There's a lot more interesting detail in the wikipedia article, including a full description of the algorithm, and Perlin's own improvement of using simplex noise.
Slack replaces in-person conversations, which have the same deficits, and many of the same benefits. It works best for remote and hybrid teams, where the in-person discussions aren't possible. It can even work well for in-office teams by allowing some collaboration to be more async. It's way better than email for this.
It's terrible for being off the record. All Slack should be considered durable for the employer.
> It's terrible for being off the record. All Slack should be considered durable for the employer.
It's also terrible for being "on the record". All slack conversations should be considered ephemeral from a documentation and records keeping perspective.
Which leaves it in a pretty ugly spot. It's good for exactly two things in my opinion:
1. Quickly scheduling a real meeting (occasionally it can replace the meeting if it's just two participants, but I've not seen this be consistently successful past two).
2. Work appropriate chit chat and water cooler discussions - which are beneficial from a "social cohesion" standpoint for remote teams, but are generally wasted time.
Basically - it's the worst of both worlds: you're always on the record and the record is mostly useless from a historical/documentation perspective.
> Work appropriate chit chat and water cooler discussions - which are beneficial from a "social cohesion" standpoint for remote teams, but are generally wasted time.
I don't agree it's "wasted time"; some amount of social interaction is pretty useful for a team to work well together. Essential? Probably not. But it does tend to lubricate the process a bit.
There's also idle work-related conversation that doesn't really neatly fit in a "ticket" but is nonetheless pretty useful.
All of that being said, I think Slack is horrible for all of this as its UI forces stuff into "threads" hard which serious reduces visibility and ability to "join in" on conversations hours or days later.
I agree with both points. One of the things I miss from my previous job is a thriving mattermost instance with channels full of jokes mixed with technical (but not necessarily work-related) info. It really brought the team together and I believe it had many indirect positive productivity effects.
For some reason I never saw this magic replicated with Slack.
> All slack conversations should be considered ephemeral from a documentation and records keeping perspective.
We use chat exactly that way. Commonly people respond to questions with a link to either the issue in our issue tracking system, or to the relevant page in the wiki. Certain individuals have learned that saying "but what I want isn't in there" gets them an edit link to the same page.
Once tech support started using the wiki it became more broadly useful. Knowledge that used to live only in the minds of the more experienced tech support people somehow ended up in the wiki thanks to juniors asking questions and the answers being pasted into the wiki. Wiki has also become something of a back channel for things that should be written down but don't really fit the issue tracking system. Common user errors and their symptoms, for example.
We've been doing almost all of our team meetings (ranging from 5-8 people) over Slack for the past number of years. They're both faster and more productive than the video chat meetings we used to have, and leave a written record. A huge benefit over a spoken meeting is that multiple people can be 'talking' at once (often in threads) without interrupting each other.
I'm also not sure why you consider the record useless from a historical perspective. It's not structured documentation, to be sure, but it's at least a useful as email in that respect. (More-so because it's generally much easier to search.)
>All slack conversations should be considered ephemeral from a documentation and records keeping perspective.
Unfortunately, from a SOX, HIPAA, or sunshine/FOIA perspective it's not. As you say, you're always on the record, even if you don't know what the record is.
> Slack replaces in-person conversations, which have the same deficits, and many of the same benefits
A couple of disadvantages of Slack vs real-time conversations: there can be multiple Slack threads happening at the same time. On particularly busy days, I find myself having to context switch between threads a lot. Threads can also keep going versus an in-person conversation which has an explicit end (further discussions are done in a follow-up conversation). Some threads play out over the course of multiple days, which requires that you keep the context of it in "working memory" for a while.
I like Slack, but at its worst it encourages multitasking, which can be a real productivity killer.
That's the point. There have always been lots of ways for employees to communicate, Slack is one with a permanent record owned by the licensing company.
It's funny to read people on HN bagging on Slack. My first experience of it was as a middle manager moving to Silicon Valley where everyone expected you to use it, along with JIRA. I used to like to use kanban boards and -- I know this sounds ridiculous -- waterfall charts. It's like these things become fads and then everyone decides they are terrible.
> Slack replaces in-person conversations, which have the same deficits, and many of the same benefits.
Agreed. Reading this, a lot seems to come down to culture problems that would exist whether that given office uses Slack or not, especially regarding interruptions.
I personally have felt way less interrupted from Slack/Teams in my 8+ years of remote work than I did in an office. All of my employers have understood that if I have Slack notifications disabled, I'm either "out of office" or focusing on something, and have also understood that Slack should be treated as a "something that could go a few hours without a response."
In-person, I'd just have people walk into my office and start talking without seeing if I was busy. I had multiple times where I had the door shut and lights off, and had someone pound on the door because "they could hear my keyboard and thought I just didn't hear them knocking."
Slack just lets the people who are going to interrupt you regardless do so with way less effort.
It looks like no one has said this yet. Many of the higher price/quality wines are expected to be cellared for a certain number of years after release. Opened too soon, they will have too much tannin and/or acidity. It costs money to keep wines under the correct conditions. One thing that drives up the price of a bottle is whether someone else already did this for you. A 2014 Bordeaux right now, on average, will cost a lot more than a 2020 of the same wine.
Yes that's another factor. For the cheaper wines (pretty much anything you can get in a grocery store), they're made to be opened immediately and don't really benefit from aging. But the higher end wines need to be aged.
One of the fun things is that you don't really know exactly the optimum amount of time to cellar a new vintage. So there are online forums where people will buy a case and open one bottle a year and report their results on how the quality changes over time.
>you don't really know exactly the optimum amount of time to cellar a new vintage.
This is a hidden benefit of belonging to a wine club. Often you can talk to the wine maker and/or they are opening enough bottles regularly that they can give you a sense of when it's time to drink. After you've been through a few years of the syrah or the cab sav, you get a sense for yourself too because you start to get the pulse of what the winemaker is making.
This is actually the first year in a long time that I have a batch aging -- using wild grapes growing on my property. The first wine I ever made (from a kit), unbeknownst to me, needed to be aged to taste good. Once I learned that, I did the same test: every few months I'd open a bottle and taste it. After a year, most of the "tarry" flavors were gone, after 3 it was getting good. At five I really liked it. Unfortunately, no bottles survived to the 10-year mark, but I did learn to make wines that matured a lot faster!
It does not cost nearly as much as the price premium.
A regular household fridge costs something like $100/year to run. My fridge has 20 cubic feet of volume, which is something like 500 liters. This suggests we can fit at least 100 bottles into it. This gives us $1/year as upper bound for storage costs per bottle. This is upper bound, because air conditioning costs go down with volume, due to square-cube law.
Point is, if the price premium was driven mostly by storage costs, it would be significantly lower than it actually is.
Small remark though, you shouldn’t age wine in a fridge (the humidity is too high, and temperature too low).
There are some fridge-like "wine cellar" contraptions that work well (keep optimal air quality / temperature).
Or a basement does the trick if the humidity is right (needs to be high but not too high)
I remember when I was a kid, my parents had a room in the basement for storing wine that was entirely airtight, with an AC-like device that controlled the air. That’s probably extremely overkill if you aren’t a wine buff (& storing huge quantities of it) though
You also need to factor in the time value of money: if the winemaker sells you a 2022 release in 2022, they get paid immediately.
Also factor in temperature and humidity controlled storage (a kitchen fridge will not do), insurance against disasters, backup power generation, and so on. If you think aged wines are overpriced, it is easy to cut out the middleman and age it yourself — so my guess is that the market is reasonably efficient.
> You also need to factor in the time value of money: if the winemaker sells you a 2022 release in 2022, they get paid immediately.
This is right, I forgot about this: at 5% interest rates, 5 years of storage is actually 25% of the original price, which is probably substantial factor.
> Also factor in temperature and humidity controlled storage (a kitchen fridge will not do),
My kitchen fridge example was only meant to provide an estimate for the cost. Controlling humidity upwards is not expensive at all, it’s even cheaper in fact than controlling temperature.
> insurance against disasters, backup power generation, and so on.
These are extremely cheap at scale. You don’t really need backup power generation, the wine won’t spoil from few hours or even days of inappropriate temperature.
> If you think aged wines are overpriced, it is easy to cut out the middleman and age it yourself — so my guess is that the market is reasonably efficient.
My point was rather that the mere cost of storage is not the main part of the premium. Capital cost is probably significantly higher, but what is probably even higher still is speculation premium: not all wine vintages are appreciating equally, and if you just buy random wines, they will likely won’t appreciate all equally over time.
Yes, but then you are doing a bunch of work — buying a (second?) fridge, paying to rent or own space to put it, making sure the fridge continues to run, making sure you don’t accidentally drink your wine before you meant to. If I cared about this property I would certainly pay someone much more than the cost of storage in electricity terms to not have to do any of that or wait a number of years to get a rolling stock going.
>It does not cost nearly as much as the price premium
for industrial climate control on wines? if you remove the improved drinkability that comes with age, and the scarcity and desireability of well-known chateaux it absolutely does.
There are companies that specialise in storing wine portfolios and you'd be amazed at how much they charge, wine in bottles takes up a lot of room and is really heavy.
You can cellar your own wine. Lots of people do it, but cellar conditions matter and it's an expensive hobby. It's nice to not need to know five years in advance what you will feel like drinking tonight. Optionality is worth something.
But yes, with care a hobbyist can do better than how some retail wine is kept.
Edit: The main points are 1) cool (~55F/13C), 2) dark, 3) not too dry (70% humidity is usually recommended. This is to protect the cork), and 4) store on its side, also to protect the cork from drying out. Five years is a long time.
Most retail wines are made to drink now though. If it's on the shelf it's ready.
Not all wines are the same! Some can benefit from aging but not all.
The whole idea of "sealing" wine in a bottle is to keep it and not actually change it. It's a preservation method. However, the bottle is not really completely sealed and the small air gap at the top is not empty either. The cork might allow a tiny amount of air transfer too. The remains of the wine creation process might also leave some reactive components.
When you store wine it seems that a cellar type environment with its stale and earthy air helps - hmmm I wonder why!
Challenge your tastes or whatevs. For example you might find that a really cheap bottle of white chilled to about 5C and fizzed in a Soda Stream makes quite a decent Champagne analogue.
Haha. Rewinding back to my university days, I had picked up what I thought was a very nice bottle of Beaujolais. I put it above my fridge... and fast forward, opened it with my Bride of 20 years. Pure vinegar. I suspect that bottle had just about everything wrong done to it storage wise, outside of freezing solid.
There are very few wines that could be aged , most commercial bottles are good for 1 to 3 years bo matter how well you store them. Even wines from respectable producers are often going to start being broken in 10 years or so. Wine is living thing and the biological and biochemical processes are going to ruin the liquid at some point. Wines that could survive 20, 30 or more years are exception not rule and you need to know which one to pick.
Depends on what your location and budget is. Storing wine outside or at room temperature doesn’t age it the same way a wine cellar in France would. In general you want ~53-57 Fahrenheit and 50-80% humidity depending on what exactly you want to happen.
Unfortunately, simply digging a hole in your back yard only gets it to the average temperature of your area which may be quite different to that hypothetical wine cellar in France.
In the end keeping even a fairly large room at whatever temperature and humidity level you desire isn’t that difficult, assuming you have the space and budget.
https://chromestatus.com/feature/4733392803332096
Doing this manually is tedious, but a browser extension would make it super easy.