multiple people, it's even less likely to speak much about the education of the person on-screen, as the post in question appears to have questioned.
The problem is the interface. Voice commands and their responses are linear, one dimensional. It’s difficult to represent complex interaction within that scope. Think of all the investment that has gone into telephone based automated customer support. The best interface conceived so far is the dreaded phone tree. That’s essentially the same interface smart speakers are exposing.
The opportunity is to figure out how to better utilize the voice based medium. No one has done it yet. When they do, it will also likely improve the experience around screen readers and accessibility.
Well, imagine a goal-based system. The first utterance to a voice assistant provides some inputs and a goal, like booking an Uber, but if you haven't provided all the inputs it needs to meet the goal, the assistant knows how to ask for more information, and also saves enough state to let you modify (or cancel) requests after the fact. This is arguably more advanced than a phone tree; you're not just giving keywords to advance along the branches.
I don't find it appealing to use voice as an interface. I'd much rather have a button to press.
I think the new feature in iOS where it guesses what I want to do (send a message to ABC, for example) based on previous patterns is promising. A whole screen of these actions would be great.
This is right. No none has yet written “The Design of Everyday Things” for voice interaction. We just don’t know what works yet so we are redoing what was done before.
I think you're right, but on the other hand, a skill is faster created than a complex 2D UI.
Sure, I won't use a conversational interface to build the next Photoshop.
I could tell it stuff like, what I ate and it calculates my kcals or macros and tells me how much I have left to eat this day or what other stuff I should eat to hit my macros etc.
I could tell it what I bought and it would categorize the bills.
Some things are just too bothersome to do with my hands.
The medium of voice is very rich and capable when talking to a human, so this is something limited by the intelligence of the system you're interacting with.
Is it? I mean, some folks do great talking. Lots of them. Most are in narrative communication. If you get much beyond that, you jump to physical interesting quickly. Even telling is benefited with gestures. Consider how vague most spoken directions are. When you can augment with pointing, things are easier.
KGO and KSFO both discussed the fires in their news updates, providing details about the arson in each case. In the "camp" fire, there were thousands of bullet casings at the base of pg&e equipment. This vandalism has been happening all throughout the bay area. Linemen I spoke with said they believed it was a former pg&e employee, but that is just their opinion.
A similar vandalism occurred at a couple sub-stations, again with thousands of bullet casings found at the site. There was no vegetation, but the shooter knew which oil coolers to take out to destroy the sub-station. They also knew how to cut communication back to pg&e so they would not get the heat alarm.
The Napa fire was also believe to be arson. AFAIK, they caught 3 of the guys driving down to San Diego, but that went quiet really fast. I assumed they were trying to avoid copy-cat crimes.
For the news reporters on this thread, please consider calling KGO and KSFO to ask what information they have.
It isn’t relevant to crypto. This is specifically about spam email mitigation. I don’t agree with their conclusion, which is “we can’t reduce spam to the level we’d like without imposing undue burden on legitimate senders so we shouldn’t do it at all”. The “all or nothing” doesn’t make sense. They never consider things like whitelists (legitimate senders need to do zero work), different levels of work required for different senders (eg a sender’s IP address isn’t recognized so dramatically increase the work requirements), etc.
If you like this topic and didn’t read all the way to the bottom, the author’s recommendation of “Prime Obsession” by John Derbyshire is spot on. It’s a fantastic book.
The problem isn't housing. The problem is transportation and infrastructure. People need to work for a living. They also don't want to spend a significant amount of time commuting to said work. California's transportation, road, and highway infrastructure is completely and utterly inadequate for the population in the SF and LA areas. This forces people into living situations that are far from ideal and creates a fight over housing.
Create multiple ways for people to commute from 30 miles away in 30 minutes and housing will be much less of a problem with people having many more options.
Proof: If people could instantly teleport between work and home no matter how far apart they are, do you really think they would still cram into SF Bay Area or LA housing? Hell no. Housing is the symptom of poor transportation infrastructure.
Well how about, at least in IT and S/W development, we encourage remote working, rather than promoting childish "agile" work practices where people come in at 9 am for a "daily standup" and mess around by writing tasks on sheets of paper like in the last century?
And if that's not a strong enough argument, just think of the climate! All those hours stuck in traffic, each one a car running for 2 to 4 hours a day, that's got to be causing a lot of pollution.
This is true. But the easiest way to fix the inadequate transportation is to build more densely. Build more highrises. A 30 floor highrise with 8 apartments per floor can easily house 500 people but only takes up the land that 4 single family houses with less than 15 persons would occupy.
But the effect is multiplied if this highrise is in an city with many highrises. Now, instead of commuting 30 miles to pass another 1,500 single homes to reach work, the inhabitants of our highrise may only have to walk 1 mile to pass the homes of a similar amount of people and reach work.
it is very uncomfortable to stand near a 30-floor building looking up. Also, people in the building will have troubles with parking all of their cars. By the way this [1] is what those buldings look like.
It’s not optimizing for “comfort in looking up”. Also, cars are only a necessity when you can’t walk everywhere. San Francisco is already a city where the majority don’t own a car. Making it more dense won’t undo that.
The question is why are there more jobs than homes? Homeowners don't oppose commercial development because it raises their home value but they oppose residential development because it lowers their home value.
The only compromise for existing home owners could be to balance out job and home zoning so that there is no massive excess or deficit on either side.
6. Network. Get personal referrals from people you know who work at the companies you are applying. These personal referrals have an order of magnitude better chance at getting you noticed. Use your time to reach out to people you know. Have coffee with them. Yes. Face to face. Let them know you're interested in working at their company. Ask them to submit a referral. Use linkedin to find people. Don't be afraid to ask a connection for an intro to another person you don't know who could help you. You'd be surprised how helpful people are willing to be.
For the vast majority of my life, I didn’t read any books. Reading for me is a painfully boring experience. I simply lack the ability to read and comprehend at a speed that keeps me engaged.
Then, I realized I assimilate information very differently based on the medium. For me, math is a very visual thing. Graphs and plots make mathematical concepts immediately understandable. For general learning, hearing someone talk about a topic is most effective for me. This is when I decided to give audiobooks a go. This has been transformational for me.
Any good audiobook app will allow for faster playback. I’ve trained myself to listen to books at 2x speed (or faster). This is easily 5x the speed I would comprehend the material if I physically read it. So it’s super effective for me. I listen to these books in my car during my commute. Audiobooks convert my commute from a time waster into probably the most valuable time I have in my day.
So why are books worth it? For me, books end up performing like the repetitive learning system of Anki (https://apps.ankiweb.net/). A good book is somewhat repetitive as it goes deep on a focus area. Spending 10+ hours over the period of a week or so consuming a topic and having time for my brain to stew on it is incredible. I can’t get this from pod casts or blog posts and other online content.
I only listen to non-fiction books, typically on topics around human psychology, business, and topics I hope to give me new insights.
Bottom line: books are worth it because they offer depth that I can’t get anywhere else. That depth is the value.