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I studied design in the early 2000s, a time of brutal design feedback culture. These days, I have at least two to three conversations every week with designers who need some advice on how to share often negative feelings at work. Sometimes it’s because of a personality clash, other times it’s ‘constructive feedback’ based on someone’s performance. In any case, it’s a ‘difficult conversation’. Helping people have difficult conversations well …

Recollections / November 12, 2024 ROBERTS: I don’t know if I told you guys this, but I worked at Musicland/Sam Goody for a couple of years in the early ‘90s, a pretty good time for popular music. I was actually a store manager for a few months—yes, Richard, it’s true—before my location closed down (there was another Musicland down the street in the mall). That’s what you did back then—you …

We all deserve and need random, enjoyable links. Onwards. Modernist Estates, a new agency (not for profit!) looking to make the most of the best bits of 20th century architecture and help get it into the hands of those who … Continue reading →

British painter Frank Auerbach has died, at the age of 93 years. Whatever else they may have been, Auerbach’s pictures were never easy — easy to make, or easy to love. Effort was demanded on both sides. First impressions of his work — on the part of critics and, indeed, the rest of us — often focused on the superficial. Auerbach’s paint could be almost ludicrously thick, his brushstrokes crude, …

In our list of hard words to spell in the English language, “awful” vs. “awfull,” “awefull,” or “aweful” is right up there in difficulty! What is the correct way to … The post Awfull, Aweful, Awefull, or Awful? How to Spell It… appeared first on Drawings Of....

The ability for SFO Museum ActivityPub accounts to both signal and promote one another provides a mechanism where people can subscribe to a single (SFO Museum) account can keep up with everything that all the other (SFO Museum) accounts are talking about. The introduction of a message processing queue, currently just to handle nearby requests, opens up a whole world of possible interactions between people inside (and outside) the terminals …

Okay, so I f**ked up. I forgot to write about <br> and now the whole series is out of order. Having announced this failing on social media, I appreciate the comments I received like, “give yourself a <br>”. Very funny and clever. “Excellent humor,” as Bob Mortimer would say. Anyway, here it is, albeit late. Some people get very uppity when you conflate the terms tag and element in HTML. …

PC, Mac$13.99Bureau 813.5 hours The Operator is a narrative puzzle game where you play an intelligence operative assisting agents in the field. By analysing photos and videos and searching databases, you discover clues, solve crimes, and unravel a conspiracy. All gameplay happens on a simulated computer desktop, which is why I like calling this genre “desktop/phone simulators”. Like alternate reality games, desktop simulators promise highly intuitive gameplay: if you want …

Below is a step-by-step guide generated by Claude 3.5 Sonnet. Here’s a step-by-step markdown tutorial to set up a cross-account AWS DMS migration from a PostgreSQL RDS instance in Account A to an empty RDS instance in Account B: Prerequisites Two AWS accounts (Account A and Account B) AWS CLI configured with appropriate credentials for both accounts Basic knowledge of AWS services (RDS, VPC, IAM, DMS) Step 1: Create RDS …

Дедпул и Върколака са турци, лъжат ви. През цялата пресилена “комедия” се засмях един път и полу-усмихнах още веднъж. Екшънът беше серия от безкрайни, безсмислени и безпоследствени регенеративни кланѐта. Дошъл съм в София да избягам от коленето на прасе на село, не да го гледам от екрана. Жалко, защото зачатъкът на история, накъсан от светкавичните микросмешки, е всъщност интересен. Докато не се изгуби в досадната мулти-меме-вселена. Позволявам си да мърморя, …

ONE OF MY FAVORITE WAYS of being with my clients is when the dialogue suddenly time travels into the future. You can almost feel it when it’s about to happen. A tale of a frustrated interaction with a colleague or a terrible edict from the C-suite starts to slow down, and there’s an almost furtive moment when something else pops up—like a little furred creature cautiously peeking their head up …

Organisations know they want to change, but they often assume that the only way to change is to do a big technology project. They call in some big and small vendors, and then they’re “procuring an IT system”. 3 reasons why they might start with the words instead. 1 - Immediately impactful Tom Loosemore: “The single thing you could do to quickly improve public services? Redesign all the words.” Rewriting …

This beautiful canyon is under serious threat California geology is complicated. Unlike any other state, it is affected by the interactions of all three kinds of plate boundaries: divergent (the crust pulling apart), convergent (the crust compressing together), and transform (the crust sliding laterally). All of these forces have formed a complex landscape with incredible scenery unlike any other place in the world. The Coast Ranges province is one of …

Hello! Here are some awesome deals for programming books and courses during the 2024 festive season. My ebooks🔗 Offers valid till 30-Nov-2024. You can get them on Leanpub: All 13 Books bundle — $15 (normal price $32), learn Regular Expressions, Linux CLI tools, Python, Vim and more! Linux CLI Text Processing bundle — $10 (normal price $20), grep, sed, awk, perl and ruby one-liners, GNU coreutils, CLI computing Learn by …

An article I wrote for the Conversation on Meta’s recent announcement around making their generative artificial intelligence (AI) models available to defence and national security organisations. Read here