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Should QA exist? 4 months ago

Of course, anyone would agree that if wishes were fishes, QAs should not exist. We would all use agile with cross-functional teams. Every single team member can do any work that may be needed. All team members can take time off any time they need to because we have full coverage and the world is a beautiful place.

Of course, none of this is true in the real world.

For example, just last week we had a QA essentially bring down our web application on staging environment always reproducible with a sequence of four clicks. Follow the sequence with about the proper timing and boom, exception.

Should this have been caught before a single line of code was written? Yes, it should have been caught before any code was written. However, the reality is that it did not. Should this have been caught by some unit test? Integration test? End to end test? Code review? I'd argue as we barrel down a world of AI slop, we need to slow down more. We need QA more than ever.

Why Startups Die 7 months ago

I love this comment because if you flip the article like see below, the concept remains the same and yet I am eased into the premise with "obvious facts" I already believe. Plus, inverting like this focuses on what we want to do to survive versus the negativity of what causes failure.

Startups have a notorious failure rate – some estimates say 9 out of 10 startups eventually fail. Yet, contrary to what many first-time founders expect, startups rarely fail because a giant competitor swoops in or because of some external “homicide.” Instead, most startups die by “suicide,” meaning their demise is self-inflicted by internal issues. As YC founder Paul Graham once noted, “Startups are more likely to die from suicide than homicide.” In my experience building two startups, I’ve seen that the biggest threats usually come from within the company’s own walls, not from the outside world.

Updated by me:

Startups have an incredibly small survival rate. One in ten startups survives. The ones that survive don't survive simply because a giant competitor didn't kill it or because some external affliction didn't cause it to fail. Counterintuitively, the startups that survived didn't actively try to kill themselves by internal issues.(The rest I can copy paste) As YC founder Paul Graham once noted, “Startups are more likely to die from suicide than homicide.” In my experience building two startups, I’ve seen that the biggest threats usually come from within the company’s own walls, not from the outside world.

Far more importantly, though, artists haven't spent the last quarter century working to eliminate protections for IPR. Software developers have.

I think the case we are making is there is no such thing as intellectual property to begin with and the whole thing is a scam created by duck taping a bunch of different concepts together when they should not be grouped together at all.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.en.html

There is really no such thing as a middle class though. We are all n missed paychecks away from being unhoused.

That's not what I see from the outside Everytime versioning comes up. My understanding is Microsoft marketing has full control over what constitutes a major / minor version bump like when typescript 4 is released vs typescript 3.9 (just an example). The people who build typescript don't even control their own version numbers.

I like the wording leftover money. My index fund has an "expense ratio" of 0.06% or something like that. Any money that doesn't go toward a patient directly, including everything from CEO bonus to call center expenses should be added as an expense that does not go directly to the patient and this expense ratio should be advertised front and center everywhere.

However, I don't think the problem is truly fixable without Medicare for all or similar single payer scheme. There is just a huge gap in not just bargaining power but just knowledge of the market information between the seller (hospitals and health care providers) and the buyers (sick people) that a free market solution can't even work in theory. Even if you ignore the fact that I can't exactly shop around when I have an emergency any more than I can shop around when my house is on fire. The only viable solution is single payer and the sooner we get there, the better for everyone.

EU just watched

A lot of us in the US don't subscribe to the idea of "either you're with us or against us". I don't expect every single country in the world to drop everything they are doing and rush to help us invade whatever country we want to invade. I think it is ridiculous to say the EU is not with us because they don't blindly follow us everywhere.

In hindsight, it was a bad idea to invade Iraq anyway.

I have a similar anecdote which isn't very relevant except it felt like googlers now care about how they can help make google more money. I would have never expected engineers at Google to care about how to make more money for google like doesn't the money just flow in...

How do you justify to your manager to spend (and more importantly commit to spending for a long time) hundreds of millions of dollars in aws resources every year? Sure, you already have the hardware but that's a different org, right? You can't expect them to give you those resources for free. Also, voice needs to be instant. You can't say 'Well, the AWS instances are currently expensive. Try again when my spot prices are lower."

I am sure you know this but maybe some don't know that basically only the hot word detection is on device. It needs to be connected to the Internet for basically everything else. It already costs Amazon.com some money to run this infrastructure. What we are asking will cost more and you can't really charge the users more. I personally would definitely not sign up for a paid subscription to use Amazon Alexa.

I don't think charge can do what I'm asking which is to bypass the battery and run the phone directly off the wall. I am ok if the phone reboots when the power is disrupted. On a computer, we have this setting called last known state, right? Like if the phone was on when the power was disrupted, turn it on again without using the battery when power is restored.

Basically, I want the phone to ignore that there is a battery until the battery charge drops to about 20 percent and then charge to to about 60 or 80 percent but don't use the battery at all. Only use the battery as a power source if the user switches off this dedicated mode or if the user powers on the device without external power present. Something like that.

I keep my iPhone at home, powered and connected to the Internet but don't use it as a daily driver.

I recently learned that the Google pixel 8 and 9 will soon get a feature that will allow these phones to remain plugged in and turned on without charging and discharging the battery (under certain circumstances).

I really wish this was widely available for all cell phones and tablets. I know new iPhones have a limit charging to 80% option (my iPhone se 2020 does not) but I think the next step is to add this? My main motivation is to do whatever we can to avoid spicy pillow problem in batteries.

Do you have any thoughts on this topic?

I think they said city centers. Banning cars in city centers makes sense to me because it reduces traffic congestion.

Japan does not need to ban cars because it is incredibly expensive to own a car in Tokyo. So either you ban it or you make it so expensive that only the rich can afford a car. Either way works for me.

I have a problem similar to this but not exactly the same. What I would like is for the whole company (assume a run off the mill ecommerce store for this example), regardless of the company size to be able to fit all (I guess almost all) their code on one physical machine (or I guess a set of physical machines). Let's assume we can stub out any external dependencies such as vendors or customers.

We should be able to run the whole system end to end and have a coherent story. We should be able to pull changed from production and be able to run it on this one machine and verify that all the steps work exactly as expected.

I joined a team that was getting into micro services. They enthusiastically told me about their domains and bounded contexts and how I had access to all the repos and could run them on my machine. So my question was how can I run them all together on my machine end to end and the answer was silence as if I had kicked a baby.

Edit: thank you for your added context with the authentication library. It makes sense why the architects and lead developers were not interested in having the whole system run end to end on a developer machine. They want to have that tight "inner loop" and have developers working in that inner loop and not worry about the rest.

This is the biggest problem. I rented an apartment for two years in the Dallas Texas area, and you just need one anecdote to know the place is massively energy inefficient -- all the windows on my apartment were single glass pane. It gets freezing cold for two or three weeks in winter. It gets triple digit (fahrenheit) in the summer. A well insulated home is a must to save money on electricity. Add to the fact that I'm sure the only heating I had was resistive electricity heat from the electric air conditioning...