cromulent

Software engineers are constantly investing their expertise into the product.

Measurement (if any) should be on the realised gains in the short and long term, not the visible investment. LOC, tickets closed, hours spent etc can all have negative payoffs.

Unfortunately that is hard to measure, as Rachel points out.

> the house always wins

Well, until Lloyd’s did lose a lot of money in 1991, and the Names had too much exposure. Berkshire Hathaway cover them now, I believe.

It's clever, but not original, so it's not ingenious :)

I think they are referring to the room with a glass bathroom cubicle in it. Linked ABC article says $400 / week, blog post says $400 / month.

The author mentioned they were having a few beers, I think we should give them a break. I understood what they were saying.

I don't think it's that ingenious - many teams have been working on the wing flex for a long time. Red Bull famously in 2011 and 2017 for example.

The McLaren F-duct, the Mercedes toe-in reducing steering wheel, and asymmetric braking systems in the 1990s McLarens and supposedly this year's Red Bulls were examples of true ingenuity, I think.

Great project. Down for me.

$ curl http://playin.coz.is/index.html

curl: (7) Failed to connect to playin.coz.is port 80 after 166 ms: Couldn't connect to server

Yeah I am guessing it is from the motor RPM pitch but I would like to find out.

The Renault F1 engine could famously play tunes this way.

https://youtu.be/XRXwWbo_mX0?t=60

Swappie is a popular service that refurbishes and sells used iPhones. They are doing very well, and expanding. They have sold over a million phones so far. Apple do not prevent this.

I guess that most of these are to "people of lower income". I have purchased devices there for my children.

https://swappie.com/us/

You are yelling about Apple making every single decision about revenue. This is demonstrably and famously not true - not every decision.

Apple was challenged by shareholders to only commit to environmental or accessibility projects if they increased ROI. Tim Cook rejected that out of hand [1].

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/mar/03/tim-cook...

Demagoguery.

Some background from Freakonomics a few months ago:

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-is-23andme-going-under-...

The guy who reverse-engineered the Bitkeeper protocol, triggering the creation of git, is the same guy who created rsync - Andrew Tridgell.

It's infuriating.

I worked on a Y2K project in 98-99 for a major car manufacturer. They tested the ERP system for Y2K (in 1997) and it failed, in a way that would make the business fail. They replaced it via this project and the business continued to be successful without interruption.

Another company I know of simply backdated their whole system by 10 years. This worked, but unfortunately the contract cycle renegotation reminders then did not appear, and competitors took many of their contracts over the next year or so. They went out of business in a couple of years.

I implemented a new manufacturing and retail system in 1992, and we used 4 digit years. The company owner complained that they were a needless expense and annoyance and that there was plenty of time to deal with Y2K. They continued to use the system well into the 2000s.

The space shuttle never flew over New Year's eve/day as they couldn't handle a single year rollover, let alone a century. Some use cases can simply avoid the problem.

PG put this perhaps more gently in his essay Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule.

I work with people whose days are a sequence of meetings and chats within meetings. They don't understand (or respect) that I have meetings but also must concentrate for periods of time.

https://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

The volume of humans is approximately 500B liters [1] and this would make a sphere just under 1km in diameter.

[1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=volume+of+all+humans

At least one of them is LeadFeeder - they aggregate information from many sites and then can match your IP etc with an existing email.

I'm in the process of coming to terms with how neurologically diverse people are.

Some people are completely comfortable with being late, or having smudged glasses, or driving erratically - it does not bother them in the slightest.

Their world is completely different to mine, and it's not that they don't care about the sloppy code or that they are too lazy to polish it - they don't even see it.

Humans are surprisingly diverse in how their brains work.

That’s a lyric from “The Impression That I Get”, a hit for The Mighty Mighty Bosstones. I guess they got it from your mother tongue.

On my visits to Warsaw, I have always been struck by the translucent advertising entirely covering the sides of new-ish office buildings. Now I know how/why this is possible.

Example (hard to find because no-one takes photos of the ugly buildings in Warsaw):

https://www.businessinsider.in/thumb/msid-70660934,width-640...

Whilst I am waiting for my number in a chemist, I kill time by finding the highest price per litre. It's normally some anti-aging cream at well over €1000 / l.

Every time the banks ask me for KYC/AML stuff, I think about the Danske Bank Estonia scandal [1].

In 8 years, €800 billion of suspicious transactions flowed through Danske Bank Estonia, which is over 5 x Estonian GDP during that period. Five times!

If this does not set off alarm bells, then checking my little transactions is not going to solve anything. Security theatre.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danske_Bank_money_laundering_s...

It's not at all unique to the US. The EU has AML/KYC legislation, which pushes the burden down through the banks to the customer.

I remember a write-up of this competition around the same time, a year or two earlier perhaps, in Popular Mechanics or some such magazine. From memory there were two main strategies: simple brute-force wall-followers and maze-mappers. The only bot I can remember was named Harvey Wallbanger.

Edit: 1980, found it.

http://davidbuckley.net/RS/mmouse/images/PM80p17article1268....

Using technology to effectively solve market externalities is a good thing.

Good analogy, from a personal perspective.

In this case, a person was yelling through the front door "Your door is wide open!" and no-one was listening.

For a 42B AUM company, at a time where running an IT operation means "use CrowdStrike so that you pass audits", leaving the front door open all night should get you fired, regardless of whether you blame hackers or not.

It's really hard to generate "all due respect" for a16z.

> If we go over 98,000 feet, we are a spaceship. Outside the capsule, it’s essentially a vacuum.

This CEO of a balloon company doesn’t seem to understand how balloons work.

(2012).

I understood that Myers-Briggs and other pseudo-scientific categorizations that value direction over degree and therefore produce polarization rather than distribution ("You are 51% extrovert in most situations? Come over here with all the other extroverts") are rather discredited these days.

The last one to be discontinued was the Intel Mac Pro in June 2023, after the Intel iMacs and Mac Minis were discontinued in 2022 and early 2023.