Fast Company did a fantastic job collecting images that represent all the amazing work going on in the space industry. From 3d printed rocket components, to new battery development methods, to innovative star tracking navigation units, etc. Give the article a look to learn more.
There are countless image compression formats, and the world likely doesn’t need more. However, Dominic Szablewski was tinkering around with compressing RGB images and came up with his own lossless, super-fast, super-tiny compression algorithm called the Quite Ok Image compression algorithm.
While this is somewhat interesting in itself, the comments have a great discussion of how image compression has gone through a whole history of developments.
Perhaps you’ve seen this little drive in located on NW Skyline Blvd. These days it sits empty except for Christmas time when it has a Christmas tree in it.
It turns out this little landmark has an amazing back story. It was run by a WW II veteran called Old Ben (Benjamin Pachkofsky) that built the drive-in himself and also created a zip-line and a gigantic A-frame swing in the woods behind the building. It became a spot for people to come hang out and enjoy his creations and his food. Unfortunately, Ben seemed to suffer from the effects of the war via PTSD. His marriage ended in divorce and his son said he was a generous man that unfortunately needed help. Help that really wasn’t around back then.
The place now belongs to Scott Posey. Ben sold it to Posey for a song when he reached his 80’s. Posey has been approached countless times about people wanting to turn it into a 7-11, bikini baristas, and everything else you can imagine. Posey denied all the requests and hopes somehow to open it back up for it’s original style, but only time will tell.
Back in the day, you had to write all your code by hand a text editor like vi or emacs, run the compiler by hand from the command line, and debuggers were also command line/text controlled horrors that were particularly notable painful experiences.
Along came programming IDE’s (Integrated Development Environments), and things started getting much better. Integrated editor, building, and visual debugging. This transformed writing software greatly, improving developer productivity and lives. Along came auto-complete and symbol lookups and yet another milestone of ease was achieved.
Google has taken things to the next level. DeepMind now powers AlphaCode – an AI trained to generate code and they claim it is almost as good as an average human programmer. I have already written about new efforts such as Github Copilot to expand autocomplete to entire code blocks using AI, but AlphaCode solves whole problems. When given coding challenges used in human competitions, it achieved an estimated rank in the top 54% of coders. Google is not alone, Microsoft is now adapting OpenAI’s GPT-3 engine to function as a coding auto-completer as well.
If you want to read about one developer’s experience using Github Copilot, check his article from Wired out.
One potential issue is that these AI engines are trained from open-source projects. Analysis shows that most of the code they generate have serious security vulnerabilities. This means that bad actors might start publishing key code blocks with known vulnerabilities in order to spread these vulnerabilities into commercial projects.
While greatly simplified, and doesn’t take into account inflation (which you cannot ignore now that we’re experiencing 10% inflation), Networthify has a little tool to show you how much your current savings rate will generate retirement income.
Each year on July 22nd (Although the main day is July 22nd, this “fiesta” last three days and is often repeated on the last weekend of Sept), the city of Anguiano Spain honors Saint Mary Magdalene in an unusual way. The Whirling Stilt Dancers festival starts with the parade of the dancers and musicians at 10 am. At 12 pm there is a procession during which the dancers, always backwards, dance to the virgin along the way. Two hours later after the mass, the whirling (Danza de los Zancos) starts.
It seems that walking on stilts was common in this area of the country because it was a very damp zone, and the tall grasslands doesn´t allow the farmers to see the cattle. On the other hand the farmers used to dance to the virgin asking for good crops. Both traditions were brought together; every year in July eight dancers on stilts of almost 50 cm high whirls down the stairs of the church and the cobbled street that leads to the town hall. The whirling flight down the steep hill is precarious to say the least. The winner is the one who makes it the furthest.
Even as far back as the 80’s, companies and inventors were playing with the idea of using fiber optic cables to bring daylight into office spaces.
It was interesting to learn that there are indeed some buildings in Japan that have these systems. It seems pretty cool, but requires actual physical fiber optic cabling from the source to each light in the building. It also requires trackers that point the collectors continually at the sun, and they don’t work if it’s cloudy or at night. This makes it great for daytime offices with lots of yearly sunlight, but probably not great of apartments/homes or areas that have lots of cloudy days. It also makes me wonder if these transfer full-spectrum light – which includes UV light.
Still, it’s an interesting concept.
In 2013, Steven Wilhite told The New York Times, “The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both pronunciations. They are wrong. It is a soft ‘G,’ pronounced ‘jif.’ End of story.”
Steve Wilhite was best known for inventing the GIF file format in 1987 – and he even won a Webby Award. “It’s been an incredibly enduring piece of technology,” said David-Michel Davies, the executive director of The Webby Awards. “Even as bandwidth has expanded it has been very exciting to see how much cultural cachet the format has gotten.”
Mr. Wilhite, then working at CompuServe (the nation’s first major online service) knew the company wanted to display things like color weather maps. Because he had an interest in compression technologies, Mr. Wilhite thought he could help.
“I saw the format I wanted in my head and then I started programming,” he said in an e-mail. (He primarily uses e-mail to communicate now, after suffering a stroke in 2000.) The first image he created was a picture of an airplane.
The prototype took about a month and the format was released in June 1987.
“I remember when other people saw the GIF,” he said. Colleagues abandoned work on other black and white formats, he said, as graphics experts began to spread the GIF online. A triumph of speed and compression, the GIF was able to move as fast as Internet culture itself, and has today become the ultimate meme-maker.
Most people prepare for interviews by practicing their responses to the most common questions. It is obviously critical to demonstrate you are qualified for the job, but one largely overlooked fact is that job satisfaction and the reasons that people leave jobs is often related to the work environment, team dynamics, and management of the position. Right out of college, I know I was just happy to get a job. As you move through your career and as stakes go up for switching jobs (having to move, family, etc), you should also be taking the time to see if you actually want to work for and in this job.
So how do I as a candidate interview the position to see if I like it? There are a number of resources out there, but here are some really good questions you could be asking your future coworkers/employer. During most good interviews, the interviewer should give you a few minutes to ask your questions. Time is limited, so you should have your questions already. Also, you should likely have different questions for team members, management, and leads so you can cover as many bases as you can.
Some great ones to start with (with follow up questions if you want more info):
For fellow team members:
Company/team:
Manager:
Update: 2/3/2023
I just heard another good one to ask both the employees and managers:
If the answer is about achieving something new with the work or an aspirational goal – that’s a good sign the environment is good. If it’s about a toxic team situation or bad management – that’s a red flag.
Jacob ‘The Carpetbagger’ has a wonderful little Youtube channel in which he adventures around the country and does very down-to-earth video blogs on everything from small roadside attractions to Disneyworld. What I particularly like is that he does it all himself on a simple camera without the sponsored pre-canned messaging, fancy instagram treatments, and other disingenuous coverage that are used by many glossy online personalities. As someone that plans travel around the quirky things along the way, I love all the little places he visits – including one from my old back yard.
Recently, he did an update that discusses the serious experiences and impacts of running his small video blog. He talks about how he started posting quick weekend video adventures while working a normal day job. As it started picking up and got to the point it could pay for itself – that’s when things started to get more complex. He tells of his encounters and learning how to deal with very negative people and feedback (everything from how he holds the camera to what he would eat). He talks about the emotional and psychological toll it took on him. He talks about how people figured out where he worked and started harassing him and his coworkers to the point that his manager told him that he need to pick the job or the blog. He also talked about his transition from a 9-5 job to blogging full time and the effects on his marriage.
I think this is critical information that anyone looking to do what he did needs to know. I believe these impacts are also a topic we need to keep discussing as an increasingly online society. With a decade of social media under our belts, we’re now into our adult years and time to evaluate and put mature limits on social media.