mosburger

I was an internal beta tester for AltaVista while I was doing a co-op at DEC in 1995. Good times.

wasn't there a quite recent incident where an American car manufacturer was leaking the real-time position of all their clients' vehicles?

You might be thinking about GM:

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/01/...

Checkout.com (UK) might be another worth checking. :) [I'm a "payments guy" for my day job].

I wonder if the author considered moving payment processing to Adyen from Stripe? They're also EU-based and a bit more... well known? I liked integrating with them in the past.

IMO one of the cool things about Wallet is the notification that appears on the homescreen when you're in proximity of the venue or time of the event and automatically displays the pass when tapped. I wonder if "create your own" will be able to do that (I'm not sure how it would)?

I said this elsewhere in the comments, but I think there's sort of a fundamental tension that shows up sometimes between DRY and "a function/class should only do one thing." E.g., there might be two places in your code that do almost identical things, so there's a temptation to say "I know! I'll make a common function, I'll just need to add a flag/extra argument..." and if you keep doing that you end up with messy "DRY" functions with tons of conditional logic that tries to do too much.

Yeah there are ways to avoid this and you need to strike balances, but sometimes you have to be careful and resist the temptation to DRY everything up 'cuz you might just make it brittler (pun intended).

I think there is often tension between DRY and "thing should do only one thing." E.g., I've found myself guilty of DRYing up a function, but the use is slightly different in a couple places, so... I know, I'll just add a flag/additional function argument. And you keep doing that and soon you have a messed up function with lots of conditional logic.

The key is to avoid the temptation to DRY when things are only slightly different and find a balance between reuse and "one function/class should only do one thing."

I got Source Code Pro. My daily driver is currently 0xProto, but I didn't see that in the game (admittedly I think it's kinda rarely used).

sssssh! if this catches on we can keep our jobs! (j/k, mostly)

ah, thanks, that's why my first thought was that "hey, this feels very FORTH like"

I didn't return mine, I just threw it in the trash and replaced it with a local-only no-cloud Eufy. It works great.

Yeah - I think it still a bit of a deterrent ... today, not everyone has a camera, and if I were a thief and one house had cameras while the place next door did not, guess which one I'm gonna rob?

But I wonder how much of that will wear off once everybody has one.

I understand your skepticism 100%, but I suspect you might change your mind if you, say, rented a car with it for a week. It's definitely a net positive for safety, and it probably costs the auto maker less than the seat belts (literally).

this is a great analogy despite it possibly coming off as snark.

I think it's hard for some people to grasp that programmers are motivated by different things. Some are motivated by shipping products to users, others are motivated to make code that's a giant elegant cathedral, still others love glorious hacks to bend the machine into doing things it was never really intended to do. And I'm sure I'm missing a few other categories.

I think the "AI ain't so bad" crowd are the ones who get the most satisfaction out of shipping product to users as quickly as possible, and that's totally fine. But I really wish they'd allow those of us who don't fall into that category to grieve just a little bit. This future isn't what I signed up for.

It's one thing to design a garden and admire the results, but some people get into their "zen happy place" by pulling up weeds.

Oh my god. This is me. If I were any better at writing, I could have written this, the author is even the same age as me (well, a year younger) and followed a similar trajectory. And a lot of what I've been feeling lately feels similar to burnout (in fact I've been calling it that), but it really isn't burnout. It's... this, whatever this is... a "fallow period" is a good term.

And I feel like an old man grumbling about things changing, but... it's not the same. I started programming in BASIC on my Tandy 1000 and went to college and learned how to build ISA cards with handwritten oscilloscope software in the Computer Engineering lab. My first job was writing firmware. I've climbed so far up the abstraction chain over a thirty year career and I guess I don't feel the same energy from writing software that first got me into this, and it's getting harder to force myself to press on.

I thought so too, they reminded me of the speedometer and analog clock (lol) in the '81 Rabbit I had in high school.

I think (I'm an American so take with a grain of salt) even the "proper lawyer reviewing terms" part can be deferred quite a while by being conservative with PII (which you should be doing anyway) and using a service like iubenda to deal with terms and cookie warnings when you first start out.

I didn't do this, but I did use a spare unsigned short (used for memory alignment) in the Quantum Atlas 10K II disk drive's servo firmware to store my wife and I's anniversary date just for yucks. :P

It used to be the case that the middle digit of an area code had to be a 0 or a 1. All the O.G. "cool" area codes like 212 are in this format, and the less desirable new area codes like 646 are not (yes, this is an accidental Seinfeld reference).

There is, but it's an adjective, not a noun.

Yeah, see also: Digital Equipment Corp until the mid 90s (where I did my co-op). Lots of brilliant people there, coasting on their legacy until they fell hopelessly behind from mismanagement and bloat. I was lucky to catch a glimpse of it at the end.

Maybe the ubiquitous "to do list" app?

The UI looks a little dated, but I've been happy with 4K Roku. The UX is more functional if uglier than AppleTV.

That's my (admittedly extremely limited) understanding. The Mozilla/Firefox people de-prioritized making Gecko a separate linkable library years ago, and it's no longer a straightforward thing to do. Which is a real bummer.

Oh I get it. I tried to convince him of the same thing. I figured the skills would be transferable to something less brutal once he inevitably burned out on the games industry. He started looking at less game-oriented programming jobs but he's now questioning his whole career path and considering going into teaching/education instead.

My son has been looking for an entry level position ever since graduating (last year, in 2024) with a Game Development degree at a pretty decent school. Right now he's teaching kids programming in an after-school program to keep from going crazy. Before that he did an unpaid internship. Things are looking pretty grim for him - I wish I knew how to help him. :(

The UK seemed generally slightly less strict than, say, Germany, France, or Poland. It sorta felt like it was splitting the difference between the US and the EU.

Oh it absolutely was a terrible employer.

My previous employer stopped hiring in the EU (except for the UK, where they were based, and South Africa, where the CTO was from) because the labor laws there made it too difficult for them to fire people, which was a particularly troublesome for them as they had almost quarterly layoffs. They switched back to hiring in the UK and US where there are fewer worker protections.

Who restarts their IDE all the time?

Xcode users laugh nervously.