fortylove

Why?

<this comment doesn't really add anything, but thought I'd share anyways for whatever reason>

I forgot the editor (maybe TextMate?) that was in vogue during the peak of the Ruby on Rails era, but there was such a feeling of magic to using what was a fairly basic editor that still had syntax highlighting.

Was this feeling of magic purely because I was younger? Or perhaps we did peak in terms of the ergonomics of human-controlling-machine without too many aids?

Fighter pilots used to fly with skill and instincts, but now are assisted by all sorts of high tech equipment that has removed much of the "flying skill" and replaced it with "equipment skill". It's not that fighter pilots are worse now. I'm sure they are better at achieving the outcomes desired, while commanding much more complex equipment. But the perhaps the art of flying is less emphasized.

In the same way, perhaps the era of software engineering is changing too?

This sentiment peaked in popularity in urban areas ~4 years ago. Since then I've noticed support for this position slowly eroding, and my hypothesis is that the general population has slowly had enough interactions with someone who is on fent.

The "walking bikes" you mention are extremely common in the US as well, and are referred to as "balance bikes" here.

Is this why we finally got darkmode in gcal?

As someone who used SoftLayer shortly after it was acquired (and it was still pretty much untouched by IBM) - SoftLayer was pretty bad to begin with. And I'm not only comparing it to AWS. It was bad even when compared to RackSpace.

I left Amazon a few years back because this ending was the inevitable outcome. Amazon had a chance to reinvent themselves as the scrappy startup that they claim to want, but instead they went full IBM.

The environmental impact of producing a product that needs frequent replacement should not be ignored. Especially when it's proven to be avoidable.

I find Temporal itself to be effectively a clone of Amazon's Simple Workflow (SWF)

Can you elaborate more on the part where using Kafka as a work queue ends horribly? Genuinely interested!

With regard to Waymo, it seems it just hit a cyclist: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39296067

A lot of modern SUVs are actually pretty similar in specs to minivans:

Mazda CX9: weight: 4,409lbs, 199″ L x 78″ W x 68″ H

Honda Odyssey: 4,482lbs, 205″ L x 79″ W x 70″ H

For us, it mostly boiled down to us needing to periodically drive in snowy conditions. Obviously an SUV is not a magical vehicle for wintry conditions, but 4wd is big advantage.

I'm not familiar with the term "people carrier", sorry. Is this like a minivan?

If so, many minivans are ~similar in size, weight, and capacity to modern SUVs (not all SUVs are a Chevy Suburban :-)). For example, you can compare the Honda Odyssey to the Mazda CX9 and the specs are actually not too different:

Mazda CX9: weight: 4,409lbs, 199″ L x 78″ W x 68″ H

Honda Odyssey: 4,482lbs, 205″ L x 79″ W x 70″ H

Edit: formatting

Modern SUVs are mostly not on truck chassis anymore. The body-on-frame breed of SUV is growing increasingly rare. Modern SUVs are a lot closer to larger sedans (for example, a Mazda CX5 is not remotely close to a truck).

Dad with wife, two kids, and a dog here. We are a one car family, and we intend to stay that way due to pretty real parking constraints.

We tried to hold out for as long as we could without an SUV. Ultimately, taking a week long trip with the family became focused around space management, having to play packing tetris and telling my wife "I don't think we have space for the pack and play". Sure we made it work, but it was stressful.

We got a 3 row SUV (3rd row collapses), and the additional space is just fantastic when it comes to packing. And when the cousins or grandparents are in town, the 3rd row comes in handy.

This seems really unhealthy.

Wow. Awful

Previous Amazon engineer here.

When considering a change, I was told by multiple layers of management that they would be totally fine with me moving away from the office and becoming permanently remote.

But none of them would put that in an email, or ask HR for formal approval. It was always "as far as I'm concerned, it's completely fine". It was never "yes, this is something that we will stand by if it comes under pressure".

I chose to leave in the end, mostly due to the weakness of this promise. And with each new article covering their RTO debacle, I become more convinced it was the right decision. I had great teammates, and a great direct manager. But the macro situation at Amazon is a mess.

Amazon is just a loose federation of mostly autonomous orgs. This is partially why the employee experience there can vary so much depending on the org. And HR at Amazon is just another org that acts mostly autonomously from the other orgs.

Shameful.

Laughable

Counterpoint: I work at a major tech company and I feel like our interns have been more productive since covid 19. It's forced them to establish a more diverse network of people to ask help from. Maybe it's harder for them, but they don't seemed handicapped by it at all.

The whole "juniors need easy help and struggle to get it themselves" seems like an artificially concocted narrative to me.

Edit: fixed a word

As someone who did away team work at Amazon, and also hosted away teams: the model sucks in most ways and was unpleasant for everyone. It got the job done in extreme situations, but it was mostly a result of subpar managers taking the term "fungible" too seriously.

Source: was sr engineer at Amazon

This isn't exactly on topic, but is anyone else experiencing Rust fatigue?

Davinci Resolve is arguably a better program, and is already available for the iPad. It is largely the same program as the desktop version, with a few exclusions that are actually easy to enable with a little research.

The concept is promising, agreed. But like most (all?) recent IBM products, the failure point will be in the execution of the concept. IBM is a marketing company at this point, not a serious technology company.

The peak mechanical keyboard will be when we teach robots to accept voice dictation and they then write what we say using these motions.

I wouldn't doubt google's ability to pull this out in the long run, but they seem to need some caffeine in order to wake up to the reality of current competition.

Their cloud is not top dog. Their search is losing ground.

I guess they have youtube, android, and gsuite.

Wow. I've gotten glimpses of this from friends who have almost all now left Google. From the outside, it seems that the political structure in place within Google exists purely to perpetuate it's own existence as a political structure, vs driving towards a deliberate balance of customer value/employee happiness.

My friends used to talk about how they loved it there, and got to work on impactful things. But slowly that shifted to "all we do is take a half year to add a field to a proto", and then "at least it pays well".

I don't have anything in particular to add here, but it seems a shame that Google has fallen so far.

True!

This screams to me that each internal team just wants a piece of the glory and the accompanying praise and "way to get this across the finish line team!" emails.

What was the outcome of that, did he find his cofounder from that thread?