foooorsyth

AOL was an incredibly successful business. Nothing lasts forever.

“Win the lottery” doesn’t really work in tech. So many mid career engineers are deca-millionaires with 15-20 years of grants and refreshers. They’re working because they enjoy the work.

Even at “regular” companies that don’t have hockey stick stock graphs, lots of the senior engineering staff are quite well off by their 40s. One of my division leads sold his last startup for 10s of millions of dollars. He still send emails late on Friday nights.

>you should be L7

The distribution of the ladder is logarithmic. Most never make L6. L5 is often terminal level IC without any “up or out” obligations. Lots of people spend a long time at L5 and retire.

Meh. I wouldn’t take any amount of money for 90 months in prison. Not sure if cooperators in financial crimes are considered “snitches” but I’m sure it doesn’t help. No thanks.

What’s wrong with Lufthansa? It’s the only international business class I’ve ever flown. Had good experiences compared most domestic airlines in the US.

Yeah, this page is quite clear: https://protobuf.dev/programming-guides/encoding/

Nothing mystical about it

Touch ID is so drastically superior to Face ID in so many common “iPad scenarios”, eg. laying in bed with face partially obscured.

I don’t understand Apple’s intense internal focus on FaceID only. FaceID with TouchID as an option when a device is flat on the table or when your face is obscured is so much nicer.

I read the article, thanks.

It makes the claims that (1) a string of a specific form (a hash) could be misused (eg. someone might call toUpper on it) or (2) passed in incorrect order to a function that takes multiple strings.

Named parameters / outward-facing labels (Swift) completely solves (2). For (1), the solution is just ugly. Just use the type system in a normal manner and make a safe class “Hash” that doesn’t allow misuse. And/or use namespacing. And/or use extensions on String. And/or add a compiler extension that looks like outward-facing labels but for return types. So many cleaner options than this nasty brand (yes, that’s the point of the article, but the solution is still hideous. Make it elegant).

Really ugly way to avoid something already solved by named parameters and/or namespacing

> Ultimately Congress should have written the law more carefully

Insane framing of “we know the spirit of the law but we are going to do everything we can to skirt it”.

>The FBI’s job is only to investigate to the maximum extent of the law

Wrong, according to the FBI itself:

“The mission of the FBI is to protect the American people and uphold the Constitution of the United States.”

https://www.fbi.gov/about/faqs/what-is-the-mission-of-the-fb...

Pray tell, how does warrantless spying on citizens help to uphold the 4th amendment?

Doesn’t really solve the cost of living problem being in coastal CA :)

The Carolinas, near the Blue Ridge Mountains where it is also pretty. Not quite the Sierras but it’ll do

You don’t have to retire there, but it turns out that the Bay Area has one of the most pleasant climates in the entire world for humans and it is coupled with some of the most stunningly beautiful and varied terrain in the world.

It’s hard to leave and call anything else retirement if you’re just considering climate, weather, and nature. My family did end up leaving the area but it was hard. I am still working. Wouldn’t surprise me if I return some day.

Vehicle rental periods are inherently time constrained. If you’re on a business trip or vacation the last thing you want to be doing is waiting for your vehicle to charge. And, you inherently also often do not have access to private charging infrastructure which means you actively have to go out of your way to find a safe and reliable charger. And you have to do this in a strange place that you don’t know. Home charging is the critical factor that makes life with an EV appealing.

Vacations are so time constrained that a huge % of ICE renters opt to just get hosed on gas up fees that rental companies charge instead of going to any ubiquitous gas station before dropping the car off. Car drop off with a flight to catch is always a race against time.

Thieves will begin to expect it to be there some of the time, after sufficient police/vigilante response. And perhaps it will be hard to find. Hence, deterrence.

Cars are stolen far less often than they would be otherwise partially due to technology like LoJack. Did you grow up in the US? Steering wheel locks used to be on every other parked car. Immobilizers and LoJack made them a thing you buy for your weekend classic car only.

It’s a massive deterrence. LoJack has been in business since 1986 for a reason.

Also, the attitude of “don’t go and get your stuff back yourself, it’s not safe” is just castrated cowardice and only emboldens thieves. Thieves should be afraid of both law enforcement and vigilante response. Better society when both are on the table.

AirTags are not better in one very important way: they don't prevent theft. They will notify thieves that they are hidden in a valuable item that they are stealing if the thief carries an iPhone.

Tile has a feature where you can submit your info and sign some sort of extra contract stating that you won't use your Tile for stalking/illegal activity, and you can actually hide a Tile in your bike frame and it can be used to find your bike if it goes missing. AirTags are useless for this because Apple doesn't want them used for stalking.

Because nobody’s really paying attention.

“LGTM!”

People buy Apple products because they don’t have that crap. What are you talking about?

If there’s one company that DOESN’T bloat your computing device with worthless junk from third parties, it’s Apple.

Uh, yeah they did. Many people thought at that time that DOJ was overstepping. Many still do. In hindsight, Microsoft’s behavior at the time seems like small potatoes compared to the ecosystem protection that occurs today.

In addition to all of those things, it also burned your battery like crazy. Jobs was very public about his annoyance with Flash’s battery drain.

What a ridiculous comment. He’s running a business, not a charity. He’s already determined that this offering will be useful to customers. He’s asking for insights on what to charge. Nothing wrong with that.

Doesn’t seem like luck if he actually finished his projects. Every undergrad has a github full of half finished projects. Seeing professional contributions to a widely used project is a completely different story.

As a non-landlord, it seems quite odd that landlords and property managers can’t “collude” on rent pricing.

If I were to have a rental property and a management company for it to be hands off, I’d probably want to defer rent setting to the people that understand that local rental market. Both parties have aligned incentives - they want to maximize rent. I guess the government just wants the low-information party to set the pricing? Are there any near-monopoly property management companies in any major metro in the US? Seems like they’re a dime a dozen with lots of competition — doesn’t seems very anti-trust-worthy to me, but what do I know?

It’s all subjects — not just economics and finance. Journalists don’t know what they’re talking about, but they’ll confidently act as if they do.

Is there any evidence that more people are attempting to live alone now than in the past (in the US)? Genuine question -- don't know the trend national trend.

It's a good thing for me for Ferrari to sell me a car for $1 -- doesn't mean that's what should be brought into reality by regulators.

A lot of founders see it as a good thing -- not everyone wants to stay in the game. Some want a big liquidity event after 10 years of grind and a sale to a large competing company typically yields the biggest windfall.

You don’t need thousands of apps. People don’t use thousands of apps day to day. They use the core system apps plus a few top social media apps and perhaps some banking stuff. It’s not 2010 anymore when all of the earnings calls for $AAPL and $GOOG were all about the number of apps on their respective app stores. The web has been highly consolidated since then and the average user only visits a handful of websites/apps. China also has the super app culture — their entire life is on WeChat so that’s really all they need.

>software engineers/developers are not in any way engaged in what might be considered genuine scientific research and development

Have you forgotten the D in R&D? Software engineers are building the product. That’s development.

What do you mean by “genuine scientific research”? I suppose you think ML researchers aren’t doing “genuine science” because they wear hoodies instead of lab coats?