MajorBee

There's an excellent HN thread that talks about this very question (that comes up on HN every now and then - what _does_ company X do that needs so many engineering resources?): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25375921

TL;DR: Managing a taxi service (that's what Uber is in my mind, not whatever "ride share" means) that spans cities and states, never mind countries, is extremely complicated. To their credit, Uber manages to make it look simple to the end user, prompting such comments as "meh it's just a few screens how hard could it be", which is triumph of product engineering as far as I am concerned.

Related: this blog from Uber talks about the problem of serving market-specific configuration data at scale: https://www.uber.com/us/en/blog/how-we-unified-configuration...

I, for one, found reading the text under the News section quite difficult to read. The combination of the font color and the spacing/kerning made it all appear like a character soup to me. It's possible this is something that has variable impact across populations though.

Generally speaking though, I do think trying to paint 90s websites as some sort of utopian ideal of function and design is purely an exercise in nostalgia and nothing else. It is entirely possible to make fast, responsive, accessible, well-designed rich websites today, all without writing a word of JavaScript (not that including JS by itself is bad or anything). Do not mistake anti-user functions like heavy weight analytics and user tracking libraries, or poorly optimized and ill-architected code bundles as the current "state of the art".

While I quite liked Ghostty to being with, the lack of a scripting API quickly drove me to WezTerm before long. See: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions/2353

I hope they prioritize scriptability soon. It's quite important to my personal git worktree ergonomics.

Only tangential, but I recently discovered that VS Code also picks up paths in `.ignore` to decided whether to include paths in search. I knew that `.gitignore` is automatically picked up, but was surprised when all of a sudden directories that weren't supposed to show up in file search started showing up -- it's because I had unignored them in `.ignore` for ripgrep. Makes sense I suppose.

It can be quite useful to check in project-wide shared editor settings so that everyone in the team is using the same linter/formatter editor settings. We do that in my team for VS Code settings and extensions, even tasks.

I haven't checked if there's a way to maintain a project-scoped _personal_ `.vscode` for those idiosyncratic settings or extensions you want applied to only this project but wouldn't be appropriate to foist on everyone else. I hope there is.

You're crazy if you think the target demo of "business leaders" and "thought leaders" aren't going to dump it into their favorite LLM first thing and prompt their way into a summary.

I just noticed that the PDF cover simply says "© <Author>", not the traditional style of author attribution, which usually is just plain "<Author>". I don't know why, I found it interesting...

Why is so much of generated AI art so... literal? The cover art of this PDF literally spells out what the graphics are supposed to represent. The vast majority of AI visuals on LinkedIn are the same way. If this is what's in store as the future of art, at least commercial art -- feels like a huge step backwards if I'm being honest.

And anyway, what's the point of generating a massive tome like this on a topic evolving as fast as agentic software? Sure it will be outdated within months, if not weeks...

In this case, as a solo dev, it's probably quite justified to be honest. I doubt ConcernedApe would have really been able to continue solo-ing it with this level of success if he also had to maintain distribution channels, sales/returns, marketing, legal stuff on a global scale.

It's probably the big name studios who already have entire departments to do that kind of stuff that feel they're being ripped off.

I bought :( Loved the thing, but yeah batter life wasn't the best. Also noticed that app developers would sometimes not take into account the smaller viewport on the Mini, and so app views would sometimes look too squished or out of place. That 's a minor grouse though compared to the subpar batter life.

The more you put yourself in social settings (online, offline, whatever), the more you increase the surface area for finding someone through "pure random chance". Just adding a more optimistic bent to things.

Google will sell Google Cloud Services to Oracle to cut their losses

Now that is a hot take! I’d like to see this happen just to experience the meltdown this would cause in this community. If you thought the Sun acquisition didn’t go down so well…

I have grown to dislike "jugaad" solutions to problems (unless it is forced onto the problem through sheer necessity), mainly because -- if left unchecked -- it fosters a culture of doing just barely enough to meet minimum requirements and no adherence or even ambition to achieving excellence and craftsmanship.

I recognize that jugaad solutions are usually not what people necessarily want to resort to, but are frequently adopted because of lack of viable alternatives. In such situations, more power to us / them! I'd call that being resourceful though. Aspiring to arrive to the jugaad solution to problems when better ways of doing it are within reach though, that's where I draw the line.

That's hardly a crazy stat, you're merely viewing it through a Western lens. In plenty of Asian cultures it is uncommon for people to have sexual experience before marriage.

Plus you can land in a situation where a user might associate bad experiences with an unofficial client with the actual service and thus leave with a bad impression overall.

Kinda going off on a tangent here, but it was a mild "ohhh" moment for me when I first realized that the company Cisco is actually named after San Francisco, followed by a second such moment when I realized that Cisco's logo represents the Golden Gate bridge.

The availability of cheap, unhealthy junk food is very high, and that combined with the force multiplier that is poverty is a core component in the obesity epidemic. If you are to draw a parellel to the topic at hand, availability of cheap, easy to use (?) guns combined with the force multiplier of mental illness…

That's not always the right way to go either. A professional using a particular device on the daily will be proficient in its usage regardless of how terrible the user interface, simply on the basis of how often they use the thing. On the other hand, how quickly an amateur can pick up a device and start using it will be heavily dependent on how intuitive and instructive the interface is. These two can often be conflicting, though not always. For a product that has a lot of "amateur" users (many home appliances), a touch screen can often be the right paradigm to choose.

A classic example of this is the situation where an experienced cashier on an "analog" system can just fly through the buttons and complete transactions in no time, while at the same time a rookie would take that much more time to ramp up, figure out, and internalize the various button mappings. A darker interpretation of this would be that the system is optimization for fungible workers, where swapping out one cashier at will for another has negligible impact on productivity.

It's not really cooking, but I find it useful to defrost frozen meat in the microwave if I have forgotten to leave it out of the freezer overnight. Defrosting in a microwave usually means letting it run at low power for a long time (> 10 minutes depending on the type of meat and weight). Of course, I use the presets that come with my microwave to figure out the right time/power combination, so I definitely find that feature useful.

Well, most of earth’s landmass lies in the northern hemisphere.

Google or Apple can get away with this kind of behavior, I doubt Atlassian can

Atlassian absolutely can in enterprise settings. In my company (a large cloud company), if JIRA goes down, large swathes of the business will also stall, including code deployment (deployments are tracked through change management JIRA tickets). We also use the DC version of Atlassian products, so presumably we aren't be at the mercy of Atlassian cloud engineers.

You say you wouldn't want to use this simplified phone-based video editing tools for serious work, but there is an entire industry's worth of livelihoods being made on TikTok and Instagram using these very editing tools. Not saying this to knock down your point or anything, just highlighting the fact that these tools have actually become good enough (sure, no one is editing feature-length Hollywood movies using them) to be qualified as "serious work".

This is quite common for women in tech (particularly engineering), I've heard. If you look "too attractive" as a female engineer, you'd more likely not be taken seriously, not to mention attract unwanted attention by being a woman in a male-dominated field.

At the end of the day, every group of people -- all the way from ethno-national levels to your particular niche in industry -- have their social signalling implements, and clothing/appearance happens to be a very common implement.

I have the very same thing you have, and I have started seeing banner ads from Roku on my Apple TV! It appears in the form of a banner overlaying on top of my Apple TV content saying something on the lines of “more ways to watch this content”. I haven’t interacted with the banner yet and don’t know if it’s actually scanning the content to generate recommendations, but regardless I thought it was incredibly invasive of Roku to insert ads into a service it had absolutely nothing to do with.

This thread reminded me of the issue and I’m currently looking into how this can be disabled. Apparently there is a Roku setting that can disable these ad inserts — if that doesn’t work, off with Roku’s internet privilege. Apple TV’s UX is leagues better anyway.

Great article! I particularly appreciated the author's positive description of a good experience in a world where cynical takes are more dominant. Standout line for me from the article:

When my bouche was adequately amused,

If you're spending a full third of your life (half, if you count only your waking hours) working, I would imagine "love" for your work and/or people should play a significant role in your choices.

only $25 billion in profit

Surely there must be a typo in one of these words? I can’t imagine 25 humongous ones being loose change for any business.

When certain races are disproportionately represented in certain classes, you can't help but draw a parallel between the two issues...

I'm not claiming that's the case here (I have no idea if these "riders" referred to in the article are mostly immigrants or not), but it is certainly a common phenomenon.

Phrase exclusion syntax is described in Search Tips. For patents, it’s appending -patent to your search term.

I have a slightly more cynical take on why Spotify pushes niche bands and music so much (in fact, I can’t even remember the last time I saw an “established” band in my Discover Weekly playlist) — Spotify doesn’t have to pay out that much per listen for these niche bands, while having, say, Beyoncé or Drake pop up on millions of subscribers’ weekly playlist would eat in their margins.