welzel

Compare the UX of any Macbook with the most cutting edge “overpowered” Windows Machine and you get the same shitty experience we have since forever:

The UI is sometimes laggy, buggy and simply sucks.

Fresh installation of Windows 11 on a 2026 high-end machine: you open a File Explorer for local SSD and there is a delay in the UI. Oh, and of course, the UI is more ad invested then a cheap p0rn page from russia. WTF Microsoft?

The much more interesting projects from Europe are created by https://schwarz-digits.de/en

3 Reasons: - a significant investment from the Schwarz Group - not just a marketing stunt, but a company with a long term vision to compete with big US tech - clearly targeted at B2B with strong ties into EU politics

The real issue is that you can´t disable this CRAP.

Why can´t Apple allow for a setting to 100% disable this bad idea of an UI/UX experience? How much drugs do you need to consume, in order to assume that people who use a computer for professional work want this interface?

What was the user requirement for it? "lets waste as much UI as possible and make it very, very hard to work on Mac OS!"

Who approves this kind of bad UI/UX?

What did people expect to happen? Nobody seems to ask the question why military is being deployed to US cities. What would be your assumption if the same happens in Africa or South America? Seriously, how stupid can people be ...

I have many friends who already left the US or prepared to leave at a moments notice. None of them are actually political, but they are aware that 1984 is already fully implemented and at any point in time it could get very, very ugly very quickly.

Just to be clear: Russia has invaded Ukraine, has declared that the country has no right to exist and ukraine people will be exterminated, but it is NATO that is the aggressor?

This is textbook russian propaganda.

I am sorry, but this question shows how deep you are in the bubble.

People don´t care, never did.

Example: after Jamal Khashoggi was murdered, people still suck up to MbS. Money rules the world.

After what we learned about Guantanamo Bay, nobody should be allowed to call the US a democratic country. But we all decided to ignore the facts, as watching Netflix is way to nice.

This is standard practice in basically every country. Try to cross a border with a pile of cash and see what happens. Police finds a box of cash in your car? You better explain where it came from and why you drive it around.

There is so much weird hate for the government in the comments, but please provide a single sane scenario where you need to send cash instead of a bank transfer that is not about avoiding laws/taxes.

There are NONE. You send the cash because you did something against the law.

So by all means, the police should keep the money until you simple prove the non-existing totally legit reason why you could not use a bank transfer. I understand the problem with this, but you don´t prove that you are innocent; but large amounts of cash are usually connected to crime and it is your job to explain why not.

There is a simple solution for this problem: increase the payout for people who are affected by overweight vehicles.

Have a law, define a target weight + speed and then make it REALLY expensive to insure or kill people with your car.

Also in the law: if you drive around without insurance, the car is instantly taken away from you, as it is a weapon to conduct a crime :-)

Still people will drive big cars around, but the market will limit the number of people who can pay for it. And of course: new cars only and when ownership is transferred. No additional tax for existing owners.

The market would solve this problem VERY VERY quickly.

The article has a clickbait title. It is also wrong.

NOT every company should give stock options to its employees, because ... it only makes sense if long term success of the company can be significant influenced by its employees. Also, those stock options can be a barrier to growth and become a liability if needed adjustments are blocked in order to protect "stockholder"

NOT all employees should get stock options, specially not the ones who contribute very little to the value generated.

NOT all employees want stock options, as people just want to take the actual money and be free to switch companies. The stock options are a way to control employees.

employee stock options are interesting when the allow to vote on the board. THIS is amazing - and almost nobody does it, because it would actually shift power to the employees.

In most companies, giving stock options is almost a scam; you save actual money for salaries, pretend to share revenues (you don´t) and lock-in high value employees. Also you spread your stocks so you are more protected against hostile takeovers.

Stock options are a great way for the actual owners to save money and actually become more powerful.

We should all support this law, just with one addition:

All data shared by politicians, public servants and all of their family members within the EU has to be shared, analysed for corruption + stored forever.

If we are all considered pedophiles, then all politicians are criminals.

Yes, a few people will be wrongly accused and we all loose our freedom.

HOWEVER, with every election we will get a small chance that the previous administration will get audited and corruption and other crimes will get uncovered.

Seems to be worth it.

One feedback on the webpage: it is impossible to find any spec on the device. It is pure emotion and marketing bull$hit, zero information.

If you want to copy Apple & Co on this, please remember to also bring the tech specs.

Like: Operation System, Ram, Storage, Battery Life, Format Factor, Weight, I/O.

My assumption: you have a less crappy display with a outdated compute unit, made from leftover Shenzhen parts.

Sorry, but every year hundreds of startups fail with a "big promise bad product" strategy.

It is nothing against this product, i just have trust issues if a company cannot even create a basic webpage that delivers relevant information.

I created a startup 2 years ago around a gigantic rabbit hole: understanding cause-and-effect and how you can move towards the outcome you want in a consistent way.

In case you want to have unlimited fun yourself, ask yourself: "What is the purpose of X?" and then "how can you measure/assess the fit-for-purpose of it?"

Possible Side-effects: #1 you might get disgusted and even angry with the self-declared "experts" who have not even understood the basic concepts.

#2 you might learn how little you understand yourself and how deep the rabbit hole goles.

Example in Software Development: Understand the quality dimensions for a "definition of ready" and what impact a good/used DoR has compared to a bad/not used DoR for the efficiency and effectiveness of a software development process.

It is amazing to see that the recommendation "put them on Apple, enable parent control, it just works" is countered with an argument from an Android user who does not understand the point: using Apple vs. Android / Windows is about how the product make you feel.

Hypothesis: Android UX is more inconsistent compared to IOS and some inexperienced users get anxiety because of that.

Hypothesis: on Android and Windows it is much simply to get maleware etc. then on Apple, because Apple can be closed down completly (and this is great!)

Hypothesis: on Android and Windows you can damage the account/system very easily with a non-admin User, on Apple this is much less likely

Hypothesis: on Android and Windows the amount of admin work needed to keep the device alive is much higher then on Apple

I wonder if a "modern" probe from 2024 could ever have a similar lifespan.

With systems hundred times more complex and build by a NASA that is a fraction of what it was 50 years ago, i guess a modern day Voyager will not even make it to the edge, let alone continue to function.

Google is not a social movement, it is not a democratic social structure or a family.

It is a business with the purpose of generating value.

Firing activists who are delusional enough to challenge senior management in public is a good move. Ensure to fire anybody even remotely involved with this activists. Make sure that people understand that their job is not to have political opinions during working hours and even of the clock that they cannot opposite the official position of the company without running a risk of getting fired.

If you belief that google is "fascist" or "undemocratic" are are delusional; google cannot be "fascist" or "democratic" because it is a company. You do not elect the CEO of google and you are not a citizen of google. It is a company, nothing more, nothing less.

If you belief that a company should be democratic: you are free to create your own company, take your own money or find investors who share your beliefs. Put your money where your beliefs are. Activism is incredible cheap and it is long overdue that companies like google stop pretending to be a "family" or "democratic".

To get some context on this, you have to look into the local administration of munich in bavaria. They messed up the switch to OpenOffice on the desktop by not supporting all use-cases and then it seems Microsoft used the opportunity to reverse the change by use some "convincing".

Anyhow, it would be extremely simple for all of Europe to role out OpenSource: just ban the transfer of critical user data to the US. Microsoft Windows is technically a gigantic NSA backdoor, therefore installing it on a government PC should be considered treason. So, maybe we should start to put politicians on trial for treason and see how quickly MS gets kicked out of Europe...

This is so cute. The webpage could be fully static, served from a raspberry as it is hiding behind a CDN anyway and the DDOS is not even trying.

Anyhow, doing the same with a high traffic application would be a very very different animal, specially when the app has 100k+ active daily users and is doing actual stuff. The advice is not bad, but it sounds so silly. From experience every time a commercial web application was build as a monolith it became very hard or even unmaintainable in a few years, specially when 15+ Teams are constantly contribution. So pick the right hammer for the problem you have, but pretending a simple marketing webpage + payment/subscription is a good example for architecture is just a bit much.

I like to encourage you to go on this adventure to learn why a toaster made in USA could be the single most horrifying idea a founder can have. I would like to encourage you to become a founder and milk every insight out of this idea you can get. Don´t walk away now, go all in and learn in order to protect you from sinking years of your life into a bad idea (Spoiler: your next idea might be even worse)

1. research the cost of producing a production-ready physical product. You need millions of up-front investment and a couple of years of funding.

2. research how a toaster is sold. Spoiler: you need attention and access to a target audience. What would be your customer acquisition cost to sell 100K units?

3. what is the customer lifetime value of a person who bought your toaster? Spoiler: your competition might be a 10 USD made-in-china piece of crap, so people a willing to spend 25 USD on something that is not dead-on-arrival. How much do you need to charge for a made-in-USA toaster? 99 USD? 299 USD?

4. how much do you need to spend on branding and marketing to get the value of "made-in-USA" attached to the toaster? 10M? 50M?

5. how will your life look like, when you manage to pull this off to sell 10K toasters? My assumption: it will be a constant nightmare/living hell, as you now have a mountain of dept, high running costs and many people asking you to sell the next 100k toasters...

I am using Scrum since 2006 and have worked with 30+ Teams so far. I don´t care for Scrum or any other framework, i only care about creating great organisations that empower teams to generate value.

In 2022 + 2023 i conducted about > 220 insight interviews with Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches and Product Owners for a product i am currently developing.

There was a VERY VERY clear pattern:

1. almost all teams where using Scrum or Kanban or some mixture of it 2. less then 1% of teams actually had a product vision, product goals or a sprint goals 3. nobody was actually doing "inspect&adapt"

My assumption #1: it is not the framework or the people, the failure is within the system.

My assumption #2: every company is different, a company is a complex system and many many factors contribute to the outcomes, nothing is clearly black or white. Any framework needs to be adopted with the core concepts in place; with Scrum the core concepts are usually not implemented and therefore Scrum fails.

() Site note: training standards of people seems to be very low; a lot of Sscrum Masters and even "Agile Coaches" cannot explain even the basic concepts of Scrum and Kanban.

Example: What is the purpose of Daily Standup? How can you assess the quality of Standup? How can you improve the Standup?

So what is wrong with the system? - company does not have a product strategy, only tasks like "develop feature X" - company does not have strategy management processes in place - there is NO collection of meaningful data regarding process health and performance and specially Scrum Master work against creating transparency (out of fear)

What is the solution? Implementation of a framework without robust performance monitoring is pointless and failure is certain.

The issue? It seems that Scrum Masters push the most against performance monitoring out of fear to become transparent. Also, being transparent in an company with low (psychological) safety might be professional suicide.

People forget that Scrum was developed by observing successful (senior) teams, but if they don´t understand how value and waste it generated it is meaningless to follow any framework.

Example: Having a lot of meetings does not generate the waste, it is only the symptom. The root causes of many meetings are inefficient management and communication structures. In order to avoid the waste you don´t need to remove the meetings, but first resolve the underlaying issue(s) and then the need for the meetings disappear. Removing the wasteful meetings might actually create more waste/harm, as the company might perform even more badly afterwards.

So yes, individual developers might get more working hours but generate less value over time. The purpose is not to maximize the working hours of developers, but to maximize the value generated by the team. The assumption that "more development hours = more value generated" assumes that alignment with product goals, teamwork and cross-functional collaboration is in place.

The current Copyright is broken - literally everybody except some evil cooperations and their corrupt politicians agree to that.

We all have ideas how to fix it - very simply could be to go with Authors life and when the art is sold it goes down to 10-25 years. Thats it. Simple.

What seems to be unsolved is HOW we actually get to this point. It seems to be impossible to get enough money to outspend the evil cooperations in buying politicians, so what do you suggest?

I have worked on very large e-Commerce sites and it seems there are 2 common issues:

#1 a lot of teams are understaffed, overworked an not aligned, improving search is simply not a priority (at the same times, a lot of people are bored out of their mind, because of inefficient allocation of capacities). And of course, usable analytics data on search does not exist as it is hard to collect...

#2 search might be actually ok, but the quality of the catalog data is a nightmare - and the catalog is maintenance by a tiny team that overworked and underpaid. To add injury to insult, there is also no clear accountability established and 5 departments and a couple of vendors play the "not my problem" game. Sometimes 10-30% of the catalog is renewed every year and people gave up a long time ago to report problems.

Sometimes i feel that reporters should be needed to add a basic statistical analysis before they are allowed to claim something like censorship.

How much content is posted every day on meta? How many content removal decisions are taken every day by meta?

Hint: Over 1 billion Stories are posted every day.

So even if 1049 content removals would happen on a single day - but this "evidence" is collected over a much longer time period.

You have to read about HRW and its campaign against Israel to maybe understand why HRW continue to post this type of propaganda: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Human_Rights_Watc...

The guardian did a very bad job at picking up this biased content.

Back in the day we where running a very nice Lotus Domino Server for a small organisation. We needed a machine to handle a complex domain setup + routing, and i donated as a temporary measure my old workstation, as i didn´t want to mess with the actual server. 3-4 years later the "temporary measure" was still in place, but the machine didn´t boot up after a power outage. Long story short, the disk drive was frozen, as it was a small consumer HDD (2 GB?) and didn´t like to be operational for such a long time.

A very very oldschool sys admin helped out by opened up the poor machine, opened the HDD and then powered up the machine, given the disk a good spin at the right moment. The disk came back to life and so did the server, and we agreed to replace the machine with a new, proper server ASAP. As i left the organisation 2 years later the machine was still operational, the disk still spinning (ZERO defects!) and the disk was still open inside the case - running non-stop-no-problemo for 2+ years!

I also miss Lotus Notes - it was an amazing concept in many regards that got murdered by IBM.

And in case you ask: the machine was running Windows NT 4 Server.

Finding a OOS business model is non-trivial.

Maybe you should talk to https://goodsnooze.gumroad.com/l/macwhisper to get some inspiration?

People are paying for convenience.

as for the technology itself: the B2B market is super-super early and i understand everybody is in goldrush mode, however 98% of all startups will not survive the next 3-5 years.

From the demand site: Companies are still sleeping, you can see very very very few proof of concept implementation, but basically nothing goes to production.

The rate of innovation is extremely high with LLM, making it a bad investment for a company.

My idea: OSS everything, become an expert in the field, learn how to sell, survive from consulting services. Don´t build products, do paid projects instead.

Focus all your energy to understand customer needs and building your target audience.

Be ready when the time is right to build a startup around LLM.

Don´t waste time building technology, develop your business instead.

I hope they keep this code in YT.

It will be a party for the EU to punish Google with an anti-monopoly lawsuit.

Best case: google gets forced to split up chrome, youtube and search as they obviously abuse their power.

Fun fact: In Europe this kind of junk fees mostly do not exist and taxes are included in prices.

It is weird how much easier it gets for customers to compare offers. Comparing political systems, in the US the gov protects revenues and the EU it protects consumer rights.

You can experience this for yourself: try booking a flight with a old fashioned carrier like lufthansa.de and then go to a "we will rip you off for sure" travel-portal from uk to book the exact same flight or a low-cost airline like ryanair. You find the portal by a simple google search, as they are so "cheap" compared to the official price.

The portal shows a price that is 20% less then the carrier price, but somehow you always end up paying at least 30% more, even IF you are really good at the game of "avoid bullshit upsell checkboxes".

As a founder i can give you one advice you did not ask for:

Stick to one market and one solution. do Enterprise, do Schools. Don´t do both. It takes an insane amount of capacity and resources to penetrate a market, and it really does not matter how much you have - trying to be in two places at the same time will fail. If you care for both, start with one and get it done.

Also: i strongly suggest to stay away from a marketsplace. Pulling off a working marketplace is unicorn-level hard. Spend a day to research how many successful marketplaces exist and then another day to find for every successful marketplace the failed ones - getting a startup right might be 1:100 chances, getting a marketplace right is more like 1:10.000.

It is the same as with YT anti-adblock: all it does is move people away from Chrome.

Chrome had a good run, but it is time again to help family members and organisations to migrate to ... firefox and never look back. Google has lost its ways and i am sure that "don´t do evil" was just replaced by "do evil stuff in a sneaky way".

I don´t want to hate on the opinion of people, but "X is better then Y" is a pretty useless type of article.

I have used AWS, GCP and Azure + some more that offer AWS style of services. In the end the question is "what is best for my organisation?" It really really really does not matter if a developer finds GCP more easy to use or if AWS is way better at feature X.

The service has to fit the requirements.

And even worse, sometimes the requirements do not care for usability, cost or features.

At my startup (https://polifinity.com) we do allmost everything manually first and only build when we have "proof" that an idea works.

Examples: - we do not have onboarding automation, instead a simple make.com trigger is send and then we do onboarding from a team member - we have not build all parts of the product, but instead use very simple manual processes to simulate a LOT of the more expensive features - only after feedback we actually invest development time - we have an intelligent reminder feature, that is done using a google sheet + make.com and manual mail; building the feature is not cost efficient anytime soon - the core of our product is about product strategy. Instead of building a complex interface in the app, we offer (free) workshops that are more effective, but absolutely do not scale at all...

In my past startups we sometimes did even more extreme "do things that don´t scale" stuff:

- giving you personalized recommendations generated within 30 min. from a human

- B2B matching from a web-page, where actually a mail was send and we generated the matches dynamically from different sources => this worked out AMAZINGLY well

- complex reporting from a huge database -> report was generated by a data scientist within 2-3 business days and then based on feedback the feature was never implemented, as every report was different and lots of time required data not actually in the database