Lupus is kind of lousy for the punchy scientific format because it has as a nickname "The Great Imitator." (Note that the porphyrias are known as the "little imitator.") Because of this somewhat Protean nature, lupus can masquerade as quite a lot of things, leading it to be a casual element one would have to bring up and then eliminate in episode after episode. Thus, for screenwriting reasons, it needs a kind of general dismissal which would stick in the mind of viewers ...
So, a Friend of a Friend died. It had been a long time since I had seen her, she had numerous medical issues, and so forth. My friend rushes several states to help with the funeral arrangements and returns to report pure horror: her "spouse" (I put the word in quotes because it was technically true but denotes a level of care which was not present) waited until the last minute to supply photos, almost all of which were amazingly inappropriate. Think leather gear, collars, leashes, and so on. And managed to make it all about them instead of the deceased. My friend and the funeral director had a frantic what can be accomplished in fifteen minutes sprint of cropping, blowing up, making collages, and so forth so as to not completely mortify the deceased's family with the details of what passed for their sex life.
I don't know if it is much of a generational, ignore your feelings bit. We're all so busy, never seem to find the time. Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines. If anything, I think time pressure has increased, we're all more "available" now. Increasing pressure to get into a good (and hopelessly expensive) college, too, may be a factor. I know seventeen year olds who think they've missed the starting gun.
When this is done, probably after the next fad takes hold, I want a grim and thorough post-mortem of Agile, from its naive utopian vision to the various parasites the ecosystem attracted, down to the disillusionment and tears. I want names and I want shame. I want the nasty cultist tendencies exposed for everyone to see and hopefully (ha!) learn from. Perhaps not post-mortem, perhaps vivisection, so that a mirror could be held up to the abdominal cavity so that Agile could at last see the teratomas lurking inside of it since shortly after its conception, before the whole thing flickers out.
The kindest interpretation one could offer is that it was a starry-eyed conception of how programming teams could constantly kick the blame-ball back to the stakeholders, as if the routine assignment of fault were somehow reasonable and rational in organizations, which it is not. At its worst, it looked like a solid grift, something that would last for several years as long as you kept smiling and promising.
I was very late to the smartphone game, transitioning somewhat suddenly from a Nokia to an iPhone SE. I found the discoverability to be against everything I was taught as a programmer. It really felt like I was expected to have grown up with the iPhone from the first generation.
Worse yet, the gestures ... I searched in vain for a decent printable sheet of the commonly used gestures, only to make my own set of diagrams for an iPad I tried to get my mother to use, leaving her with a set of laminated sheets: the green one detailing the parts of the iPad, the red sheet showing the different screens and how to get there, and finally a blue one with the gestures.
I think iOS really needs a "Tutorial mode" app bundled with it. This of course requires that someone resist the temptation to interject with all of the bundled apps that Apple wants you to know about but aren't needed to do the basics. No Focus, no Stocks, no Apple TV ... just show me how to get around in some Settings, practice locking and unlocking a screen, drills for all of the basic gestures.
I recall the Journal News, of New York, making an online map of locals who held gun permits, back around 2012. Of course, someone published the addresses of those journalists who were -- unsurprisingly -- all boo-hoo-hoo about it.
Meowing is definitely a "please parent me" behavior. It took quite some time to domesticate two feral cats that were nearby -- many years. The meowing reflex was not present until much much later. One cat would open her mouth but forget to make the sound, but she eventually caught up to her brother, who would correct her by looking at her and meowing if she forgot.
A lot of times this just does not work for me. Even if the air is a temperature I would like, a room with cold walls, well ... you can literally feel it. It's a blackbody radiation thing ... you are emitting heat but the walls aren't emitting as much as you are, and it feels like heat falling off of my body. Which is fine sometimes but if I need to get work done, I go into torpor.
I may be unusually sensitive to infrared: one of my backrub tricks is apparently "kknowing" what hurts without being told. Aside from posture, if you just wave your hands over someone's back, you can feel the heat come off more in any inflamed or tense area.
Yeah, but if you don't have an XY problem, you have to spend a lot of your question pre-defending the "it's not an XY problem" stance and lordy ... is that frustrating.
There's a lot of people out there who are happy to tell you that you have an XY problem, but when you explain why it is not, ... crickets.
I guess I will say it again in a different way: they promised big, they promised they knew how to do it in spite of the challenges (which they laid out beforehand), they made a lot of noise, and then they just ... wandered off when it wasn't an instant success.
Another rephrasing: it's the big shot in the bar running his mouth, someone says "What about X, Y, Z?" and he goes "Yeah yeah, got it covered." Waves his wallet around. Makes some boasts and some promises. Then it turns out that X, Y, and Z were not so easy as boasted.
I am not angry about Google Fiber, I'm disappointed.
This project reminds me of Google Fiber in that it had a kind of optimism backed by a tremendous amount of capital, both in cash and in goodwill. For fiber, of course I knew about the incumbents. The 1990s were an enormous giveaway to the telecommunications industry in terms of tax breaks in exchange for a nebulous set of promises and, as far as I can tell, no teeth -- what penalties for failure to deliver? They took the money and devoted it to lobbying and eventually as much regulatory capture as they could manage.
We knew going in that it would be tough. And of course infrastructure, physical infrastructure, is tough. You have legal requirements, like permits and easements. You have the "merely" physical task of digging all of these trenches, mile upon mile. You have an huge outlay of equipment, from ordering to configuration and maintenance. You have the relentless horror of the last mile. Most importantly, the competition wouldn't like it. Not one bit. They even spoke of it. I don't think anyone didn't know this going in, but the promise was that Google could and would deliver results because they knew all of this beforehand.
Somehow, despite all of that, it didn't work out, but they were very certain at the time it would. They even managed to convince me and I come with a fairly dour outlook on these kinds of pitches.
This has much the same smell as did Google Fiber. This I can be a little annoyed at because it sounds as if lessons were not learned.
Does this count for the Google Graveyard? I'm still waiting for that miraculous Google Fiber to come rolling in here.
I am wondering precisely how projects get the green light at Google. This kind of thing is just ... it's like someone read some shiny-eyed sci-fi story from the 1950s and decided to Brave New World it into being with metrics without asking if anyone would find it objectionable or even desirable.
I didn't have problems, uh, thinking in parametrics, but lordy was the rendering slow. I might try it again.