Right. And why the hell can't Facebook sell non-targeted ads on WhatsApp? If the users are there, advertisers will follow.
(1) Non-targeted ads compete with every other advertising medium -- targeting is attractive to advertisers and they are willing to pay a premium (2) Non-targeted ads annoy you users approximately as much as targeted ads. Some users like targeted ads. Some find them creepy.
In a nutshell, all ads have a negative cost in terms of user experience, so you might as well milk it for all the revenue possible,
I strongly suspect you are onto something important. If you are a young women with a full set of social skills and an A- in calculus, the world is your oyster: you have the mental horsepower to succeed as a doctor, lawyer, engineer, scientist, etc. -- pretty much anything. So, is such a person more likely to choose an exciting career in IT dominated by lots of young men with uncertain social skills, or do you choose to try to cure cancer while working with a very gender and ethnically diverse peers? Or maybe be a lawyer and get the more certain $250k per year salary? Or be a doctor and save lives? If the world is your oyster, maybe IT is not that attractive?
Unscrupulous project management shops with little technical expertise will suck your business dry by proclaiming that "the customer is always right!" and doing whatever you ask. As a project manager, it is your job to discover what your client wants--not what they're asking for, but what they expect to achieve. If they want you to build something and it won't achieve their purposes, you push back. They can cut the contract or force things through their executive suites if they want, and it's your job to drive them that far if they're trying to make unnecessary and damaging scope changes that will harm their business and ultimately cause the project to fail by delivering something not appropriate or functional.
They call that "Agile"; that's not agile. Iterative and incremental delivery is agile: show each workable unit so the customer can test, analyze, and give feedback before you go basing the next piece on that. This increases customer interaction frequency and reduces risk by continuously validating that the project is developing as expected and actually fits the needs of the business and the product. Running around with no plan and no governance isn't agile; it's bullshit.
Of course I like to get shit done; a lot of people seem to just like money.
In a nutshell, it sounds like you know your stuff. But project managers with your perspective and sufficient subject area expertise (or team with experts who can assist) are not easy to find, apparently.
I would emphasize your point that "the customer is always right" can be a CYA gambit for bad behavior. I would also say that services shops that brag about CMM5 are often playing a variant of the same game. After all, it is really not that difficult to find contractors who can document their work precisely if given extremely explicit and detailed instructions; what is genuinely valuable are those who can achieve good results for the customer in the face of ambiguity.
Better question: why aren't they rewriting this stuff?
Because the actual requirements are pretty complex and easily underestimated. If you underestimate the complexity of a core system, the replacement project will be very expensive and could easily fail regardless of how much you pay. What makes it worse is these services shops like Accenture love big messy projects with vague requirements because they can make bank on the endless late game change requests that are necessary for the system to be usable.
It is not actually rare for big companies like banks and insurance companies to blow $50-100 million on replacement projects that fail. Literally. But the cost are rolled into some generic multiyear infrastructure improvement project and the CIT is forced out. Bummer.
IME the very best people in every endeavor are looking to get better work from themselves and everyone around them. And while that is not always pleasant, they have a very clear focus on "playing the ball, not the man".
It is the second tier that is disproportionately filled with assholes -- the people with some real talent but are shackled by their own shortcomings and are never going to be the best, but like to pretend otherwise and take out their frustrations on others to demonstrate their "self-confidence".
Well, if bullying is acceptable, than there is ground to complain about "bullying" with a code of conduct in response. Sow the wind. Reap the whirlwind.
I would bet a very large amount of money that most of these exchange hacks are inside jobs. It is probably not an "accident" that so much was in the hot wallet, because one of the people whose jobs it is make intelligent decisions about such things did not want an appropriate amount. Note also how it took multiple days to discover the theft.
Is it really so hard to monitor the appropriate blockchains and figure out if your hot wallet is being drained? Is it really so hard to be notified within 1 hour that there is a huge problem?
The reason easy and obvious risk mitigation measures were not taken is because someone(s) did not want to mitigate risk.
When the culture of the group says it is okay to make ad hominem attacks, then questions of motives are inevitable. Cut the gordian knot by talking about code by discussing the actual code and not the people writing it.
I get a call twice a week circa noon in Mandarin. What I have read is it is a threat that I need to make good on a bogus debt or they will turn me in to ICE>
There might be limitation in our neural physiology, but this math model might explain while paying for "better hardware" is not worth much.
There is a rule of thumb in movie sound editing that there is a hard limit in the number of tracks of distinct sound that should be in the film at any point in time. IIRC, the number is four. (Maybe 5?) . If you go further, the sound is perceived as muddy.
Secrecy also protects suspects who may be innocent.
Hypothetically speaking, rather than announce that "Chinese scientists are spying for China" and end up tarring the reputation of a dozen people, they could do a careful investigation and winnow the suspect list down to the actual 1 or 2 people who are responsible for a particular suspect device.
It is a well written piece, backed by reasoned arguments, but the conclusion is not obviously correct. When a word's primary use is an insult, it is not surprising that someone does not take kindly to a doctor using the term in a technically correct but unfamiliar usage.
Rehabilitating words does not seem like an easy thing. Would we have good examples of success there?
No. It has to be overall more practical than paying the blackmarket price for dollars or euros from your friendly neighborhood mafia guy. The proliferation of cell phones makes this seem plausible. But ultimately, most regular citizens will have to find someone who can exchange fistfuls of the crappy national currency into crypto and back again some day down the road, which is probably the very same friendly neighborhood mafia guy.
Challenging authority with reasoned arguments, which some of these students did do, is a good thing. Just because the argument is reasoned does not mean the conclusion need be accepted, of course.
Jumping to the conclusion that they are "bubble wrapped" or "fragile flowers" just because you disagree with an argument is emotionalism, something a competent authority does not need to resort to. Adults mimicking the kinds of emotionalism that adolescents are famously annoying for does not seem like an auspicious strategy for teaching better behavior or wiser decisions. In fact, it undermines your authority by suggesting that namecalling works in lieu of reason.
No, the students are correct to question and challenge the requirement. "We" should be able to explain to them why it is important, how those who are poor at this can learn to improve, and how/what kind of assistance is available to those who experience extreme discomfort.
Throwing a label at these students only buttresses their suspicion: those adults who claim authority do not know crap.
While I expect cryptocurrencies to not disappear, what kills them is when the bounties earned are less than other uses for that kind of computing power. Thus an individual cryptocurrency could very easily effectively disappear as performance lags and volatility adds implicit costs, eaten by other cryptocurrencies and more valuable uses for the GPU cycles.
A friend of mine has nearly three decades experience in this space and he said his company looked at investing in Theranos. Company policy absolutely disallowed writing big checks without seeing peer reviewed journal articles and/or data in lab notebooks. They were told: no way -- our data is awesome and too secret to show. So the conversation was over.
He found it very "interesting" to see which companies failed to follow reasonable and common best practices for the industry.
It is a fair point, but I would say that all Waymo cares about for the moment is some good numbers for the PR. In the long run, this is not going to cut it.
We only need so many historians. But history as a BA is an effective means of learning practical critical thinking skills, outside of the STEM fields.
What does a history student actually do? A bit simplified, it goes like: Read a bunch of information about a topic Consider previous analyses about topic Form a reasonable theory Create arguments to support the theory and back that with historical evidence/citations Anticipate the main counterarguments, and counter argue with evidence
The are reasons so many future lawyers got a degree in history -- the basic methodology of legal argument and a history paper are very similar (with law having a higher level of precision, hopefully).
The self proclaimed intelligentsia look pretty dumb
"Intelligentsia" is a accolade given to someone with a track record of persuasive and sophisticated arguments about complex topics. It is not something someone gets to claim about themselves, 'cuz they threw a little political rally on campus and yelled a lot.
"Self proclaimed intelligentsia" is chock-filled with people entirely lacking in self-awareness. They are too easy fodder for Straw Man arguments.
You have seen some the left wing nutters. Have you noticed the right wing nutters whining about "avocado toast" and "virtue signaling" in the same rant? Talk about unintentional irony!
Slashdot Mirror
Right. And why the hell can't Facebook sell non-targeted ads on WhatsApp? If the users are there, advertisers will follow.
(1) Non-targeted ads compete with every other advertising medium -- targeting is attractive to advertisers and they are willing to pay a premium
(2) Non-targeted ads annoy you users approximately as much as targeted ads. Some users like targeted ads. Some find them creepy.
In a nutshell, all ads have a negative cost in terms of user experience, so you might as well milk it for all the revenue possible,
I strongly suspect you are onto something important. If you are a young women with a full set of social skills and an A- in calculus, the world is your oyster: you have the mental horsepower to succeed as a doctor, lawyer, engineer, scientist, etc. -- pretty much anything. So, is such a person more likely to choose an exciting career in IT dominated by lots of young men with uncertain social skills, or do you choose to try to cure cancer while working with a very gender and ethnically diverse peers? Or maybe be a lawyer and get the more certain $250k per year salary? Or be a doctor and save lives? If the world is your oyster, maybe IT is not that attractive?
Unscrupulous project management shops with little technical expertise will suck your business dry by proclaiming that "the customer is always right!" and doing whatever you ask. As a project manager, it is your job to discover what your client wants--not what they're asking for, but what they expect to achieve. If they want you to build something and it won't achieve their purposes, you push back. They can cut the contract or force things through their executive suites if they want, and it's your job to drive them that far if they're trying to make unnecessary and damaging scope changes that will harm their business and ultimately cause the project to fail by delivering something not appropriate or functional.
They call that "Agile"; that's not agile. Iterative and incremental delivery is agile: show each workable unit so the customer can test, analyze, and give feedback before you go basing the next piece on that. This increases customer interaction frequency and reduces risk by continuously validating that the project is developing as expected and actually fits the needs of the business and the product. Running around with no plan and no governance isn't agile; it's bullshit.
Of course I like to get shit done; a lot of people seem to just like money.
In a nutshell, it sounds like you know your stuff. But project managers with your perspective and sufficient subject area expertise (or team with experts who can assist) are not easy to find, apparently.
I would emphasize your point that "the customer is always right" can be a CYA gambit for bad behavior. I would also say that services shops that brag about CMM5 are often playing a variant of the same game. After all, it is really not that difficult to find contractors who can document their work precisely if given extremely explicit and detailed instructions; what is genuinely valuable are those who can achieve good results for the customer in the face of ambiguity.
Better question: why aren't they rewriting this stuff?
Because the actual requirements are pretty complex and easily underestimated. If you underestimate the complexity of a core system, the replacement project will be very expensive and could easily fail regardless of how much you pay. What makes it worse is these services shops like Accenture love big messy projects with vague requirements because they can make bank on the endless late game change requests that are necessary for the system to be usable.
It is not actually rare for big companies like banks and insurance companies to blow $50-100 million on replacement projects that fail. Literally. But the cost are rolled into some generic multiyear infrastructure improvement project and the CIT is forced out. Bummer.
IME the very best people in every endeavor are looking to get better work from themselves and everyone around them. And while that is not always pleasant, they have a very clear focus on "playing the ball, not the man".
It is the second tier that is disproportionately filled with assholes -- the people with some real talent but are shackled by their own shortcomings and are never going to be the best, but like to pretend otherwise and take out their frustrations on others to demonstrate their "self-confidence".
Well, if bullying is acceptable, than there is ground to complain about "bullying" with a code of conduct in response. Sow the wind. Reap the whirlwind.
History is a blockchain. The protocol does not support reversals.
I would bet a very large amount of money that most of these exchange hacks are inside jobs. It is probably not an "accident" that so much was in the hot wallet, because one of the people whose jobs it is make intelligent decisions about such things did not want an appropriate amount. Note also how it took multiple days to discover the theft.
Is it really so hard to monitor the appropriate blockchains and figure out if your hot wallet is being drained?
Is it really so hard to be notified within 1 hour that there is a huge problem?
The reason easy and obvious risk mitigation measures were not taken is because someone(s) did not want to mitigate risk.
Inside job.
When the culture of the group says it is okay to make ad hominem attacks, then questions of motives are inevitable. Cut the gordian knot by talking about code by discussing the actual code and not the people writing it.
I get a call twice a week circa noon in Mandarin. What I have read is it is a threat that I need to make good on a bogus debt or they will turn me in to ICE>
There might be limitation in our neural physiology, but this math model might explain while paying for "better hardware" is not worth much.
There is a rule of thumb in movie sound editing that there is a hard limit in the number of tracks of distinct sound that should be in the film at any point in time. IIRC, the number is four. (Maybe 5?) . If you go further, the sound is perceived as muddy.
Secrecy also protects suspects who may be innocent.
Hypothetically speaking, rather than announce that "Chinese scientists are spying for China" and end up tarring the reputation of a dozen people, they could do a careful investigation and winnow the suspect list down to the actual 1 or 2 people who are responsible for a particular suspect device.
It is a well written piece, backed by reasoned arguments, but the conclusion is not obviously correct. When a word's primary use is an insult, it is not surprising that someone does not take kindly to a doctor using the term in a technically correct but unfamiliar usage.
Rehabilitating words does not seem like an easy thing. Would we have good examples of success there?
Quadruple rot-13 for me. Just try to crack that!
Surely he got the idea from his side gig as the Green Hornet.
No. It has to be overall more practical than paying the blackmarket price for dollars or euros from your friendly neighborhood mafia guy. The proliferation of cell phones makes this seem plausible. But ultimately, most regular citizens will have to find someone who can exchange fistfuls of the crappy national currency into crypto and back again some day down the road, which is probably the very same friendly neighborhood mafia guy.
Challenging authority with reasoned arguments, which some of these students did do, is a good thing. Just because the argument is reasoned does not mean the conclusion need be accepted, of course.
Jumping to the conclusion that they are "bubble wrapped" or "fragile flowers" just because you disagree with an argument is emotionalism, something a competent authority does not need to resort to. Adults mimicking the kinds of emotionalism that adolescents are famously annoying for does not seem like an auspicious strategy for teaching better behavior or wiser decisions. In fact, it undermines your authority by suggesting that namecalling works in lieu of reason.
No, the students are correct to question and challenge the requirement. "We" should be able to explain to them why it is important, how those who are poor at this can learn to improve, and how/what kind of assistance is available to those who experience extreme discomfort.
Throwing a label at these students only buttresses their suspicion: those adults who claim authority do not know crap.
"Damn expensive" means what? Here in the USA we pay about 50% more as a portion of our GDP for our healthcare, overall, compared to Canada.
While I expect cryptocurrencies to not disappear, what kills them is when the bounties earned are less than other uses for that kind of computing power. Thus an individual cryptocurrency could very easily effectively disappear as performance lags and volatility adds implicit costs, eaten by other cryptocurrencies and more valuable uses for the GPU cycles.
Sure. The effective way to do that is to build more housing, so the less well to do will not get priced out.
A friend of mine has nearly three decades experience in this space and he said his company looked at investing in Theranos. Company policy absolutely disallowed writing big checks without seeing peer reviewed journal articles and/or data in lab notebooks. They were told: no way -- our data is awesome and too secret to show. So the conversation was over.
He found it very "interesting" to see which companies failed to follow reasonable and common best practices for the industry.
It is a fair point, but I would say that all Waymo cares about for the moment is some good numbers for the PR. In the long run, this is not going to cut it.
We only need so many historians. But history as a BA is an effective means of learning practical critical thinking skills, outside of the STEM fields.
What does a history student actually do? A bit simplified, it goes like:
Read a bunch of information about a topic
Consider previous analyses about topic
Form a reasonable theory
Create arguments to support the theory and back that with historical evidence/citations
Anticipate the main counterarguments, and counter argue with evidence
The are reasons so many future lawyers got a degree in history -- the basic methodology of legal argument and a history paper are very similar (with law having a higher level of precision, hopefully).
The self proclaimed intelligentsia look pretty dumb
"Intelligentsia" is a accolade given to someone with a track record of persuasive and sophisticated arguments about complex topics. It is not something someone gets to claim about themselves, 'cuz they threw a little political rally on campus and yelled a lot.
"Self proclaimed intelligentsia" is chock-filled with people entirely lacking in self-awareness. They are too easy fodder for Straw Man arguments.
You have seen some the left wing nutters. Have you noticed the right wing nutters whining about "avocado toast" and "virtue signaling" in the same rant? Talk about unintentional irony!