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throwaway346434 commented on The cost of interrupted work (2023)   blog.oberien.de/2023/11/0... · Posted by u/_vaporwave_
throwaway346434 · 3 days ago
From: https://ics.uci.edu/~gmark/CHI2005.pdf (sample size: 1x company, n=24, lots of limitations discussed at end of paper)

"When people did resume work on the same day, it took an average length of time of 25 min. 26 sec (sd=54 min. 48 sec.). This may seem like a relatively short amount of time, but it is also important to consider that before resuming work, our informants worked in an average of 2.26 (sd=2.79) working spheres. Thus, people’s attention was directed to multiple other topics before resuming work. This was reported by informants as being very detrimental. In some cases, the physical or desktop environment is restructured, which makes it more difficult to rely on cues to reorient one to their interrupted task. For example, a blinking cursor at the end of the last typed word can enable one to immediately reorient to that document, whereas if other windows have been opened, it can be hard to remember even which document had been worked on."

And "We found a trend that showed more externally interrupted working spheres are resumed on the same day (53.3%) compared to internally interrupted working spheres (47.6%), X2 (1)=2.97, p<.09. Externally interrupted working spheres are resumed on the average in a shorter time (22 min. 37 sec., sd=53 min. 52 sec.) than internally interrupted working spheres, (29 min. 1 sec., sd=55 min. 43 sec.), t(987)=1.92, p<.055."

So no, it does not say 23 minutes and 15 seconds in that paper.

But to say: "the paper never goes into details regarding the recovery time between finishing the interruption and getting back to the original task." is flat out incomplete, because they are reading the followup paper to the original work in isolation; and haven't considered that a number of reports summarized the findings of that (22 m 37s) as "about 23 minutes". The way it is written implies the research is all wrong, rather than more accurately stating "I can't find the exact source of a quote but it's broadly 22-23 minutes, not 23m15s afaict".

There is also some irony in "ctrl+f", "23" being explained as the methodology for review on the topic of attention span for complex tasks...

throwaway346434 commented on The Enterprise Experience   churchofturing.github.io/... · Posted by u/Improvement
marssaxman · 9 days ago
My experience at big companies has been that you only get the opportunity to do something big if you are willing to waste years "proving yourself" on a lot of tedious bullshit first. The job you want is not the job you get to apply for, and I've never had the patience to stick it out. Smaller companies let me do meaningful work right away.
throwaway346434 · 9 days ago
Politely, I disagree. It means you are in a context where the risk aversion is high, everyone keeps their head down.

Done right, you can be a disruptor, for what are very benign or proven changes outside of the false ecosystem you are in.

I recommend these changes are on the level of "we will allow users to configure a most used external tool on a core object, using a URI template" - the shock, awe, destruction is everyone realizing something is a web app and you could just... If you wanted... Use basic HTML to make lives better.

Your opponents are then arguing against how the web works, and you have won the framing with every employee that has ever done something basic with a browser.

You might find this level of "innovation" silly, but it's also representative of working in the last few tiers of a distribution curve - the enterprise adopters lagging behind the late adopters.

throwaway346434 commented on UI vs. API. vs. UAI   joshbeckman.org/blog/prac... · Posted by u/bckmn
integralid · 15 days ago
>The whole story of

Is that really the story? I think it was more like "backward compatible solution soon about more pure, theoretically better solution"

There's enormous non-xhtml legacy than nobody wanted to port. And tooling back in the day didn't make it easy to write correct xhtml.

Also like it or not, HTML is still written by humans sometimes, and they don't like parser blowing up because of a minor problem. Especially since such problems are often detected late, and a page which displays slightly wrong is much better outcome than the page blowing up.

throwaway346434 · 15 days ago
More or less? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHATWG is fairly neutral. As someone in userland at the time on the other side of it, it was all a bit nuts.

IE we got new standards invented out of thin air - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Guides/Mic... - which ignored what hundreds had worked on before, which seemed to be driven by one person controlling the "standard" making it up as they went along.

Microformats and RDFa were the more widely adopted solutions at the time, had a lot of design and thought put into them, worked with HTML4 (but thrived if used with xhtml), etc etc.

JSON-LD/schema.org has now filled the niche and arguably it's a lot better for devs, but imagine how much better the "AI web UX" would be now if we'd just standardised earlier on one and stuck with it for those years?

This is the main area where I saw the behaviour on display, where I interacted most. So the original comment feels absolutely in line with my recollections.

I love bits of HTML5, but the way it congealed into reality isn't one of them.

throwaway346434 commented on AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing   rakhim.exotext.com/ai-is-... · Posted by u/ambigious7777
neilalexander · 19 days ago
> "Why didn't the semantic web happen?"

Advertising.

throwaway346434 · 18 days ago
To a degree re ads on pages, but why didn't big business end up publishing all of their products in JSON-LD or similar? A lot did, to get aggregated, but not all.
throwaway346434 commented on AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing   rakhim.exotext.com/ai-is-... · Posted by u/ambigious7777
rglullis · 19 days ago
Uh, the author got so close to make the same realization I had while working on a project [0] for the Wikimedia Foundation: we wouldn't need search engines if we had better tooling to query semantic databases like wikidata.

However, the thing that the author might be missing is that the semantic web exists. [1] The problem is that the tools that we can use to access it are not being developed by Big Tech. Remember Freebase? Remember that Google could have easily kept it around but decided to fold it and shoved it into the structured query results? That's because Google is not interested in "organizing the world's information and make it universally accessible" unless it is done in a way that it can justify itself into being the data broker.

I'm completely out of time or energy for any side project at the moment, but if someone wants to steal my idea: please take a llm model and fine tune so that it can take any question and turn it into a SparQL query for Wikidata. Also, make a web crawler that reads the page and turns into a set of RDF triples or QuickStatements for any new facts that are presented. This would effectively be the "ultimate information organizer" and could potentially replace Wikidata as most people's entry page of the internet.

[0]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/QuickStatements_3.0

[1] https://guides.library.ucla.edu/semantic-web/datasets

throwaway346434 · 19 days ago
ChatGPT etc does an OK job at SPARQL generation. Try something like "generate a list of all supermarkets, including websites, country, description" and you get usable queries out.

In a much, much more limited way, this is what I was dabbling with with alltheprices - queries to pull data from wikidata, crawling sites to pull out the schema.org Product and offers, and publish the aggregate.

throwaway346434 commented on Past, present, and future of Sorbet type syntax   blog.jez.io/history-of-so... · Posted by u/PaulHoule
throwaway346434 · 4 months ago
> There was also a project called TypedRuby, largely a passion project of an engineer working at GitHub. After a few weeks of evaluation, it seemed that there were enough bugs in the project that fixing them would involve a near complete rewrite of the project anyways.

There's 6 open bugs and 4 closed ones. This seems like either it's throwing shade or they didn't bother lodging bug reports upstream.

throwaway346434 commented on Why can't HTML alone do includes?   frontendmasters.com/blog/... · Posted by u/susam
tsimionescu · 4 months ago
The semantic web is a silly dream of the 90s and 00s. It's not a realizabile technology, and Google basically showed exactly why: as soon as you have a fixed algorithm for finding pages on the web, people will start gaming that algorithm to prioritize their content over others'. And I'm not talking about malicious actors trying to publish malware, but about every single publisher that has theoney to invest in figuring out how and doing it.

So any kind of purely algorithmic, metadata based retrieval algorithm would very quickly return almost pure garbage. What makes actual search engines work is the constant human work to change the algorithm in response to the people who are gaming it. Which goes against the idea of the semantic web somewhat, and completely against the idea of a local-first web search engine for the masses.

throwaway346434 · 4 months ago
I would encourage you to go and read more about triples/asserting facts, and the trust/provenance of facts in this context. You are basically saying "it's impossible to make basic claims" in your comment, which perhaps you don't realize
throwaway346434 commented on Why can't HTML alone do includes?   frontendmasters.com/blog/... · Posted by u/susam
riffraff · 4 months ago
I kinda agree with you but I'd argue the "death" of microformats is unrelated to the death of XHTML (tho schema.org is still around).

You could still use e.g. hReview today, but nobody does. In the end the problem of microformats was that "I want my content to be used outside my web property" is something nobody wants, beyond search engines that are supposed to drive traffic to you.

The fediverse is the only chance of reviving that concept because it basically keeps attribution around.

throwaway346434 · 4 months ago
JSON LD is alive and kicking.
throwaway346434 commented on Map Features in OpenStreetMap with Computer Vision   blog.mozilla.ai/map-featu... · Posted by u/Brysonbw
throwaway346434 · 5 months ago
Oh, great re swimming pools - solar detection is another one on my list to have a go at.

I feel like a lot of the pushback here is an idea that OSM can grow from hand mapping; but as someone with 60k changesets over a decade... no amount of human volunteer enthusiasm is to the point that it can "solve" mapping at a global scale to the standards that make the map data overwhelmingly useful.

I feel we need a scalable framework for importing and maintaining data: ways to annotate the quality, sources, where to report bugs in the data source, and guidance to consumers. Ie if I want to query "businesses of type X" "mapped by humans within the last year", I can sort of do that with "check date".

But who knows how many of those attributes are accurate, or if the mapper who checked only checked one aspect (name/location)? Would it be better to ingest alltheplaces opening hours to maintain this data automatically, every month?

Would it be better as a data consumer if I could filter to only certain sources I trust? Or I could use data - even if the polygons aren't perfect or similar, even with known limitations like "poi inferred by AI".

throwaway346434 commented on Alphabet spins out Taara – Internet over lasers   x.company/blog/posts/taar... · Posted by u/tadeegan
throwaway346434 · 5 months ago
Wait. Is this why twitter got rebranded; a billionaires pissing match and brand confusion?

u/throwaway346434

KarmaCake day218January 10, 2021View Original