popularonion

From many years of first hand experience:

- QA is always the first thing companies outsource, with predictable results

- Companies either go the route or “separate QA org with separate management chain” or “have QA engineers report to dev managers”. I’ve seen serious misaligned incentives and toxic outcomes with both

- Frequent Slack messages at 4:15 PM on Friday - “hey they just merged the PR, we really need it tested before Monday stand up”

- QA becomes a de facto dumping ground for glue work that other teams don’t want to do. Senior QA ends up morphing into a de facto “responsibility without authority” project manager role

- There is zero internet “community” around QA the way there is for developers or designers. There is no Slashdot or Hacker News for QA and there never will be. Just a bazaar of book authors and consultants promoting themselves on LinkedIn

IMO the only thing that makes sense anymore is having good SDETs embedded in engineering teams.

Destination Thailand Visa is comically easy to get if you have ~$20K in savings

Discord culture is the definition of riff raff

The thing is a healthy community, by definition, isn’t going to allow a struggling loner to join them

I used to feel that way but I’m completely over it, especially going through the experience of registering a few domains for side projects recently. There are just too many already squatted.

The only other market based solution I can think of is just charging like $10,000/yr minimum per domain name and forcing the plebs to use randomly generated strings like Tor onion sites

It makes complete sense and it would be for the best, therefore it will never happen

The participants in the train study were essentially given a "job" to talk to strangers, which completely changes the mental framing.

People generally try to follow through on a job they promised to do. They'll try to make the best of it so they feel like they made a good decision accepting the job.

If the conversations go badly, they can easily rationalize it away with "I didn't want to talk to them anyway, but I didn't have a choice".

Many shy and socially anxious people do basically fine in public-facing jobs because of this phenomenon.

Eh, I got my comp sci degree in the 2000s and for the most part we learned barely enough to pass the exams. Colleges weren't exactly churning out an army of disciplined professionals well versed in low level programming. Most of us ended up working on PHP or Rails or some Enterprise Java monstrosity.

Then came of the flood of Leetcode in the 2010s. If you memorized the top 100 interview puzzles, you would have had a good chance to get paid 5x more than a kernel or firmware engineer, and you could have ridden the stock market to generational wealth

I’ve followed this issue for a long time, the thing is at the end of the day the average American just doesn’t care very much what happens to tech workers.

There’s an underlying attitude of “serves those entitled nerds right” on both the political left and the right.

Every company I’ve seen that maintains a separate QA org chart, inevitably offshores the entire QA org to India or China, with predictable results.

In 2025 I think the only thing that makes sense is having SDETs embedded in development teams.

Suburbs and commuter towns desperately need Robotaxi - there’s literally no other option. Public transit isn’t coming, Waymo isn’t coming, Uber and Lyft are shrinking

Even a US city of 100,000 people, it can be really tough or impossible to get an Uber - good luck getting a ride from the airport at 12:30 in the morning

I’ve been using Tesla FSD since the original beta rollout. Collision avoidance has never been a real problem. Phantom braking has gotten a lot better, though still not 100.0% fixed.

Most of the problems I have now are things like lane selection or turning into the wrong parking lot, which seem solvable in software given enough time, and the Robotaxi project should ramp up the urgency on that front

Never seen it in the US, but it was fairly common when I was on vacation in Europe

In the English speaking world, the biggest and most important dating app by far is Instagram.

Match Group should be considered an adult entertainment business, like the old Craigslist personals.

Actually, I just checked the market cap of MTCH, it’s $7.3 billion - about in line with the $8 billion valuation being floated for OnlyFans.

I’m not sure outsourcing every function of education to SaaS products like we’ve been doing the last 25 years ever made the system more productive

TLDR

It is also revitalizing an unsuccessful experiment the company began in 2016: offering bespoke local activities, or what it calls “experiences.” The next stage, launch date unspecified, involves making your profile on Airbnb so robust that it’s “almost like a passport,” as Chesky puts it

After that comes a deep immersion into AI: Inspired by his relationship with Altman, Chesky hopes to build the ultimate agent, a super-concierge who starts off handling customer service and eventually knows you well enough to plan your travel and maybe the rest of your life.

That kind of makes sense to me - Airbnb must have learned to deal with trust/safety/reputation issues better than basically any other consumer app based company (except maybe Uber/Lyft)

Looking at incumbents:

Tour booking - TripAdvisor and Viator, not enough network effect

Home services - Angie's List and Thumbtack, not enough network effect

Events and concerts - Ticketmaster, enough said

Classified ads - Facebook Marketplace, enough said

Gym and fitness - Classpass, which I think is pretty good actually, but definitely going to be acquired or copied by Big Tech

Volunteer event hosting - Meetup, anyone under 40 even remember that?

Eh, back when I got my first software engineer job at $BIGCORP 20 years ago, I was almost always the only one in the room younger than 40. Not being a web dev was the key, of course.

The Coming Psychological Black Death (2023)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0K0sI5XiP4

The post says they use pandoc for parsing, that’s a very good trade for being able to cut Node completely out of your project

slopper

new 2025 slang just dropped

Not sure why this is downvoted. People forget or weren’t around for the early 2000s when companies were absolutely preoccupied with code copyright and terrified of lawsuits. That loosened up only slightly during the GitHub/StackOverflow era.

If you proposed something like GitHub Copilot to any company in 2020, the legal department would’ve nuked you from orbit. Now it’s ok because “everyone is doing it and we can’t be left behind”.

Edit: I just realized this was a driver for why whiteboard puzzles became so big - the ideal employee for MSFT/FB/Google etc was someone who could spit out library quality, copyright-unencumbered, “clean room” code without access to an internet connection. That is what companies had to optimize for.

The problem is society doesn’t allow normal people to enforce boundaries or consequences against those “aggressive angry people” in any meaningful way.

If only Snapchat didn’t lose cultural relevance, how different things could have been

I was born in 1985, we got dialup around 1996 I think?

I did teach myself programming in the 90s, after my friend loaned me his floppy disk with all his QBASIC stuff. Then dabbled in PHP, MySQL, etc.

We had one computer programming class in high school and I never got to take it because I had too many other electives. I don’t think it would have done much for me by the time I could have taken it.

It never really occurred to me as a teen that I could use the internet for getting really good at academics or broader “self-development” - I guess I just cared about video games and making money. Parents’ attitude was as long as I was getting As and going to college they didn’t need to do anything.

I got put into some “smart kid” activities in grade school, but as a poor kid with zero advice from parents, I really had no idea what to do with it.

No one told me that math is really 90% about writing proofs, all those homework problems I did were just the weed-out stuff, the academic equivalent of Leetcode.

So when I got put into some “real” academic math as a teen, I crashed and burned hard. I didn’t have a tutor and it never would have occurred to me to ask for one, so that was that.

When I was 18 years old in my first year of college, after my first semester grades came in, a guidance counselor set up a 1-on-1 with me to talk about the Rhodes Scholarship process and what my research interests were.

My response was: 1) what the heck is a Rhodes Scholarship and 2) how could I possibly have “research interests” as an 18 year old college freshman.

That was the final chapter of society considering me “gifted”, but it was just as well, I couldn’t imagine any greater success beyond getting a job and being able to afford my own apartment.

The app is a Twitter clone (The name is literally a pun on Twitter) and this type of writing has been an ongoing meme for a few years.

I’d say it’s more of an example of jumping on a trend at a good time.

Soft layoff/encouraged attrition

You have a dozen people that would give you emotional support, maybe once, but you are too afraid to burn the single emotional support coupon until its more important.

This is real. I went through an emotional crisis last year and reached out to a few friends and family for support. My choice to do that has left those relationships more distant, if not permanently damaged.

What will replace Internet data for training? Curated synthetic datasets?

Enter Neuralink

I read https://ziglang.org/learn/why_zig_rust_d_cpp/ but I’m still not clear on the endgame for this language. Is the plan to kill both Rust and Go?