I don't know that this is a particularly good article, but it touches on two elements of games based on incomplete / imperfect information.
One of these elements he refers to as "leverage" and I think he does an ok job explaining what it is, although maybe not how / why it works.
The other one, contrasting doctors and contractors, I think he does poorly. Full disclosure: I've had really crappy luck with doctors (it's not just luck). Doctors aren't used to getting "not to exceed" demands, things like that. On the other hand my father was a psychiatrist, a specialist, and that gives me insight into the "practice" of medicine; and I've worked for a number of biotechs and I have some insight into the evolution of medical practice. Combined, I have a pretty good sense of when the doctors are "practicing" versus forming a hypothesis (ask for one!).
During one of my burnouts I took a "vacation" working (what started as part time) for a high-end flooring contractor. Although the owner and I had different backgrounds and beliefs we had mutual respect for each other (and we had great conversations). But what the public calls (and in public we called) an "estimate" we called internally an "interview"; and we wanted to take the temperature of the "pain in the ass" factor: Does the prospect truly understand the work? Does the prospect have irrelevant concerns? (I'm doing a poor job here, although I'm pretty sure successful contractors will understand what I'm talking about.) Our bids could vary as much as 300% (upwards) from our baseline model / estimate for the job... before we said "no" outright or came up with good excuse for them to fire us before receiving our bid.
There were some rather "zen" aspects of the process (my father had a zen question: how do you feel? I have a zen question: what do you measure?), such as an insistence that all special instructions had to fit, legibly handwritten, in about 1/3 of an 8x11 piece of paper. (We did $10000 floors on a one page contract, not including non-negotiable required boilerplate; why can't we do that in IT? Can we? Yes, yes I say we can.)
But distilling this down: some contractors would rather deal with the masssages and fish tank cleaning (at 3x the $$$) than do floors... whereas for us flooring was a religious calling or something. You'll find this both in doctors and in contractors; and you'll also find people out there who expect to pay that 300% markup to have the contractor walk their dog.
That can mean a lot of different things, and imply various adjacent activities which may or may not meet your definition of "contributing".
I've submitted PRs to projects I use (dnspython, scapy). One of the cybersecurity companies I worked for managed various ruses to keep me from supplying fixes to upstreams; the most feckless bullshit reason they came up with was "opsec".
While working for Farsight I reviewed and provided feedback to several open source projects regarding their integrations with e.g. DNSDB.
Not everything has to be a PR, or targeted at the project's self-declared consituency. For instance I wrote a protobuffer dissector for scapy (https://github.com/m3047/tahoma_nmsg) because scapy was a handy "living off the land" kind of way for customers and prospects to taste Farsight's tunnelled SIE products without compiling a bunch of C libraries. (You can declare your own protobuffer data types, use https://github.com/m3047/tahoma_nmsg/blob/master/tahoma_nmsg... as an example.) I don't distribute scapy, so there's no compelling reason for me to use the same license. (You're welcome.)
In fact, I re-used the protobuffer dissector for the Dnstap half of the ShoDoHFlo DNS + netflow correlator (https://github.com/m3047/shodohflo). I started down that road because Vixie got his panties twisted up and his hair on fire about DoH, and once I looked at it it seemed that there was something in there that I'd personally find useful. A couple years later I decided I wanted e.g. "dig -x" more than a GUI, and after several iterations I came up with Rear View RPZ (https://github.com/m3047/rear_view_rpz). I find it useful, and I think it's a pretty cool hack. (Works with EtherApe!)
ShoDoHFlo stuffs data into Redis. I found myself utilizing that data for other purposes and got tired of installing a Redis client and dealing with the security issues. So I implemented a DNS proxy for Redis (https://github.com/m3047/rkvdns).
I still haven't "found my tribe"; or maybe I have, and most of them don't contribute to open source. Nobody submits PRs, and nobody I know opens issues; instead they send me emails. :-/
I don't have a college degree. I made a deal with the head of the college math department that he'd sign me in to (senior level) Numerical Analysis (this was the early 1980s) if I taught myself calculus first; which I did. He had misgivings about this self-guided selection of study, and summed it up thus:
How do you know what's important?
Now of course ML is all the rage, but that question has stuck with me. I still ask myself that question, and I don't always know the answer.
> And forcing all cell phones of every design every where to have GPS.
Cell phones need some kind of accurate-enough (GPS is arguably overkill) self-locating ability, because the encryption properties of the modulation make passive transmitter location and ranging determination difficult: they need to know when to switch between cell towers (ENodeB).
Wiener functions are cool, and the RADAR applications were top secret during WW II.
I don't know of any strategy that uses GPS location to decide when to switch between towers. A tower could be offline for maintenance. You're probably going to want to use the signal strength from the tower as the strongest indicator of switching.
Aside from that ENodeB uses GPS for timing. At the base station. In a way that does not require your phone to _also_ have GPS.
A chunk of the Post Alley article is spent on the observation that a single stevedoring company controls operations at all terminals in Seattle, but not in Tacoma; yet they're both part of the same port alliance.
Doctors don't ask about this. People still take Prilosec, and it's acknowledged that it causes cancer. You get what you give: confirmation bias.
Edit: The essential problem is that ranitidine isn't shelf-stable. This could explain some problems with other theraputics which we won't name to avoid downvoting / politics.
It is acknowledged that nitrosamines cause cancer. It is acknowledged that ranitidine breaks down on the shelf to nitrosamines: this wasn't discovered by the FDA or another government agency, it was discovered by a mail-order, compounding pharmacy which also tests ingredients. Their discovery led to ranitidine being recalled.
As for prilosec: the cancer risk is acknowledged in the packaging.
Hey. I brought up ranitidine because it is specifically associated with nitrosamines, and nitrosamines cause colon cancer. No redirect: colon cancer. You take issue with prilosec being admitted to this debate, then that would be because ion pump moderators cause stomach cancer. My bad: stomach cancer irrelevant to you.
You can't see ranitidine when it farts in your face: nitrosamines cause colon cancer. Why is that not relevant? Why is that not potentially more relevant than foo foo microbes? (By the way, I eat sour cream or yogurt when I eat meat or take e.g. glucosamine. YMMV.)
> There is so little fresh surface water on Earth that if you collected it all into a ball, it would barely reach across New York City.
I'm not sure what this means. I think we could drop New York City in one of the Great Lakes with little problem... or drop Moscow in Lake Baikal if you prefer.
I think the interpretation is "take the volume of fresh surface water on Earth", then "make that volume into a perfect sphere", and the diameter of that sphere is smaller than NYC.
I don't think that is even true. This may refer to the total volume of potable water. between the great lakes and Antarctica, there is lots of non-salt water out there. Easy google results show 35 million cubic kilometers, which is a rather large sphere.
The volume of the Great Lakes, per Wolfram Alpha [1], makes a sphere ~22 miles in diameter. The Great Lakes is ~20% of the world's surface fresh water.
Your number of 35 million cubic kilometers includes the Antarctic ice sheet, but the definition of "fresh surface water" sounds to me like it intends to exclude the ice sheets from the list.
One of these elements he refers to as "leverage" and I think he does an ok job explaining what it is, although maybe not how / why it works.
The other one, contrasting doctors and contractors, I think he does poorly. Full disclosure: I've had really crappy luck with doctors (it's not just luck). Doctors aren't used to getting "not to exceed" demands, things like that. On the other hand my father was a psychiatrist, a specialist, and that gives me insight into the "practice" of medicine; and I've worked for a number of biotechs and I have some insight into the evolution of medical practice. Combined, I have a pretty good sense of when the doctors are "practicing" versus forming a hypothesis (ask for one!).
During one of my burnouts I took a "vacation" working (what started as part time) for a high-end flooring contractor. Although the owner and I had different backgrounds and beliefs we had mutual respect for each other (and we had great conversations). But what the public calls (and in public we called) an "estimate" we called internally an "interview"; and we wanted to take the temperature of the "pain in the ass" factor: Does the prospect truly understand the work? Does the prospect have irrelevant concerns? (I'm doing a poor job here, although I'm pretty sure successful contractors will understand what I'm talking about.) Our bids could vary as much as 300% (upwards) from our baseline model / estimate for the job... before we said "no" outright or came up with good excuse for them to fire us before receiving our bid.
There were some rather "zen" aspects of the process (my father had a zen question: how do you feel? I have a zen question: what do you measure?), such as an insistence that all special instructions had to fit, legibly handwritten, in about 1/3 of an 8x11 piece of paper. (We did $10000 floors on a one page contract, not including non-negotiable required boilerplate; why can't we do that in IT? Can we? Yes, yes I say we can.)
But distilling this down: some contractors would rather deal with the masssages and fish tank cleaning (at 3x the $$$) than do floors... whereas for us flooring was a religious calling or something. You'll find this both in doctors and in contractors; and you'll also find people out there who expect to pay that 300% markup to have the contractor walk their dog.
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