harshaw

I really wanted to stay in the google chromebook / googlebook echo system. But the hardware was expensive for what you get. Apple announced the macbook neo and I picked one up. Great hardware. can run light weight mac software. I don't run much beyond chrome and wahoo SYSTM (bike trainer app). It's really solid hardware and cost $600 or so.

I use gemini extensively (and claude). But - do I need this integrated in my laptop? Don't quite see it. And it's hard to beat Apple on hardware now.

this post will probably never be read but.. I was on the team that was trying to make the marriage of S3 and EFS work a year ago. it's a pretty hard problem. At one point we proposed this solution (which seems like a caching layer) but it got shot down for a more complex system that would have attempted to rebuild EFS on faster S3 blob storage. I left before this engineering monstrosity made significant progress, and it clearly died at some point.

Looks like they went back to a simpler solution they could deliver but with some obvious warts. good to see something get launched but the sausage making her was brutal.

The reality is that if you read https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2026/04/s3-files-and-th..., it sounds like the great minds at S3 figured out that a caching layer was the way to go. We (EFS) fucking proposed that years ago. But we had to deal with Seattle and the S3 braintrust who didn't want to do that. I know we wrote a PRFAQ that was close to this concept probably four years ago. The political story is that EFS was taking over by S3 and the EFS folks didn't have the agency or political backing to build a more workable solution. So we wasted a shit ton of time tackling something that was never going to work and many of the tenured EFS engineers left.

somewhat off topic, but I really am not sure that adding chromebooks to every school has made education better. hard to block youtube when they bring these home (I know you can, but the average person can't).

If you don't want to go through your insurance company you can check out an app we built called RoadClub. You get points for safe driving behavior - and you can get the hard brake alerts. Is it a bit annoying? yes. You can't just drive agressively - you need to give space to slow down. I still struggle with it.

Nice research. This is fairly well known in insurance circles. Most auto insurers that do telematics consider hard braking the strongest indicator of risk. One of the things that we do at work (Cambridge Mobile Telematics) is build tools to deal with this risk. We have apps that monitor driving and we play a tone to indicate that a hard braking event was detected. Simply letting people know that they had a hard braking event is an effective mechanism for behavior change (other companies have similar tech)

I am confused about what Tesla is doing. They have effectively two automobile products now with one failed product (cybertruck). reading various articles about this doesn't make it more clear. Do they not want to be a car company?

Full disclosure: I am pretty sour on the current Amazon/AWS leadership as I think, well, they couldn't lead a company out of a paper bag (former manager at AWS). Is there data that Amazon/AWS is still hiring junior devs? I've heard it's very hard to get into student programs these days but I don't have the data. My grumpy position would be Garmin saying one thing and doing another.

Why? I look at this. I want engineers to use the tools on the stuff that AI is good at so we can do more high value work.

If I were to summarize how we attacked this when I was on AWS (different team)

formal methods. Some of this started a long time ago so not sure if it was TLA, TLA+, or something else. (I am a useless manager type)

fake clients / servers to make testing possible

strict invariants

A simulator to fuzz/fault the entire system. We didn't get this until later in the life of the service but flushed out race condition bugs that would have taken years to do.

We never got to replaying customer traffic patterns which was a pet idea of mine but probably the juice wasn't worth the squeeze.

i'll bite. Please give me an example of questions that are scientifically validated.

not quite true - there are some regions that have a different set of AWS users / credentials. I can't remember what this is called off the top of my head.

I think this is an astonishingly dumb take. Regardless of what you think of Musk, SpaceX is building a fundamentally important reusable lift technology that can be the underpinning of some many future developments. Who cares if China gets to the moon first? This is how NASA historically gets into a mess with its launch system - political pressure, conflated goals and requirements (see the Space Shuttle - does it launch people?, military payloads?, oh goodie - let's do it all). If anything I wish NASA would do more to make sure we have a decent starship competitor which its hard to see blue origin being anytime soon (but I am not an expert on this topic)

Sounds more like an object system (immutable) with the veneer of a file system for their use cases. I sort of read the doc - sounds like data is replicated and not erasure encoded (so perhaps more expensive?).

I think many people have said this, but "file systems" get a lot easier if you don't have to worry about overwrites, appends, truncates, etc. Anyway, always interesting to see what people come up with for their use cases.

I did Symbian programming back in the day. IIRC the Sony-Erricson P800. It was not developer friendly. The memory management model was hard to program and could crash easily. Also did some work with Nokia on the N60. I was working at Orange at that time and we had hired a contractor to integrate push to talk (because for some reasons Orange though push to talk would take off in Europe, lolol). I got a couple of free trips to Tampere to theoretically help Nokia debug this third party push to talk app. I seem to recall Nokia not being too enthused to work with some pushy American hacker who wanted to open a debugger and fix things. I remember that we had some nice reindeer dinners.

Early mobile is littered with dead operating systems. not really that surprising. PalmOS, Symbian, SaveJE, windows mobile, etc. not worth crying over.

My problem is that there is a reauth FOMA that gets copied with the most trivial of applications. A good example is the Electrify America charging app. It's job is to be available so you can charge. But they log you out frequently - and they want to do second factor with email. Guess what - that doesn't always work. My wife was trying to charge the other day, was logged out, and couldn't get the email verification to go through. So I had her login with my credentials and I answered the email verification and gave her the token over the phone. super annoying.

But more importantly- mobile phones already have good security mechanisms. It's like all these shitty apps copied web based auth mechanisms with timeouts when they could do something better (and probably are built on web technologies with cookies instead of using the trusted store on the phone).

There are precious few apps out there that tell you ahead of time that reauth is happening (Zoom does this - kudos). But even so - I don't think it's necessary most of the time.

This isn't so much about the Author's story but the space. He is correct that marketplaces are hell, and especially auto repair market places. I was one of the several devs that went through trying to make Openbay work (a US based market place for auto repair). We actually did have service providers signed up and we did have a way to acquire customers who wanted auto repair. So you had the illusion of product market fit - but the problem is that it's really really hard to get people to actually click "buy this brake job" and then, more importantly, they have no reason to come back to your app because 1) you don't need brake jobs all that often and 2) they can just go back to the service provider. And many shops are happy to still take phone calls as their default way of booking work.

The reason the company existed is the rich founder was upset that a shop wanted to charge him a fortune to get his BMW M5 repaired. He wanted better quotes. So we built a marketplace to get better quotes. But that's not what real customers want (because most people have Toyotas not M5s). And also we didn't do the customer development / research to understand how repair shops work. You want to know how my repair shop manages their repair schedule? They have a paper calendar and write down your phone number and the job. sure there are better ways to manage the work - but this paper mechanism has worked for them for years and why change it? And you know what - I go back to the shop all the time because I trust them. Ultimately people tend to have a fairly personal relationship with their local mechanic. You can build a leadgen product but the ultimate relationship is between the customer and the repair provider.

TLDR - everyone should understand the lean startup. /working backwards model and relentlessly focus on the customer.

They should make anyone who denies anesthesia for a colonoscopy drink that awful orange flavored drink you take the night before. This is just like... basic care.

Random comment: slide 10 talks about using Twisted and then adding a twisted middle layer. 2010 me (or earlier) liked Twisted a ton but not sure I would have foisted this technology on a development team. As a single dev doing all kinds of crazy shit it (sort of) worked but was pretty hard to debug or understand.

There is room in storage for many kind of products with different sets of tradeoffs. And don't underestimate the ability of a startup to move much faster than AWS.

What company?

As an amazonian, this has come up during the five day RTO discussion. As a manager, I can't imagine a more obvious way to destroy the service that I help run and then really risk losing customer trust.

I we are all cogs at some point but I really have trouble being this cynical.

maybe. In my case my big project was cancelled and my engineers borrowed to work on an away team. So yeah, not super productive after that. But other times it was very busy and rewarding.

we already do that on my team- you can hardly respond to a pager in 10 minutes if you commuting. I suppose it's an unofficial policy but we never got any pushback from it.

Money, but that has diminishing value. The quality of life I would lose by going into the office 5 days a week is too high.

Cool hack. Funny to see them drive onto RT 2 after alewife and have a 25 mph limit as everyone floors it. Also not sure where an mbta train ever hits 55.

The weather? it's well documented. SAAD.

I have two airtags on me at all time. So my wife can find my wallet or my keys. I have an android. The iPhone network is larger so Apple seems more useful. And I can do nothing about these alerts.

let me put it this way. As an EVSE owner I see a direct correlation between how far I can go between chargers if I drive 65 vs 75. Because I have to stretch out where I am going to hit a fast charger. I see F150s going 80. Do you think they are calculating their MPG like my parents used to back in the early 80s? I don't think they are. So maybe it is 16 in some cases, but people drive them really really fast.

of course. But people - real people - will compare DC Fast Charges with traditional gas stations. So you aren't really doing a fair comparison here.

Let me put it another way - do we think that getting people to convert from ICE to EVs will only view fast charging as a convenience? or will they view it as a necessity? In the fullness of time we can view DC fast charging as a luxury, but not right now (which is my point I suppose)

Sure. I home charge. But many American's drive for work. Trades people, people going on vacation, sales people. Many vehicles can't just charge at home. Because there is no home, or apartments, or whatever. Get out on the road and see the broad mix of vehicles out there. I see tons of people flying down the road in F-150s getting maybe 8 / mpg. Those people - and those are most of the people out there - will never move to electric vehicles unless it is so fucking easy to charge, gas has to be prohibitively expensive, and you can charge anywhere and not think about it.