davidham

I an Jack’s complete lack of sympathy.

I’m team old folks on this, youngun

Looks like it always has, to me.

I used kustomize to build an ArgoCD install at a previous company, and I was impressed at how powerful it was. Our setup was pretty involved, and kustomize was able to handle all the per-environment differences easily, and the code was easy to work with.

I work at Grafana, and Jsonnet powers our whole k8s infrastructure. It can get a little baroque sometimes but overall it’s tremendously powerful, and it’s fun to work with.

Apple Watch was and is a huge hit.

Musk is different from the other people in Trump’s orbit. Trump can’t afford to throw Musk aside or turn him into an enemy. Not yet anyway.

This is not to say that there won’t be a breakup, there may yet be. But it seems like Musk was able to parlay his Twitter investment into tremendous direct influence over the government, a pearl without price. I don’t know that he ever cared whether Twitter made money or not.

Are you sure? He used it to help get Donald Trump elected, and now Musk has an unassailable position in government and tremendous power to steer government spending to his businesses, and to cripple the agencies that regulate them.

I'm with you! I kind of love GitHub Actions, and as long as I keep it to tools and actions I understand, I think it works great. It's super flexible and has many event hooks. It's reasonably easy to get it to do the things I want. And my current company has a pretty robust CI suite that catches most problems before they get merged in. It's my favorite of the CI platforms I have used.

Yes, as an end-user I didn't really care about Apple Intelligence, and had to disable it because it kept suggesting dumb responses in Messages, which I use many times a day. As an observer of and investor in Apple, it's very concerning. Announcing and hyping products that don't exist is a serious breach of their brand promise, and as Gruber rightly observes, signs of serious rot in their culture.

Yes, that's my point: it's the X model because Musk bought the platform so he can amplify himself and censor whomever he likes.

This is the X model. Nobody moderates Musk!

In America, the First Amendment guarantee of 'freedom of speech' only protects you from the government restricting your speech. It doesn't oblige any other entity to provide you with a platform, and it doesn't free you from the consequences of your speech. You can (and should!) host your own servers, but unless you buy ads on a search platform they are not obliged to prioritize, or even index, your content.

The platforms don't decide what is legal, but they do have the right, and in many cases the obligation, to moderate their platforms. They can be held liable for allowing CSAM for example. And these platforms have business goals that can be in conflict with, say, allowing anti-LGBTQ or Nazi content.

I have a copy of this from the original Kickstarter, and it’s a gorgeous book. Very high quality, very well done.

OK neither GPT-4o nor myself is great at counting apparently

Its first answer of 12 is correct, there are 12 _unique_ characters in https://google.com.

(Thank you for the reply by the way, I didn't know that about the 0.15%!)

That seems...fair to me? Apple makes a phone a lot of people want to buy, and adds NFC to it to enable mobile payment, and they provide security guarantees for the end user and the card issuer alike. I don't know why they should be obligated to provide this functionality to the card issuers for free.

Regarding the Apple Wallet: what about it is uncompetitive? I can add credit cards from many providers to it, and as far as I can tell Apple doesn't get anything if I add my Chase card and use it with Apple Pay. I don't think banks have to pay Apple anything for their cards to be used in the Apple wallet. Nor do non-financial cards like memberships.

What would you suggest?

I would say that a sprint is fundamentally about delivering a valuable Increment. Something useful, some kind of meaningful progress. You can start to use past performance as a way to estimate what you'll be able to do in the future, but only with a stable team that has been estimating its own work for a while.

None of the things the author complains about are specified in Scrum. The Scrum guide states that the developers choose the work: "Through discussion with the Product Owner, the Developers select items from the Product Backlog to include in the current Sprint." I've also heard people complain about the meetings, but honestly people hate meetings generally--my current team doesn't do Scrum or any other agile system, and we still have several time-wasting meetings every week. In my experience, scrum reduces the meetings you need to have to a minimum, and each one is there for a reason. If you use each meeting for its reason, they are valuable, if not, then sure, they probably are a waste of time.

I know that scrum has often been weaponized by managers and tools, but scrum doesn't prescribe this. Scrum doesn't prescribe story points or velocity or burndown charts. Those things may suck at your company, but they're not Scrum's fault.

Personally I like Scrum. I like the focus of the sprint goal and I like being able to show what I did at the end of the sprint. My team, as I say, has no process, and I started implementing scrum just for myself and my projects, that I work on solo. It's not perfect or ideal but it's better than any other system I've seen.

This whole episode gives the lie to this concept of building the company for the good of humanity. The real players here care about humanity about as much as Elon Musk does. Altman has the power because he can make (or lead others to make) a thing that’s worth billions of dollars. All this nonprofit org chart craziness and good of humanity is horseshit and always was. Safety, justice, corporate governance, the law generally, effect on the environment, will always be second to AI’s capacity to generate money for those who make it.

I’ll bet you $1,000 USD he does not get pardoned by Biden.

Is it just me, or is anyone else seeing what looks like the mouse pointer of everyone else reading the page, like 1,000 little ants on the screen

In any case, I’m one of you.

Nothing? They provide and run the marketplace that distributes your app anywhere in the world, and handles nearly frictionless payment. And they have created a marketplace where users feel safe downloading your app. As an Apple customer I value these things pretty highly, more than I value any one app.

I have had good experience with Scrum when all the participants had a common grounding in it, and worked together toward its goal of frequent delivery of valuable software. But I’ve also had bad experiences, in which the company claimed or pretended to do scrum but left out one or more key parts. The main thing you need, and that we don’t have at my current company, is someone to act as the product owner, the person who says what they want built. The key relationship is between Product (who wants a thing built) and Engineering (who build the thing). Without that, we have a lot of performative number-watching and busy-keeping.

Agree with all the advice to grow your savings. I would also add: be intentional about what kind of work you want to do. Seek out this work at your current employer. It's easy to go with the flow and end up doing vague or undifferentiated work, just because no one is looking out for your personal development. Then if you get laid off, or quit, your skills aren't as fresh. Think about your own skills and professional goals, and seek opportunities, at your current or prospective employer, that will help you achieve those goals.

I also agree with all the advice to be kind.