senbrow

I know you probably mean very well, but IMO it's really bizarre and patronizing to be offended on someone else's behalf, especially if the offended people in question are perfectly capable of expressing the sentiment themselves.

If there's actual outrage from the group, it will surface from them without your involvement.

If it offends YOU, just say so plainly.

The hypothetically offended group doesn't need a random stranger to white knight for them in the comment section of a niche tech news website.

I think your main point is right, but there are many Costco members who are NOT shopping for "weeks of groceries" at a time, and many of them live in suburban or urban areas with high density. For example, I shop at Costco once a week for just my girlfriend and I; we don't buy outrageous quantities. We live in a populous area.

Our situation is pretty common; it's just a normal grocery store in effect for lots of people. The weird stereotype of Costco shoppers driving for miles to buy huge carts of food just doesn't line up with the typical case for my area.

It is significant if you don't want to sit at a computer all day just to MAYBE get basic functionality, then find you've backed yourself into a corner because you didn't know some esoteric detail and have to spend another day doing a refactor, etc etc

I don't want to sift through docs and man pages and debug cryptic compiler and runtime errors in my spare time.

There are far richer things for me to do with my life.

I want to use my computer to get my tasks done and be done with it. Slogging through technical details an LLM could crush in minutes is a much better use of my resources.

This just doesn't matter for a lot of us. We have LLMs that can tweak it and the tools work as intended.

The whole point of this sentiment is that the personal tools wouldn't EXIST due to the time sink needed.

The tradeoff makes sense for a lot of people even if it's not a good fit for you.

IMO, it's a bit disingenuous in 2026 to argue that technical college degrees exist for the sake of pure education and that we're best suited to continue pretending as such.

The vast majority of students and employers treat them as vocational certificates in practice, and the profession would almost certainly benefit from adapting curricula to more closely match that reality.

Foundational concepts are still necessary, but I don't buy the argument that we should continue teaching like it's 1946.

I've been thinking along similar lines as you and really appreciate you posting this comment.

I, too, think it's important to put dreams out there even if they have holes in their implementation or are easily torn apart by naysayers. We can and should collectively dream of a better future if we want something worthwhile to aim at.

Thanks for taking the time to write such a high quality reply; this is something I've wondered about for a long time and I appreciate the thought and detail you've shared here. :)

Low barrier to entry and hard to get fired once you're in.

Rotten people put on a good face in the interview and then spread their misery around for decades to some of our most vulnerable. It happens in pretty much every unelected position in the public sector in my experience.

I'm willing to bet TPUs wouldn't be nearly as successful or sophisticated without the decades of GPU design and manufacturing that came before them.

Current manufacturing numbers are a small part of the story of the overall lineage.

Almost certainly not at the scale of the consumer gaming industry, however!

We don't need to know the exact boundaries of what's acceptable to recognize obviously harmful behavior and make efforts to stop it on a societal level.

This is the classic "perfect is the enemy of the good" type scenario.

Let's make imperfect progress if that is what we're currently capable of.

The drug so popular no one thinks of it as a drug any more.

Criticism without a better solution is only so valuable.

How would you do this instead, and why?

I was in an extremely good spot financially when I quit (years of runway) due to living well below my paycheck for years of working at FAANG.

I was terrified to do so, but the only alternative I could see at the time was killing myself if I had to continue as is (lots of mental illness prior to and greatly exacerbated by my time in tech).

It is the biggest leap of faith I have ever taken, and I do not have a big appetite for financial risk.

I went through the exact same thing as you, and I needed some time to explore different ways of living. I tried being a drone pilot, a kayak guide, and a paddleboard instructor and learned a lot in the process.

After those forays I designed and built a trailered coffee from scratch and now I run it on a public park that overlooks the ocean.

I am more fulfilled than ever, I can pay my bills, and I get to do WAY more "real" engineering than the bureaucracy of my past life at FAANG ever allowed for.

You cycle multiple packs to run for hours.

Your battery blower sounds like it's just not very good.

I can move piles of wet leaves easily with my makita blower that uses two 18v batteries. It's a pretty old model too.

Batteries can surge power and not risk fire hazard like AC over a long extension cord. Manufacturers know this and have to intentionally limit draw way below the 15A ceiling so a 100ft 14AWG cord doesn't trip breakers or burn houses down.

Corded yard tools will always suck because they can only pull <15A on a standard US outlet. They just don't have the juice.

It's always better to go with batteries for electric outdoor stuff for that (and other) reasons.

It seems very likely to me that the sensations experienced during exercise are highly variable among individuals.

I say this because my experience is very different from yours: I get a very perceptible "high" once I get into the rhythm of a good workout. Think mild euphoria, mood lift, and general feeling of "rightness" in my body once it's been well wrung.

This only happens if I'm in decent shape, though. If I've fallen out of shape it's a slog.

Edit: I can't remember the podcast, but I recall some discussion of emerging clinical evidence in exercise response variability along many dimensions that may help explain the disconnect.

There is no universally "correct" granularity.

You could easily scoff the same way about some number of API endpoints, class methods, config options, etc, and it still wouldn't be meaningful without context.

It's ok to split or lump as the team sees fit.

Credentials should only be provided at the application root, which is going to be a different root for a test harness.

Mockito shouldn't change whether or not this is possible; the code shouldn't have the prod creds (or any external resource references) hard coded in the compiled bytecode.

It's useful to get "glue" code out of the way while building, but to the point in the article it all becomes very difficult to debug and maintain once there are problems in the that layer.

Spring Boot and other similar frameworks come to mind; by forcing huge amounts of indirection you lose a lot of visibility of your call stack because the convenient "glue" code is now orchestrating everything at runtime, but that code isn't yours, and it isn't easily inspected or fixed.

Fabrice is certainly very skilled in CS, but his achievements are more in software implementation IMO.

AIUI the Turing award is primarily CS focused.

These tests also break encapsulation in many cases because they're not testing the interface contract, they're testing the implementation.

The world is too complex, and life paths too varied, to reliably assume "everyone" in a community or group knows about some fact.

You're usually deep within a social bubble of some sort if you find yourself assuming otherwise.

no one asked, but FYI in English it is more commmon to say "for several years" instead of "since some years" :)

Hah, that exact transition was my last project there before I decided I had had enough!

The GPM team was hugely passionate about music and curating a good experience for users, but YT leadership just wanted us to "reuse existing video architecture" to the Nth degree when we merged into the YT org.

After literally years of negotiations you got... what YTM is. Many of the original GPM team members left before the transition was fully underway because they saw the writing on the wall and wanted no part of it. I really wish I had done the same.

As someone who used to work there, Google will never get product releases right in general because of how bureaucratic and heavyweight their launch processes are.

They force the developing team to have a huge number of meetings and email threads that they must steer themselves to check off a ridiculously large list of "must haves" that are usually well outside their domain expertise.

The result is that any non-critical or internally contentious features get cut ruthlessly in order to make the launch date (so that the team can make sure it happens before their next performance review).

It's too hard to get the "approving" teams to work with the actual developers to iron these issues out ahead of time, so they just don't.

Buck passed, product launched.

I'm pretty sure most PS controllers use Bluetooth natively if they're not connected via USB.

Thanks for writing such a detailed reply about this.

Like GP I'm not very good at spotting these patterns yet, so explicit real-world examples go a long way.

Almost everyone is using these controllers wirelessly if I had to hazard a guess.

The USB interface is used for initial pairing and charging, in which case the port location doesn't matter nearly as much.