flavor8

Not commenting on the content specifically, but that scrolling table of contents is horrific. Aside from the useless animation, it's impossible to click on items at the bottom of the list.

> the Pixel line of phones isn't known for having long lasting battery

Anecdote: I still have a 2XL and it can get me through 24 hours. It's gotten a _little_ worse recently which I attribute to hardware age. The camera is fantastic, so I have no need to upgrade (although having stereo speakers would be nice.)

> Also requiring a .edu email is a good start.

Not really, unless the intent is to discriminate against immigrants to the US / people outside the US / people who went straight into a career from high school.

To truly compete with Amazon, they need convenience. Buying packages from mom&pop retailers to ship can yield anywhere from 1 day to 3 week delivery times. Aside from a strong anti-Amazon conviction, where's the motivation for consumers to do that?

To achieve convenience requires either building out a logistics infrastructure on the scale of Amazon, which is clearly a business Google doesn't want to be in, or to approach the problem from the opposite direction. Brick and mortar retail is declining, especially post-pandemic (but also pre); that said, there is already an infrastructure that exists transfers goods to retail locations - it's just spread over 10,000 companies rather than 1. However, if you can write software to better utilize that infrastructure so that you allow consumers to find items that are already physically close to them, and ship using either "last mile" crowdsourcing (and eventually auto-driving vehicles), or at least direct consumers to where the items are so that they can travel less than 30 minutes and get _the_ item they want, then you can come up with a credible anti-Amazon alliance.

Example: I want to buy a sun shade for a pergola. There are probably 10 stores within 20 miles of me that carry them, but I have no idea ahead of time the brands, the price, the color, the size, etc. I could spend an hour calling the stores, and have irritated minimum wage cashiers do inventory searches for me an attempt to answer my questions. Alternately I can go on Amazon, make a purchase, and have it shipped in 2 days from a warehouse 900 miles away from me.

They need to solve shipping. Partner with Uber (or hey, Waymo) to pick up and drop off packages from shops to consumers.

An alternate model would be to make search good enough let consumers find stores within a radius of their current location selling X, and price compare them. E.g. I need a widget - stores a, b and c are selling it. Store a is $14.99 and 5 miles away, store b is $8.99 and 15 miles away, store c is $11.99 and 20 miles away.

We use flyway to create a template. Then each test that mutates the DB automatically invokes a cleanup routine which recreates the test DB from the template. You get into hot water around the connection pooling, but it's much, much faster than refreshing using flyway.

Interesting interview; thank you for doing it. Here's a few questions.

You say that for end users, ALSA just works, and you tend to encourage it for newbies. What are the tradeoffs? What kind of latency penalty am I taking by using ALSA vs JACK? Can it scale to as many channels?

What's your preferred JACK frontend? The UbuntuStudio UI has some nice bridging set up out of the box, so you can e.g. play Youtube while Ardour or Reaper is active. QJackCtl certainly works (and offers a UI around the patchbay you describe) but it doesn't have that feature at least.

Does Pipewire aim to solve the problem of persistent device names? I had a bit of an adventure figuring out how to set up ALSA so that it didn't constantly give new numbers to my audio interface, USB midi IO, control surface, etc (which was painful, because it meant having to reconfigure the DAWs after each reboot.) Once I found the right howto, it wasn't too bad, but it'd be nice if that was taken care of.

Do you have any background knowledge on Bitwig's weird MIDI setup? They support JACK audio, but not JACK midi, so you have to do this weird juggling act to bridge midi to ALSA, which was too much friction for me to bother with (and so I don't use Bitwig.)

Finally, is there much difference between audio interfaces in terms of latency as long as they are USB class compliant? If there is, are there any good references that you know of? Or is it a case of experimentation?

This is great advice.

> Your position is stronger than you think. A buyer will want your cooperation as a top priority.

To emphasize this: as the sole developer, the buyer is going to want to retain you (at least for 6-12 months, depending on the complexity of the software). The buyer's tech team is not going to want to reverse engineer software that's 20 years old. The owner of the company knows this if he's talked to any potential buyers so far (and if he hasn't, will learn it.)

> Best to be calm. This is your strong card, but keep it low key.

The owner may resist your initial ask. If you at any point see red and are tempted to raise an ultimatum, step away from the send button / tell him that you'd like to continue the conversation later. The worst thing you can do is back him into a corner where his ego gets involved. You may well run into conflict, but better to leave him aware that you disagree until you pick up the conversation again than to get into a heated dispute (that will incentivize him to think about a solution in the meantime too).

I digitized my studio a few months ago and settled on Reaper (running on kubuntu 20.04). I'm pretty happy with it, though Linux support is "beta" and support is forum based (there's a couple bugs that I'm just living with because nobody's engaged on them in forum posts).

I probably could have gotten away with Ardour for my needs (recording, editing, mastering) - however, I can run Reaper at lower latencies (via Jack configuration) than Ardour. Mixbus seemed promising, but requires more latency still. Bitwig is cool, and I'd happily pay for it, but their midi implementation on linux is pretty weird, and I don't have the patience to fiddle around to make it work. I haven't used Ableton, so I can't comment on comparison; there is a plugin for Reaper which gives it a live performance mode apparently along the lines of Ableton's, but it's mac/windows only.

Anyway, Reaper is extremely featureful, and is only around a 15MB download. Good midi implementation, customizable, good range of bundled effects (and ability to write your own in javascript). There's an audio engineer who posts tutorials on youtube under the name "Reaper Mania" - check out the recent ones to get a sampling of capability / workflow.

Yeah, one of the items was third party, one was Newegg. But I agree - you can't outcompete Amazon by trying to be Amazon.

Sweetwater (who I mentioned upthread) are great because they do musical instruments (and related) and nothing else. Deep domain knowledge, rich and well organized catalog, community of music nerds, and (as far as I've noticed) no third party junk.

A Newegg could theoretically do the same for computers and peripherals. (Find me all motherboards compatible with i7 and ddr4, with usbc, blinkenlights and onboard wifi - much easier on Newegg than Amazon, but unfortunately it suffers from the aforementioned issues).

I tried shopping Newegg recently (BC). Newegg's online customer service made Amazon's look positively erudite, and in addition Newegg's return policy is terrible by comparison. I still haven't received an item that I ordered 7 weeks ago (shipping was not advertised as being particularly slow), and I still haven't been refunded for another item that I returned 2 weeks ago. Amazon gets that if you can't touch the item in store, there should be a no-fault return policy (and yes, I know that returns are environmentally unfriendly, etc).

I tried to shop Jet (before they were acquired) and I found the search / shop experience had too much friction. Amazon's UI has plenty of annoyances, but they've made it _real_ easy to get something into your cart and check out.

On the other hand, all of my music studio purchases I make at Sweetwater. Great customer service, free shipping, will price match if you ask, and frictionless returns.

IMO Amazon is vulnerable to good competitors, but the emphasis is on good. I can tolerate a small shipping fee, and I don't need next day or two day shipping (although it's nice). On the other hand if you make it hard for me to shop, customer service sucks, or I have to jump through hoops to return something, I'll go back to Amazon.

Upgrading from 18.04 isn't supported until July, when 20.04.1 hits. The LTS->LTS upgrade path is handled more conservatively.

If you're not on LTS, then you should upgrade every 6 months when the OS tells you a new distribution is ready, and you'll be fine.

> The only 'con' is the pushing of Snap packages. It looks like deb files only can be installed via the terminal.

Another solution to this (aside from synaptic, command line, other clients) is to use Kubuntu (which has an apt based package manager called Discover, much improved in this release over prior versions). KDE still doesn't work great on tablets, but in all other respects it's a lot nicer than Gnome. Spend 30 minutes tweaking it to your preferences after install (apt install kubuntu-desktop) and you'll have a desktop that does exactly what you need it to. (You could also install KDE Neon, which packages latest stable KDE with a LTS Ubuntu core.)

I kickstarted some with some kombucha yeast that I had left over from a batch. I think it got the starter going faster, and it's been making good bread. I'm 15-20 generations in now.

The review system is flawed.

https://www.businessinsider.com/why-airbnb-reviews-are-a-pro...

> They added a software feature in an iOS update that throttled the CPU in this condition to prevent a crash, at the expense of lower peak CPU performance.

The user friendly approach would have been to pop up a warning message on next boot:

"Hey Avalys,

We detected that your battery has degraded, and so your phone's performance has been lowered to prevent your phone from crashing. To restore performance please take your phone to the apple store to get your battery reset.

Give them code AH534 to get $25 off battery replacement. Offer is valid for the next 14 days."

Blokada seems to be very similar to DNS66, and is more actively maintained. Any reason to prefer DNS66?

Latency?

I mean making a distinction between mind/consciousness and body is one thing, and while I wouldn't, those of a religious bent might try to justify it. Making a distinction between brain and body is just sophomoric. The BBC unfortunately seems to have content-farm mistakes like this fairly frequently in their online writing.

> Every day you stay at Google the more valuable you become.

Ehhh, to a point. Straight out of college and then (e.g.) 10 or 15 years at the same company says a lot about a person.

I haven't used it, but isn't this what https://airtable.com/ is for?

That's exactly what I said in my initial comment.

OK great, that's pro bakers who are presumably selling what they're producing, and need 100% consistency. I make bread weekly, and it turns out great weekly (for our home consumption). I'm constantly experimenting with different balances of whole wheat and white, different brands of flour, different amounts of leaven, different percentages of hydration, etc. If I hadn't experimented I wouldn't understand bread as well as I do. Dough, like pan cooking, is very forgiving if you understand what you are looking for.

"Follow the recipe" is an awful philosophy. Learn the recipe and then improvise is much better, because it helps you understand the domain much more significantly.

That's a terrible article. Improvising is half of the fun of cooking. Once you learn some basic principles there's a lot of room for modification of what you're doing. Granted that baking is less forgiving than e.g. pan dishes (where you can sample and adjust), but even baking is not some unobtainable mystery.

> I like positivism.

Not disagreeing with your main point, but positivism doesn't mean what you think it does (you wanted "positivity" instead.)

noun: positivism

1. a philosophical system that holds that every rationally justifiable assertion can be scientifically verified or is capable of logical or mathematical proof, and that therefore rejects metaphysics and theism. a humanistic religious system founded on positivism. another term for logical positivism.

2. the theory that laws are to be understood as social rules, valid because they are enacted by authority or derive logically from existing decisions, and that ideal or moral considerations (e.g., that a rule is unjust) should not limit the scope or operation of the law.

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33133712 has a pretty good discussion of this question.

Well that's not true. There are two from the late 90s missing here: Blink and Bookmark Box.

Yeah, broccoli is actually a cancer preventive, according to the How Not to Die doctor.

https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/broccoli/

By the time you add airport parking and transport from the airport to the city (unless you take the subway) it's break-even on price for DC->NYC. It's easily break-even on timing given that front door to train in Union Station is 15 minutes, and, as you point out, you're dropped in the center of Manhattan.

DC->Boston full trip would obviously be insane - it's 6 1/2 hours even on Acela. But, probably preferable to driving.

I did, for 7 or 8 years. It was good for my writing skills (and fun) but it was a little like talking into a vacuum.