Non programmer and I found Pragmatic Programming excellent. Help me problem solve better in general, communication better with our development team, and understand more about their processes.
California resident here. Female and in what was then called junior high school when Senator Feinstein became Mayor of San Francisco.
She was one the people who changed the profile of power. That profile can only change so much at a time and change it to accommodate women was and still is a very big deal.
I didn’t always agree with her but I always thought she was committed to public service. And, like any long-serving senator, she changed her mind. Time and growth will do that, especially in a legislative body that should be built on compromise and inclusivity.
It’s sad to me that the end her career became dominated by not stepping down. I don’t know much — or anything — about back room politics but can imagine it was a decision calculated and agreed to by more than her or her staff.
I read an article a few months ago — I can’t find it now because of today’s news flood for her name — that talked about the way she wrote letters, position papers, instructions for years. She communicated in writing. And that is part of what gave her a high functioning staff and one that could support her in this last term. She had spent a lifetime in public service documenting what she thought.
In President Biden’s statement, he wrote that she was often the only woman in the room. Every article is chronicling her firsts. That she was the first woman to represent CA in the senate and that she was tenacious and held on when other people thought she should go quietly seems to me a perfectly logical pairing.
I’m currently involved in a project to develop a tech intervention to support outreach workers in providing emergency shelter to unhoused individuals[1].
Part of the goal is to get data on why people don’t accept available shelter and how to address those blockers by creating more shelter spaces that meet more people’s needs. We know we will see the ability to keep companion animals, safe storage for personal items, and the ability to stay with family members as reasons people don’t take shelter. It’s easy to empathize with that. If I were a woman on the street with my mid-sized dog (companionship and protection) with all the possessions I had left (after months at least of hard decisions about what I couldn’t take) and a 13-year-old son (we are likely to get separated in shelter placement) I would be resistant to most of the options available to me. And that doesn’t even begin to address what led me to the streets in the first place (job loss, family support system loss, domestic violence, health expenses).
This is my opinion, but based on some observational experience, the only people for whom living on the streets is “easier” are those who are young, healthy, and have a family support system to return to.
I have an information triage process that ends with DEVONThink. I save bookmarks to drafts app, go through them when I have time. And if they are worth it, I save then in DEVONThink where I go through and mark them up.
I’ve used ChatGPT to generate value scenarios, possible use cases, and descriptions of use for internal white papers. If another colleague were helping with this, I’d credit them in the acknowledgements at minimum. If I had gotten a list from a published paper, I’d credit it — even if I changed it considerably.
I do this for three reasons: (1) giving credit; (2) letting readers find more details so they can better interrogate the paper; and (3) proving transparency of sources generally.
With that in mind, it seems I should credit ChatGPT, especially to meet the second or third reasons. And that crediting should include my prompts and, in an extended session, multiple prompts.
The hard part is the first reason credit. The way it works today, I can’t give credit to the pieces that help build the response I’m using in a very precise way. I’d love to see a better way of doing that.
I get this worry. I didn’t read it this way though. I read it as being more about being conscious in choosing how to spend you time and not assuming that productivity leads to open amounts of person or quality time.
I am lucky; I love the work I do and there is an overlap with what I do as a “hobby.” The place I find myself in this trap is that often the places I am most “productive” are not the places I can do the highest value work, which tends to be slower and harder.
Optimizing yourself into answering emails instead of building stuff is pigeonholing yourself into mediocrity.
Being more productive does not necessarily make you better at things, and the article really argues that increasing your productivity on the wrong things negatively impacts your productivity on the right things.
My system is very much like this. I capture most things to Drafts app with a “to process” or “to read” tag. And then review and handle at least once a week.
If it’s a resource that I want to refer back to (like how to do something or a tool I found interesting) I keep it in Drafts in a resource workspace appropriately tagged. If it’s a resource I keep and share a lot, I move it into Obsidian and write text around it to make sharing easy.
If it’s a longer item — say a paper that’s building my knowledge in a subject area — I move it into DEVONThink and annotate.
I do need to recall and reuse things and I find having different tools and workflows for different kinds of information helps me.
