Vicky Harp
Product person at Microsoft. Dev experiences, Al, data. Helper of experts. She/Her. Black Lives Matter.
This meeting could have been a riot.
- I'll be talking about leading teams through change, the resistance factors that naturally arise, and the concrete steps you can take to address them.
- 60% of Americans have a chronic condition. Among people over 65, it's 95%. Saying most of our health care spending goes to chronic conditions is just another way of saying it goes to health care.
- This is all so grim. Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia, the most common childhood cancer, had essentially a 0% 5 year survival rate until the 1960's. It is now 94%, but indeed, those 4 year olds who do not die every year will cost more over their lifetime than if they had. How do they think this works?
- Maybe the patriotic thing to do would be to stop the price gouging where companies charge $1,000 for a pill that costs 25 cents to make and which you have to take daily www.propublica.org/article/revl...
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View full threadI do not claim that this or any other 1990's site is as accessible or responsive as you'd do now, but the fundamental "just the facts please" aesthetic is refreshing - plus I can actually print this thing out and stick it in my music folder.
- True story: after I posted this I was in an orchestra performance and the person sitting next to me had this exact site open on their phone while we were warming up (playing outdoors affects intonation and you might need to change to an alternate fingering, it's a thing)
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- Hobbyist sites which have been maintained with hand-written HTML since the 90's are some of the quickest and most usable sites on the web IMHO Example: www.wfg.woodwind.org/clarinet/cl_...
- I'll be playing with the Redmond Tech Orchestra at the opening of the Marymoor station around noon :)
- We bought a Toyota in March 2017 and I got my first "Urgent! Activate your SiriusXM Trial!" email that month. I've received over 100 such messages in the years since, including 3 last month. This latest one claims it is my "final chance."
- (I have unsubscribed before, but I have a feeling it is re-subscribing me when I get the car serviced at the dealership)
- Reading stories of AI making up facts, apologizing when caught, and doing it again, and thinking of people who I have caught doing essentially the same thing over the years in various tasks, and wondering what will happen when those people inevitably begin to use AI.
- I am remembering standing in the middle of my living room on my bare concrete foundation while on the phone with the contractor who was confidently telling me that they had spent the day installing the tile floor.
- About 10 years ago at a previous job - Me: Did you test the installer? Them: Yes, all good Me: I ask because the installer is busted Them: Sorry, you're right, I didn't
- Eventually people are going to realize the point has always been eroding the education quality of the general public
- While there are heroic individuals in the system who try their best, with good intentions and often good outcomes, as a system public schools in the US have long been more invested in instilling compliance and conformity than in education.
- If you want to know the true priority of a school consider which is treated with more urgency: a child not understanding a passage in a book, or a child not getting up and moving in an orderly fashion to the next classroom when the bell rings.
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- I am sorry you had a bad experience, I truly am. I know your heart is in the right place here. Fortunately I am not in a vulnerable position: I have a CPA I trust, a business degree in my own right, a high net worth, and a fixed rate mortgage at an interest rate significantly lower than inflation.
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- Anything short of completely paying off your mortgage in this economy is simply increasing risk for no benefit, in my view. You can reduce your monthly obligations if you pay it off. If you simply increase your equity, you are reducing your liquidity and locking up the cash.
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- I understand where you're coming from. I still think most people should speak with an advisor for matters like this, which includes factoring in your risk tolerance, lifestyle, expenses, and time horizons. Even people with the same net worth will choose differently based on these considerations.
- Asked Google Photos to suggest a photo from my library which might make a good watercolor subject and it gave me this
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- Honestly: talk to a financial advisor. There are good reasons and scenarios when you should sock away savings into something more liquid and when you should not. My mortgage rate is less than a money market account's return, selling stock to pay it off would be a tax hit on realized gains, etc.
- I didn't screenshot it but I just had Google's AI overview suggest that the best way to keep my hair dry under a swim cap is to get my hair wet before putting it on
- (before someone explains: I know about pre-wetting hair to avoid chlorine damage, this is to do with keeping freshly dyed hair actually fully dry)
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- Those simple days of (checks notes) the Oklahoma City bombing, the Rwandan genocide, the "Contract with America," government shutdowns. Some good movies though.
- Had to be efficient to hit all the message boards after marching band practice
- I look back at myself in the 90's and I can't even understand the min-maxing I was doing to have school, band, a job, weekend babysitting, and an active social life, and somehow still time to catch every single Red Dwarf episode as it aired on PBS
- I turn on the Procomm Plus dialer for the list of the 6 or so BBSes I frequent and goof off on the PlayStation until one doesn't have a busy signal and I hear the modem handshake in the next room.
- Also, that car would need to be a Ford Taurus
- I see folks mocking reporters for tiptoeing around Trump, but then I go into meetings at work and see people doing the same thing with executives. Setting your whole livelihood alight in the hopes that this one time will be different, this one time will cut through the noise - it's a lot to ask.
- I have been enjoying a drop of lavender syrup in my morning cup of tea lately after enjoying some Stash "Breakfast in Paris" on a trip recently. This way I can stick with my regular Yorkshire Gold and not have another box of tea rattling around the kitchen.
- One thing I haven't been able to figure out about tariffs / de minimus revocation is: does this also eliminate the duty free allowance when you are returning from abroad? Let's say I drove up to Vancouver BC and then came back having bought a few odds and ends. @altuscustoms.altgov.info
- I think this comes from a good place but I disagree. A common thread in deradicalization stories is stigma: Once people start losing friends and jobs they reconsider their beliefs. Obviously you should try to be nice to people but you also need to draw a line where you won’t engage anymore.
- Why it’s time we change how we talk about conspiracy theories www.cnn.com/2025/05/03/p...
- There's secondary social pressure you can encounter when trying to ostracize people, but you have to push through. My parents' generation especially seems to try to "smooth things over" between me and people I have cut off, and so it's another front where boundaries have to be set and communicated.
- Got a little sister Eb to go with my A and Bb clarinets
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- Oh yeah the wide shoulder is fine, it's the fact that it's just suddenly gone with nothing you can do about it. I see people riding this direction from the Burke-Gilman with kids on the back of their bikes and it makes me so nervous for them. Like, do they know what is ahead for them down the hill?
- Oh you can have both where I live. This is the Google street view of the bike lane in my neighborhood. The elevation drops from 107 feet to 66 feet right here where there's no railing, but where there often IS a trash can in the way. It's a blind corner and the cars are going 40 mph at best.
- I especially like this part where they have painted a bike lane marking approximately 10 feet from the unannounced end of the bike lane, right next to an impenetrable section of woods with a hidden cliff that drops off into a creek immediately past the treeline.
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- I'm kind of coming around to thinking that nonprofit is the way to go, ala Signal
- Of the many things I don't understand about anti-vax, one is: do they even *have* children? How do they not know they get sick all the time? If offered a magical shot to end the vicious cycle of daycare bronchitis running through our house in about 2017 I would have sold my car to pay for it.
- I went to the doctor coughing so hard I had broken blood vessels and had not been able to sleep for 2 days and they were like "yeah this is going around, it usually peters out after 2 months." TWO MONTHS.
- A garbage truck got tangled up with our lilac tree so I needed to cut back some branches.
- It is distractingly huge and is going to drop a heap of flower litter approximately any moment now, but it smells glorious and it seemed like such a waste to put it directly into the compost
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- It was a weird and sudden change from the fatalism of the nuclear threat. I remember my parents in the 80's being all "you don't need to worry about nuclear war, we are close enough to the port that if our region was attacked you would never even know it." And I was like, oh okay.
- Kiddo has one of those school assignments right now where they have to make a costume of a famous person and recite a speech as though they were that person. Who exactly do they think they are assigning "make a costume" to? This is elementary school.
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- Oh is that today? Neat :)
- There is some part of me that feels like unsupported home school during Covid was less hassle than public school craft-o-rama and the accompanying schedule headaches, last minute cancelled busses, and rolling upper respiratory infections.
- Gansai Tambi opal colors feel like magic
- Painted a nebula, pretty happy with it
- @erikabakse.bsky.social Have you tried these?
- It is spring again, he just ate a bee and is feeling sick.
- Using Bluesky as our collective CVR
- I just saw the NY Times headline "If A.I. Systems Become Conscious, Should They Have Rights?" and I have not read it because I do not subscribe, but I will add my normal reminder here, which is that we already don't give rights to all conscious things. In fact, we eat some of them.
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- This restaurant is still open but way out of my reach these days: Central Texas BBQ in Pearland, Texas. They have something called the Jeff Special, which is red beans and rice with smoked jalapeno sausage and cheese. Just look at this place - IYKYK
