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Gods, yes, this. The FitBit app is like someone said "Let's use a wonderful asynchronous architecture so we won't block on retrieving data!" and then completely ignored all the ways that might lead to terrible UX if implemented poorly.

My steps stick at 0, then suddenly are the total of the last 3 days' worth. I log food, and it re-populates the "quantity" field with the old value after I edit it, sometimes up to 8-10 times in a row. My sleep data takes a roulette-spin amount of time to go get processed in the cloud and redownloaded, and even once the main dashboard has the info, the "Sleep" detail page will refuse to admit that I slept last night for another 3d20 minutes.

It's like someone connecting the pieces of a car with Slinkys instead of bolts because they're more flexible. If I didn't like the hardware so much I'd have switched ages ago.


I glanced at their latest code push a few days back, and some of the bugfixes/updates were related to presentation on mobile, so it's definitely something they're paying attention to and improving over time. (They're not blazing-fast, since the ratio of codebase-size to programmer-time is high, but they're persistent.)


In addition to the public-health issues of heart attacks and car accidents, the time-swaps are also a huge PITA for parents of young children. Kids between half a year and three years old have sleep routines that don't shift just because someone says the clocks have changed.

Fall back an hour? Congrats, your wake-up time just went from 5:30 AM to 4:30 AM because that's when your kid's still getting up. Spring forward an hour? OK, you just lost an hour from that shining window between when your kid goes to sleep and your own bedtime when you can actually get other stuff done.


A couple ways:

1) By thinking about them in other modes. I have an internal monologue, but it's not so much "the only way I can think" as "a thing that happens that comments as I think, and can be used to talk through things in my head". Eg: I'm also a pretty strong visual/spatial thinker, I can recall scents OK, and I'm reasonably facile with numbers; all of these sorts of thinking / recollection feel different as I do them.

Some may involve the inner monologue in an assistive role - eg, for math, my mental voice will often either narrate or speak key numbers as I complete steps, which allows me to use audio-memory as well as visual-memory to keep track of all the things I'm operating on.

2) Dynamically created neologisms that refer to particular not-easily-describable thoughts. Though in many cases, my brain may not create an actual word but just think "THAT thing" where "THAT" is accompanied by the concept in question, or some association/shorthand of it.


I think it is a good idea to try to give things names. The named thing need not be very precisely defined, and it can change, or we can find a better name for it or both.


This how I think too.


I'd wager because strong emotion tends to result in strong memories, and waiting for a needed ride that isn't showing up is stressful, particularly if you have no insight into where the right might be or if/when it's arriving.

I have memories of several times I was stood up or unreasonably delayed by bad taxi service / rideshare service, and the higher-stress ones (e.g., when I was trying to catch a plane) are the most vivid. One's from over a decade ago - I can't remember where I was going, but I remember the room I was in, pacing back and forth, calling the taxi dispatcher for the 3rd time.


Agreed. At one point I looked up their APIs, planning to do something pretty simple... and it just wan't even possible.

They also blew a lot of time tinkering with minutae / fringe features while fairly basic functionality was sub-par.

Still, on balance I've found G+ both useful and fun, and I'm annoyed it's shutting down. I'm growing more + more wary of relying on any Google services to be around in N years' time.


FWIW, I'm pretty sure that "tearing someone's work apart" doesn't require "tearing the person apart / humiliating them"... and I suspect it's the former rather than the latter which is, in the right contexts, useful in learning / improvement.


Well said. You can tear the work apart if needed but don't get personal. Ever.


I found that a good way to do this is to try and guide the person's thoughts carefully towards the point that you are trying to make. The monent of realization that this hopefully creates is a strong teaching moment. And they tend to experience this as emotional high points themselves when they manage to take up your train of thought and complete it.


I may have misunderstood or be misremembering, but isn't that what's called “the Socratic method”? Which seems to imply that this ought to be known pretty generally, even among Linux kernel developers. It's not as if it were some new-fangled weird idea out of left field...


You mean, the work and the person are completely unrelated?


No, but what is your aim?

If your aim is to make yourself feel better by putting someone down, then sure, I guess the person is responsible for the code, go nuts.

The aim of any adult should be to get a contribution without the flaws. If that's your aim, then telling someone they are stupid or whatever, at best, does nothing. At worst, they never contribute again.


How can you produce good work if you never improve yourself? If going personal can improve someone and then improve their work, whats the argument again that we shouldn't go personal?

Hurt feelings?


Yes, feelings matter.

"Going personal", as the grandparent pointed out, doesn't help anyone improve themselves. You can point out issues with someone's contribution without attacking them, and that's all they need to improve.

If someone is incapable or refuses to learn from that, then you can say that they need to before you can accept contributions from them, but attacking them personally is just unacceptable.


What would you consider "going personal"?

If student is lazy or didn't think his work through - is it personal to call student on that - call him/her lazy? Tell him/her "you're not thinking!"?

Surprisingly - some people take personally critique of their work.


Telling someone they are lazy or they didn't think isn't critique of their work, it's a statement about them as a person.

If the work is wrong or bad, explain why. Insulting someone doesn't help them improve.

If you argument is people won't change unless they are made to feel bad, people said the same thing about physical pain - banning corporal punishment would mean no child would learn again. That was nonsense, and so is the idea that making people feel bad is necessary for them to improve.


> If you see something stupid, call it out. If I’m doing something stupid or say something wrong, call me out!

...but that can be done politely, or not(†). In my experience, being polite doesn't add a high cost to calling someone out, makes the person being called out less upset on average, and generally improves the quality of ensuing answers/discourse (because those involved aren't burning emotional energy on pushing their anger to the background). Both of those latter two things are good.

Sure, there are some people who can take a flaming load of unfiltered criticism to the face and remain unfazed, but assuming that that's the _norm_ doesn't seem especially realistic.

(† = Or in between - "polite" is not a boolean. It's not even a numeric measurement; one can be polite/rude in different sorts of ways.)


The cost of excessive politeness can be that the person doesn't get the message. I've seen people waste hours on the wrong problem because the person giving feedback was overly polite, and also things just reach an impasse with no progress made because everyone's being too polite to point out the elephant in the room.

I think a better word is "respectful." You can be direct and blunt, as long as you're respectful.


Is anybody really suggesting politeness as a substitute for clearly stating the problem and expectations?

I mean there are really two axes here, right? You can be rude+vague, or polite+precise, etc.

              Precision
                 ^
                 |
                 |
  Rudeness <-----|-----> Politeness
                 |
                 |
                 v
              Vagueness


Yeah. I worked a 3-day week for 6-7 years, and overall it worked really well for both my employer (who got a more productive employee) and me.

From my side, the biggest drawback was that it was a sort of golden handcuffs - I almost certainly stayed there longer than I otherwise would have because getting an equivalent setup elsewhere would have such a pain.

My impression was that the biggest drawback on my employer's side (after hashing out the initial bureaucracy/paperwork) was my more limited availability for meetings.


> I almost certainly stayed there longer than I otherwise would have because getting an equivalent setup elsewhere would have such a pain.

Would you consider freelancing? It usually affords more flexible working hours.


As the saying goes, when you work for yourself, while in theory you can "work your own hours", in practise what generally happens (at least initially) is you work all the hours.


> As someone who went from working a 5-day week to a 4-day week, I feel like a 4-day week is a 'sweet spot' - I'm just as productive as I was working a 5-day week, but when I work any less than 30 hours a week (e.g. when I take a day off), my productivity always goes down.

Perhaps - but I suspect it depends on the person and the details of both job and workplace.

I spent about 6 years working a 3-day, and it went really well. However, it was more vulnerable to constant-cost outside factors like "unneeded meetings".


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