matrix_overload

Google is sadly known for doing cool proof-of-concept stuff with no regard for profitability, and then axing it when the hype is over.

How does it work given the 500-year half-life of the DNA?

Well, the elephant in the room is that an app these days is a packaged version of a website with one twist: notifications. Unless you explicitly disable it via settings, it will try to get a small chunk of your attention every now and then.

- Would you like to enable notifications to see when your EV finishes charging?

- Yes.

(in a couple of days when you're thinking about a completely different topic)

- SPECIAL OFFER! 20% OFF THE FATTY FRIES IF YOU GET A CAR WASH FROM US!!!

And that's everywhere. It pays off due to the scale, just like spam. It costs nothing to send an annoying notification to a horde of users, and even if 1% of the users go for it, it is still 5+ figures of revenue out of a handful of characters pushed to users' devices, and hours of human time wasted dealing with useless annoying distractions.

They are not paid 6 figures to add fields to JSONs. They are paid 6 figures to brainrot into obsolescence instead of going out there and creating a competing product.

The last part is working very well. Most of the innovation these days is coming from China.

Well, if you are annoyed by a particular maintenance task related to your business, find a way to automate it!

In this case, you could create examples for your API in common programming languages, publish them on the product website, and even implement an automatic test that would verify that your last commit didn't break them. So, most of the non-programmer inquiries can be answered with a simple link to the examples page for the language they want.

As a bonus point, you will get some organic search traffic when people search for <what your API is doing> in <language name>.

It's not you, it's the industry. For every non-trivial task there is a long line of people within the company willing to do it for some visibility. But in order to get promoted to the position where they can do it, they need an army of button-moving monkeys working underneath them. So, they will say whatever they need to say in order to get you to sign up. Because that increases the head count and gives them more internal weight.

If you want to play the corporate game, you need to get used to having 5 meetings to move 1 button. And it's not about the button either. It's about asking Alice how her daughter is doing, and asking Bob on how he feels after that surgery, and casually hinting to Carol that you really like her choice of coding style for that new project. You play that game for a few years and you'll be allowed to have some monkeys of your own.

Or if you find the game soul-draining, you need to beef up your sales skills and connections, and become a consultant. One of those guys that gets invited to unwind a particular clusterfuck, gets paid $500/hour and quickly moves on to the next gig. This means less stability, more control, and a totally different skill set. Ultimately, your call.

Got 2 of those. Same behavior, otherwise both work just fine.

I had that problem as well (8TB Seagate). It would write some data, then get completely stuck to the point where Windows would report an I/O error. So I wrote a small tool that writes data in smaller chunks, monitors the write speed and allows throttling it if needed.

Weirdly enough, just using the tool instead of copying files with Explorer somehow stopped the weird hanging from happening, even without having to enable the actual throttling. Probably some bug somewhere along the driver/firmware stack triggered by the write block sizes.

Overall, I wish the drive vendors would expose some API to directly manage the SMR/CMR areas via software, just like the FLASH memory chips do. That would make the job of appending new backups + overwriting the old ones actually manageable with predictable and consistent timing.

They still have valid use cases like backups or unedited video footage. It's just kinda lame that the manufacturers don't market them as "slow backup devices" clearly listing all limitations, and that you have to find it out first time you use it.

TLDR: building projects with Clang is now about 4% faster due to optimizations in the way it internally handles assembly.

Why does this comment read like it's written by AI?

Not the developer, but chances are, they are either using a fine-tuned ChatGPT, or cloud-hosting something in the likes of Llama. So they are getting quite a bill each month from one of the 3 cloud landlords.

So until they find a good product/market fit, opening the floodgates to free users would just drain whatever money they raised faster than they would get any meaningful market response.

TL is lining you up for PIP/termination. The other guy on the team is likely his buddy. Come review time, you will be shown as an IC that struggles to deliver, and the other guy will get all the credit.

Been there, seen that. Start looking for other teams internally ASAP.

Exactly. And then the board votes on who gets extra shares to compensate for the dilution, and the CTO is suddenly not on the list. Because the CEO spent months playing political chess with the board members, negotiating who gets what, and before that spent years playing political chess with investors to see who gets into the board. CTO is usually not involved in these games, and has no pull beyond the CEO's goodwill.

By my logic, to make bank from a startup, you need to be a master negotiator constantly watching your back, parsing poker faces in meetings, reading fine print in agreements, and trying to bust other people's schemes, while scheming on your own. You won't have any time left for the technical side.

A CTO, in theory, is supposed to be shielded from all the political screwery, and focus on delivering the product. In practice, it makes the CTO's equity one of the easiest targets for those willing to play games.

So, unless the CEO/CTO relationship is decades long and is worth to both sides more than a short-term gain, CTO gets screwed.

The article misses the obvious. You don't become a technical co-founder to make bank with the equity or salary. You'll get diluted, replaced and kicked out the moment traction starts gaining.

You become a technical co-founder to trade in your technical skills, learn about a new domain, figure out where the pain points are, and eventually jump ship and become a captain of your own vessel.

Also, the article is an obvious pitch in the likes of "don't get a co-founder, order an MVP from me instead".

With sufficient data points, you can do A/B and see that all affected systems run a specific version of Linux distro, and eventually track it down to a particular package.

Not necessarily. A frustrated developer posts about it, it catches attention of someone who knows how to use Ghidra et al, and it gets dug out quite fast.

Except, with closed-source software maintained by a for-profit company, suck cockup would mean a huge reputational hit, with billions of dollars of lost market cap. So, there are very high incentives for companies to vet their devs, have proper code reviews, etc.

But with open-source, anyone can be a contributor, everyone is a friend, and nobody is reliably real-world-identifiable. So, carrying out such attacks is easier by orders magnitude.

Freedom of speech works as a mechanism to maintain decentralized power. If there are multiple sources of power interested in preserving their own shares of power, they end up agreeing on fair mechanisms of resolving conflicts. Like arguing your case in a court vs. sending an assassin, or discussing different viewpoints in a civilized manner rather than waiting than the party-chosen one goes into the extreme, and evokes an equally extreme counteraction.

Power in the West has been centralizing for decades now. Information society and low interest rates have been catalyzing this even more. It is inevitable than hard-fought-for freedoms will fall, followed by an economic collapse, splintering, and a slow crystallization of new sources of power over the courses of centuries. Empires fall. History repeats. Humans are humans...

Because a whole generation doesn't care about their financial well-being, affording kids, retirement, or any kind of future plans. They are happy, as long as they have a petty emotion-driven control over what others will be allowed to say or think. And the government is happy to deliver...

Wyze cameras can actually be used very securely, as long as you bother to jump through some hoops.

First of all, google "Wyze RTSP firmware". It's the official firmware from the vendor that enables the RTSP protocol. Now you can enable RTSP via the app and give the camera a fixed IP address in your DHCP server.

RTSP is a pretty standard protocol, so you can now view the feed via VNC player, record it 24/7 via ffmpeg, use tools like motion, etc.

The camera will still try to connect to cloud, but you can move it to a local-only Wi-Fi network, or outright block it from reaching the outer world on the router side.

And if you want advanced stuff (multiple streams, organized recording, etc), there is a plethora of free/open-source security camera tools (iSpy for instance). It all takes time to learn and configure, but you can have your own fully closed-circuit surveillance network, while still using the Wyze's rather cheap hardware.

Nah, the purpose of propaganda is to control which subset of infinitely complex reality will get remembered.

Make enough people associate Orwell's works with the dark pages of his past, and the focus will shift from the ideas of the works to the identity of the writer. Then use it to attack those who still dare to bring up those ideas, and you have driven them off the public's attention span for good.

Learned what? When it's zero interest rates, funding from desperate investors would dwarf any possible profits you could make, and the bigger headcount makes raising money easier.

It's the policymakers and society in general that should learn. A decade of low interest rates together with outsourcing of everything that can be outsourced created hordes of useless people that add little value and feel entitled to their salary. As you get more and more of those, the value of money decreases, and inflation starts piling up (COVID accelerated it nicely, but things like housing, educational and medical were off the charts for a long while).

The hangover from those rates will last longer than most expect.

Kind of a dark pattern to hide the license price (last line in the AppStore page -> in-app purchases). Should be really prominently shown on the "buy now" page.

Also the features page is garbage. Wall of text with fairly generic stuff while it's still unclear: Can it run Windows? Can it run Linux? Arm64, x64 or both? MacOS?

Your main competition is VMWare Fusion and Parallels. See what features they advertise, make sure you are better and cheaper. Currently it looks like a university project rather than a real product.

They have been. But in the old times such behavior would quickly get you labelled as a village slut and become avoided by most people.

But in the social media age companies need such people to generate content that drives engagement, and serves a a conduit for ads. This creates incentives for such destructive behavior, and forces such people into others' attention spans, reinforcing the loop.

BOOM! Now anyone doing due background checks on her and googling her name will find that post and flag her as a huge liability and a complete no-hire. Brilliant.

I know some of the folks involved and they are working on 50 years to launch.

I.e. far enough in the future to safely assume all current employees will happily retire. Isn't that brilliant?

High interest rates. If Fed dropped them to 0 overnight, everyone on the list would have happily hired everyone back. But then the grocery prices would start growing faster than SPX.

People fundamentally misunderstand how this works.

For a large enough product company there's always a years-long queue of feature requests, fixes, optimizations, and other things to do. All of it will never get done! The doable amount of highest-priority items will get picked through a combination of pressures from different people and departments, and will get more or less implemented.

If you cut the workforce by 50%, instead of doing 30% of the infinitely growing backlog, you'll do 15%. Since most of the completed work gets obsoleted or thrown away due to various inefficiencies, there will be some effect, but it will be far from dramatic.

As for the individual workload, you'll carry as much as you let the company put on your back. And that mostly depends on your negotiating skill, and somewhat on the supply/demand dynamics of the current labour market. The latter will tough for the couple of years, but the former is up to you to level up.

Vertical integration is not competition. A decision maker at any level within the vertical of power is facing internal competition from political rivals, but no results-based competition from his peers in other companies. So this promotes political shenanigans, and applies negative selection pressure on the actual product quality.