I rolled this out when it was "Facebook at Work" at an education non-profit I was working at in Cambodia. It was generally successful and useful for doing the type on internal storytelling we were trying to do. Particularly because teachers and staff didn't have, need or want Slack.
It was loads better than Google+, which we had tried before.
These days I suspect things like Slack started to take over here, but for that particular time and place it was a great fit.
Teams is bundleware, people don't use it because they want to, but because it was delivered by the IT contracts for microsoft products and is hard to un-bundle (until the EU stepped in and they are now making it optional).
I suspected that MS will play some pricing tactics to make this uneventful. A search turned up:
> First, beginning October 1, 2023, we will unbundle Teams from our Microsoft 365 and Office 365 suites in the EEA and Switzerland. We will instead simply sell these offerings without Teams at a lower price (€2 less per month or €24 per year).
For any company already using MS/Office 365, €2 is pretty low but with Slack at $7.25 USD it still seems viable.
So when you want to use email on your phone you first open a web browser, then navigate and sign in to your email service? I don't know anyone who does that, do you get some benefits from doing it that way (if i understood correctly)?
I will say, i use Firefox for YouTube rather than the native app, but only because Firefox extensions _infinitely_ improve the browsing and viewing experience (ad blocker, distraction blockers, subscription grouping and sorting, automatic resolution selection).
I do this on a couple of devices where I'm not logged into accounts at the device level, so app stores are not always available. I end up using the browser for most things, and it works great. The browser saves my sign-ins, and I bookmark sites like apps to make them easy to access. Works really well, dodges all the weird app stuff (app store exclusivity, permissions, app upgrades, etc.). This is all Android though, so I can add all my browser add-ons that make the web usable, which helps the overall experience tremendously.
Why would that matter? Certainly, important to know the why, but more important is the outcome. "Who are you selling to?" and "Who has the spend/budget?" are most important. Tragic, for sure.
If Teams is problematic enough, and enough upper-middle folks who have to use it are unhappy and want more productive tools, the guys with the spending power may decide otherwise. Salaries are a far bigger expense than chat software licenses; wasting 1% of time of 50 highest-paid employees would tip the scale on numbers alone.
"You don't get it Steve, that doesn't matter." [1]
That actually does not matter if Teams is making larger progress than Slack. I prefer Slack over Teams too, but to disregard the market force and market position of Teams is naive.
> It was loads better than Google+, which we had tried before.
Most platforms were objectively better than Google+, but it's original implementation (with the drag-able 'Circles') will always be the most missed social network, in my view.
It's transition to small-business focus and then eventual shuttering will always be, in my opinion, the loss of the only truly whimsical social network by a large company. (Path was equally awesome, but the web version basically never rolled out and it died a sad death as well.)
Interesting - this was actually a feature that got me to convert. I have some slight annoyances with how it handles natural pauses as I collect my thoughts and speak, but overall it's been great.
I've had some interesting discussions and it's helped me structure some thoughts by asking questions and follow-ups, then summarizing our conversation... all while I'm on a walk.
One fun thing I did with my family was have it do an interactive adventure story starring us. We had an adventure, and then used the built in DALL-E to generate images of scenes from our adventure.
While walking the dog today, it talked me through some trade-offs between DBSCAN and isolation forests. Walking + verbalizing the problem is a very different and positive experience for me.
I've also used it several times on ~15-20min drives to memorize something I wanted to have available for immediate recall. I had it chunk & quiz me, and by the end of the drive I had it down pat. Fun use of drive time.
A word of caution - I've asked ChatGPT 3.5 to generate quizzes based on books before and while most answers were right, a few were technically wrong, and some were outright fabrications (presented very confidently!)
On a computer, I'd paste in a corpus of some sort as a regular ChatGPT message - just because it's easier to accumulate a big string. Note with GPT4 Turbo and the recent UI upgrades, the context window is so large now that you can paste a sizable body of knowledge, possibly even as an attached file.
I'd then switch to the phone and retrieve the chat from History.
Here's an example prompt I just used to help my son prepare for a DMV written test:
```
I'm going to paste a large list of questions and answers and then switch to voice mode. Once I indicate that I'm ready, begin quizzing me on these questions. Feel free to rephrase slightly. My goal is to achieve complete retention of all of these questions through quizzing and spaced repetition. The questions are California DMV questions. I am preparing to take the written test.
1. *Q:* You may drive off of the paved roadway to pass another vehicle.
*A:* Under no circumstances.
2. *Q:* You are approaching a railroad crossing with no warning devices and are unable to see 400 feet down the tracks in one direction. The speed limit is...
*A:* 15 mph.
...
```
> I have some slight annoyances with how it handles natural pauses as I collect my thoughts and speak
I hate this about all voice assistants. They force you to speak in an unnatural way.
It seems like there’s nothing intelligent about when they decide to respond, it’s like they just wait for X milliseconds of silence instead of using the context of what’s being said like a human would.
Sometimes it’s the opposite problem. You finish asking your question but you gotta wait for the assistant to pick it up whereas a human would understand that you’re finished talking based on what you said.
It might seem small and unimportant but I really think it’s one of the main reasons why voice assistants feel so… artificial.
I think the same thing can happen when speaking to anyone with different societal/cultural factors than yours. We just become more accustomed to it over time and it's less noticed. I think if this GPT had a big green alien face then we would find speaking to it less strange, somehow.
One of the very few things I like about Alexa is that it has an option for being more forgiving about stammers and pauses. It actually works pretty well.
Maybe the same will make it into ChatGPT at some point.
Yeah, I wish there was an option to verbally cue that you were finished talking... like an "over and out" thing. Do you know about the feature where you can press the circle to force it to listen and then release for it to answer?
It's interesting how in my frustration I intuitively tried that push-to-talk sorta-feature and it worked. Integrating something like Whisper and streaming live text could be neat, especially considering how different cultures handle conversational pauses and turn-taking. Wondering why there's no move towards full-duplex conversations in such tools.
I use OpenLens and this is exactly my sentiment. For someone who isn't fluent with kubectl, these tools are a wonderful way to approach the matter, but if you have learnt kubectl first, which is my case, then this brings you to "unlearn" it
Same here. I started with k8slens, but moved to k9s when k8slens started requiring the login. I didn't know about Openlens, which seems to be a fork of the open source portion of k8slens. But I've gotten pretty good at k9s now, so I'll probably stick with it.
In either case, both tools have made me less proficient with kubectl. Now I mostly use kubectl to apply yaml manifests. Editing a manifest in k9s is not as straightforward as I would like, and it's nicer to have a local copy of the file.
I've found the act of prioritization to be one of the hardest practices to build. I know I should prioritize. I know it takes time to do it well... but if I spend just 10m doing this one thing I can get a nice dopamine hit for having accomplished... something.
One of the things that has helped me most recently is building out a better set of rules for my inbox that let me segment out unknown priorities from known priorities.
Previously, I'd get so many bids for time the act of even enumerating the tasks TO prioritize was too much and I'd end up in a push-workflow, rather than pulling tasks by their appropriate priority.
So, hopefully this is some encouragement for you to think about what's urgent/important in your inbox, what's unknown and needs triage, and what can be scheduled for later.
So happy to have this small mystery solved. I lived in SE Asia for years where we avoided the local tap water, including for ice at home.
My kids and I observed these ice spikes every morning when I took out the trays to for iced coffees, and I always wondered why I'd never seen them anywhere else in the world.
It's almost a nice retroactive confirmation that the water delivery service we relied on was selling distilled water as advertised!
You shouldn’t drink distilled water. It’s devoid of minerals so when you drink it, the distilled water sucks minerals from your body to equalise which can cause issues.
"Since distilled water doesn’t contain its own minerals, it has a tendency to pull them from whatever it touches to maintain a balance. So when you drink distilled water, it may pull small amounts of minerals from your body, including from your teeth."
But that it could be a problem. So its not a myth, that it is demineralizing your body. Its a small effect - but its there, and it could have a negative effect on the body.
I also live in SEA. While distilled water is pretty popular (gaining more popularity these days), spring waters are even more popular and widely available (also tastes better IMO).
Hi @atonse - I'm a Senior Manager at GitLab Support. I appreciate you taking the time to put together your feedback. I'm happy to discuss the particularities of your support experience if you send me an email at lkozloff[at]gitlab.com
There's a couple of general points though that I'd love to comment on.
> Why can't I just SSO using my GitLab credentials into Zendesk?
I'd love to have this as well - it makes complete sense (especially for our SaaS customers - it wouldn't help as much for self-managed). In order to get it implemented we need GitLab.com to become a SAML or JSON Web Token source. We have an open feature request for that here: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/238419
Even with that implemented we'd still have some challenges identifying who should be getting support without occasionally asking for proof of a support contract. As you said, you're part of multiple GitLab groups. It's well possible that some of those are on our Free tier and others on Paid tiers. In some contexts you'd be eligible for Support, and in others you might not be.
Usually this speed bump only hits the first time you contact support. Once you've opened a ticket we'll have you linked up correctly.
Recently I've been working on improving contact management and making sure customers are aware of what they can do to make their first support ticket the best experience it can be. You can track that effort in https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-com/support/-/epics/156
> Why use terms like "Support Entitlement" – just say, which org/group are you with?
We have to consider both our self-managed customers and SaaS customers with our language. For GitLab.com customers naming a path completely works (and is one of the ways you can prove your entitlement: https://about.gitlab.com/support/managing-support-contacts.h...). For Self-managed we have to map account names exactly and need a bit more as some organizations have visibility of tickets between users, in which there may be sensitive data.
Thank you for your really detailed and thoughtful response (not surprising coming from your company). Someone did reach out to me and this might get resolved after all this got escalated.
I'll keep an eye on these issues and will reach out at some point. The support entitlement stuff is more about just using plain English language. Most users don't know what that means. I'm the owner of the org and I barely know what that means.
> Should you ever lose your phone or access to your one time password secret, each of these recovery codes can be used one time each to regain access to your account. Please save them in a safe place, or you will lose access to your account.
We're directly emailing our most at risk users and are still processing resets in the mean time. Additionally, many users will see a CTA banner reminding them to regenerate their recovery codes if they haven't recently.
If there's anything else we can do - I'm happy to hear it! I've had to rely on recovery services in the past because of pure bad luck and a move to a new country, so we didn't take this decision lightly.
The safest option would be to prompt users next time they log in (or at least next time they use the site) and have them choose one of "Sounds great, please permanently enable MFA" or "Please disable MFA on my account for now." However, that'd probably leave you with a long tail of users (like, uh, myself) who use gitlab.com rarely and will be in the limbo state for months.
Please consider some kind of exemption for non-commercial open source projects over a certain size.
This change would force me to choose between unacceptable risk to my users, or severe impact on my hobby/life balance and mental health due to the extreme personal responsibility I would have to take to mitigate it.
It's already terrifying enough to publish applications that users run on their systems. If I make an error I can cause all sorts of harm. But at least I only have to worry about that when developing.
Now, if I enable MFA, I can never relax. If I lose my work MFA, there's a perfectly safe process to recover. If i lose my personal MFA it's a few hours of calling banks. If I lose my GitLab MFA I harm hundreds of people. So, I have to permanently vigilant for something I already give so much to for free.
We did use to do identity card verification. The issue that we had was that we often didn't have a lot of information about the folks who opened free accounts.
Often names would be pseudonyms or match only partially with their ID. Not to mention, of course, the difficulty of verifying the authenticity of IDs from all over the world.
I suspect that support cost also played into the decision.
Consider requiring payment: It covers your support costs, and provides some ties to a real-world identity as well as rate limiting/imposing a real cost on attackers.
For credit cards, AFAIK you can set which security level to apply (i.e. whether you'd rather have a higher fraud risk or more shopping cart abandonement because the customer didn't have/want to deal with whatever auth the bank requires at the highest security level). I imagine cranking this to the max would reduce the risk of stolen cards significantly.
I'd imagine requiring
- identity verification (even if you can't link it to the account, it will deter attackers) through a third party provider
- payment (both to cover the cost and as a second form of verification/audit trail generation)
- inactivity of the account
- contacting and warning the user for a week
- requiring the user to confirm a confirmation link at the beginning and end (i.e. an attacker would need control of the user's e-mail)
would strike a good balance. If you don't want human judgement in the loop on your side, it can also be completely automated if the ID check is done by a third party.
If there is no way to recover, it creates a perverse incentive to not use 2FA in the first place.
> I suspect that support cost also played into the decision.
I respect this if it’s the case, but just say it, don’t hide behind a “best practice” security blanket when your true motive includes other factors.
> If there is no way to recover, it creates a perverse incentive to not use 2FA in the first place.
Agree. The user has to now perform a cost benefit analysis in her head to determine if she’ll use MFA with the most punitive risk being she loses access to her account forever.
Support Manager (and person who wrote that line) - it's certainly not meant to be dismissive or tongue in cheek. If you've got some suggested wording to help take away that feeling, I'm happy to submit (or merge) and MR to the blog post to make it feel less that way.
We actually do want (and care) about your feedback and wanted to provide a clear way to give that. In the past we've gotten support requests, tweets, comments on GitLab issues and a myriad of other creative ways of voicing thoughts, opinions and ideas.
My hope was to streamline feedback into a single place that GitLab support and our community teams are actively monitoring. There's been some helpful discussion there (and here) already.
Sorry, wrote that and then went offline for a couple of days. Perhaps it's my own cynicism about corporate engagement coming through, and that may be unfair given how open GitLab is as a company -- but the sentence beneath that heading just says "we're accepting community feedback, write your thoughts over here".
I guess the core of my (admittedly petty) complaint about the language is that it doesn't really indicate a willingness to listen, more than it steers people towards a box in the corner they can vent into. A bit of language along the lines of "we think this is the right decision, but we're willing to reconsider" would maybe come off as more considerate, I guess?
I don't think you're wrong here. Remote itself does unlock advantages that aren't accessible to colocated companies (e.g. hiring anywhere), but one of the primary things that remote-practices unlock are surrounding communication.
Organizations approaching remote have a helpful speedbump that encourages them to take an intentional look at the way they disseminate information. Being fully remote is an accountability structure that helps ensure that everyone is following those practices.
There's nothing that would prevent a well-run colocated company from capturing those particular advantages, but such a company would probably slowly drift remote as companies like Buffer (and GitLab!) have as they grow and look for new talent.
It was loads better than Google+, which we had tried before.
These days I suspect things like Slack started to take over here, but for that particular time and place it was a great fit.