PebblesHD

So don’t allow accounts with ages set below the limit like they already do for under 13s. Why does this translate to every other site wanting my government ID or a scan of my face?

Just this past 12 months both my drivers license and passport have been involved in data breaches and there are no penalties or recompense for the companies at fault, so my patience for providing ID is near zero.

I’m very interested to watch (not as much to experience…) what this will do to economies like Australia where the middle class and up are driving a shockingly large percentage of actual spending in the economy. If the historically wealthy white-collar classes ceased to be able to afford their mortgages and rent, stopped buying discretionary items, and stopped eating out, I think the economy as a whole would just stop.

If I was one of these pseudo-oligarchy members, I would be a lot more worried about a large percent of the population becoming disaffected and angry.

Thats just… weird? Why would you want to use somebody else’s fridge? Like I get its a few hundred dollars but they last decades. The Samsung fridge I still have was the very first appliance I ever purchased when I moved out at 18. Added to the fact that basically no free-standing appliances are included with rentals here, other than clothes dryers which I also hate and swap for my own.

My experience with eSIM has so far been quite negative. I’ve upgraded phone twice since being forced to use one by my carrier and it’s been a pain both times. The initial setup of scanning a QR code was nice, why is every subsequent SIM change a 10 step dance in an app (or worse a support call) rather than one phone showing the QR and the other scanning it?

Once this phone needs updating, I’ll be swapping carrier to one that has regular SIM cards.

This reads like more overworked salaried employees mentally justifying spending their own time on work. Once you start setting the expectation that you’ll spend your own time doing work that couldn’t be finished during the week, that’s what your employer is going to expect. And may also expect of your colleagues. I’m sure they’ll appreciate that…

Personally, I log off at 5pm friday and don’t think about anything work related until after at least one coffee somewhere in the vicinity of 9am the next monday.

Rather than improving testing for fallible accessibility assists, why not leverage AI to eliminate the need for them? An agent on your device can interpret the same page a sighted or otherwise unimpaired person would giving you as a disabled user the same experience they would have. Why would that not be preferable? It also puts you in control of how you want that agent to interpret pages.

While not a complete rebuttal, allow me the following. I manage a team of 4 scrum masters each with 5-6 engineers. We provide services via a user interface we'll call the console, as would be fairly familiar to any B2B or B2C service provider. The backends of this portal are split up by functional area, so we have a compute management service providing CRUD apis for dealing with our compute offerings, a storage service for CRUD on our storage offerings, a network service for interacting with networks etc. all sharing a single, albeit sharded, underlying data store.

My teams pick up a piece of work, check out the code, run the equivalent of docker compose up, and build their feature. They commit to git, merge to dev, then to main, and it runs through a pipeline to deploy. We do this multiple times a day. Doing that with a large monolith that combines all these endpoints into one app wouldn't be hard, but it adds no benefits, and the overhead that now we have 4 teams frequently working on the same code and needing to rebase and pull in change, rather than driving simple atomic changes. Each service gets packaged as a container and deployed to ECS fargate, on a couple of EC2 instances that are realistically a bit oversubscribed if all the containers suddenly got hammered, but 90% of the time they don't, so its incredibly cost effective.

When I see the frequent discussions around microservices, I always want to comment that if you have a disfunctional org, no architecture will save you, and if you have a functional org, basically any architecture is fine, but for my cases, I find that miniservices if you will, domain driven and sharing a persistence layer, is often a good way to go for a couple of small teams.

Just as I’m sure producers would love Australia to stop labelling produce for use of hormones and pesticides. But in both cases, there is a consumer interest in buying high quality products free of polluting elements, and in many cases, supporting actual humans doing work.

He seems to be intentionally missing the point of most of the complaints in order to direct away from his core area. The many legitimate criticisms of windows poor user experience lately will eventually drive change, but long will that take?

Not to mention, I can find AI perfectly impressive and still have absolutely no day-to-day use for it… certainly not enough to justify it taking over my operating system experience.

Possibly too little too late. Even my uninterested family and friends are moving over to MacBooks just due to not enjoying windows 11 or not wanting to upgrade hardware to get a minor OS change. Between that and valve looking to move on the casual / console gaming space with the new steam hardware and devs already being split between macs and linux, they’re going to have a hard time coming back if they fumble this for much longer.

Yep, declarative mode is what I use, tried the data mode with loaders and it never really agreed with me as a pattern.

I have yet to reach the limits of doing a Vite create and installing react router myself for the several entirely client side apps we manage. It has sane build defaults and for whatever definition of ‘works’ is possible in JS, ‘just works’. If it becomes too complex for that basic setup it usually means we’ve over-complicated something.

Where we have a need for server side, nodejs just never felt natural for us so we stuck with java springboot or flask/fastapi as appropriate.

I had a play with this and you’re right, it does have a style, but first: this is awesome, and good fun, well done!

I think the system prompt or training data probably focuses on marketing websites, it didnt manage to make a settings page or a canvas game, but did make a site telling me how to make a canvas game :)

How does it interpolate the path to make the prompt? (Havent checked the code yet…)

Challenge is we ended up with one really bad streaming service but lots of capital slurping up all the licenses. In my ideal world, the regulator would prevent using exclusivity as a moat to prevent smaller operations competing.

Australia is a tiny market but before the big american companies bought them out, our local AnimeLab offering was one of the worlds best. If a new similarly oriented offering could launch and compete I’d love to see it, but sadly only pirate operations can do so, and are doing so effectively.

I’ve posted before about my half-in half-out life between Japan and Australia, and the media I consume is a product of this. Anime, while not a massive part of my watching habit, is certainly a weekly thing at least, and over the past few years it’s been getting harder and harder to support legal services outside of Japan.

In Australia, AnimeLab used to be the gold standard. It had a polished app and dedicated team, mainly because it started out as a piracy site and went legal, keeping the passionate team etc.

They got bought out by Funimation and the app was shelved in favour of Funimation’s far worse but still usable one. Then Funimation was bought out by crunchyroll and their app was also shelved for crunchy’s terrible one. I kept paying for a while after that but after a few instances of missing subs and poor releases I gave up and just kept my Japan side subscriptions going, while getting my Australian side content ‘elsewhere’.

I’m sad the market doesn’t seem big enough to support a new competitor with a focus on quality, but as mentioned in TFA, exclusivity deals make this even harder than it otherwise would be. Shame really, as lately the releases from even the various smaller anime studios have been rather excellent.

While these are cool, I honestly wish GRUB was silent unless you’re holding a key during boot. The 5 seconds it takes to go away and just boot the OS by default is really unnecessary.

I agree, and in the space I spend most of my time in regulatory compliance, the adage ‘its not done until its done’ applies, so showing 100 is almost never helpful unless it actually is absolutely complete.

Most of my reporting tools implement similar logic to the python in the article, so handy to keep around for those use cases…

Both the video and related post are incredibly high quality productions. The animated circuit diagram on brown paper in the video is a very approachable way to explain the problem and solution. Nice! And it’s always nice to see some Australia pop up on my browsing.

With the US seemingly entering a period of isolationist market settings, some portion of foreign investment is bound to be heading back out either to home markets or elsewhere international as those investors potentially deal with market altering policies such as tariffs etc that may make turning those investments back into products harder.

What I’m curious about is how this will affect smaller regional markets such as the ASX, if our investors who prefer American markets will return those dollars here or into larger Asian markets closer to the NYSE in volume.

Your example of web devs writing drivers is why I posed the question, as go is very much not a widely used web dev language, and the devs who know go may not at all understand the common web development patterns and practices.

Rather than the specific language, I’m more thinking of the domain, meaning ‘web devs who know go’ being a smaller cohort than ‘webdevs who know react’.

Would be interesting to see a follow up in a few months on whether the tradeoff from a heavier but widely used stack to a possibly more performant but certainly more esoteric one works out positively.

I can’t imagine trying to hire for a front end developer to work on something like this is that easy compared with finding a react dev.

It does suffer slightly from looking like it was developed in the 90s. The UI kit it uses by default looks very out of place on most modern platforms and despite their being other UIs available, most end users will look at the default and choose something else, likely office. They need to invest some time in modernising the human interface parts of the suite.

Switching equipment for anything over gigabit remains triple or more the price here in Australia, so these standards might be great but even the 2.5gb port on my desktop is useless to me so any more than that just gets further from helpful at a consumer level. Never mind I can’t even get internet at over 100mbps…

Meanwhile for data centre usage, what is the attraction for faster copper vs fibre interconnects?

I don’t understand what value the users would get out of such an environment and therefore why they would keep interacting? I find the same with Snap’s AI they put at the top of everyone’s friend list, I’ve never sent so much as a hello to it and don’t understand why anyone would talk to it.

To be fair though, in places like Sydney, the 1% are buying most of the houses, having most of the good experiences, and living a very much better quality of life. You could be in the 90th percentile and still not afford any better than ‘house 90 minutes commute away’ thanks to $1.6m median prices.

I am very much an upper income earner and yet I could not afford any ‘average’ house in any suburb I’d actually want to live in.

I had wondered at the time what the expected outcome was of spinning off the business, beyond simply trying to shed the terrible reputation IBM had as an MSP. The companies still doing business with them in my area were looking for the door and have mostly found it since the rebrand and split.

It is certainly too soon to say but I do hope this leads to a ramping down of lowest dollar cost outsourcing in favour of slightly higher cost but better outcome based services. I can dream…

If the FCC cannot regulate the caps out of existence, they could at least enforce consistency in how they are advertised. For example, a theoretical offering of 1gpbs internet with a 120GB cap might need to include prominent language that at 100% utilisation, you might only have 4 seconds of internet per day.

Suddenly there (in a functional market) be a reason for caps to be lifted as consumers can readily compare worst case usage.

All that said, the caps are a terrible mechanism and should be entirely removed as thankfully Australia mostly did a decade ago.

Not difficult to imagine a future where streaming gameplay footage is banned by rights holders because the video can be used by ‘unscrupulous’ users to ‘steal’ the game.

Seriously though, we can’t have good quality home recording devices thanks to the possibility of music and movies being ‘stolen’, why do we imagine once this is possible gameplay will be treated differently by our copyright enforcing classes?

Dropped my prime subscription when they added the first lot of ads. I don’t buy enough stuff to make the free shipping worth it on its own, and was mostly there for video anyway, so having ads immediately killed the value proposition for me.

For a technology offering I once thought had a shot at being the future of packaging and deployments, Docker (the company) sure seems set on being the betamax of container technology. We’ve reviewed this at both companies I’ve worked for since their original license changes and both times worked out it was overall better for us to drop Docker all together. In each case a different tech stack won, but for both having an easy, open container standard would have been the better outcome. Keyword being easy, we had some false starts with a few of the ‘replace docker desktop with us’ products that just never worked as well, and so we just walked away from containers as the package and deploy portion of our apps.