This is all helpful but I felt like it skipped past a critical part - how do you "extract the range my manager is looking for"? Presumably your manager has to stick to the polite fiction that estimates are a bottoms-up process, so what questions do you find helpful to get a sense of the number your manager/leadership team had in mind?
Readit Newsoakashes commented on How I estimate work seangoedecke.com/how-i-es... · Posted by u/mattjhall
oakashes commented on Running a business means contact with reality fredkozlowski.com/2025/11... · Posted by u/fkozlowski
Bad business people have been blaming outside forces for their failings forever. Taxes! Regulations! China! The Algorithm! It’s a symphony out there.
Yes, and none of that matters when the money runs out and you can't convince investors that your business will bring them a worthwhile return in an environment that includes all of those outside forces.
oakashes commented on The JJ VCS workshop: A zero-to-hero speedrun github.com/jkoppel/jj-wor... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
Something I ran into during exercise 2 (and from watching the solution video[0] closely I see the author did as well):
There were four consecutive changed lines in my original commit. When I split it, I selected the deletion and addition for the first two lines. In the resulting newly created commit, those two lines had been moved to below the other two lines, so the order was now 3 -> 4 -> 1 -> 2, with the second commit moving 3 and 4 back to their original places. I didn't figure out a clean way to fix this - when I edited the commit which changed lines 1 and 2 to put them back at the top, it made a conflict with the second commit which I had to repair.
Anybody know what I should have done differently to split the commit and keep the edited lines in their original places?
[0]: https://www.loom.com/share/e3e148f07fb9420180ebb047f5ca94b3
oakashes commented on Show HN: Demo of my web game about social persuasion talktomehuman.com/demo... · Posted by u/mbforbes
This really feels like a glimpse at where video games are going, I felt like I could really enter into the character's role because what I said actually affected the dialog.
That said, I ran into the same issue someone else mentioned where I really struggled to get my phone to accept single words without a sentence context, the color reading challenge was incredibly frustrating.
the teacher knows you either way so the bias would be there for the written exam as well
True but I think there's still an element of falsifiability to a teacher's evaluation of an essay that doesn't exist in an oral exam or interactive discussion. An essay is an artifact and if a teacher is giving student A worse grades than student B, a third party can look at that artifact to see whether it's remotely reasonable. A 1:1 discussion or an oral defense is much more subjective.
Not saying this is a fatal flaw, but there is a bit of a tradeoff there.
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oakashes commented on Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023) theluddite.org/#!post/goo... · Posted by u/MrVandemar
It's a fair point about how awful recipe sites look without ad blockers, but this part is just plain incorrect:
> You can tell just by looking at the URLs that those sites are going to be worthelss blogspam.
At least two of the three results in the screenshot are from legitimate baking sites (Cookie and Kate, Sally's Baking Addiction) which are generally trusted sources online. I don't know anything about the third. But Google seems to have actually done a good job of highlighting recipes from reliable blogs.
The points about the compromised experience on those sites due to intrusive ads remain.
oakashes commented on The history of lead pencils and their lack of any lead (2021) pensunlimited.co.uk/blog/... · Posted by u/nkurz
> because of this prevailing thought that the pencil was known as the lead pencil, a name that has endured until today
Wait, so we didn't realise graphite and lead were different substances until after pencils were invented? Yet we never took that mix-up to the point of putting lead in pencils?
It didn't make any sense to me either. I found this article[1] which frames it a little more clearly: it's not that they thought graphite and lead were the exact same thing, it's that they thought graphite was just a particular type of lead that was useful for drawing when first discovered.
1: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/ever-wonde...
> Counting calories. Say your weight is stable and you start eating a single extra piece of sandwich bread every day. After a year, you’ll gain 3.8 kg (8.3 lb) of fat. Almost no one counts calories that accurately.
I'd argue that one big benefit of counting calories is that it teaches you that a single piece of sandwich bread contributes a surprisingly high amount of calories to your diet. This potentially empowers you to minmax your plate with the things that will get you the most enjoyment/satiation for your calories.
Also as time goes by, it'll get smoothly integrated into docs/gmail/maps/calendar/youtube/search/colab/sheets/android/assistant
So Gemini could by your one-stop AI shop for everything. Only Microsoft can match it (but Microsoft doesn't have a popular maps, youtube, mail, smartphone OS service).
Apple is another strong player (but they don't have productivity tools like docs, sheets or youtube).
It really is Google's to lose this AI race from now on.
Going to chatGPT and copying and pasting results will become painful (not to mention it's painful bing integration). Also at this point, they seem to be focusing on scaling LLM (while Google Deepmind is exploring other avenues)
Google can also bundle Youtube TV, YouTube Premium, Google Drive, Storage, Ad free Search, Gemini integrated Docs/Sheets/Gmail, Subsidized Pixel Phones / Watch for a monthly fee of say $99 and it'll be very compelling for a lot of people
I agree that Google is well-positioned, but they were also well-positioned to take advantage of these synergies with Google Assistant for many years and I would say that that did not meaningfully materialize in a way that was helpful to me as an Android and Google ecosystem user.