Great read, with some amusing asides.

Shots fired!

We probably have the same model - the one with the big oval stand. Every once in a while I wish it was OLED and/or higher resolution, but it’s not worth the expensive or all the modern “features” such as these.

That your company has an in-house software dev team is impressive. Does the revenue-generating business have access to that team?

Not OP, but in a similar situation. We have in-house dev for both tooling/infrastructure as well as revenue generation. For better or worse, leaders have neglected the software tooling and infrastructure that we use to build and deliver our revenue generating software for decades. Some serious cracks in the foundation showing and we might finally start fixing things.

Android is built in the Linux kernel. That’s actually some of what causes this - Android’s permissions model takes the Linux model and amplifies it. Apps are treated like users to prevent them from messing with each other’s files. If an app uses Android’s downloads manager it can write to the downloads directory, but it can only see the files that it put there.

There are some Linux users with iPhones, perhaps that’s what they meant?

I feel this in my bones. Even before the recent round of restructuring we’ve had a significant about of turnover. Our infrastructure is a massive rube golberg machine with multiple houses of cards built on top of it. Institutional knowledge was never written down and it has been leaving the company at an accelerating rate over the past 5 years. Tons of “new blood” making lots of assumptions on how things work is resulting in… humorous end results.

I am a product manager that loves coming up with detailed specs. How else will I actually get what I want? If you care about some specific behavior/outcome you must specify it. This logic is lost on my leadership.

Apple is almost the tale of two companies.

From the software usability perspective, they have the “it just works” reputation and that might be true if you’re doing really basic stuff. I’ve found both windows and Linux to be much more user friendly if you want to do mildly advanced things.

Their hardware is generally pretty solid but comes at a premium, especially once you start talking about increasing RAM/SSD capacity. I have both a MacBook pro M3 pro and a Snapdragon X Elite Lenovo Yoga slim 7x. The 7x can give great battery life, but is much more inconsistent in doing so. On the other hand, the 7x has an amszing 3k OLED screen, has a removable m3 SSD, and you can upgrade to 32 GB of RAM for around $100.

What I find interesting is that a large swath of developers have macs. I get it for some use cases (ARM emulation on ARM vs doing it on x86), but it seems like it’s a bit of a status symbol for others.

Clearly you’ve never used a Mac. It wasn’t until 2024 that you could snap windows, they have a built in dark mode but the word processor that ships with their computer requires you to use a dark page template if you want black background/white text, and lord forgive you if you want to take a screenshot.

Better still, he invited the home owner and the arresting officer over:

On July 24, Obama invited both parties to the White House to discuss the issue over a beer, and on July 30, Obama and Vice President Joe Biden joined Crowley and Gates in a private, cordial meeting in a courtyard near the White House Rose Garden; this became known colloquially as the “Beer Summit”.

From Wikipedia

Be sure to get one for long hair cats if necessary! I didn’t realize this was a thing until I tried using our short hair deshedder on our long hair and she promptly got very pissed off. She’s still not a super fan of the long hair version, but she will tolerate it.

And you’re right - tons and tons of fur comes off when I groom our kitties every few weeks in spring.

I ran into this at work today. Proposed a very simple approach for something to an architect and an engineering lead. Engineering lead said this was a practical solution that solves a problem that’s been plaguing them for two years. The architect nearly immediately said, “well, the real source is a mainframe that was stood up in the very early 80s. Let’s ignore the fact that changing it takes an act of Congress or that we have multiple modern downstream systems between it and us that are a much better home for this new function.”

It really seemed to amount to, “I didn’t come up with this, therefore I don’t support it.”

Ah, corporate politics.

Aka totally predictable and easily avoidable, which makes this BS unbelievable.

Building capacity costs a ton of money and with the constant flip flopping on tarrifs there’s a lot of hesitancy to break ground.

I was born in the 80s. I had a paper route at 13 so I could buy an OG PlayStation. Definitely not crazy shift work, but I wonder how a 13 year old could find employment for some spending money these days.

Fun fact, if you save money for retirement, it tends to go up, shocking.

I wonder how long “line goes up” will last. Forget late stage capitalism, this whole thing was built on growth. What happens when global birthrates drop below the replacement rate? It certainly seems we’re heading in that direction. This will make a lot of our current systems/structures struggle.

Discovery will be interesting. I hope that the pilot was on the radio with someone asking for advice/providing updates and doing general CYA things before they physically confronted the passenger. I could easily see the pilot being agitated because they were put in that situation, but I also hope there were other interactions leading up to a rapid escalation.

I wonder if they were in the air or on the ground. Based on the fact that they were detained after they landed I’m guessing they were in the air. The whole thing sounds very non-ideal. Reading through the discovery material, if the case makes it that far, will be interesting.

To build on top of this excellent reply, put some fiberglass on top of the wood if you to the two part epoxy route. It should be transparent when done and you’ll get a more ridgid and ding proof surface. That’s why many wooden water vehicles have a layer of fiberglass embedded into their epoxy.

Now this I totally agree with. Between everything you said above, climate change, and many societies having a birthrate below the replacement rate, it will be very interesting to see how the next century or two plays out. Not that I’ll be around to see it.