rovek

I love this article and the pluralist worldview harking back to 2015/16. I'd love to tell my team "Hey we're going to build this small separate use case in Svelte". But the evaluation checklist, which is pretty accurate, is in direct opposition to the point being made.

Assess Performance Needs: 99% of apps are not going to notice the difference, so you choose React

Team Skills and Learning Curve: Everyone knows React, nobody knows Qwik, you choose React

Scaling and Cost of Ownership: Immaterial

Ecosystem Fit: React has the more full and stable ecosystem, you choose React

On top of all this, all the AI tools have good capability with React - defaulting to it themselves - and engineers are increasingly expected to make significant use of AI tooling.

Fun but I prefer the previous version about a bridge building team

https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks - Second section

Nothing soured my (already negative) opinion of Crypto as much as regular conversations with a Crypto VC. Every time we spoke they were either sceptical or very excited about something that, to me, was obviously a trivial example of 1 or more classic scams. Whether or not they were excited about it didn't seem to track with the scamminess.

I would suggest because the sentiment is a trite misrepresentation of people's experiences across multiple facets. Throughout the summer you'll smell weed constantly if you're out and about and never see anyone so much as approached by any nearby police, regardless of who they are.

Edit: UK, I can't speak for the US

We drive on the left, which means we walk on the right (to see traffic coming), so I guess it stems from the latter

Depends what you mean by "the remainder of the world". Most mid-tier companies I've worked at or know people who work at in London started moving on from microservices some time ago. So I guess, unsurprisingly, no.

Leaving them in the room to complete the tasks was an early red flag here. If you have no insight into how people think about and complete tasks then you are testing the product of their time, not their approach to problem solving. You then shouldn’t be surprised by the lack of what you didn’t test for after the fact.

This is great, I would upvote it more if I could. Also very accurate on the lack of required empathy.

The combination of your last points and "hard work does not pay off" are something that it took me until 32 (and arguably then only because of lockdowns) to learn. Working hard on your employer's problems is unlikely to be fulfilling, they will never give you the influence or credit you want (or maybe deserve?) because of "hard work". Working hard on your own things or with people you care about is where you can earn fulfillment. And I don't mean a $10,000/month side hustle, I mean tiny incremental improvements on things you enjoy but may suck at. For me it's been attempting to learn another spoken language, which I'm still comically bad at 3 years later, and some other hobbies which I'm also lower-end-of-the-curve bad at but get a lot of enjoyment from.

I feel a bit of this every time there are pushes to get everyone to code, it's very weird. Sort of related is the expectation that you should just be able to switch into a programming career in a few weeks. You can't do that with almost any other meaningful career but for some reason you "should" be able to for programming and there are very profitable businesses selling the lie that you can.

Consdering the state of learning materials for the remainder of my educational (and professional, I'm looking at you compliance courses) life, it really is mindblowing what they achieved with Encarta in the '90s.

My experience of two games going free to play, PUBG and Rocket League, is that in the former 100% of games now have cheaters in and in the latter ~25-40% games have people playing on fresh accounts to keep their rank artificially low.

For me the biggest negative to F2P is in competitive games, so especially Rocket League in this case, because being F2P means that the competitive element and matchmaking system is 100% worthless.

It feels like some of the more agile publishers reacted to this sentiment some years ago, in that they started publishing 5,000 word articles about EVERYTHING and subsequently even long reads are self-indulgent garbage.

I personally would extend this article in today's world to be more like "scan the headlines every 2-3 days and go read books instead". That way you know "what" is largely happening, e.g. geopolitics, floods, murder trial, but you don't waste time consuming a few thousand words of garbage from somebody who knows no more than you do.

A friend of mine started doing this way before me and a take of his was that any sufficiently big news will make its way through to you via social circles anyway, use people who don't value their time as your filter.

It's so satisfying to see these streams getting massive attention and loving it when they must go through insane peaks of traffic but mostly trundle on with a smaller dedicated core. The raw passion is refreshing

I'd be interested to know what drives these differences, whether it can be measured, and why there seems to be limited crossover of "circles".

In the UK, I've had WhatsApp for about 12 years since the Nokia N900. If someone gives me their number, it's assumed we will communicate by WhatsApp.

As an interesting crossover, my American friends communicate with their friends/family in the US with iMessage but use WhatsApp for everything else and the only Brit I've met who used iMessage by default had spent significant time in the US in recent years.

I think it would be charitable to assume the author meant "fulfilling" by "cool stuff". I am looking for a company right now that fits into either "cool stuff" or "positive impact" but the latter is FAR more difficult to find. There are plenty of "positive impact" SaaS companies around pedalling meaningless Corporate Social Responsibility platforms (what even is a tool that legitimately helps with this?), but nobody using software to make a meaningful impact on the world - possibly because it's rarely a software problem.

Cheaper for sure but the underlying complexity is completely hidden on consoles. There are many justifications for why PCs "can be simple" if you just buy pre-built, but that only solves your problem for an unspecified amount of time.

With a console, you buy the latest one and play the games until there's a new one (in the case where money is no object). You never have to worry about settings or optimisation, it just works. You also know exactly when your hardware is out of date because there's a new generation console.

Personally I'm a PC gamer, I currently run an RTX 3070 and I still wonder whether my CPU or RAM are limiting performance because I'm not getting the performance I expected (but wasn't guaranteed by any single vendor for my custom build). This is a problem I can solve, but it would be worth it to me to pay someone else to deal with it because I just don't have the time/inclination.

Maybe I should buy a console...

This article seems to present a strange collection of information. "Young people and porn" as a heading really came from nowhere.

I'm no expert in anything relevant, but this comment and the parent strike me as great examples of Western Individualism and Eastern Collectivism; the idea that da Vinci as an individual creates some view of the world through his being, not just his output, that should be revered. It seems a given that if one had the talent to reproduce the Mona Lisa by hand then the output should be just as remarkable as the original, but as a Westerner I kind of understand that it wouldn't be appreciated in the same way if at all.

Your second quote conveniently chops out the main point of the article, which is that Apple abuse their dominance to force developers into having no choice.

Analogies tend to remove any meaningful detail from a situation, as in this case

I feel this about anything I read about empire in the last few years.

I enjoyed Paxman's book Empire for the very reason that he mocks the self-righteousness of the "heroes of Empire", their "divine mission", the way the country at home responded (or didn't care at all anymore) but doesn't shy away from giving the same critical eye to the colonised people.

I don't see that anything in your comment precludes reciprocation of unnecessarily conservative limitations on one's life.

It could be argued that keeping everyone home instead of just those at risk was irrational.

Seems like a question of reciprocity and solidarity. I'm not sure if I agree with the sentiment of OP but I do understand frustration that those of us who had an inconsequentially small probability of falling ill to this virus have lost more than a year of the prime of our lives in an effort to protect others; others who will now enjoy all the freedoms we still don't have back despite there still being next to no risk to us.

I always try this if I accidentally press a button, or enter an empty lift with a few buttons pressed. One glorious day in a hotel in Penang, I double-pressed a button and my dreams came true, lights out. That one experience will be enough to keep my dreams alive for decades to come

I'm excited about this. I've used Excalidraw as a simple, lo-fi interviewing tool at a few companies for when we want candidates to draw something without having too many tools to get bogged down in making a masterpiece. For me it really hits the sweet spot between being fast and flexible like a whiteboard while still working well for computer input (i.e. doesn't make you free draw with a mouse).

It might be worth adding a toggle to the marketing website alongside dark mode to switch the handwriting font to something more readable though

I don't know if this is a cultural difference with cryptic crosswords in general or if it's specific to NYT crosswords, I used to do NYT crosswords with my American partner (I'm British) and the wordplay never made sense to me. Answers often seemed to be made up of words which could literally relate to the clue but combined made no sense as a term or phrase, even as a pun.

Edit: Don't want to sound like I'm deriding their style too much, my partner always got the wordplay so clearly there was a learnable style to it

And the whole blue/green bubble pretentiousness

Honestly, reading the rest of the comments in this thread to this effect, it's terrifying that the runaway success of a single company can so degrade the fabric of personal relationships this way.

The only people I've met who use iMessage have been Americans and the Americans I've met that live in the UK use WhatsApp or Messenger as their primary local comms, though frequently iMessage with friends in the US. I wonder why it is that iMessage hasn't enjoyed the same dominance here, even when the iPhone has. (45% iPhone in the US vs 40% in the UK)

That is despite the Daily Mail writing multiple stories a day about his comments around that time and employing him as a columnist.

Sounds like they take a manual approach to manipulating their search ranking; spam is worthy of downranking.

The UK is infamously known for not appreciating programming skills.

Not sure what the basis is for this. I'm a SWE with 10 years experience and I've been shopping around for countries to escape to for more than a year, I didn't really want to consider the US but currently my options based on salary expectations are only the major US cities.

Nowhere in the world that I've seen offers comparable rates to London/NYC/Bay area. You could include the rest of the UK in the statement I quoted, but then you'd have to also include the rest of every other country. I doubt you'll find a competitive tech salary for a non-remote job in Arkansas or Düsseldorf.

edit: Someone else mentioned finance salaries in this thread, I haven't worked for a company anyone here would likely know and this was all true before I moved to a finance-adjacent business