I've got ALS (MND). Completely agree UX is the problem, gazing at a keyboard on a screen designed to stop multiple keys clogging (QWERTY) feels wrong.
Some ideas
- gesture based eye movements, maybe two sweeps on a nine by nine grid, which map directly to phonemes
- enormous 4k 75inch tv with thousands of words or ideograms or phrases
- "writing" with your eyes then doing line to text AI to clean up
- standardish keyboard with massive LLM prediction and clean UX for autocomplete/throwaway with branching options
Ideas are cheap so no clue if these work. Also Tobi split between cheap good non-hackable gaming eyetracking and medical products doesn't help. Finally, with ALS you want to communicate about different things and are more tired.
I worked on the Eye Control Keyboard that has shipped as part of Windows since version 10. You are right that having a QWERTY keyboard is wrong, in many ways.
The Windows keyboard does actually implement something similar to your first and third suggestion. You can spell words by fixating on the first letter of a word, glancing between the following letters and finally fixating on the last letter. Some people can do this to successfully and achieve good input speeds, however, it is a skill that takes some mastery.
For me the real problem comes from three places.
Firstly, having to spell out words either with some kind of keyboard or even with a Dasher-like system means word length matters, long words are harder to enter than short words. The amount of effort needed to express an idea should be proportional to how unusual that idea is, not how many letters are needed to express it; "Hello Dave, nice to see you, how are you today?" should be easier to write than "Eel shoes".
Secondly, in order to achieve some level of throughput, you need to accept that you're going to be living near an edge where typos are inevitable. On current systems, the mechanisms for making corrections are extremely disruptive to throughput, mostly involving repeatedly pressing a key to delete the last character, word or sentence.
Thirdly, similar to the second issue, revising finished text is also a fraught problem that is inadequately addressed and often requires repeated pressing of arrow keys and the like.
I am working on a solution that I believe addresses all of these issues. A solution that allows text to be created quickly using input methods slower than typing, be it eye tracking or switch access scanning. Similarly, a system that allows the same input methods to be used to review and revise text efficiently.
I will be looking to see if I can take advantage of Paul's interest in this area to help his friend and others.
Thank you as well for the encouragement. I'm currently head down working on getting my code into something that could ship as a minimum-viable-product on a variety of platforms.
The math for cheap amazon microscopes is often based on the ratio of a digital image. So use a 60" monitor rather than 30" you have an extra 2x magnification. But not better resolution!
A strawman argument, which no one is actually saying:
> Second: Consequently, people from these less settled societies are better fighters and more militarily capable than their settled or wealthier neighboring societies.
> Third: That, consequently the poorer, harder people will inevitably overrun and subjugate the richer, more prosperous communities around them.
I prefer real history to science fiction, myself. The 30s were indisputably hard times, but they produced the people who won WW II and went to the moon.
I'm not sure that follows at all. The people who were growing up in the 30s were much too young to be decision-makers during WWII (which itself started in the 30s, not the 40s, though Americans don't realize that because they entered the war late). They were barely able, if at all, to even fight in WWII. The people who caused WWII probably came of age around or before WWI. Hitler, for instance, was a low-level soldier during WWI. He wasn't a product of the 30s.
Did this in a shortlived startup 20 yrs ago. Other cofounder was the ideas guy. Pitch was to roll up granular, factual project achievements up into reporting data , and cascade objectives down. This avoids the red/amber/green fictional layer between PMs and sponsors.
Learned two interesting things
- if your tool mandates a philosophy or process, you massively shrink your market
- real pms , sponsors and engineer s buffer their risk by selectively disclosing information. They don't want a permanent record of open, granular outcome information unless they are in a very mature company.
Two really insightful learnings, especially that second one. A lot of meetings are pageantry, with decisions made through backchannels and off-the-record pre-meetings. Moving from a meeting to an online system doesn't remove that need.
I worked on an HR system recently, and "continual feedback" is all the rage. Folks have realized that those annual reviews and PIPs are completely divorced from reality - if we gave people continuous, incremental feedback they could course correct much more regularly. That ought to reduce the emotional shock of a PIP or a bad review, and also the time lost before the employee improves.
So performance review systems have started adding the ability to officially record weekly 1:1 meeting notes, and then getting confused that no one is using this oft-requested feature. Of course any honest feedback is purely verbal, or stored in shared documents kept as far away from HR as possible. The very fact that it's an Official HR Record makes it completely useless for purposes of getting truly honest feedback in there.
Agree with this. The Lib Dems had an existential crisis at that time (2010) as Labour and the Conservatives were both fighting for the centre ground and it seemed that would become the norm (deeply ironic given Corbyn, Brexit and Truss later).
So Clegg rolled the dice on getting proportional representation rather than first past the post to solve this and lost. He also had a go at being less of an opposition party (where you oppose) and more of a coalition party like in Europe to get things done (post the financial crisis). This failed.
Everyone hates him for tuition fees, but apparently George Osborne told him to vote against the huge raise. Had this happened I doubt people would remember him with the malice they do.
Finally, he always seemed an ethical person (Lib Dems usually are excepting local election shenanigans), so the charges seem odd and out of character, but so did the move to facebook.
> apparently George Osborne told him to vote against
Ha, the Conservative coaching the Lib Dem how to be a Lib Dem. That's a good friend.
As others have commented, opposition parties have to oppose.
Further, #1 job of party leader is to build the party. Especially for an upstart. That playbook includes symbolic defeats. To show everyone what you stand for.
> So Clegg rolled the dice on getting proportional representation rather than first past the post to solve this and lost.
Clegg compromised on a referendum on the "Alternative Vote" (i.e. what Americans call "Instant Run-off Voting" and Australians call "Majority Preferential Voting"). Alternative Vote isn't proportional or even semi-proportional. I think he considered it a worthwhile compromise:
1) on the grounds that it's a form of Single Transferable Vote (which also has proportional forms), and
2) on the assumption it would increase votes for smaller parties and hinder the major parties from forming governments in the face of opposition by a majority of voters (the received wisdom being that there was a block of like-minded centrist and left-of-centre voters that was inefficiently divided between Labour, the Lib Dems and others, to the advantage of the Conservatives - but Clegg's deal took place after more than a decade of Labour's votes having unusually been the most efficient, and Clegg was considered part of the Lib Dems' "Orange Book" faction which was less friendly to Labour and the left than Lib Dems typically are).
Management is about sensemaking. Management provides the last answer (if one is needed) for 'Why are we doing this?'. It carries accountability for calling 'when to stop', and in the obverse provides belief and is the backstop that 'this can be done'. It therefore also has accountability for changing constraints (money, scope, resource, time) if needed when asked.
Management ties contexts together, so other individuals don't have to ask infinite 'whys', they trust the manager has this covered.
Management can be done by individuals, within the team, or hierarchically. All can work.
Personally strongly disagree with 'managers typically have no skin in the game'. I find it is necessary to care about the outcome and the team and the customer when I work, but YMMV. Do agree that management is a support, though I prefer to use the analogy that it is the 'glue' role
It's always ok to leave a company - if they can't survive without you, you are doing them a disservice.
But it's an interesting question - I've been intrigued throughout my career (5-25 person project management)
"Which 'reality disconnects' are important and need addressing, which can be left to lie, and which ones are fatal?"
Still don't really have the answer but my guidelines would go like this
- There has to be at least one part of the project (hopefully the most important) that is functional and grounded in reality to grow from. If there isn't then scrap the project/ do a new project. ( In consultancy a question to ask a new client was - Tell me about your last project that succeeded and your last project that failed - sometimes they had no successes - that was worth knowing)
- Fight the small battles all the time - How do we know what done is? Are the tests good? Is that code understandable? Are the specs and interfaces understood? Are we shipping sh*t?. You need to keep your principles here or you can't mentor and good people won't follow/ trust you
- Some of the big battles especially the political ones can only be fought in very specific contexts (changing budgets, team structure, new cultures). Put down a marker you'd like to see improvement there, but also state that now is not the time till the fundamentals are done.
- At the end of the day imagine yourself as a new hire in your team. If the new hire thinks 'My boss isn't the right person to lead the team' then think about leaving/changing roles. If they think 'Wow this is a tough job but I can see how we get there' keep on going. If they think 'I respect my boss but no-one can fix this mess' then think about re-negotiating to what can be done(either leave or help re-base things). If the 'junior you' isn't going to stay in your team, then things aren't going to work.
Strongly recommend Rands in Repose - Bits, Features, Truth
Question - I've managed (bottom-up, servant-leadership, small smart teams) a few very very smart people who may or not have had ADHD, or been partially on a spectrum or ... I truly appreciated the awesome work and have been open and honest and dealt with all sorts of emotional issues and variable progress on simple tasks and diving down rat-holes etc and seen some amazing overall results and had some great co-workers. The area I really struggle with is when people get temporarily obsessed with a topic that is so far removed from the project and its goals, that I can't cover them e.g. they want to completely redevelop an established, adjacent area of expertise (new to them) from scratch. Any advice on how to have this dialog up-front e.g. we have a software project and I'll back you a long way on these areas A B C for good exploratory work, but designing a new compiler or doing a full org redesign or building custom hardware is not something I can back you on so can we agree that at the outset and just trust me, or let's agree a protocol for how to deal with these situations?
I've found myself, really wanting to reengineer code and have been fired from projects as I mostly freelance...
It's sort of a two way street... Knowing the expectations, convincing us that the bear minimum is all that's needed.
Just fix the bugs. Keep your head down. Don't rewrite 2k lines of code that's ugly and not broken...
Then I think positive two way communication is good... As the op said we suffer from fear of rejection bad also as a given imposter syndrome so if I get good feedback, I know I'm doing what you want, that you're happy... Etc.
I think part of wanting to reengineer may be wanting to convince the boss in the scenario or ourselves that we aren't just faking it and adding 20 hours to a budgeted 5 hours ends up having the reverse effect.
Tldr: good conversation, praise where due to reinforce good work and constructive criticism when something needs to change.
I was a lot worse in this respect as a junior dev... So that may also be a factor, the more ppl I work with the better I am.
I have ADHD and could be slightly ASD or just overlapping on symptoms which is common. Wasn't diagnosed till 3 years ago, medicine and exercise changed my life.
- gesture based eye movements, maybe two sweeps on a nine by nine grid, which map directly to phonemes
- enormous 4k 75inch tv with thousands of words or ideograms or phrases
- "writing" with your eyes then doing line to text AI to clean up
- standardish keyboard with massive LLM prediction and clean UX for autocomplete/throwaway with branching options
Ideas are cheap so no clue if these work. Also Tobi split between cheap good non-hackable gaming eyetracking and medical products doesn't help. Finally, with ALS you want to communicate about different things and are more tired.