kevinob11

I've frequently just done both, which I suppose is rather silly, but I like having a nicely named boolean field. I suppose I should probably just make those derived properties though.

Do you think they really do disincentivize that behavior (serious, not flippant)? If my very close friend questioned my decision certainly, but if an internet stranger with intentional snarky tone did it I'm not sure it would.

Oh, this is knowable, a quick search says the top 1% owns 32% of the wealth (I know this isn't income, so not perfect) but given that I'm going to say I think 26% is either fine or too low.

I don't quite know the best way to measure it instead, but isn't saying the top 1% of PEOPLE pay 26% a pretty misleading statistic? I have no idea if it is too high. The 1% is a fixed number of people, how rich are they? If they have 99% percent of the wealth then 26% is too low. If they have 1% of the wealth 26% is too high. It also can grow if you lower their tax rate, if they get enough richer they might pay 27% even if you lowered their rates. It feels like we should be saying X% of wealth pays Y% of taxes, I think I could at least have an opinion about that number that has some meaning.

Were things better for low income communities before those attempts to help? I'm young, so honest question given minimal experience. Most of these programs seem to short-term help, with some minor annoying externalities and at worst flatish long-term results.

Same, in area South of Seattle they have just become whole foods for the most part. I still go because at least the money goes to smaller scale businesses, but there is nothing inexpensive about them.

Yes, and the convenience of not needing to know how to maintain the server. You can point a person with a different type of experience at this problem.

I'm a white straight male, grew up middle class near Seattle. I'm now in my mid-30s and have 3 kids. Semi-recently I had an (maybe my first?) experience where I wasn't the favored party in a situation. My kids have made focus more difficult, and I work in an industry (tech consulting) where focus is a big deal, and the idea that I'm not the perfect person for the job was a foreign feeling. I no longer felt "I was made for this" or "I'm perfect for this".

While I hate that things are getting worse for anyone (and want to fix it!), these findings are good reminders for me that almost everyone else has dealt with similar circumstances much more often than I have. Often the cause is out of their control and that they are just trying to make the best of it, with varying results. It gives me good perspective and reminds me that peoples choices / actions include inputs that I'm not exposed to.

That all being said I hope we can find a way to make these situations less common for everyone. I'd settle for quick fixes (adjust taxes, better welfare, etc.), but I'm excited for the societal changes that I hope are the eventual long-term fix.

While I agree that killing advertising is effectively impossible I'm not sure I agree that the problem is that people aren't willing to pay for things.

I think advertising dollars paying for services that users use is a convenient excuse that companies use to justify it, but it isn't an imperative for why it should exist.

If you can't get people to pay for your service when they know the real price maybe your service shouldn't exist, or shouldn't exist at the scale it does now.

That being said your main point that the industry grew organically based on human behavior certainly seems true. Banning advertising (like banning lobbying or corporate contributions to elected officials) is an impossible game of whack-a-mole. It can't be defined tightly enough to be outright banned (are you going to ban telling people you sell something they might like?) and the value derived from it is large enough that people will get creative when you ban the outcomes.

That being said I do think the most egregious versions should be regulated. Ads to kids, deceptive mail or email ads that look like invoices or bills, ads that are obviously lying about features or benefits, but enforcement is incredibly difficult. I'm not especially optimistic.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately because I have a friend who always discusses equality when we talk about taxes. What makes numbers so equal in the minds of humans? Especially when it comes to fines, taxes, etc.? If we still punished people by cutting off their hands (THANKFULLY WE DON'T - but humor me) would be equal to just cut off any part of the arm longer than 24 inches? No, effect was what made it equal, cut off the hands so you can't use them anymore. The example is gruesome but makes it pleasantly obvious that raw numbers are only equal if we all make the same amount of money and have the same costs in our lives. Since we don't I don't think there is anything equal about fixed amounts of money.

In my experience it is incredibly common for people without much money to have cars that seem impractical, because they are easy to buy but hard to maintain. I think this is pretty common with cars that were very popular when they were first released (the 300 was) so the market is saturated with old ones in rough condition that are cheap to purchase but terrible to maintain.

Sample size of 1, but my roommate in college (I was in college, he was not) went through 3 cars in the amount of time I had just 1 because he only ever had enough money to buy a crappy car and had terrible credit. They all broke down pretty quickly so he ended up spending more in the long-run, but in the end he had to get to work, so he did what he had to do.

Sorry for the late response, missed this somehow. I'm realizing as I try to write this that it is a bunch of small things, and maybe it boils down to having used it a long time or it being my first non-garbage (SSMS, PGAdmin) UX db tool. The autocomplete seems to work exactly as I'm expecting, the filtering seems to work a little better than TablePlus. Copying and pasting is a bit more consistent (I do this a lot while dev'ing). The whole UI is lightning fast and always stays responsive.

That all being said, TablePlus is 80 - 90% of that and the fact that it also works with multiple databases is huge. I also love the vertical tabs for multiple connections, editor sidebar pane for single records and tabbed queries vs a single query pane.

Both are fantastic, but if I was postgres only I'd probably stick with postico. As-is I just paid for both.

TablePlus is the only thing I've used cross-platform that is even close to Postico. Postico is amazing.

I tested this with "Caribbean Vacation" and wow what a difference. Everything on Google is "TOP X LIST" and "BEST XYZ" which are just the worst when trying to find real interesting information about experiences you can have on vacation somewhere. I had used those as starting points then searched for long-form blogs of real experiences people have had. This surfaced those kinds of things immediately. I love it.

Is this really so confusing to most people? I feel like it was pretty clear throughout that the first statement in most cases was: "We expect X is [not] effective based on history, but we aren't certain because this is so new" and the second statement was "Our initial research shows that we were [right / wrong]" followed sometimes by a third statement which is "As more information arrives we were right about Y and wrong about Z".

I agree with you that politicians are afraid to give it to us straight, but I attribute their hesitance not to how they expect the people to respond but how they expect media to respond. You get in a little trouble for being wishy-washy, but you get big trouble for giving a straight, honest well-informed sounding (described this way because its not like the announcers are the ones actually doing the research) detailed response and then finding out some of your details are wrong.

I have been thinking about this a lot, we all hate the way politicians speak (me included) but we made them speak this way because while they may not impress anyone they don't give definitive sound bites that will then be repeated over and over on the news when they happen to be wrong.

Who was your target audience with the blog post?

Real thing that has happened to me, at the time my company (IT consulting / support) was ~10 people (we're ~25 now). A Gartner cold call that wanted to sell me a report that I could use to recommend which cloud storage vendor (box, dropbox, etc.) my clients should use. I explained that we were doing just fine by evaluating which one to used based on which features were more important to that specific client, but he seemed to think having the Gartner rec was critical. I said sure, then asked about the price, once I knew that I was clear that we weren't interested and thankfully he got the message and stopped calling. Maybe this is why my SMB IT company will never make the transition to enterprise clients.

It gave me a pretty jaded view into how those types of reports work. It was hard to not think they are purchased to CYA (internal or external) when you end up recommending the wrong software. I hope that isn't always the case, maybe there is some great content in them, but at 50K I'll never know :)

Take this with a grain of salt, perhaps I'm just not in a good headspace for reading this.

The first two paragraphs of the first section (The next iteration of Dev Ops) reads like it was written by someone at Gartner trying to get my 11 person business to buy a report for $50K that still won't actually tell me if the product will do the things I need it to. I imagine it's exciting for investors, but it made me sad and made me suddenly (and likely unfairly) scared that the features were going to take a back seat to the "placing strongly in several markets".

That being said I read through the feature list and while none are specific things I needed it certainly sounds pretty great. We made the switch from github to gitlab about 4 years ago and I haven't really ran into any major issues or frustrations. So for what its worth after my comment above a BIG thank you to the Gitlab team.

Interestingly after reading other comments I think I agree that it isn't very intuitive. I say that as someone who switched from windows to mac about 6 years ago and don't really want to go back.

I think Windows is more intuitive when you first sit down in front of it. You click an app and it opens, click it again and you get another one (usually). All context for the app is on the window for the app, physically connected. The start menu allows you to get to almost everything, things are in 5 different places on a mac (dock, spotlight, apple menu, etc.). I think all of that adds up to make windows vastly more intuitive (discoverable?), especially for a first time user.

Where I really love my mac is in the first tier of shortcuts and features below the discoverable level. I find the hotkeys to be more reachable and intuitive (easy for my brain to remember the associations) than the windows equivalents. I love spotlight and find it to be much better at opening programs than windows search, though this seems largely fixed in windows 10 I think. I really like the swipe gestures on my touchpad, enough that I bought a magic trackpad for use when at a desk. Swiping between workspaces is glorious. I'm a consultant, and jump between client meetings all the time. I set up each client in a workspace and just slide over to that workspace when I'm ready for that meeting or work session. Then I can jump to the next client without cleaning up and just do a full cleanup later in the day of all of them at once.

I have no idea how I lived before cmd+left and cmd+right go to start and end of line without taking a hand off the home row to reach over to home / end. As I say this though I realize the arrow keys are just below home and end, so maybe it's weird that I love this. Better on a mobile keyboard I suppose.

I'm not someone who could never see going back to windows, I like it plenty, but the M1 has probably locked me in for the next few years.

I would go even further on #3, it isn't like an iPad vs an Android tablet, because Android isn't bad, the only issue there would be hardware responsiveness. More like iPad vs a 2010 feature phone for most infotainment systems I've ever experienced.

I have always asked myself why a prerecorded video doesn't work just as well, it sure seems like it should, especially in these 1:10000 classes. Personally, and apparently for many others, it just doesn't. I really have no idea why, I can pontificate that it has to do with being on a schedule, or when they say your name or encourage you directly, but in the moment those things don't seem valuable. That being said it does certainly seem to nudge me to more action, which in exercise seems worth it if you can afford the price.

I don't own a Peloton, but I do spin classes, live online yoga classes and run and bike on my own. I will probably buy a Peloton if prices come down on the secondary market as the pandemic ends.

~1 year ago there was a zero-click (rce I think?) for easy smtp. At the time it was the most popular plugin for smtp setup on Wordpress, I can't imagine how many sites have that plugin installed without updates.

Fair enough, Wordpress is certainly more user friendly than everything I used before it. All I know is how often my clients who use Squarespace make meaningful changes to their site and how often my clients who use Wordpress do it, as well as their technical levels needed to do so. In my case, they seem to do it a lot more if they have Squarespace.

Good to know, thanks!

How slow is it? Genuinely asking because I wonder if it is much larger / more complicated than sites I've built so far.

Most sites I've created are _usable_ in about ~500ms, though they take quite a bit longer to fully load. There do appear to be tons of scripts and tracking crap loaded after initial load, but through (what appears to be) above-the-fold handling and a pretty quick (200ms) time to first byte they appear fast-ish.

Do you add a lot of custom scripts?

All of this is 100% correct and if its easier / easy enough for you then that works. I wasn't really making the case that it was explicitly better for everyone, but it is awesome for my clients.

For backup, I either end up paying as much as Squarespace (WPEngine) or have to keep an eye on it to make sure its working.

I have no global stats on Wordpress hacks, of the clients I have running it (40???) I think probably 10 have been hacked. Zero have been hacked since moving to WPEngine (which is the first thing we do when we take over management), which is certainly something.

I'm not sure what the exact definition of mature website is, but I'm not sure it is that difficult. Certainly if you have 100s of pages, posts, articles etc. then it could / would take a while to make the move. At that point we're just talking about target market. Most of my clients have stopped posting tons of news / blogs because they were only doing it for SEO and it didn't really work anymore. In my world where sites have 25 pages with semi-limited complexity it just doesn't take long to move anymore.

I do certainly have clients with more complicated needs (member areas, ecommerce, etc.) but most of the time I just recommend they link out to that content and use another service (client portal in their main line of business app, shopify, etc.) rather than building it into their site.

When your Wordpress site gets hacked and you pay someone $500 (if you are lucky) to fix it this flips pretty quickly. If your Wordpress site doesn't get hacked its because you manually maintain it, and time at most of my clients is worth more than that.

If you are on something that can't get hacked (static site) it is because you are a developer or at least pretty technical and the ease of use doesn't apply to you.

Again, this is all targeted at US (West Coast to be specific) SMB.

I get where you are coming from as an idea, and generally I agree you should own your data. That being said you can export your data from Squarespace, you just can't "transfer" your site to alternative hosting because the platform is proprietary. So it isn't that they won't let you leave, it is that you are trading (pros) not having to think about hosting and security for (cons) slightly higher migration costs, and I think in this case pros outweigh the cons for sites below a certain level of scope.

Yes! This is a value I kind of missed in my description. We have a static html site right now, its lightning fast and easy enough for me to maintain, but we'll be moving to Squarespace internally on the next site update. Right now our contact form is annoying to maintain, non-developers can't easily make changes and images aren't automatically optimized. It just solves too many problems at too low of a cost, in dollars and other things.

I love Squarespace. I find it to be as close to the perfect mix of flexibility, usability and beautiful defaults that I've ever seen in a website builder. I can hand off management of the site to someone with almost zero technical skill (my 70 y/o father with almost no technical knowledge manages a Squarespace site I built him!) and when I look back in 2 years the site will still look pretty good and will still work on mobile. Chances of the site being hacked are much much lower than on Wordpress. Prices are reasonable. The layout engine is exactly what I want, it looks nice on all devices and can handle most layouts, which is a totally worthwhile tradeoff for the few times that something just doesn't quite look the way I want it to without custom css.

I know people say this stuff:

"You can't transfer your site away" - I know, but I can build a reasonable site in ~2 days, so the tradeoff is worth it and the sunk cost is lower

"But I want a fully custom design" - Yeah, fair enough, there is a cap on the high end of design with it but I think that cap is pretty high, especially in 7.1

"But it is making the whole internet look the same!" - Not really, between colors, photos and sections in 7.1 I just don't think this is true. If you use unsplash for all of your photos then maybe, but if you are doing that you are probably too small to care, worry about that when you hit 2MM in revenue

"But Wordpress is user friendly too" - No it isn't

As I write these I think that maybe it is just the perfect thing for my subset of clients (SMB), so read this from that perspective. I know this isn't really the discussion on this thread, I just wanted to see what experiences of others have been.