Microsoft OneNote had this back in 2007 or so, granted the speech to text model wasn't nearly as advanced as they are now.
I was actually on the OneNote team when they were transitioning to an online only transcription model because there was no one left to maintain the on device legacy system.
It wasn't any sort of planned technical direction, just a lack of anyone wanting to maintain the old system.
I remember trying out some voice-to-text around 2002 that I believe was included with Windows XP.. or maybe Office?
You had to go through some training exercises to tune it to your voice, but then it worked fairly well for transcription or even interacting with applications.
That was such an amazing mission statement. It was a real measurable goal, and progress towards it was quantifiable. And Microsoft actually did it! That mission statement drove actual strategies (lower costs, don't complete with Apple on the high end, force OEMs to compete against each other on price, etc) that resulted in its ultimate fulfillment.
Once we have direct neural inputs VR will explode. Or at least the ability to wire directly into the optic nerves.
VR, or at least AR, is obviously the future. But Meta, like so many companies before them, saw the future and tried to jump on board way before it was the right time. See: WebTV, the tablet PCs from the early 1990s (!!), Apple Newton, Palm Pilot, etc. (I call it the first mover disadvantage!)
When I was 17 I was hired by a startup to write a book. The end product was a complete disaster (don't hire a 17 year old to write a book, also don't enter into contracts with 17 year old high school students w/o informing parents.)
The book was on 3d modeling in Rhino 3d. I was really good at Rhino3d at that time, to the extent that using it felt like a natural extension of my hands. IMHO every other 3d modeling program has a trash UI compared to the absolutely amazing UI that Rhinoceros 3d has.
I had to learn how to translate my absolute love of Rhino3D onto a page and explain it to other people. It was hard. It made my brain work in ways it was not used to, but it was an incredibly valuable experience.
The only remaining copy of the book sits behind me on a bit rotted CDR.
I have had 3 types of math teachers in life. American teachers, who generally teach rules from a book according to a curriculum. Russian teachers, who have a passion and a love for the field and who teach how to intuitive the answer to math problems first before going all in on the formulas. And East Asian math teachers who show off the beauty of the equations themselves.
I had one math teacher who couldn't speak English. He didn't need to, he had an incredible ability to communicate math through pure equations. It was lovely, one of the best math classes I've ever had. Math was truly used as a universal language.
I had another teacher (Russian) who got so excited solving equations and explaining DiffEq that he'd break his chalk in half and he'd go diving under desks to pick up the pieces.
But it is artists who are some of the best at transmitting intuitive knowledge. They have centuries of best practices of how to train students to rewrite their brains to literally see the world differently. (And yes a lot of it does involve drawing boring still lives of fruit bowls! But, hey, it works)
TLDR: Michael Gibson is the brain child for Rhino3D's UI.
Yup. I know some of this story.
It's been a minute, so I forget some details...
Ages ago, Robert McNeel & Assoc had been working on the geometry kernel for years. They had high value customers who needed very correct results, not available (from other kernels) at the time. By that time, being a VAR, McNeel had experience with most commercial offerings.
Not having their own front end, they had to import/export to other CADD systems. One of their motivations for reverse engineering AutoCAD's DWG format.
McNeel stumbled onto Sculptura. A mesh modeler written by a solo dev. As I remember it, Sculptura's UI was innovative, amazing, and norm breaking. Exactly what McNeel was looking for. They bought it asap. (Gods, I wish I could quickly remember that guy's name.)
McNeel's intent was to synthesize Sculptura's UI and their state of art kernel.
McNeel had the dual luxury of time and no installed base (legacy). Their initiative motivation was a correct kernel. Like correctly joining 3 curving surfaces. (Their canonical example at the time was to accurately model a styrofoam egg carton.) Which took years of R&D.
So they had time to really nail Rhino3D's UI.
Aha. I just found the official history. My memory wasn't too far off.
Michael Gibson! Yay! I now recall him grinding away on Rhino. Whenever I visited McNeel, he loved giving demos, talking about ideas, etc. Great guy. (We were both young, surrounded by olds, so had that connection.)
I grew up in Seattle and attended West Seattle High School. The technology teacher (whose name I forget, but I can remember his face and voice!) decided to teach us Rhino3d. That went on to me talking about Rhino on Slashdot one day and a digital book publishing startup noticed my comment, and eventually offered me a job of writing a book about Rhino.
I actually haven't used Rhino for much of anything for decades now, I think the last time I used it was to build a scale model of my old town home. I cannot really justify spending $1000 on a program that I would only boot up once every few months for fun. But I have kept love for it all these years, every time I have started it up (downloaded a trial to get some particular task done) I was able to continue right where I left off making things.
I had to force myself to forget about rhino after they deprecated the only version I had a license to, and I moved off Windows, because I would have been destroyed if I realized what I had lost.
Calculus is required for English degrees in other countries. Heck a lot of countries require some amount of calculus just to graduate high school.
Same goes for the basics of statistics. A basic understanding of statistics is a requirement for any college degree in many countries, and for good reasons. Stats comes up all the damn time. From proper A/B testing, to marketing, to understanding public health emergencies, to making informed medical decisions.
6 semesters seems like... a lot? IIRC getting a math undergrad at my Uni didn't require that many classes of calc.
I think calc 1 and 2 are extremely valuable. The concept of rate of change is fundamental to so many things in life, and understanding "area under the curve" is essential to understanding how many ideas are communicated, including lots of graphs in physics, chemistry, and economics.
Beyond that I feel calculus starts getting into specific applications and is less generally applicable to the populace at large.
> From another former Az eng now elsewhere still working on big systems, the post gets way way more boring when you realize that things like "Principle Group Manager" is just an M2 and Principal in general is L6 (maybe even L5) Google equivalent. Similarly Sev2 is hardly notable for anyone actually working on the foundational infra.
Before the days of title inflation across the industry, a a Principal at Microsoft was a rare thing. When I was there, the ratio was maybe 1 principal for every 30 developers. Principals were looked up to, had decades of experience, and knew their shit really well. They were the big guns you called in to fix things when the shit really hit the fan, or when no one else could figure out what was going on.
One of Microsoft's problems is their pay is significantly lower than FAANG and so you very very rarely see people with expertise in the same verticals jump to Azure. I get that "the deal" at Microsoft is lower pressure for lower pay but it really hinders the talent pipeline. There are some good home grown principals and seniors, but even then I think the people I worked with would have done well to jump around and get a stint at another cloud provider to see what it's like. Many of them started as new grads and their whole career was just at Azure.
Meanwhile when I was at another company we would get a weekly new hire post with very high pedigree from other FAANGs. And with that we got a lot of industry leading ideas by osmosis that you don't see Azure getting.
Yeah the deal has also changed. Right as I was leaving the messaging started changing a lot and there was a clear top down “you all need to work harder”. They hired an ex Amazon guy to run my org which really drove the message home.
To be fair though I think Microsoft has decided they are fine with rank and file being mediocre. I don’t know how interested they are in competing for top talent except for at the top.
> I get that "the deal" at Microsoft is lower pressure for lower pay but it really hinders the talent pipeline.
The deal used to be a lower cost of living in a major coastal city, an amazing campus (it is seriously lovely), every engineer had their own office, serious job security, and an unbelievable health care plan.
Seattle exploded in price, they moved to open offices, Microsoft started doing mass layoffs, and they gutted the healthcare plan (by the time I left the main plan on offer was a high deductible with a miserable prescription formulary).
Hard to attract talent when there is no big differentiator.
Of course in the 90s the deal was work there 10 years retire a millionaire. Easy to attract talent when that is the offer ...
> What are we reading here? These are extraordinary statements. Also with apparent credibility.
I left Microsoft in 2014. Already back then I could see this sort of stuff starting to happen.
The Office Org was mostly immune from it because they had a lot of lifers, people who had been working on the same code for decades and who thought through changes slowly.
But even by 2014 there were problems hiring developers who knew C++, or who wanted to learn it. COM? No way. One one team we literally had to draw straws once to determine who was going to learn how to write native code for Windows.
It wasn't even a talent thing, Windows development skills are a career dead end outside of Microsoft. They used to be a hot commodity, and Microsoft was able to hire the best of the best from industry. Now they have to train people up, and Microsoft doesn't offer any of the employment perks that they used to use to attract top talent (Seattle used to be a low CoL area, everyone had private offices, job stability).
When I started at Microsoft in 2007, the interview bar included deep knowledge of how computers worked. It wasn't unusual to have meetings drop down to talking about assembly code. Your first day after orientation was a bunch of computer parts and you were told to "figure out how to setup your box".
Antivirus wasn't mandatory. The logic was if you got a virus, they made a mistake hiring you and you deserved to be fired.
When your average developer can go that deep on any topic, you can generally leave engineers well enough alone and get good software.
> But even by 2014 there were problems hiring developers who knew C++, or who wanted to learn it. COM? No way.
It doesn't help that there are some teams that are hardcore in keeping things as they are and don't want any tooling that might improve COM development experience.
To this day Microsoft is yet to have any COM related tooling for C++ as easy to use as C++ Builder does it.
MFC, ATL, WRL, WIL,.... you name it.
The only time it seemed they finally got it, with C++/CX, there was a group that managed to kill this product, replace it with C++/WinRT, with no tooling other than the command line IDL compiler, now also abandoned as they refocused into windows-rs.
On the other hand there was e.g. CVE-2021-1647 where Microsoft's antivirus would compromise the PC with no user action.
(At least I think that's the one I'm thinking of. It's marked as a high-severity RCE with no user interaction but they don't give any details. There was definitely at least one CVE where Windows Defender compromised the system by unsafely scanning files with excessive privileges.)
People forget that prior to Microsoft releasing Defender, antivirus on Windows was universally bad. Like "make your machine almost unusable" bad.
This was also before SSDs as well.
With local build times already measured in multiple hours (large C++ code bases, lots of caches obj files loaded from central build servers to make local incremental rebuilds even possible), Microsoft didn't want to make things worse by forcing any bloat on developer machines.
“One team we literally had to draw straws once to determine who was going to learn how to write native code for Windows.”
Jesus, you have tons of people who are willing to do that, even now. Microsoft just don’t care to hire from non-target schools, or ordinary professionals and train them —- sure the reason is, people believe that you cannot improve mediocrity, which I don’t believe so.
On a completely different page, most of the generals and advisors and high level bureaucrats of the first Emperor of the Han dynasty came from exactly one county — the county of Pei. But in peaceful time they are just “ordinary people”.
> Jesus, you have tons of people who are willing to do that, even now. Microsoft just don’t care to hire from non-target schools, or ordinary professionals and train them
Microsoft was never elitist about what schools they hired from. When I was there almost anyone who applied from an accredited CS program got at least a phone screen.
But no one in their right mind, in 2012 (when this particular incident happened!), would voluntarily pick up native Windows development skills. It was obvious even then that it was a dead end market.
The number of companies hiring native Windows developers is tiny, and the pay isn't all that good.
It isn't quite COBOL bad, but it isn't a growing market.
I don’t know, I’d love to do the job. Where do I sign up? I know some C from my OS projects, a bit of C++ with my SDL game projects, nothing professional. I also write a lot of Python and SQL. I’m in Canada. Don’t care about salary as long as it’s kinda stable and above 90k CAD, that’s about 1/3 salary cut. QT is good too, I did one project.
I actually tried my luck on LinkedIn but without answer, so would love to get a reference somewhere. If people say my side projects are not enough, which is probably true, I can focus on some Win32 programming for 3 months and see if it works.
But if they only hire greybeards who bagged 20 years of experience then I’m out of luck.
Of course the ideal job is some system programmers job, but I understand that’s too hard, so a notch above is the next good option.
Every large company is doing layoffs right now. Getting an interview 10 years was your best bet. Heck even in 2022 I heard they were brining everyone in for interviews.
There are some really funny people who run parody accounts, or who are retired and just don't care. They publish some hilarious posts. If you follow a few of them LI becomes worth visiting!
I was actually on the OneNote team when they were transitioning to an online only transcription model because there was no one left to maintain the on device legacy system.
It wasn't any sort of planned technical direction, just a lack of anyone wanting to maintain the old system.
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