I've been using SwiftKey for 10 years (typing not swiping), and test ran FUTO for the last month.
FUTO improved a lot (I had tried it a year earlier also) but SwiftKey's suggestions are still a lot better in my opinion.
With SwiftKey I can just type roughly in the right spot without looking and the correct words will come out most of the time. FUTO still suggests a lot of nonsensical next words that just do not follow after the previous in English.
I hope it improves further so I can switch.
The voice models are great though, and they can be used as part of the keyboard or standalone.
I think this might scare some people off from management unnecessarily.
A lot of what's being described here is important for new managers to understand, but eventually, once you find your footing, you can start to determine where the rules can bend.
For instance, a lot of new managers struggle because they want to keep a foot in the IC world. I think most new managers would benefit from stepping away from the code for an extended period of time. But many experienced managers do eventually return back to writing code while still serving in a management role, although certainly not at the level they did before.
Likewise, it's really important for new managers to understand that friendship dynamics will change. But that doesn't mean that you can't foster very warm relationships with people who report to you. Just like a teacher-student relationship, you can have great fondness for each other while recognizing that there are some lines that absolutely can't be crossed.
If it scares you off, thats a good thing. A manager who doesn't want to do these things might not be an effective manager. I think its better to go in eyes open to what it really means. I think the author did a good job of that.
I was hoping for more upsides, but, I'm not surprised by the short list either.
It's a service-oriented job that attracts people who like to control other people. There are only so many upsides to a situation like that. Here's my favorite take on the subject:
> "Police business is a hell of a problem. It's a good deal like politics. It asks for the highest type of men, and there's nothing in it to attract the highest type of men. So we have to work with what we get—and we get things like this."
It confirmed that management would be a bad choice for me. If anything I think that the article is going to give people the ability to say "no" if they are on the fence.
I don't want to sell. I don't want to politic. I don't want to know about re-orgs before the employees whom it actually affects. I don't want to lay off someone because my team's profits are being siphoned by others. I don't want to carry upper management's BS and tell it to my coworkers with a straight face. And if you do, I hope it keeps you up a little bit at night.
Those are definitely the down sides. As a manager who has had to let people go, no matter how deserved, it is a part of the job that I wish I didn't have to do, and it does disturb my sleep and peace.
But there are some very meaningful upsides as well, and the one that rises above all the rest is that I genuinely love working with teams and helping them grow.
Based on your list of things you don't want to do, I would say that if you can enjoy the success and stability you wish to have while avoiding all of those things, then more power to you! But keep in mind that in most businesses, _somebody_ has to do those less desirable things, or the business isn't going to stay afloat.
I've seen people fired that produced 10x+ their salary in value. That certainly isn't desirable, nor is it necessary. In one case it was because a flailing upper manager was trying to find a scapegoat. I don't see ethical people get promoted to upper management. In fact, they seem to weed those people out on purpose.
I think any position of power attracts those with dark triad personality traits
The bigger the name of the company, the more attractive upper management is to these types of personalities.
If your idea of a satisfying career is navigating the various disorders associated with narcissists, egomaniacs, delusional, Machiavellian, for the status that it affords, upper management might be for you.
Mid to lower level management often just serves as the enforcement arm for this upper class. They make the “tough” decisions (which are not tough at all if you lack empathy), and force the managers under them to actually implement it (the real tough part)
The managers who have no trouble doing it (because they share the same traits) are obviously the best suited for promotion. And so it continues
Here's a concrete example. I hired somebody who was really impressive during the interview process, but then soon realized they just didn't have the right skills for the role. He wasn't a bad person. Had a family, and I knew it would be a big disruption for them to have to go through job searching again.
Another case. A guy I managed caused a lot of friction with one particular co-worker, and it came to a head when he he stepped way over the line and veered into personal attacks on a call. Had to let him go, and I was angry with him at the time, but it still pained me to do it and was on my mind for quite some time.
I agree those are two common scenarios where it would be painful. Those two people were not good fits for their roles, so hopefully they found something more appropriate.
As a manager, there are several qualities that I value highly in an engineer, and they all happen to begin with the letter C: Competent, Consistent, Curious, Caring, and Clear Communicators.
While SAT scores might act as a proxy for competency and possibly curiosity, they're not going to tell you much about whether the person is consistently reliable, whether they care about others and cooperate well, or whether their vocabulary or literary analysis skills have any correlation with their ability to read the room and tailor their communication to their audience.
If I were giving these job posters the benefit of the doubt, I would guess they're including this requirement for the same reason that musicians request particular colors of M&Ms in their riders. They want to weed out people (or bots) who aren't paying attention. Nevertheless, there are better ways to do that than demanding (and presumably filtering by) teenage performance metrics.
I met an HR manager who had worked for a local but well known company with a reputation for caring about things like GPA and SAT scores. She told me that remembering your SAT scores after college was a sign of a competitive attitude.
In the same sense that the high school quarterback continues to talk about the Big Game now that he’s an overweight retail employee making minimum wage years later.
I've seen what happens in engineering with those with low SAT math scores. They need others to do the math for them, or they just wing it.
I remember one who was trying to reduce the noise in an electronic amplifier. He spent days trying random things. Another engineer asked what he was doing, did a quick calculation, and put in an RC circuit that solved the problem.
Off-topic, but can an RC circuit really reduce noise? I can see how it would reduce distortion (which is not the same as noise), but adding passives is surely going to increase thermal noise?
You are correct, but an RC circuit is part of the amplifier circuit and you can do a lot to improve the signal to noise ratio (SNR) depending on frequencies/signals are trying to amplify versus the ones you want to filter out.
I see, so you want to band-limit the noise, and are willing to accept potentially raising the noise floor in the band-limited range, the idea being that if the original noise is sufficiently broad-band, this will still increase SNR?
Fair enough: I was reading the original comment as referring to (thermal) noise intrinsic to the amplifier design itself (as opposed to noise due to imperfections in DC supply or due to coupling with some external transmitter), but this makes more sense, and we should consider the whole system anyway.
The problem here seems to be that the person was unwilling or unable to ask for help when they needed it, not that they don't know math per se.
I don't know how to do that either, but "winging it" is not something that would occur to me. First I'd Google it and try to figure it out. If it turns out to be nontrivial, I would just ask for help.
And I wouldn't feel the least bit bad about it. After all, those same highly educated folks need my help with e.g. git a lot more often than most software needs serious math :)
No, that's not the problem, as you yourself admit in the false dichotomy you constructed in the second line of your post.
The problem is that, in your own words, they took days to fail to solve the problem. If they Googled the solution, and so it took them 30 or even 60 minutes to solve it, we wouldn't be having this conversation. If they asked their colleagues for help right away, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
Unless this particular role is going to be predominantly circuit design -- in which case I do have to wonder how this person got hired in the first place -- this is simply a stupid criterion to select on.
I would rather pay the engineer who knows how to solve problems even when they don't already know the answer, first and foremost. Beyond that, I would much rather pay the engineer who has practical, hands-on knowledge, that they don't teach in school. How to use git effectively, as already mentioned. How to debug production issues. What actions are and aren't safe to perform on a production server. What facilities the OS offers to get information about one's own process and the system itself. How different valid-on-paper approaches might actually play out in real life. When it's worth pursuing an exciting new technology, and when it probably won't be. Oh and of course, what new and updated technologies exist since your guy graduated Electronics 101 a decade or two ago in the first place.
You forgot that the SAT requirement is not exclusive but an additional data point. While I agree that it could narrow the path for truly good employees, I’d argue that an additional data point like SAT (+ GPA) could tell the employer a lot about consistency of the applicants. Or at least an interesting talking point (“I see you got a very high SAT score but your GPA was lower, what happened?”), if they care.
I think it could serve the purposes of hiring fresh/young graduates. However, it’s still weird if they requested it for people already 5-10 years or more in the industry.
I have been a supporter of Cures Within Reach, a nonprofit that focuses on repurposing drugs, especially for rare diseases. https://www.cureswithinreach.org
They have funded some important repurposed-drug studies for Huntingtons Disease, which runs in my family. For a disease like this, it's never going to make sense for major pharmaceutical companies to invest the effort to develop entirely new drugs, but by repurposing existing drugs, it gives people living with rare diseases a chance to ease symptoms.
> For a disease like [Huntingtons], it's never going to make sense for major pharmaceutical companies to invest the effort to develop entirely new drugs
This is ... not correct.
Roche, Regeneron, and Novartis all have novel HD drugs under development in tandem with smaller labs (Ionis, Alnylam, and PTC respectively), and then smaller labs like uniQure and Wave Life Sciences do too. Novartis have already dropped $1bn on the partnership with a committed $2b more. In addition, there are a bunch of incentive schemes for diseases like HD: both the FDA and EMA have offered orphan-drug designation to therapies for HD, the FDA does expedited programmes and can offer RMAT designation for drugs like AMT-130.
With some luck (which is always in short supply for HD treatments, sadly), people with the disease might be able to get a single-injection treatment in the next 12 months[0].
I'm scratching my head about why they would venture into an entirely different field like this, one with tremendous regulatory hurdles, if they know (and surely they must know) that radiologists are going to pan the results.
It's like if LeBron announced he was switching to bowling and was going to revolutionize the sport, then rolled a gutter ball.
Not sure. Image reconstruction/generation is a computationally intensive process, and in recent years DL based methods for improve image reconstruction have advanced fields like musculoskeletal MRI imaging. The physics behind this idea are interesting, but will have to wait to see if they produce images with high anatomic detail.
It's a juxtaposition of optimistic futurism (in 5-10 years, most people will just rely on robocars and robotaxis) and anti-regulatory sentiment (critical of the requirement that elevators accommodate stretchers).
Some of the more difficult problems are hand-waved away as, "We could solve this if we just put our engineering hats on."
That said, I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. It's true that other countries and cultures have very different approaches to residential development. But a big part of that is cultural differences in how people live and what they want. Cultures that are more family-oriented are naturally going to have housing that is more family-oriented.
I just spent a week in Austin and took a half dozen Waymo rides. Robotaxies are definitely here and they are awesome. There's no reason why they won't be coming for Walnut Creek.
I think Waymo was approved to operate in Walnut Creek and a lot of northern California in November 2025, but hasn't really expanded outside the peninsula.
Since then, Waymo has actually regressed and stopped driving on freeways, which is a big problem for suburbs. Distances are farther and parking is more available, which suggests people would be taking Waymo less than in more dense areas.
Being against bad housing regulations is not "anti-regulatory sentiment". Some regulations just aren't good. We shouldn't valorize rules for the sake of rules.
I am curious about the energy/expense of getting water that has been "consumed" by data centers ready for other use (e.g. drinking water), versus the energy/expense of getting water that has been "consumed" by residential users ready for the same use.
To my understanding, the only thing that changes when water is used for data centers is its temperature.
That's a lot different than residential use, where it's used in toilets and needs to undergo significant wastewater treatment to be cleaned enough to be re-used.
So how do we compare apples to oranges for these very different use cases?
Update: It appears my assumption about the only thing changing in the data center case is temperature. For much of that water, a phase change occurs (evaporative cooling), so it is no longer accessible to be recycled.
Yeah the main problem is just that the cheapest/easiest way of getting rid of heat is evaporation*. Once it's evaporated it's obviously not economic to try and get it back at that point. You could have a closed loop system sinking heat into a lake or the sea, even better it could go into a heat network heating peoples homes. All those things are just more 'hard' than ordering a cooling tower.
*
In air-cooled datacentres an approach is "direct evaporative cooling". They might take 30°C outside air and spray a fine mist into it, cooling it to perhaps 25°C before it enters the servers. After passing through the servers the air might leave at around 38°C. The water is now dispersed as humidity in a large volume of exhaust air. Recovering that water would require condensing it back out of the air, which means removing huge amounts of latent heat, it would be cheaper to just use 'traditional' compressor based cooling in the first place.
Cooling towers (which are used in many 'ai' facilities) have essentially the same problem. Servers reject heat into a water loop, and the cooling tower then cools that water by evaporating a portion of it into the atmosphere. The water that leaves as vapour is the "consumed" portion. While some liquid water remains in the system and a small amount is discharged as concentrated blowdown that can be treated and reused relatively easily, the majority of the consumed water has been converted into atmospheric moisture as above.
I am sorry, should have put up a warning there, but You can do sem unsetup, if you go to the github, you will understand more about the way to reverse it.
Uninstalling a git hook isn't exactly rocket science. If you consider this user-hostile, you must have a terrible time using git in general, since it's not exactly the most noob friendly vcs.
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