Number of times I've had a true positive alert from Apple's new device tracking notifications: 0
Number of times I've had false positives due to intermittent connectivity issues with my airpods or from my partner using mine: over a dozen. I'm this close to disabling all of these features
Everything else? I had my iPad in the backpack I was wearing get left behind. Same with my AirPods. I’ve turned those things off and just put an AirTag in my backpack.
That said, I already had two extra air tags since I got a four-pack instead of buying two separately.
This is a general problem with proactive alerts related to rare events. How many "OMG, you're separated from $X" alerts am I willing to put up with for the one legitimate "You just left $X in the restaurant!" alert.
Ha! A friend sent me this comment when he recognized this project. Unless there happens to be another firm who did the exact same thing we did, I was a part of this project (see this blog post https://www.svds.com/introduction-to-trainspotting/).
You misunderstood the point of the presentation. The company was a consulting firm that specialized in data science and engineering. Our clients wanted to kick the tires and see what our technical chops were before hiring us but they didn't want to let us use their proprietary and confidential data for our own tech demos.
We didn't want to just use the same open source datasets everyone else did, so we got to thinking about novel datasets we could create that might have applications for industries we sold our services to. From this, the Trainspotting project was born.
Many of us commuted via the Caltrain, which was right next to our office, and we were frequently frustrated with the unreliability (this was in ~2016 or so when car and pedestrian strikes were happening seemingly every week), so we made an app that tried to provide more accurate scheduling.
We used the official API for station:train arrival times, but we found that it was unreliable, so we wanted some ground truth data on whether a train was passing. Since our office was right next to the Castro MTV station, I had the idea to use a microphone (attached to a raspberry pi) to just listen for when the train went by. In addition to ground-truth data for validating arrival times, this gave us a chance to show off some IoT applications. It actually worked pretty well, but it had false positives (e.g. the garbage truck would set it off). So we added a camera.
We pointed it at the tracks and started streaming data off of it. At first we used very simple techniques, processing the raw stream on-device with classic computer vision algos (e.g. Haar cascades) in openCV. We discovered that the VTA, which had a track parallel to the Caltrain and was "behind" the Caltrain in our camera's shot, could cause false positives. Gradually we used more and more complex techniques like deep learning, but the raspberry pi couldn't handle it (IIRC it could only process a single frame in like 6 seconds). So we used a two-stage validation whereby the simpler, faster detectors that could run on the raw stream in real time detected a positive and then we'd send a single frame to run deep learning.
TL,DR: The whole point was to be a tech demo, not to gauge the speed. The trains were either stopping or pulling out of the station, so speed would have been useless.
Really enjoyed this post and explanation, thank you! I work in ML and used to live on Alma St in Palo Alto so it really hit home for me :).
I also acutely enjoy the notion that a pithy critique of people who refused to simplify the problem they were solving is in itself grossly oversimplified!
I'm surprised and skeptical about some of this. In particular:
We also measured networks across more than 90,000 Microsoft employees in the United States. Frankly, we expected to see them shrink significantly, given the rapid shifts in environment, daytime rhythms, and personal responsibilities. Instead, we discovered that most employees maintained their existing connections. Even more encouraging, most people’s network size increased. We had assumed that in a time of crisis, employees might strengthen networks within their own work groups in an insular way. In fact, we saw network growth not only within existing work groups but also across different groups, indicating that to adapt and thrive teams sought to build bridges.
This does not square with my lived experience. Close connections at work have stayed relatively strong, perhaps even strengthening as we shore them up with recurring 1:1s and social team meetings. Peripheral connections have gone down the toilet. Team and role homophily run rampant.
I wonder what evidence they actually used to back up this statement. I suspect the effect is actually in the opposite (and more intuitive) direction, and that their finding is actually a result of the McNamara fallacy.
"Network" is measured by Outlook emails, Yammer posts, and Teams conversations and meetings. I'm willing to wager money most peoples' network metrics increased simply because offline conversations never happened, and they moved to online conversations where necessary.
Not only this: online, the cost of “growing” your network by adding more recipients is (nearly) free which is very much at odds with offline growth. So my guess is the quality of weaker connections actually diminished even if the number of connections increased.
> because offline conversations never happened, and they moved to online conversations where necessary
Not to mention throwing everyone who might need to know about something on a thread because you don’t know who should be. This would be measured as a network increase. But it actually represents distancing.
> Close connections at work have stayed relatively strong, perhaps even strengthening as we shore them up with recurring 1:1s and social team meetings. Peripheral connections have gone down the toilet. Team and role homophily run rampant.
This absolutely mirrors my experience. Casual conversations with people outside of my team and friends, which would've happened by just being in close proximity to them have disappeared.
While I believe we're still working very well as a team, opportunities to form connections outside of our domain have dwindled. We used to have this Slack app called Donut [1] which periodically matches colleagues together for a 1:1, but these days people are sick of Zoom meetings so you really do need a sound excuse to set one up. In-person 1:1s were a chance to escape the office for some coffee and a snack; Zoom meetings are much less tantalising.
I think more video conferencing apps needs to have simple games available like https://team.video does. Basically there's a new Scrabble game available for each meeting which you can play whenever. We have found ourselves using it as a nice social moment before and after meetings even if it's just for a minute.
Yes that would be awesome! We try and play games during our team happy hours, but the friction of finding a site, getting everybody to sign up, and dealing with "this doesn't work on my machine" issues is often off-putting. Having a collection of games we can start instantly mitigates many of these issues.
I'm wondering if remote-first and work from home will end up being reverse-ageist. Developers and others with deep existing networks and a lot of experience may do just fine or even thrive, while the young may struggle to develop those networks in the first place.
I think there's still plenty of opportunity to develop a professional network through structured events like 1:1s and mentoring sessions, but you definitely need to be intentional with this since you can't just strike up a conversation in the hallways anymore.
Where juniors will struggle with is not being able to swivel their chair and ask someone next to them for help. I've witnessed situations where people hold back "stupid" questions which end up blocking their work because the effort of crafting a Slack message or asking to set up a Zoom was too high. For anyone with juniors on their team, make sure to check up on them every now and then!
That the poor souls were so bored and deep in procrastination that they actually logged on to and used the corporate Yammer instance and "liked" perhaps five messages on there before being adequately underwhelmed to return to their respective work tasks, I am willing to bet.
People I don’t have to talk to on a regular basis at work feel really distant now. Lunch used to be a great time to randomly hit up coworkers to talk and share ideas. That network has completely dissolved now.
I have witnessed that the opposite also holds true: less enjoyable coworkers are now less irritating simply because of the added distance and buffer room, making them easier to tolerate* than when having to deal with in person on a daily basis. *quality of work notwithstanding
But now imagine starting a new job and not being able to build that distant network at all. I have colleagues who joined half a year ago but have never seen a coworker outside scheduled videoconferences.
Not Microsoft, but my network's expanded significantly including to associates at Microsoft.
Mostly helped by the people I'd normally struggle to contact because they hide away in different buildings, behind different physical and digital security rules, now being much more available for video calls. Appreciate your mileage may vary but it does square with my lived experience.
I've lost some connections with people I only spoke to because we were physically situated together, but that's way outnumbered for me by those I now find more accessible.
My network has expanded, but it was deliberate on my part. Acquaintances that I meant to talk to more often, especially geographically distant are now much easier to make regular contact.
Before, conflicts with travel, out of the office meetings, at workshops made it very difficult to line up calendars. These days, there is a good likelihood that a 30 minute meeting will work.
It’s been much easier to avoid the time burners that pounce on me at the office. It’s been wonderful missing out on their complaining and uninvited ‘thought leadership’. They can post it to Yammer and LinkedIn.
If it’s mostly the people You met at smoke/coffee breaks or going to lunch with you that network won’t grow much remotely, stagnate at best.
If it’s mostly people directly working with you, having everyone on the same playing field (nobody is physically closer to your desk, or to your office) can help that network to expand.
Perhaps they measured it as emails/chat network patterns, but the increase could easily be explained by the fact that you cannot just walk up to someone's desk anymore.
I agree, everything else in the article pretty much matches my own experience except that.
Also understanding what is going on outside of your immediate duties, which is based on informal or overheard conversations, has disapeared completely (not the least because no one will put a rumor or an overheard conversation in writing in a chat room), and it has a nasty effect of making people feeling isolated.
I wonder what facilities are available to Microsoft employees to discover people outside their teams when seeking assistance or niche experience.
You can see a “who reports to who” in Outlook on our phones when searching peoples names but I don’t think that’s how these peripheral connections are being made.
"Blame" helps, too. All the bigger projects are in Visual Studio Online, so if you wanted to know, for instance, the latest contributors to WMI, it's just a few clicks away.
I think that the increase they're talking about probably came about because people where highly stressed out and worried about Covid-19. A certain degree of comfort comes from reading about shared experiences during this stressful time on a company-wide Yammer feed.
Before corona I’d ask a colleague next to me for help first even via Skype, now I just go straight to the one likely responsible because I won’t get the social component so I no longer care to prioritize the contact of my team-mates.
[source: PhD in drug design specializing in G-protein coupled receptor pharmacology]
Drugs like LSD form non-covalent bonds with receptors. In a macro-world analogy, think of your hand sticking to a syrup-covered fork vs. a covalent bond being your hand stuck to a super-glue covered fork. Different drugs have different levels of "stickiness" (called affinity) for a particular receptor, and LSD has pretty high affinity for its target receptor, 5-HT2a, but it isn't permanently attached. In fact, affinity is defined by relative association vs. dissociation rates of drug-receptor complex.
On a microscopic level, each molecule of LSD is falling in and out of the receptor binding site stochastically. This leaves open the possibility of another drug binding to the same site (called competitive inhibition) when LSD isn't occupying the site. If another drug has a higher affinity, it will occupy the receptor more of the time. When you zoom out and consider the entire set of receptors and drugs, the sum of these individual stochastic events these effects follow characteristic patterns described by the law of mass action.
> Personally, I think that the effective ban on psychedelic research is a crime against science and mental healthcare - given its immense potential...I am happy to we are slowly starting research into that.
Have you thought about supporting the people who have been laying the groundwork for the current wave of research (e.g. https://www.heffter.org/)? This new crop of research owes a lot to this group's decades long mission to bring psychedelic research back to acceptability.
[no affiliation other than knowing some of the founding board members]
This whole thing seems overblown. The conditions required to induce NDMA accumulation are so far outside the normal bounds as to be farcical. Every drug I’ve ever seen advises you to keep it in a controlled temperature environment.
It was 130C / 260F that is considerably higher than the inside of a car.
Still, this suggests that ranitidine may not be stable and its breakdown products may be risky. If mixing it with nitrite produces NDMA under condition found in the stomach that is another risk case. I wonder if there is any breakdown over time just sitting on the shelf?
I assume that's 140 Fahrenheit. The testing in question was conducted at 140 Celsius (which is quite a bit warmer...).
I also think it's unlikely that those people who are keeping their meds in their car are also keeping their meds dissolved in a solution with high levels of nitrite.
The article is highly misleading. in the heating test, they heated the drug to 130 C, far beyond the temperature you'll find in a car. The gastric simulation with nitrites seems legit though.
From what I’ve read (the FDA website is fantastic), it’s an issue, but not a huge one.
Valisure said “these levels are too high”, the FDA came back with “you’re testing it wrong”, so the FDA retested and determined a few of the drugs has higher than allowed NDMA, but we’re talking 10-50% too high (of a very small limit), not the 20,000% too high that Valisure claimed.
My guess is the FDA will institute new guidelines on testing, manufacturers will change their processes and ranitidine will come back in a year or so.
> Every drug I’ve ever seen advises you to keep it in a controlled temperature environment
And yet even pharmacies have no problem shipping via consumer services in the dead of summer, and show zero care for whether "overnight" actually means "over weekend".
I used to work in QA for a major drug company where we'd store the drugs for years at different temperatures and humidity, and every 3/6/12/18/24/48/60 months we'd test them in spectrometers, as well as testing for clumping in powders, colour changes, etc. One of our jobs was to make sure they didn't turn into anything nasty, but it was mainly making sure they stayed stable.
For all day-to-day drugs it's really a precaution rather than anything else. Usually they just become a little less effective by becoming less concentrated, but most of the ones I worked with even the 50/80(?) ones were still fine years later (stored at 50 degrees celsius, 80% humidity (I think? Was 20 years ago)). We had a special warm room where all the samples were kept.
One time I was on a drug that had to be shipped to me from an out of town pharmacy in a refrigerated vehicle. The delivery guy demanded that my apartment leasing office refrigerate it, which led to them almost losing it.
Next time I had it shipped to a local pharmacy instead for pickup. That pharmacy didn’t refrigerate it at all and insisted that was kosher. (They also almost lost it.)
I called the original pharmacy and they assured me it doesn’t actually need to be refrigerated, as long as it doesn’t reach its melting pint of like 100 F.
It’s not just Zantac. It’s blood pressure medication and now diabetes 2 medication to lower blood glucose. If you read the Bloomberg article linked in the post, it’s even more scary. Basically they don’t test the drugs which is why They are being discovered one by one.
If you’re on any sort of generic medication, it’s probably manufactured in India/China and it’s probably contaminated. And if it’s not contaminated it might not even fit to specifications, ie too much of the drug or too little per pill. It’s happening all the time and the FDA is reactive not proactive. There’s a quote in the Bloomberg article about a judge not wanting to peel the onion because it could be too bad.
This is not necessarily correct, and I suspect specifically not correct in this particular case.
The first step in the synthesis of ranitidine is a Mannich reaction on a furan compound (furfuryl alcohol) to produce essentially one half of the molecule. The key reagent in that step is dimethylamine hydrochloride.
The final steps of the synthesis involve conditions that will form nitrosamines from amines.
Thus, if any dimethylamine hydrochloride is left over after the first step, conditions exist to turn it into NDMA.
Dimethylamine is a bugger to get out of a reaction mixture, and it would not surprise me to find that a poorly-designed or badly executed reaction scheme may fail to remove some trace amounts, therefore opening the door to producing NDMA. In other words, as an impurity existing from the first step of the synthesis.
So it's not just a case of "NDMA accumulation".
I have had experience witnessing syntheses of pharmaceutical APIs at Indian manufacturing plants, and have seen some horror stories.
The NYT reports that Sanofi's recall "applied only to the United States and Canada, and that its products sold outside the two countries were sourced from different suppliers", which is fairly common practice. So it may be that only some API makers have the problem, which is likely a manufacturing and QC problem.
This is not correct. Studies have clearly shown that if you give someone a moderate dose of ranitidine, the NDMA levels in their urine skyrocket. upwards of 400 times higher if I remember correctly. This is higher than in people who have bladder cancer due to schistosomiasis, a disease causing increased levels of NDMA in the body.
