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mitchitized

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The AirPods Effect 1 month ago

The author has clearly never tried to leg press 300+ pounds in the gym to Madonna's "Like a Virgin". Sometimes the biggest sell of earbuds is noise REDUCTION, not what sounds they can make.

I do agree that there are "social interactions" that are greatly devalued by people wishing not to be interacted with. But for me the earbuds are usually in to block annoyances, not avoid human contact.

Another reality is that at that scale you need to diversify your vendor portfolio so you never get stuck in a single-vendor scenario (for contracts, liability or scale). Many companies half this size have infrastructure across all three - AWS, Azure and GCP. The primary reason is redundancy, but that also gives them potential leverage for contract negotiation.

You're absolutely right!

(Sorry, couldn't resist.) I could be the lone dissenter here, but to me well-written comments are a lot more fun to read than near-gibberish.

I wished more people tried harder to be better communicators, but it is what it is. If AI can decipher these comments and produce a much more coherent statement, then I'm for it.

The world changes. Time marches on, and the very skills you spend your time developing will inevitably expire in their usefulness. Things that were once marvelous talents are now campfire stories or punchlines.

LLMs may be accelerating the process, but definitely not the cause.

If you want a career in technology, a durable one, you learn to adapt. Your primary skill is NOT to master a given technology, it is the ability to master a given technology. This is a university that has no graduation!

The only places where a 4-way stop has room to make a roundabout are places where there is not enough traffic for it to matter either way.

The biggest obstacle is that there are just too many 4-way stops in urban areas where there is no space left to make a roundabout, you would have to tear down buildings. I don't think that is a valid argument in that scenario.

What I want to know is the privacy impact of this partnership. I see terms like "Apple will be running Google's models on their infrastructure" but that definitely is not enough detail for me to know where my data is going.

Any details on privacy and data sharing surfaced yet?

People listening to music for free is less than a drop of water in the ocean of causative reasons musicians get fucked.

Astonishingly ignorant hot take. Music is what MUSICIANS DO. Some of them are also performers, many are not. What they create is the same as what a painter does, or even a chef or architect. However it is not a physical good so people with tiny brains think that means "iT's FreEEe!!1!" when each musical instrument used costs money, the recording cost money, the distribution cost money, the filing/registration costs money, and then there's all the years of time and effort spent learning how to do all of this.

The fact of the matter is that right now music is treated very similarly to software. There is ownership and copyright, and being able to make a digital copy for minimal cost/effort does not magically remove that ownership.

If you don't like it then you should change the laws. It's like being mad at cops because of the speed limit, when the likely culprits are your local city council.

Although I agree with the overall sentiment of the article, the reality in 2025 is that it is a totally dead market and we are still trying to figure out WTH is going on.

Some companies are holding their breaths due to political instability, others are in sectors that are already getting decimated (likely from the same instability above), yet others have reached a point where they (and "they" appear to be in a majority in their respective industries) are more centered on efficiency than headcount.

I'm employed and I'm grateful... I know plenty of people searching and are getting nothing but silence in their search. I think both sides of the hiring equation are getting a hard reset right now.

Each use case, which for many is a project-by-project thing, likely determines the right tool for the job.

For new projects, I find Claude Code extremely helpful, as I start out with a business document, a top-level requirements document, and go from there. In the end (and with not a lot of work or time spent) I have a README, implementation plan, high-level architecture, milestones, and oftentimes a swagger spec, pipeline setup and a test harness.

IMHO pointing CC at a folder of a big typescript project is going to waste a ton of compute and tokens, for minimal value. That is not a good use of this tool. I also have a pretty strong opinion that a large, complex typescript codebase is a bad idea for humans too.

Point CC at a python or go repo and it is a whole 'nother experience. Also, starting out is where CC really shines as stated above.

For a big complex typescript repo I would want very specific, targeted help as opposed to agentic big-picture stuff. But that also minimizes the very reason I'd be reaching for help in the first place.

Definitely not seeing the horrendous collapse of the once mighty Apple.

That said, they have always been behind the curve with AI, and recent product releases/updates have been, uh, suboptimal. Latest Logic Pro is a disaster (e.g. unstable/crashing, removed key shortcuts killing productivity) and don't get me started on the dumbing-down of iOS.

They are for sure headed in the wrong direction, but they are just too big to fall overnight.

That is because I do not think Google's aims for captcha are the same as ours.

I can tell you that as soon as you download Chrome and login to any Google account of yours, the captcha tests are suddenly and mysteriously gone.

Use firefox in full-lockdown mode, and you will be clicking fire hydrants and crosswalks for the next several hours.

My crazy conspiracy theory is that Google is just using captcha as an opportunity to force everyone out of privacy mode, further empowering the surveillance capitalism engines. The intent is not to be effective, but inconvenient.

Hey, there's a really cool new tool that you could use to add this feature, I think it was called 'memex' or something like that.

(sorry couldn't resist)

Been playing around with this for a day and found it intuitive and fun to use. A little scary on the "but how much will this cost me if this becomes a frequently-used tool?" question. Can't wait to point this at local models, too!

It is a public website and a public service - it's like saying "hey I got free lemonade here, but you can't have it unless I decide I like you first."

If you're giving something away online for free, then you are giving it away for free. I'll never understand the cognitive dissonance of "conditionally free".

A more important question is where do we draw the line of abuse? If someone links to my website and that's okay with me, but someone else does and I don't like it, do I have the right to conditionally block access to them? And do they have the right to circumvent that to regain access that I freely give to others?

This actually strikes at the heart of the disconnect between open source philosophy and common vernacular.

I've argued for years that "free" does NOT mean "free to use as long as you follow my restrictions". To me the only licenses that meet this criteria are the permissive ones such as MIT, BSD and friends where the only requirement is preservation of the copyright notice. The vast majority have limits of what you can do, or when you have to pay, or some other BS that just complicates everything and IMHO just reeks of "I'm manipulating the FOSS community so I can make a buck" or "I'm pretending to give this software away but actually have a laundry list of rules you have to live by". Basically the opposite of what "free" means!

Similarly, "open source" implies that I can do whatever I want, since it is "open". But most open source licenses - including this one - have restrictions and in many cases pretty strict ones that forbid use for many. This is not open at all.

Either give it away, or lock it up, but PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE stop with the hypocrisy, lying and wordplay so you can make a buck (or satisfy a religious tilt). If you want me to help you with your code then you gotta let me use it how I see fit!

And for the love of all things holy, quit calling restrictive licenses "free". This is a binary state, it is either free or non-free, and "you can only use this if you make less than X" or "only use this with other free software" or "if you make changes you have to share" are NOT FREE.

There. Thanks for reading. Stepping outside to yell at a cloud now. And get off my lawn.

I think teaching requires not only that you understand how to do something, but also what someone else's incomplete understanding is.

This 100%. I have been playing guitar since around 1972, and am really good at it. I will never offer lessons to anyone, at any level, because that is a completely different skill than just being able to play a guitar.

I also know instructors at bootcamps that are not master programmers, in fact more than a few don't meet senior-level expectations; but they are exceptional at explaining the basics, triggering those "lightbulb" moments in their students, that makes them a far better instructor than someone with vastly more experience and expertise.

As a hiring manager LinkedIn profiles are a huge window into someone's professional side, just like github may be a huge window into their technical side.

As a candidate I think LinkedIn is absolute trash - and toxic with all the ghost jobs and dark patterns. Feels like everyone else has the same opinion, or at the very least it is a common one. But when I have 50 candidates to review for 5 open positions, LinkedIn is going to give me great insight that I cannot really get anywhere else. I keep my profile current in the hopes that I'm not doing it for LinkedIn, but for the person researching me to see if I am a valid candidate for their role.

My biggest gripes are mostly Atlassian's fault, in that their products seem to take AGES to load (wasting my time) while also providing a UX that seems designed to force as many page loads as possible (wasting even MORE of my time). They keep hiring product people from the Marquis de Sade School of User Interface Design, and it shows.

I also have a huge dislike for all the horrible things so many companies do with Atlassian products, and although that is not necessarily their fault it is still somewhat related to those products. Want a guaranteed raise next time? Just chop your code up into a zillion commits, and write a crapton of sub-issues. SMH

GitHub issues/projects are great for small teams, but can't remotely stand up feature-wise in a larger organization (and assumes everyone is a developer) so as much as I love their stuff, it cannot really compete in the Enterprise space by design.