BC TECH
Saved by @zmbnski

So, today, for the first time in 25 (!) years of Apple, I downgraded. From the 2016 MacBook Pro to my 2013, which I had kept in a drawer...

 It was pretty simple to do—Apple Time Machine backups let me do it with one click.
That first tweet captures, in two pictures, how badly Apple has “lost the plot” (to quote @wylieprof). On the right is the Apple MagSafe adapter, from 2013. On the left, what I had “upgraded” to.
@wylieprof Thanks, Apple! I really was nostalgic for worrying about yanking my computer off the table.
@wylieprof Oh and I really appreciated not knowing if my computer was charging. What was great was the little whoop sound you used, so that the speaker before me could be informed I was charging my laptop.
@wylieprof Just kidding! That was lame. On the plus side I could now plug the charger in either side. (Except I couldn’t quite because one of the ports was faulty, and it wouldn’t charge properly—I was alerted to that by the salience of a non-whoop silence.)
@wylieprof What else? Oh! The mysterious double-space. At some point, your new keyboard started occasionally inserting two spaces when I only hit the spacebar once.
@wylieprof Maybe I was typing too hard? But then I noticed it elsewhere. For example, I’m pretty sure it happened to Mary Beard too, judging by the unexpected in her tweets. Hi Mary!
@wylieprof The new software updates were great, too. For example, at some point AirPlay stopped working. Fortunately I had yet to upgrade my iPhone, so I could still play music on the stereo.
@wylieprof Still, the upgrade was worth it. After four years, I had a hard drive that was... 50% larger, and a processor that was... 25% faster.
@wylieprof This made it easier when I stared losing work (for the first time in a decade) by unexpected application crashes, because I could load up Safari and... hang on... oop
@wylieprof I also had new friends. Like Laurel and Hardy! Hi guys.
@wylieprof These were so advanced that I had to upgrade their firmware when I first plugged them in (!) Also I think they were $60 each.
@wylieprof The computer itself was so skinny that when I carried these around I felt like a photographer’s assistant at a fashion shoot.
@wylieprof Making the trackpad extra large was great because my finger got a concussion running off the edge of the last one? Not really, but now I could randomly fail to click something if I rested my palm wrong.
@wylieprof This was the first time since the late-1990s Jobs reboot that I felt I was working for my computer, not the other way around.
@wylieprof The era of understated perfection is, in my opinion, over. Given the bugs that erupt with each incremental update now, I can’t even imagine the current team rolling out an entire rewrite of the OS, as they did for OS X. https://t.co/2lZn5RQm4w
@wylieprof One last example, a little more technical. Apple rolled out a new file system. It’s called APFS, you’ll get it free if you upgrade to High Sierra.
@wylieprof APFS forbids “hardlinks”. So if you do upgrade, all of your UNIX stuff will probably break. Why? Because screw you, that’s why.
@wylieprof Oh also—APFS is incompatibile with older versions of Time Machine. Apple can’t even not break its own stuff. And you can’t reformat back to the old system.
@wylieprof https://t.co/RD5XpCYTSm if you don’t believe me.
@wylieprof A new update was released today or so—Mojave (motto: Welcome to the Desert of the Real).
@wylieprof I learned this because people already figured out it breaks Mathematica.
@wylieprof A well-built machine is a beautiful thing. You get attached to excellence in them the way people get attached to the old Volkswagen Beatle.
@wylieprof So, support request to @AppleSupport. Please fire Johnny Ive, and take everyone else on a five year retreat to Tibet to meditate on non-being or something.
@wylieprof @AppleSupport We can wait.
@wylieprof @AppleSupport Or, someone start a tweet campaign and get @elonmusk to build a better laptop—something that will last twenty years and be more than a platform for failed AI voice assistants and marketing popups from Software Update.
To cheer everybody up, here is a list of cool people using macs. https://t.co/pToRotyQyX
https://t.co/NloM4XBgIN
https://t.co/JcUr9ZahSZ
https://t.co/NTmT4BC8dA
Here's why Al Gore lost the election
https://t.co/Oi7WM6vmpe
(Compare to Gore)
The Dixie Chicks?
Don't tell Kayne he forgot the adapter.
Unfriend (@SwiftOnSecurity)
I do not enjoy this user experience
"Mr Putin, I can't find our password?"

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This is a pretty valiant attempt to defend the "Feminist Glaciology" article, which says conventional wisdom is wrong, and this is a solid piece of scholarship. I'll beg to differ, because I think Jeffery, here, is confusing scholarship with "saying things that seem right".


The article is, at heart, deeply weird, even essentialist. Here, for example, is the claim that proposing climate engineering is a "man" thing. Also a "man" thing: attempting to get distance from a topic, approaching it in a disinterested fashion.


Also a "man" thing—physical courage. (I guess, not quite: physical courage "co-constitutes" masculinist glaciology along with nationalism and colonialism.)


There's criticism of a New York Times article that talks about glaciology adventures, which makes a similar point.


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So—probability. Do we really need it? This has been on my mind since 2017, when I finally sat down to think through quantum theory. (/n)

One thing that’s always struck me is how *late* probability theory came in intellectual history. We had integral calculus before we had probability. And probability is insanely simple, mathematically!

I’m tempted to say that probability theory is not, in fact, Lindy. Frequentist probability is (for all the usual reasons) best understood as a heuristic. Bayesian interpretations, by contrast, take the remarkable step of tying it to mental states.

You have to work very hard to convince yourself that beliefs really are “degrees of belief in sets of events” (or whatever). It’s not natural—and I won’t rehearse the whole story about rational choice and decision theory...

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Someone tosses a coin ten times; it comes up heads every time. What's the probability it comes up heads on the next toss? (Pretty darn high—part of @nntaleb's work is unprogramming you from your high-school rules of thumb.) Now consider the (related) Gambler's fallacy...

In this case, it's a theory about compensation: the worse one's luck is, the more likely it is to see a reversal. On the surface, it's irrational. The more bad luck you have, the more you accumulate evidence that the system is rigged.

But there's also an anthropic component. If the luck is bad enough, it starts to become inconsistent with your survival. You've accumulated evidence for correlations in the environment, but these correlations (may be) inconsistent with (people like you) being in this environment.

An example. You're in a city where everyone takes public transport. You encounter a string of bad delays. It's reasonable to conclude they'll end—otherwise people wouldn't take public transport. It's unlikely that you happened to show up right when the network collapses.

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Some thoughts worked out in a letter to a friend, which is the kind of thing you do when off Twitter for a glorious week. (🧵)

“Chance is ignorance”—the Bayesian story; all probabilities represent states of mind, not states of the world. One *could* put (some) chances “in the world”, but let’s take Occam’s Razor seriously...

That the probability of a fair coin coming up heads is 50% simply means that marginalizing (tracing, as the physicists say) over the hidden facts leaves you, nearly, maximally ignorant of the outcome.

Quantum uncertainty (access below!) poses an apparent challenge to this story. There seems to be nothing to be ignorant about when it comes to (say) electron spin—there is nothing “inside” the

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You are interviewed for multiple skills simultaneously. Cognitive skills, communication, leadership are a few to name. If the point is not finding a solution, then what is it? Let me explain.

Your interviewers try to understand what it feels like to work with you on a daily basis. An interview question is just a tool in achieving that, it is not there to specifically measure your skills on a topic but a tool to understand the depth of your thinking.

Before the interview starts, ask them what they want to get out of this interview. Good interviewers should already have a plan and a set of expectations. Ask them what you should do. Don't start coding yet. Ask them you should produce. Discussion, diagrams, pseudo code, code?

Then, start cracking the question. List whatever questions you think it is important to solve this question, ask your edge cases. Get to a point where you are discussing about pros/cons of the solutions. These steps are critical. Don't just start coding. Have a consensus first.
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2) Facebook engineered ways to access user's call history w/o alerting users:

Team considered access to call history considered 'high PR risk' but 'growth team will charge ahead'. @Facebook created upgrade path to access data w/o subjecting users to Android permissions dialogue.


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https://t.co/PwiRIL3v9x
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There’s nothing in the Agile Manifesto or Principles that states you should never have any idea what you’re trying to build.

You’re allowed to think about a desired outcome from the beginning.

It’s not Big Design Up Front if you do in-depth research to understand the user’s problem.

It’s not BDUF if you spend detailed time learning who needs this thing and why they need it.

It’s not BDUF if you help every team member know what success looks like.

Agile is about reducing risk.

It’s not Agile if you increase risk by starting your sprints with complete ignorance.

It’s not Agile if you don’t research.

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Product management and developers also need to be out with the team, conducting the research.

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1/ A lot of new consumer technologies have been introduced to US households in the last 100 years. But it's taken many of them - like the telephone - more than 50 years to get to the majority of the US. Why is that?


2/ We had to literally teach people how to use phone. Which end goes to your mouth, which goes to your ear. Say "hello" when people call. The motivation of consumers to talk to their friends has always been there, but we had to teach the behavior


3/ If you compare phones to the latest technologies, there's been a huge shift. Things are being picked up much faster.


4/ Even while there's been all this innovation recently, physically speaking, we are still the same human beings from 100,000 years ago.
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Sri Maha Bhairavar Rudhra alayam, Chengalpet, Tamilnadu

This temple is being constructed merely on the instructions from Bhairava by his devotee Shri Bhairava Siddhantham Swamy. The Temple is fully enshrinedin a transparent glass enclosure..1/n


with Rudrakshas on both the sides of the entrance This temple has a circular Sanctum Sanctorum which has twelve stepseach representing a sign of zodiac and after that twelve steps we find the supreme deity of this temple Sri Kshetra Paata Bhairava. 2/n


Beneath the Bhairava, in the lower level are installed the Ashta Bhairavas, SapthaRishis in the form of stones, and Saptha Kannis in the form of brass lamps. Thereare a number of little blue and white lights in the ceiling that is shaped like a dome.. 3/n


which give an ethereal atmosphere when switched on. The steps representthe twelve signs of the zodiac and when one steps over them to reach thesanctum sanctorum all the doshas pertaining to the horoscope are cleared onceand for all..4/n


The Sthala Vriksham ”Peepal Tree” which is grown on a pedestal, a trident which is considered as Bhairavi, Pancha Mukha Anjaneya, Prathyankara Devi, Subramanya, Rudra Vinayaga, Vaishnavi Devi, Naga Rudra, Eswara, Vana Durga etc. 5/5

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