archeantus

See “faster, lighter, etc” :D

I can see that happening. My vision for the future is that voice assistants and LLMs will converge into something as useful and powerful as “Computer” in Star Trek. And that this assistant that will know you and all of your accounts/online profiles, will only need a microphone and an internet connection to function.

So the Apple Watch, for example, could be everything you need to carry around because the voice assistant can literally do everything you can possible think of (besides consume social media and YouTube content).

You must not have tried the voice feature in the ChatGPT app yet. Try it out, it’s amazing. It pairs the power and functionality of a conversational voice assistant with all the power of ChatGPT and LLMs. Obviously the integration isn’t as convenient as Siri’s yet, but the utility is infinitely higher.

My point is that it seems pretty clear that the future is in the space that OpenAI is right now. And that isn’t a bet that Apple was investing in very heavily.

I tried it for the first time last night and I was not too impressed. It felt like a solution in search of a problem.

For the past decade Apple’s product lineup has pretty much remained the same (faster, lighter, etc), while they invested heavily in spatial computing (flop) and autonomous vehicles (scrapped). All while totally neglecting the industry they pioneered (Siri) and should have been perfecting. Instead, OpenAI came along and ate their lunch and Apple was caught completely flat-footed. And now they’re way behind.

It’s shocking to me how bad the above bets and non-investments have played out for Apple. Tim Cook needs to ride off into the sunset. It’s been a good ride. He ran the business well. They need an innovative CEO at the helm that can make better bets.

Great post. I love the idea of the product and have wondered why AWS doesn’t offer this level of convenience out of the box.

Half-joking name suggestion: I recognize the domain probably isn’t available but wouldn’t “upordown.com” be slightly more slick? ;)

Back in 2014 I was tired of how awful the Mint app was and I wanted to make a banking app of my own (that I affectionately called Basil). The premise was that it would be like Mailbox (remember that flash in the pan email app?) but for finances. You’d swipe on every transaction to make sure they were categorized correctly. I even wired it up to my local bank’s very rudimentary API.

It was beautifully designed (thanks to some help from a designer friend) and I was really proud of the architecture and Objective-C code.

A large retailer reached out to me on LI and asked about a job. As part of the interview process they asked me to submit a code sample and I submitted basil. The senior dev in the interview commented that he didn’t have any negative comments about the code but instead spent the interview telling me the things he liked about it. It was so fun and gratifying to get that feedback and I got the job and worked there for seven years. It totally changed the direction of my career!

My first smartphone. I started working at Tmobile in college as a sales rep when the G1 came out and I immediately was smitten with it. The functionality and experience was so much better than anything that BlackBerry had to offer, yet all of the seasoned reps scoffed at the G1 and continued to push and sell Blackberries. They thought I was crazy to carry and sell the G1. I think I got the last laugh.

For example my daughter has a friend who asks for all of her good stuff at lunch everyday…she has a hard time telling her no, even though she doesn’t want to give away all of her food.

We’re guess people through and through. It’s really hard for my kids to say no to awkward things that their “friends” ask of them who are askers. How do you say no to askers in a way that they will know they can’t come to you with dumb asks in the future?

I worked at the biggest retailer in the world and we used them a ton. They got even more useful once we built the concept of a versioned flag that would allow us to be true or false, depending on the app version we were on. That kind of flexibility is a must.

I loved the build up in this article, but the solution left me wanting more. My org suffers from the disease of Date Driven Development, but just telling my boss to let us work until it is done simply means we will never ship because it will never be done.

Literally the list of new feature requests from product is a mile long. So where do you draw the line? And once you draw the line, how can you justify pushing off on everything else that needs to get done while you are hardening and making sure that what you have decided to ship is actually ready to go?

The problem statement resonates with me, but I’d love more help on the solution. What is a viable way to get out of date driven development? Please help!

So it sounds like they did a decent job sticking to the science on the Interstellar movie?

Observation: there is a ton of water on this planet.

I really enjoyed this read. I’ve been grinding for so long in the huge corporation version of agile that I don’t even know what is what anymore.

It was refreshing to hear their take on project managers, as it matches how I’ve been feeling recently. They schedule 7 checkpoint meetings per week and I’ve given up on attending, I just can’t do it anymore.

I hope that we can move past agile into a new world that is free of the baggage and process of yesteryear. Even if the core principles are the same, let’s call it something different so we can start fresh and impress upper management.

So if the acquisition of IG and Whats App were wrong, why did they get regulatory approval at the time?

OP here: it looks like I can’t edit the post to add more details that many have called out as missing. I’m 34 years old, and have been doing software since college.

I have a large family that is quite young. Six kids under the age of 15.

My annual expenses of $100k is definitely for a lifestyle that is nicer than we need. Most of that is on a big mortgage.

I’m surprised at how many people have joined in on this discussion. Thank you!

$1m is not enough to retire on by itself. I have a large family and our expenses are around $100k/yr.

I want to stretch the $1m as long and as far as I possibly can. Looking for tips/suggestions on how I might do that.

Thanks for your comment. I’m currently at a huge company making (in my opinion) a really great salary. The golden handcuffs are cushy, and the only real draw to this new company is it’s a title bump (director) that would give me a chance to showcase what I think I am capable of doing.

Things are going really well at my current job, so the draw to the startup isn’t super strong. If there was a financial incentive, that could help, but I’m doubtful they’ll be able to pay as much as I’m making now.

Assume we move over to electric vehicles (like Tesla) as the default mode of transportation at some point in the future, will that solve this problem?

In other words, is our ability to generate electricity for all the electric vehicles more efficient and better for the earth than how we currently power them with gasoline?

The thing that surprises me is how stationary everything in space seems to be, in order for this to have been possible.

But everything is moving, right? So how could a series of pictures over this long of a time work out to be so clear?

I made this same decision a few years ago and can attest that this is true.

The side projects I was working on were pretty small potatoes, so that needs to be pointed out. But overall a higher focus on my job has led to two promotions and a ton more money.

Maybe I could have struck it rich with a startup, but the golden handcuffs feel so nice right now that I may never find out.

My experience with S3 buckets was that it was super painful and annoying to make the images publicly visible. So these people had to go out of their way to make this publicly accessible.

Just like parenting, police should never resort to violence. Why? It’s a short-term fix that causes way more problems down the road.

So what kind of parents/police beat their constituents? Men who are angry and want to assert themselves as macho and in charge. It needs to stop.

If they gave me the 0% financing option like the other auto makers are doing, I’d buy a Tesla today.

I’ve always looked at the Jet deal as $3b to get their CEO Marc Lore to get in there and fix their e-commerce operations. If you look at the online sales performance since Lore joined, as well as the stock price (it has more than doubled), I think $3b was a good deal.

Burn it all to the ground. This model that saddles unknowing students with debt, while locking in old and crusty professors to their cushy jobs for life, is antiquated and needs to go.

I was lucky enough to get a great remote job that was happy to pay me as if I lived and worked in SF, but let me live anywhere I wanted to in the country.

Remote devs that have this arrangement definitely take home more money than their peers who live in more expensive zip codes.

It’s amazing to me that Apple’s refusal to support remote work has caused them to be caught flat-footed here. I doubt they considered the need to be remote friendly as a contingency plan in case of a disaster, but here we are. Hopefully more companies can be more open-minded in the future; to avoid doing so could be very risky to their business.

“ However, Levandowski personally filed today for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, stating that the presumptive $179M debt quite exceeds his assets, which he estimates at somewhere between $50M and $100M.”

I’m not an English expert, but I am a native speaker. Although the above sentence is understandable, when you look at it closer the sentence structure is a bit wonky. Anecdotally, I don’t like starting a sentence with “However,”, and this article has that twice. I think it is that kind of style where the author is making a statement and then forcing you to hold it in memory, so to speak, is what the commenter is referring to. It gets mentally taxing to keep track of all of the threads.

I loved every second of this video. And I also loved every minute I spent playing and beating this game as a kid. Such an amazing game!