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.

I was wondering why our clear skies the past few days looked like they had a layer of lake effect cloud cover. This also explains that.

You’re right that phillips screws are prone to cam out if theres a size mismatch, but it doesn’t stop there. Apply too much torque or have a misshapen screw head or bit and you’re out of luck.

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.

Their low power compute hardware, very compact form factor, and OS/apps are the selling points.

There are both commercial and DIY alternatives, but I am not aware of any that really check all three boxes quite as well.

When my disk station eventually dies I’ll go the DIY route but that doesn’t mean I’ll be excited to do so.

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.

My initial response to this was “ehhh”, but a quick look at the consoles I grew up with shows you’re right. The only exception I saw was the PS3 thanks to it’s pretty bonkers CPU.

The Super Nintendo user a Ricoh 5A22, which was based on the W65C816S used in the Apple II.

The Sega Genesis used a Motorola 68000, which was popular for Unix computers. It also made it into a number of PCs like the Apple Lisa, Macintosh, and Amiga

The PS1 and PS2 both had a R3000A-compatible 32-bit RISC CPU that was used in a lot of workstations of the era, but none of those would be familiar to an x86 user.

The PS3’s processor was the stuff of hype and legends. It bore no resemblance to PCs of the time

I’m sorry - what strategy finally got us gay marriage?

Gay marriage is presently legal in the US at a federal level due to a Supreme Court ruling, not a law. It seems inevitable that this will change given the present makeup of the court, similar to abortion.

I am all for LGBTQ rights, but until something is passed by Congress the current situation seems precarious.

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.