My only exposure was CMMI. Your comment gave me flashbacks. It made a lot of consultants a lot of money, that’s for sure. It was also a good way for federal acquisitions officials to steer contracts to preferred vendors, few of whom were able to deliver quality products on time.
As a quite successful shark, I was initially pretty cynical and amused at the idea that “marine biology experts” with no shark experience had anything of merit to say.
What brought me around was when I actually looked at some of their observations and realized that an outside perspective actually had unique and meaningful points for me to ponder that I don’t think I could have arrived at on my own, stuck inside my shark-preferential perspective.
(Now substitute shark : entrepreneur and marine biology : sociology)
What’s your point? Personal spiritual beliefs are bad because they encourage people to speak out in defense of potential life?
Having personal spiritual beliefs automatically qualifies you as, and lumps you in with every other, “unhinged religious nut bag,” no matter what you’re trying to do as a result of those beliefs?
Personal spiritual beliefs are bad in both cases (and generally when not kept strictly private) because they are not rational, therefore the worst possible start to base an argument for any cause.
If you want to credibly argue for something, I would recommend not professing that your life is structured by magical thinking.
Warning: potentially biased opinion. Speaking only for myself, but informed by my job.
There are lots of problems with scraping-based approaches.
One, yes, you need some really good tech to scrape data from menus, which, even though they are “structured”, next time you’re at a sit-down restaurant, pay attention to all the subtle discrepancies in formatting between different sections/categories on the menu.
Two, if the menu isn’t html, but is an image or a pdf upload, now you need some strong OCR on top.
Three, the website is generally not likely to be current with what’s actually on offer in the establishment itself. Specials, seasonal dishes, or items that are out of ingredients (“86’d”) will still appear on the menu. That’s going to lead to complaints, refunds, or generally bad customer experience from whoever’s consuming your data / using it to buy food.
Four, you’re going to want to to be paid for all this tech and customer support you’re electing to intermediate between the end purchaser and the restaurant, as a service, and so you’re going to tack on some fees and either jack the price up on the consumer or try getting the restaurant to pay you a finder’s fee, cutting in to their already narrow margins.
Five, if you’re trying to provide ordering service and not just menu data, you still need to submit the order into the store itself, somehow. Which either means calling it in, robo-submitting an online order (if you’re lucky), or sending a courier to place the order and wait. And then, on the other side, whoever’s taking orders for the restaurant has to punch in the request to the register to actually complete the transaction. Which means the system you really want to talk to isn’t the website, it’s the point-of-sale.
Good luck with all that.
Source of bias: I work for a company that helps restaurants enable online ordering and POS integration so they can pay much less in fees and focus on making exceptional food.
Ok so I am laughing because of course the spicing is important, but the important thing to understand here is that there is no correct spicing: it can go in many different ways. That's part of the beauty of these sorts of dishes, you can perturb them and not get burnt out so easily. Oh lemme tell you about regional Indian, but I can't because I am a child there.
So... I sometimes send this dish off in a French Provençal direction, or sometimes toward Mexican Sonoran, or even Oaxacan. But you don't need to do that, all you need is some umami, and some basics. We have eaten it many times over the decades with Worcestershire Sauce as the umami (basically anchovies in soy) and the basics are a good grind of black pepper and potentially something sweet, if the tomatoes suck, as they often do. Don't get too fancy: you want to eat this after a frustrating day at work, freezer->microwave->plate. We add whatever chili concoctions we feel like as we like a bit of burn. But you don't need to do that!
So: take ground beef, cook if raw, use the fat to saute the vegetable matter, compose layers of beef first, then green matter, tomatoes, and then finally sliced potatoes covering the top. Add stock and spices to fill to just covering the potatoes, cook until as moist as you like. We like it saucy, but not a stew though. The more you make, the more nutritious and tasty comfort food you have for those days when... maybe I'll just order DoorDash.
So, I made this last night. Having no clue what proportions you typically use, I just winged it.
Turned out not bad. Not quite beef stew, maybe
more like a soupy shepherd’s pie.
I did end up with a considerable amount of unnecessary broth. I made a batch with 5lbs of beef, maybe another pound of veggies, 1.5 lbs tomatoes and 4 large gold potatoes. I filled my dutch oven and my crock pot with the layers and used 4.5 cartons of stock to get the liquid just over the potatoes. So it cooked in the liquid, but barely absorbed any, and I separated out the solids to pack in the freezer, adding back enough of the broth to hit a sloppy-joe ish consistency.
If you have a recipe with measurements, would love to compare. As it stands, looking to eat well for the next couple weeks. Cheers!
Individual performance isn’t the critical attribute for a company / hiring manager though. You can be an exceptionally talented developer and still be a complete asshole no one wants to work with.
You can also be someone who just doesn’t have the rest of the skill stack to deliver really outstanding products. Technically intricate and high performance, sure - but how about easy to use, valuable and cherished, insanely great?
Funny enough, Google’s own HR division did a huge longitudinal study of what makes teams great; Project Aristotle. What they found was that the sum of individual performance is nowhere near as important as having psychological safety in the team - high trust, high empathy, high openness and vulnerability and feedback without blame.
> The researchers also discovered which variables were not significantly connected with team effectiveness at Google:
Colocation of teammates (sitting together in the same office)
Consensus-driven decision making
Extroversion of team members
Individual performance of team members
Workload size
Seniority
Team size
Tenure
Interesting that you know it as the SSC community, because Scott (TFA’s author)’s original site was Slate Star Codex. The new Substack where this was posted is Astral Codex Ten. Both are (near)anagrams for his nom de plume, Scott Alexander.
Anyway - I’ve lurked both for ~6-7 years. The best summary I can give is that Scott is an excellent and insightful author at his best, prone to certain idiosyncrasies, but who attracts a pretty thoughtful and generally pleasant commenter community.
The bias in astrange’s position is grounded in some factual truth, but I would argue that Scott’s commenter community is not entirely in the “rationality” camp, even if that’s a big part of how Scott reached his audience. The bigger part, imo, are the incredible series of articles he wrote circa 2014-2016 on a breadth of topics, many that still hold up.
I’d say check it out for the articles and see how you feel about the comments. Take astrange for what it’s worth, with a liberal dose of salt
