Congratulations on the launch. We sell B2B crowd forecasting software, a fairly niche market, so something like this could be very interesting for us. We sell mostly into governments, think tanks, and other types of research institutions, with the occasional commercial application. A couple thoughts:
Perhaps I didn't do something correctly, but I ended up with a list of companies. That saves me a little time, but I want to be able to then get to something role-based. Is this behind the upgrade or do I never see this information?
Related, I want role to be one of my primary filtering mechanisms. Find me all Chief Risk Officers in x,y,z industry for companies larger than 500 people, for example. Then let me review their backgrounds, get their contact info, and contact them.
I think this is how many sales people / founders operate to try and start to sell. What am I missing?
Yes! you can add contacts based on job description. You'd do that by clicking on the far-right of the table to add a column, then select "Find Employees" and add as many key words and job descriptions as are relevant.
We run a public crowdsourced forecasting site for the government here: https://inferpub.com. For our various stakeholders, we're using ChatGPT to summarize forecaster's rationales for their probabilistic forecast. We ask it to both summarize the arguments for the event happening, and against. We still need a human in the loop given who the information it's going to, but it's been an excellent starting point.
Somewhat similar conversation going on in the /r/chicago subreddit. Top comment from that thread[1]:
Anthony Bourdain is a far superior wordsmith than myself, so I will leave this here:
Here are Bourdain’s most memorable quotes about Chicago.
“I’ve done shows in LA, but LA’s a fantastic sprawl. San Francisco? A great town. New Orleans? A state of mind. Chicago? Chicago is a city.” — No Reservations, 2009
“Chicago is big — not just any kind of big — I’m talking major metropolis big. I love this city. In my opinion, it’s the only other real metropolis in America.” — No Reservations, 2009.
“You wake up in Chicago, pull back the curtain, and you KNOW where you are. You could be nowhere else. You are in a big, brash, muscular, broad shouldered motherfuckin’ city. A metropolis, completely non-neurotic, ever-moving, big hearted but cold blooded machine with millions of moving parts — a beast that will, if disrespected or not taken seriously, roll over you without remorse.” — Medium essay for Parts Unknown, 2016.
“It is, also, as I like to point out frequently, one of America’s last great NO BULLSHIT zones. Pomposity, pretentiousness, putting on airs of any kind, douchery and lack of a sense of humor will not get you far in Chicago. It is a trait shared with Glasgow — another city I love with a similar working class ethos and history.” — Medium essay, 2016
“Chicago is a town, a city that doesn’t ever have to measure itself against any other city. Other places have to measure themselves against it. It’s big, it’s outgoing, it’s tough, it’s opinionated, and everybody’s got a story.” — Parts Unknown, 2016
2021 Tesla Y owner here. Midwest location. Took a 150 mile trip yesterday. Temps were 38F. Left my house fully charged at 330mi range, battery topped off. Arrived with 100mi estimated range left.
On the way home later that evening, temps were 28F. Left again almost fully topped off with estimated range of 310mi after visiting a supercharger. Arrived home with estimated 70mi of range left.
Many lament the downfall of traditional media then crucify them when they creatively explore new opportunities for themselves.
Should the "Gray Lady" have just stubbornly continued to print its papers until it was bought up by the same PE vipers who have destroyed countless other newspaper companies?
I applaud them for establishing other opportunities for themselves to survive and thrive. IMHO, the NY Times is not the enemy here.
I'm not sold, yet, on roundabouts improving safety over four-way stops. Pedestrians at regular intersections are pretty easy to spot. But when you come up to a typical roundabout, the road is twisting a little, you're looking to see what traffic is approaching the roundabout, and the crosswalk is usually right in the area where the road is twisting to line up for roundabout entry.
I don't know that I have any suggestion, though, to make it better other than try to keep pedestrians far enough from the roundabout that drivers can easily focus on them and not be distracted by more moving parts.
The argument that you are only crossing half the road at a time is fairly compelling, though. I guess there's a trade-off there.
Roundabouts where pedestrian traffic is expected should have the zebra crossing set back some meters before the actual roundabout, which makes the pedestrians move perpendicularly to traffic in all cases, where their visibility is higher.
I cross one frequently and it's still pretty dangerous because cars rarely signal roundabout exit. As a pedestrian it's hard to predict if a car will exit, and drivers are also often distracted at that moment / looking down at gps (did I take the right/wrong exit)?
Hahaha. Are you joking? It's somewhat rare in Europe not to have a roundabout like this. They are clearly way better for pedestrians. You only have to cross half the road before you get to a safer place.
Compare this intersection which seems to have been somewhat recently upgraded:
Notice that there is also now a bend in the road so a car physically has to slow down to navigate it, unlike miles of straight traffic light intersections.
I'm a huge roundabout advocate but the user you replied to is correct. Despite the Carmel roundabout looking safer, when you're there, you don't feel like pedestrians are considered. I've driven through them.
Smaller roundabouts in narrower streets feel safer for pedestrians even if the islands are smaller. It's really the street size that is doing the work and the smaller roundabout works in conjunction with the street size to make cars behave more like they're in a turn and not a road with curves in it.
Having worked in a consulting firm for years, I spent very little time in the office anyway. Instead I was constantly deployed to client sites. I wonder how this will impact those who are working for clients who have different policies. Will the consultants still be remote, or will they have to adhere to their client's policies, some of whom inevitably will require being in the office. In that case, this isn't as sweet a deal as it may seem.
As a former dev in Risk Assurance: PwC’s offices are terrible and crowded open offices. It’s a godsend for the software people. Also lots of client engagement work happens offsite. Though of course to a large extent PwC’s job is to show up and look pretty.
As a dev in Florida their offices were the nicest offices I had ever been to. Anyone could checkout window seats, standup desks, or regular cubicles.
I also disagree with the show up and look pretty. Real work was getting done the majority of the time everywhere I turned. People would often work hard and leave an hour or two early because they had better time management. I saw significantly more overall productivity than at other big clients in other states.
Tampa, circa 2015-2018, IIRC. I was on the 10th floor at 4040 Boy Scout for a couple months and it was glorious. Then we moved to the 4th floor and it was bad. They intentionally under buy office space there because they already expected the majority of their IT to work remote.
And yeah, PwC also does productive work. I have a friend who works in healthcare who said working with PwC was a nightmare - basically teaching their associates how healthcare worked. The comment about pretty is really about how PwC seems to hire intentionally for visual appeal in their client facing roles. The company is basically selling confidence in their competence, so using the halo effect is a pretty natural strategy. It also lingers for me as being a bit icky.
A lot of consultants I know do not want to work remote because they specifically enjoy the on-the-road lifestyle. My experience with many of my consulting colleagues is that this this type of news is great because they still get to travel to client sites, but also can live (almost) wherever they want on the weekends and not be tied to a specific PwC office location.
Also how will they determine this part: "Location does factor, however, into PwC employees' pay, Seals-Coffield said. Employees who opt to work virtually full-time from a lower-cost location would see their pay decrease, she added."
Nope. But they have become more understanding of those who are so long as performance is improved. Many will still require you onsite, but they don’t care where you fly in from.
I hope people don't read your comment and choose not to read the article. I was very moved by how Bobby's death impacted his family and fiancee in different ways. It's an extremely well written piece and doesn't deserve (IMHO) the flippant "tl/dr" treatment given its subject matter and quality.
I would encourage anyone with a little extra time to read about the PLATO system. Truly ahead of its time, invented by an engineer at University of Illinois named Don Bitzer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Bitzer
I was fortunate to have a parent who worked for Dr. Bitzer and we had a PLATO terminal at home, hardwired in to the university mainframe at 1200 Bd. Played most of the games mentioned in the article along with Empire, a Star Trek-inspired multiplayer team game. Great memories.
PLATO was absurdly fun. Houston Independent School District had a single terminal at each high school I attended and screen time was highly coveted. To the point that a friend of mine would sneak into school early just to get on, which promoted the administration to put a lock on the phone. Undaunted and despite more than one '9' in the phone number, we learned to dial by rapidly flashing the switch hook to simulate a rotary phone dial.
Thematically the school administration putting in what seemed like arbitrary rules just inspired us to work even harder to get access.
HISD also locked down "author" mode which was required to write new programs (called lessons) in PLATO's programming language named tutor.
Someone eventually cracked the account owners password, which is how some people ended up with accounts with author rights. We ended up replacing the login program on HSEP's PDP 11/34 so we always had super user privileges and I managed to socially engineer privileged access to our CDC mainframe. My flashhook dialing buddy figured out the system operators had buried end of file characters in the system docs on the CDC mainframe and we were able to find lots of interesting new commands to run after that. Again, telling us we couldn't do something just inspired us more. OK, upon reflection we were just hacking anything we could get our hands on.
Frankly I couldn't tell you exactly how I socially engineered it any more but I managed to track down an oil company here in town that not only had a PLATO terminal but a printer and gained access to both over the summer. Needless to say this was an amazing coup for a high school kid who just wanted to do a little coding and play a few games, if I say so myself.
I no longer have the long rolls of yellow paper from playing TREK and other games on an ASR 33 connected to the CDC mainframe or indeed anything else from high school, but the PLATO dot matrix screen print of Labyrinth's start screen remains a treasured possession to this day.
I used Plato at udel , and had my first programming jobs there. It is hard to underestimate how far ahead they were, and that system influenced all my designs in my entire career.
Like realtime chat with any other user, character by character updates (what, you have to press enter to send? primitive!)
Friday afternoon dogfights used a lot of resources, but were super cool. Tens and maybe 100 users all in the same real time flight space, duking it out...
Back in the day, most hardware couldn’t send data without having the user press ‘send’.
A shared system that could survive being interrupted whenever any of its users pressed a key still was relatively rare.
So I guess this might ¿partly? Have been to show of the capabilities of the system. At 1200 or maybe even 300 baud, it may also be the better UX, but I wouldn’t know.
The most that you could have in the dogfights would have been around 30 (if =empire) or about 5? (if =dogfight), and the definition of 'real time' was 1 frame every few seconds, as one might expect when you are limited to 10 TIPS (thousand instructions per second).
Empire was built around a 10 second replot mechanic and you frequently used the STOP button to stop the screen from drawing so you could get interactivity back quickly.
Realtime chat was amazing, especially with the ability to move characters around/erase characters with the pixel addressable 512x512 plasma screens; people would draw art by using characters, then moving the cursor back over them, and then erasing, or drawing in another character. O shift-space * shift-space ? would be O, * and ? on top of each other, which kind of looked like a smiley face. Fun times.
My high school had one they left abandoned in an unused science classroom. Yours truly found many excuses for hanging out in there. When they found out I was actually using it, they left me alone.
This one was standalone, so a later model. Also the screen was bluish-white as opposed to the orange ones that I see photos of. All of the software was on floppies and much of it of the educational/industrial ilk. How to Not Kill Yourself With Chemicals, and So, You're a Sociopath. That sort of thing.
It's a joke, of course. But there were a lot of "personality test" kind of things that were clearly meant for employer screenings. Hence, *So you're a Sociopath..."
I saw a demo of PLATO in the 1970s and it inspired me for years about what was possible with computers. On the hardware side, it had a touchscreen which was remarkable back then, as well as the high-resolution graphics and flat plasma display. The software was also amazingly interactive. This was the era of punch cards, or a Teletype if you were lucky, so seeing the PLATO was like a vision from the future.
The early plasma displays were basically a big array of neon lamps. Coincident voltage on X and Y lines turned pixels on and off. A sustain voltage kept the lit pixels lit. The screen was thus its own memory.
IBM had big flat panel plasma displays in the early 1980s.[1] Early in the history of AutoCAD, a driver was written for one of those things interfaced to a PC. The slow update rate was a big problem for the cursor. Orange plasma displays struggled along for decades, but the slow refresh rate limited their usefulness.
Perhaps I didn't do something correctly, but I ended up with a list of companies. That saves me a little time, but I want to be able to then get to something role-based. Is this behind the upgrade or do I never see this information?
Related, I want role to be one of my primary filtering mechanisms. Find me all Chief Risk Officers in x,y,z industry for companies larger than 500 people, for example. Then let me review their backgrounds, get their contact info, and contact them.
I think this is how many sales people / founders operate to try and start to sell. What am I missing?