BeLinda Nichols

I understand this sentiment. Too many employers still think unemployed ppl are that way bc they��re the corporate equivalent of “box office poison.” They think those people deserved to be sloughed off & don’t deserve another chance to get rehired & drag another company down. I get it. I’ve been in that position a few times in my career. However…I don’t think we need to decriminalize, if you will, specific words. We need to understand that those words - fired, sacked, let go, laid off, etc. - are just loaded subsets of what people ultimately do: They leave companies. Whether they planned to or not, they still leave. “I left” is active - “I was fired” is passive. Regardless of whether a prospective employer is “one of the good ones,” painting yourself as passive isn’t a positive thing to do. The “hero’s journey” story that you tell in interviews isn’t “how I was buffeted about by cruel circumstance.” It’s “how I transcended adversity & hope New Company will join me in my inevitable triumph.” So, let’s be honest with ourselves about what what we’re really doing when we’re let go. And then let’s own our story so we can tell it in a compelling way without resorting to false flag words that - let’s be honest - will never be truly normalized.

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Hey awesome people! Do you have contacts in the book publishing industry? I self published a novel a few years ago, and I recently finished a draft of the sequel. I have two more books planned for the series. I'm interested in looking into formal publisher arrangements, but I know it's unlikely without knowing the right people. I'm uncomfortable bragging about stuff like this, but let's just say that the push to get this series to more people is coming from the early readers. *I* was fine slapping it on Amazon and calling it a day, lol. Feels like a longshot, but you never know! **Edit: I'm aware of many services that help with self publishing. For the purposes of this post I'm referring to the classic publishing process.

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Another wave of helpful Narrator improvements is rolling out to the Windows Beta Channel. Highlights include: ✅ Narrator key + ctrl + x to copy what was last spoke to the clipboard. ✅ Narrator now auto-reads contents of mail in the new Outlook. ✅ Fixed performance issue that surfaced after 15 minutes of continuous use. ✅ Removed extraneous "contains style" announcements ✅ Improved support for 200% text scaling #Narrator #Accessibility https://lnkd.in/gaP9zQTh

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Years ago, a manager of mine told me I needed to learn how to work with ambiguity. It was terrible advice. Don’t get me wrong. Ambiguity is a constant in many work environments. And I’ve heard many other managers give similar advice to their reports that mine gave to me. But the message is poor; it implies that ambiguity is something you’ll just have to put up with. Now, I would give different advice. I would say: “You should have a high intolerance for ambiguity. And when you encounter it, you should do everything you can to eliminate it.” I don’t want to “deal” with ambiguity, any more than I want to “deal” with a weed in a garden. I want to get rid of it and take steps to ensure it doesn’t come back. That’s how you make progress.

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Join TPGi for a free webinar on May 9, 2024 at 11am ET that will walk you through the steps for identifying tools for each phase of your Accessibility Program and illustrate with examples of successful strategies. Register today! https://buff.ly/3QleFFT #Accessibility #A11y

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How you lead is as important as hitting your goals. Be the leader that people remember well.

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I'm honored to have collaborated with Nick Potkalitsky, PhD in discussing a realistic pedagogical future for middle school students whose educators are employing the Montessori Adolescent Guide imbued with AI capabilities (and VR). I highly encourage all educators to read this article in "Educating AI" to draw inspiration for infusing AI within your curricula as a tool! Thank you Nick for the opportunity to join our minds together and I look forward to future work together! #EdTech #EduTech #EducationTechnology #AIforEducation #Montessori #ArtificialIntelligence #AI

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Here is another quick read from Marty Cagan. Is Product Art or Science. This would translate to Are Product Managers Artists or Scientists? Do share your thoughts in comments below 👇

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Slate folks, I put together this quick video for our Slate-A-Minute series because join selection in a Configurable Joins query is one of the most common sources of errors we see when working with clients. The case of Schools vs. School by Rank Overall illustrates what can happen if a join is not configured: https://lnkd.in/gXtMP3ZR

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Here's a quick tip from Dr. Spotfire on how to provide a confirmation dialog for executing a script or action. http://spr.ly/6041iE1nU

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I'm trying something new. It's been a while since I've blogged and I'm trying it again. This time, it's focused around a simple experimental project I'm working on. Can I build a non-trivial, web-based, multi-player, game only using AI? I won't write a single line of code myself. Instead, I'll pair with the AI and let it write everything (or in some cases, tell me what to write). How far can I get? What are the sticky edges? Are we in imminent danger of losing our jobs? (spoiler alert: no) Here's the blog chronicling my experiment: https://lnkd.in/g-FwHK37 Here's the code so far. THIS IS VERY MUCH A WORK IN PROGRESS. The game is functional but needs more mechanics to make it fun. It also hasn't received any real styling to speak of. I'll work through that as I go. https://lnkd.in/gtpiebPi

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Great to see more press coverage of the possibilities for AI + robotics to create new ways to help people and do things that have not already been imagined. I think the future of robotics will be different than what we see today, stranger and more amazing. 

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Someone I'm mentoring just started their first job in the tech writing field (hoorays!) and came to me asking for advice about their new role. Their boss, who isn't a tech writer, was building the team from the ground up to take on a new project, and everyone else on the team was new as well. Where to begin? Here's the advice I gave him: - Give yourself time: Give yourself a month to figure things out - at the minimum. Every company is different, and every department is different, and every manager is different. You should give yourself a month to figure out what’s important and at least three months to figure out how everything works. - Solve your boss’s problems: There’s a number of things keeping your boss up at night, and you should be working to understand what their problems are and how you can contribute to the solution. It’s OK to point blank ask your boss “What’s your biggest problem right now?” and “How can I best help you?”. There’s a good chance your boss doesn’t have any process set up and needs some guidance around it. Try to not get frustrated that you boss doesn’t know everything. Try your best to be the solution to their problems, reducing their workload instead of making more of it. - Find allies: Make friends with other people in your role at the company and learn from them. What are their challenges? How are they different from yours? What tools are they using and can you use them in your own work. If possible, work together with them to develop standardized processes for work. Share your knowledge with others and work to grow together. - Define your own personal goals at the job: This is not your “forever job” or your “forever company”, so define what you what to learn from the role and how you want to grow. Your own personal development is on you. See if your company will help pay for professional development, like books or classes. Decide if you want to grow more technically and what technical skills you would like to learn. If there are conferences or meetups you’d like to attend, sign up and make it a priority. - Keep a paper trail: Take note of your weekly accomplishments in a document, including your “To Do” list. At Google, this is formalized in a process called “Weekly snippets” where what you got done this week and what you plan to do next week are published weekly to the company. You don’t need to do anything as rigorous, but at least once a week, take 15 minutes to write down what you’ve accomplished in case you’re ever required to highlight the work that you’ve done for the company or make a case for promotion. Also, keep ongoing 1-1 notes with both your boss and with others on your team if you meet with them regularly that you can refer back to if needed.

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Reading linear texts on paper versus computer screen: Effects on reading comprehension: https://lnkd.in/gbKb4sXh

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WebAIM shares how to make VPATs and ACRs more effective in procurement. https://buff.ly/3zkfABu #VPATS #ACRS #DigitalAccessibility #Accessibility #A11y

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PDFs can be a large part of an organization’s digital content. This article provides tools and steps you can take with Adobe Acrobat Pro to check and fix PDF accessibility issues. https://buff.ly/3y0UhUw #Accessibility #A11y #PDF #PDFs

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Anthropic released another paper on their ongoing work towards interpretability of large foundational models like their Claude 3 family, built on previous work by many. Their work continues to be enlightening and inspiring. The findings in this work are generally similar to previous findings on smaller models but scaled up to Claude 3 Sonnet: 💡 they find large numbers of "features" corresponding to combinations of neuron activations and these features map to concepts that we recognize/understand: for example, features for transit infrastructure, particular people, concepts (like bias and "objects lacking sentience"). This might sound familiar from classical machine learning, but the interesting thing is that there is no single thing/neuron encoding each of these concepts, it's a particular combination of neuron activations that embeds these concepts in "superposition" in the network. 💡they observe a sort of "distance" of these feature activations that arrange themselves "near" semantically similar features. When they use their sparse autoencoder approach to learn more and more features they observe that the level of abstraction in the detected features becomes more granular, in ways that are interpretable and meaningful. 💡when they artificially fire these activation patterns during inference, it affects the output in ways that relate to the "feature". For example, asking Claude "what's the most interesting science" normally it responds Physics, but if you clamp the feature activations for the feature "Brain Science" to 10x their max values then Claude responds: Neuroscience. Ways to interpret _and_ influence the model. Great readable work [1] along with an interactive explorer of some of the "features" themselves [2] 🎂 There's an easter egg too: if you scroll in the feature explorer tool and try and select one of the "Randomly selected features from 1M" you get a message "if you want to see the rest of the features, we're hiring!" with a link to their recruiting page :) [1] https://lnkd.in/gZbparwp [2] https://lnkd.in/gC9eus53

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