PebblesHD

Another happy Pixelmator user, migrated across from Photoshop and Illustrator. For the relatively small cost ($30 on sale) its most of the way as good for my semi-professional work creating content. It has some rough edges but has so far been improved with every update.

And I’m sure like every other cool, reasonably priced American thing it’ll be over $100,000 when it gets to Australia. Our import and ‘luxury’ taxes are really silly when we don’t make anything here anymore.

I still remember visiting the UAE in 2018 and finding our Holden Commodore top trim models available there in left hand drive cheaper than they were here before conversion and shipping.

The shorter attention span idea is an interesting perspective on this. I’d have thought fidget toys like electronic pets etc. might have the same effect of inducing attention diverting behaviours but as you said, my experience of Facebook/Snapchat at the time was mostly static images. There was video on Facebook and to be fair we watched a lot thanks to many Australian phone plans zero rating data for Facebook but we didn’t do that during class.

I still think of myself as a ‘digital native’, as in this technology has existed my whole life, but in many ways yeah I agree with your perspective that it was not as pervasive during my formative years and I guess that makes all the difference here.

I’m still very confused why this has become such a thing recently. I was in senior year a decade ago and we had iPhones back then too. iPods and tamagotchis too. If the teacher needed to deal with a student on their phone rather than working, they’d confiscate it. Most of us left them in our pockets, and seem to have graduated just fine.

Why have kids seemingly become unable to leave their phones silently in their pockets, and why have teachers seemingly become unable to confiscate them when needed? Is social media these days that addicting? Are teachers exposed to consequences for managing their classrooms?

Anyway, as a student I would have been reluctant to leave my phone at home when I’d demonstrated my ability to not fiddle with it in class, so for many ‘normal’ students I can see why they’d push back.

My average (3 days a week ish) day includes sipping the same can of energy drink for probably 8 hours during which ill get through about 3/5 of the can. I drink water throughout the day and like the occasional acidic zest of a sip of drink, and at an emotional level makes me feel productive even if the caffiene delivery is probably on the order of 15mg per hour.

Something sounds a bit off if your IT professionals don’t understand files and folders. In any case, my anecdata in an organisation of over 1000 windows computers and about 400 macs is the windows device owners are generally the ones with icons strewn about the place and displays plugged in set to mirror ‘because it gives them more space’ but I tend to find this is because the windows users are the ‘business’ users whereas the macs are the developers.

Only a little disappointed the header video isn’t Colin Furze’s wall of death built out of pallets. Still, using the lower gravity to your advantage without requiring mechanical leverage is a very cost and energy efficient approach to enabling exercise.

I see your second point as exactly where Google and many other hyper-scale companies are going. They seem to legitimately see all employees as spreadsheet rows to be shuffled around to achieve maximum efficiency.

Outsourcing in general comes and goes in waves, and Australia is also certainly on the upswing towards outsourcing at large corporations as well, but it will likely come back the other way once time cost and quality is considered, before a different MBA comes in a few years later and starts the whole process again.

Still doesn’t really answer the question as to why an employee in a high HDI country would move to a lower one for reduced pay when they could remain in their existing one and get a different job? Not sure any amount of money could convince me to move to a place with potentially unreliable plumbing and sewage and away from my support networks where I am now, and that’s coming from someone who spends their time between two diametrically opposed cultures already.

The value Google sees in these places is lower cost labor. This is not valuable to the current employees and is not a reason to move there.

I’ve been running a Phillips 49” ultrawide for nearly 2 years now and it is simply the best thing I’ve ever used. The USB-C / display port KVM built in works a treat and makes swapping from my laptop to my desktop a single plug, and the monitor itself mostly behaves itself with every device I’ve tried it with including an iPad.

I wish it was higher resolution but I suspect going beyond its 5120x1440 current resolution is pushing the limits of most display connections and standards at this point.

Overall though, I love it. Do recommend.

> a setback in its yearslong effort to improve consumer privacy on the internet.

Not entirely sure these are the words I would use to describe Google’s years long efforts with regards to the web. Eroding consumer privacy with invasive tracking comes more quickly to mind.

I agree with you, however: The WaPo has a veeeeery wide variety of endpoint devices. If they stuck to HTML + CSS it would mean an imperfect output on things like kiosk panels, public news stand displays, ebook readers etc. or needing to maintain multiple output services server side, with potentially different authoring considerations.

With their current approach, they can share one content authoring environment over an API that splits all render concerns to the consuming client.

Sounds a lot like what HTML was supposed to do in the first place doesn’t it… but not all devices support arbitrary html web browsing, nor would you want to serve a full page to most , so the next best option (according to some) is API plus javascript client for the web side of things.

While I don’t think this path is correct, given the tools we have I do see why it is used so frequently.

Ahh yes, Google Chrome flags like picture in picture, notable for being hidden behind a paywall by google on every platform where they can get away with it. How forward thinking…

In a similar flavour, on older versions of Mac OSX, you could touch an initial setup file and reboot which would start the out of box experience and let you make a new admin user if you ever found yourself locked out of one for some reason. Modern disk encryption put an obvious stop to that…

Ours are all stored and managed in the CMS/DAM we use, which happens to be Adobe Experience Manager. When the email service renders an email, it calls the CMS endpoint which returns the html with handlebars style template placeholders. That endpoint is heavily cached so not too worried about the mail service hammering it.

Staff get to format the email in a graphical editor they’re familiar with that handles revisions etc, and we don’t need to manually import templates.

AWS Summit in Sydney was the same this year. Every topic and talk was ‘using generative AI to…’ which I’m sure was very popular with most of the business people there, but on the builder day felt like a bit of a miss with most of the platform engineering crowd.

Now I have a 2 hour meeting on Tuesday with the BI team who want to use bedrock for something…

Are there any videos or screencasts of one of these in operation? I’d love to see a fresh out of box to up and running walkthrough similar to what VMWare produced for Tanzu. It’s such a niece thing that lots of tech people who’d be really interested will never get to play with one but it seems there’s not much material out there.

You should use whatever makes you productive. Programmers aren’t paid to hand write software, they’re paid for features. Creature comforts as the article calls them , like auto-refactoring and jump to definition, make writing features more efficient. These features are what I need graduate hires to understand and use, not necessarily ‘nuances’ as the article suggests. Once you understand the basics of programming, the language itself becomes less relevant. I’d hire a grad with solid IDE experience over one who is an expert at rust but absolutely insists they only write code in emacs.

By all means, if you’re most effective in emacs then please use it, but in all the places I’ve ever worked, emacs and vim have never been the tool of choice for anything beyond ‘I need this one line changed in this config file’, and there is a reason for that.

Then why not release it for free? I suspect the poster above might be right that the loss is on the investment creating the thing not the income tax.

I’d have expected you would need to demonstrate an attempt to generate income from an asset before the government would effectively give you a write off of the whole value. Anyway, thanks, hadn’t thought of it that way.

Not an American so a bit unsure, why does voluntarily choosing to destroy this IP create a tax advantage? If this is not the intended behaviour, why does the IRS not come out and say ‘we will not accept this loss, please revise your return’?

Assuming things are as they seem to be from the context provided in the video, this is really disappointing to see from a company that I largely respect and appreciate for their technology and engineering content. I do hope we get some insight from their side at some point rather than leaving people claiming mass layoffs under cover of terminations if that is not the case. As an engineer in the industry seeing things like this would be a massive warning to not actually ‘meet my heroes’ so to speak if I applied there.

Edit: it appears a few already have on Twitter. https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/cloudflare-ceo-says-viral-fi...

At least here in Australia it’s a popular option to de-badge your BYD removing the ‘Build Your Dreams’ from the back hatch.

I wonder what the Australian government’s excuse will be to make it impossible to import one of these like the rest of the affordable EVs you might actually want from China and elsewhere around Asia and Europe. Instead we get a few $40k MGs and Hyundais that would make you miserable then a $30,000 gap followed by Teslas and Polestars.

We did get the BYD and I’ve driven one on a roadtrip from Sydney to far north Queensland and back and it was actually really good. Pity it ended up so expensive compared to competitive ICE cars.

Hoping once the majority of China’s auto market swaps to electric of some sort we can start getting the cheap hatchback competition and hopefully some cheaper hot hatch style EVs to meet the lower end of the market at around this $30,000 price tag.

That may be the median for all dwellings including apartments. The median detached house price is closer to $1.4m AUD in Sydney at the moment. Grocery prices are still near record highs, petrol has come down slightly but give it a week and it’ll be back up with our cycles, and products are still being shrunk in dishonest ways.

Still waiting to see the ‘prices come back down’ from the parent post, meanwhile our main shopping companies all posted record profits.

And continues Sydney’s inability to build any public infrastructure without then selling it cheaply to a private company to then reap massive profits for decades from us. Sydney was already the most tolled city in the world before this opened. We’re still number 1 I guess…

Investing in actual office space that isn’t directly in my bedroom space, with a large solid desk on a standing frame, and a 50” ultrawide with a KVM in it. Everything just works, I can focus, I have good music and speakers, and when it’s time to finish for the day I can turn it all off with one button and walk out.

In my case this was done by moving to a larger house with a seperate office, but this could easily be a shed, a wework, or a rented commercial suite, but the separation really helped.

Roughly a third of the entire country is currently without mobile service. The communication from Optus has been rather lacklustre.

I think I’ve made this comment before, but there really are some jobs that monolithic big iron does better, particularly in banking where you need guaranteed exactly-once delivery scaled massively to support transaction processing, where re-creating the system with a modern architecture would need multiple times the infrastructure and maintenance. That combined with existing COBOL/Natural codebases that work pretty reliably and are regulator approved gives mainframes an element of inertia that I suspect will outlive even me.

>> or using a M&K for Halo where headshots are instant kills on Swat/Snipes game modes

By this do you mean a mouse and keyboard? And you consider this to be cheating?

For the others, I feel like banning all third party peripherals is just going to disadvantage kids like I was who always had hand-me-down madcatz controllers because we couldn’t spring 3x the price for the official sony ones.

If this is such an issue, perhaps the game makers could balance it out a-la mario cart and detect likely cheaters and handicap them until the game balances out?