emdowling

One nitpick: Royal Mail and Post Office are two separate companies with independent boards. Royal Mail is the network and carrier, while the Post Office is the primary entry point into that network (they also offer access to a bunch of other services not related to the Royal Mail). Doesn't make your point any less valid, but wanted to call out the distinction.

Not at all. I see it as a great thing! But I love London, and actually enjoy being career-focused right now. It satisfies me in a way that Australia did not. I definitely plan to move back in 6-7 years, and will be in a strong financial position when I do. Win-win.

This is exactly my plan. Another 6-7 years in London, then back to Australia. I love London and my life here - I’ll be able to move back to Australia when I’m 40, have a high quality of life and be in a strong financial position relative to my peers.

Couldn’t agree with this post more. I left Australia 6 years ago and work for a FAANG earning 5x-7x in London than I would in Australia as a PM.

Most Australian tech companies are mundane and boring. They lack ambition because the base quality of life is just so damn good.

We invented smashed avocado on toast and pioneered the evolution of brunch from a novelty into a globally-recognised art form. You're welcome.

I'm so glad it is not just me. There are 2-3 restaurants that are only on UberEats. Every time I open it, I hate it. The Uber ride app was/is the pinnacle of good design; UberEats has extremely poor information architecture that makes using it painful.

Agree with all of this. It is just such an easy environment to work in. Pipelines, team management, etc are a breeze.

When it gets too expensive, Cloud66 is a great migration path and offers the best of both worlds. It's a fairly simply transition too.

Wasn't a unified place for communications, with connections and feeds from all the services you and your company used, the original goal of Slack?

I've worked as a freelancer, founder, and employee (for start-ups, scale-ups and now FAANG).

The one constant has been my daily exercise session, whether that has been a workout, yoga session or swim. My daily schedule (pre-Covid) usually involves 45 mins at home checking email/chat and addressing anything urgent and modifying my to-do list for the day. Then it's to the gym for 90 minutes, and in the office by 10:30am. It's what I need to do and it keeps me sane.

Building a startup in my early 20's was easily the most stressful period of my life. Going for a swim each day was probably the single most important thing that got me through it in one piece.

I have a lot of respect for what the author has accomplished; building one of the top tech products and brands in America is ridiculously hard. However, this article shows a lack of empathy for how people work and what they need.

Clubhouse has proven quite popular for traditionally underrepresented groups, and I believe it is in a large part due to being audio-only. For speakers, they can focus on what they are saying and hearing, rather than what they look like.

It also lowers the cost of entry. While smartphone cameras are quite good, the expectation for video quality has risen to the point where it is prohibitively expensive for a large portion of the population. When you factor in lighting, hardware and software for editing, bandwidth and time, it excludes a huge number of people and narrows down the diversity of content. Traditional podcasting is also suffering from a similar rise in total cost. Clubhouse eliminates most of those costs - all you need is a smartphone. Granted, it is iOS-only, but this will not be the case for much longer. We can expect Clubhouse to explode even more when it launches for Android.

For listeners, everyone is subject to unconscious bias. By being audio-only, it helps reduce a lot of the factors that would bias our opinion of someone.

It's a feature. Not a bug.

My entire point was that people decry a lack of ports as a specific downside of the MacBook 12 and, in my opinion, that wasn’t an issue for me (or it seems several others).

Not all products have to appeal to all people, and products involve hundreds of trade offs. If more ports doesn’t mean increased weight or thickness, I’m not opposed!

Like everyone else, I love the MacBook 12. Give me one with a M-series, at the same (or less) weight, with Touch ID and the new keyboard. Like others, I don’t need more than 1 port. Not discounting anyone else’s need for it, but after living with it for a few years I really don’t need additional ports.

For cabinet members resigning, it helps them avoid being part of the decision to invoke (or not invoke) the 25th amendment. Betsy can say she resigned, rather than be faced with the decision to remove a President from office. So while not linked to Democrats at all (she was 2 weeks from losing her job anyway), resigning was politically safer.

I'm at a $MEGACORP and actively work to reduce meetings as much as possible. I've found there to be far less need for meetings as my colleagues are more experienced than those at startups. I can trust them to execute, make smart decisions and escalate if need be. Startups tend to require a lot more hand holding (and therefore more meetings).

The Lululemon men’s range is by far the most comfortable long-haul travel attire.

Literally a walking cliche but may as well own it.

Giving Apple the benefit of the doubt here (which is a significant caveat), I'd like to think that they modelled out various scenarios and looked at growth rates to know that the year 3 scenario you envisage rarely occurs.

Or, they could've just picked $1 million because it's a nice round number and looks good in a press release.

So? Consider 3 aspects:

1. Power efficiency (read: battery life) 2. Performance 3. Openness

99% of consumers only care about 2 of those. The more that time goes on, the more it becomes clear that prioritizing openness, in particular for hardware, is a direct trade-off against building a great consumer product.

It's interesting to think about gaming specifically. Genuine platform exclusivity is rarer and rarer these days, as the underlying engine market has become more and more commoditised. It is relatively cheap to port a game built in Unity or Unreal engine from PC to Xbox, PlayStation, etc.

Mac has always lagged because the market wasn't big enough to warrant investment. Catalina wouldn't have cratered your gaming library if there was enough incentive for the developers to update the game. Now that iOS apps (read: games) can run on Mac with relatively low effort, and we already see PC games being easily ported to iOS (eg: Fortnite, legal challenges notwithstanding), I feel that this is the best thing to happen to Mac gaming in years.

On email providers - I moved away from Gmail for my personal email address a few years ago, and now use iCloud. I've had very few issues with spam, and there are no ads. My personal email has much less volume than work, so I haven't really missed the advanced features of Gmail.

From a privacy perspective, how does iCloud compare to others like Fastmail?

The Twitter replies are absolutely brutal and overly aggressive towards the developers, but I do have some level of empathy for it. This is such a hotly-anticipated release and people are craving escapism in 2020, and this game is going to provide that for so many people. That said, the level of aggression is intense and crosses the line.

Still, I feel sorry for the developers who were seriously in a Catch-22. They are (correctly, IMO) prioritising the right thing by focusing on quality over the short-term negativity from a very vocal group. I wish more companies would take this approach (or, in the case of Apple, rediscover this approach).

I agree with other posters - the issue isn't that Apple doesn't better support your business model, it's that you aren't honest about it in the app description.

Also, even in the app you don't have a clear statement saying that you must purchase a subscription to use it. I spent 5 minutes thinking I was missing an "X" in the top corner or some kind of "dismiss" action that would let me use basic functionality before buying.

A fantastic outcome for a fantastic team and product. I've worked closely with both Twilio and Segment for a number of years as the internal driver behind large enterprise deployments.

I first encountered Segment when they were a young company and would frequently chat directly with Ian if I needed support or needed feedback. He was always gracious and humble, despite no doubt being ridiculously busy.

Twilio has gone from strength to strength - they have an agility that is only possible from a company that is willing to deeply listen to the market and stay one step ahead. Very excited to see where this leads!

I’m 32 and can absolutely relate to this, especially with COVID. I work for a FAANG, and the pressure to perform has increased significantly while working from home. It feels relentless, and the lack of in-person social contact with colleagues makes it worse. I know remote working is all the rage right now, but the lack of all in-person engagement has had a hugely negative impact on me and led to feelings of burn out.

Layered on top of that is an inability to escape with now. My family all live overseas, where it isn’t practical to visit them, and holidays are a complex nightmare right now.

I’m incredibly fortunate to have a job during a pandemic-induced recession, but man am I feeling exhausted.

The bigger story here is for game streaming apps (section 4.9). Previously Xbox game streaming and Stadia had been rejected as they were a single app that provided access to multiple apps.

tl;dr the new rules allow For games to be streamed, but each title must be a separate app and run all in-game purchases through in-app purchase. They’ve also explicitly allowed for game streaming services to have catalogue apps that link to the individual App Store listings.

This is massive and strikes me as a great compromise solution. It separates the technical implementation (streaming) from the actual value proposition to users (the game itself). Essentially, each individual game needs be a separate app in the store and be reviewed individually.

I think the xCloud team at Microsoft is about to pull a few late nights to get this launched on iOS in the next few weeks.

This conclusion (10x higher mortality if deficient in Vitamin D) is rather significant. How trustworthy is this source?

I’ve been using 1Password every day for over 11 years now. The oldest passwords I’ve got stored are for Twitter and Dropbox (yes, the passwords have been changed but the records were first created in 2009).

It’s one of those apps which has been made with proper craftsmanship and care, so while I’m not a Linux user, I’d have no problem recommending based solely on Agilebit’s reputation.

This is likely the final iteration of this design and for Intel processors. They’ll save the redesign for Apple Silicon. They are definitely road testing a few new technologies for that future iteration, like the new screen technology.

Definitely agree with this. The lack of gender diversity is really glaring now that you’ve pointed out Susan Kare is missing.

The key criteria is loyalty. Lattner left for the competition before Swift was ABI stable and mature. He didn’t see it through. If he had still been around now, he would likely be on the list.

Exactly this. AMD is willing to forgo on margin to make up for it in volume. Being ahead of Intel in outsourcing manufacturing will help them keep up with demand.