In your view, is there a difference between micromanaging authorian culture compared to a consensus-driven culture where the employees all trust each other?
I've seen several different companies from the insidr, and each one has had vastly different cultures. Usually it is an implementation of the CEO/upper management's views of what "corporate culture" is. There's still usually a facade, but that facade is not necessarily disingenuous.
I still think there's a need for standardized APIs in this situation. At some point, the context constraints mentioned in the blog post have to get translated into some action with parameters. I'm guessing that action will be API calls to other Google products behind the Duplex Google Assistant UX.
"Ok Google, can you reschedule my Dr. Appointment this Friday for next week? I have a conflict." -> calls the Dr and reschedules -> adapts result to rebooking action with partners (ie, an api call to your Google calendar) -> applies action and responds to you.
There is still quite a bit missing from this to be a useful AI product. It's getting really close though. I can't wait until this makes it into Google Assistant and it can call a restaurant to ask about gluten free options while I'm driving.
You're absolutely right! There's a huge need for standardized APIs for interacting with outside systems for this use-case. In your example, your doctor's office.
In practical terms, there may be some minor issues such as incompatible multiple implementations and adoption costs. But that's made much easier to handle by a very small number of expected consumer systems.
As for interactions with end-result partners, well. I've worked with standards designed to represent such highly general cases (xcbl and cxml). They're invariably rife with interoperability problems and other issues arising from overly broad standards. These tend to not get better over time as much as one might hope, as it's not easy to continuously update standards at a reasonable speed across N target types of partners. Keeping up with how usage evolves is never easy.
The best approaches to this that I've seen in use are those that focus on providing a vehicle for arbitrary data for delivery to the app - like HTTP or TCP. Getting more specific is the route to madness. Which, unfortunately, is probably precisely the bit you'd most like standards around.
You're completely right. There's a very real and very important need for standards here. There just might be some issues worth mentioning that might arise from the attempt to create and rely on them.
The field is changing so quickly, but fast.ai is always ahead of the curve teaching modern techniques! Hats off to them for being able to keep up, AND share that with others.
But we are in the golden age of SparkFun! There are so many great project kits and microcontrollers that I wish I could've found as a kid at RadioShack.
Maybe it helps being rich, but just as a counter example, my grandfather was never rich. He was a clock-in/clock-out guy and still managed to spend a lot of time with me while I was growing up. He had a lot more patience than most of the "white collar" adults in my life ever did, and taught me lots of useful skills like how to fix a lot of electrical or mechanical things.
"It's better to be young, rich and healthy than old, sick and poor" is probably not the most novel insight worth writing down for the benefit of others.
You think 'a lot of things that take time are easier when you have the means to do whatever you want with your time' is something that eludes most people? About anything much, really, be it child rearing or laundry? I think that is very, very unlikely.
It could well be that you're right and noticing that not having to go to work frees up a lot of time is indeed a counterintuitive and valuable lifehack. It could also be that I'm right and it's an observation made of pure triteonium.
I'm sure we can both agree, though, that the gold standard for statistical significance is 30 Helens. 33 HN users is nowhere close to 30 Helens.
I've seen several different companies from the insidr, and each one has had vastly different cultures. Usually it is an implementation of the CEO/upper management's views of what "corporate culture" is. There's still usually a facade, but that facade is not necessarily disingenuous.