lnanek2

Seems an odd thing to be infuriated about. Like, some people have no email address, right? Should we be infuriated about that? No? Then why are we infuriated about people with an email address with a whitelist? It doesn't stop you from having an open email address if you want. It's their choice.

Personally, it sounds pretty handy. Every day my personal email address gets 100 messages. The only reason I check it is once every week or two my family might have sent something. Whitelist sounds perfect. As it is I just open Gmail, search for my family's address, and close it if nothing shows up. The Gmail icon on my phone has 9,714 unread messages...never gonna go through all that.

Google Maps does have an offline download option it offers occasionally if you know how to trigger it. Have never seen Apple Maps offer that.

Even if Apple Maps doesn't have as much data as Google, the experience is so much better. Makes a lot of sense that Google is copying it as per the article.

Whenever I use Google Maps, it constantly harasses me about how there's a slowdown ahead, puts a little tray across the bottom of the screen hiding the information I care about, with no way to get rid of it except tapping and other nonsense. I searched throughout the settings and can't find anyway to turn off all these annoying pop ups it has. Someone needs to write an ad blocker for it.

Apple Maps not only doesn't constantly harass me with meaningless notifications I can't dismiss without taking my hands off the wheel, it also shows traffic lights, and the voice over instructions include them as well. With Google I often turn too early or too late because it isn't very clear exactly when to turn. With Apple Maps that happens a lot less because Siri will flat out tell you, turn at this light, turn at the next light, etc..

Not even just that. Often we engineers know about the issues, but they are so rare the PMs aren't willing to let us work on them. PMs get bonuses for shipping features, not letting their engineers do KLO work and keep all the rare edge cases functioning.

My team once had a bug on a client app that caused the phone to vibrate randomly, and the PM still wanted us to spend a week to rewrite an Android demo to iOS so he could look better for a presentation to the CEO next week instead of fix it.

Sometimes the release team will put their foot down on a really bad error rate and force a team to fix it or not get into the next release. You pretty much need hundreds of crashes an hour for that, though.

One guy paranoid about people trying to login with his phone number and flipping a weird option would just get set to priority normal, backlog status in the issue tracker and never looked at.

Apple uses their own IP address when accessing sites to protect privacy: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212614

Maybe the majority of iOS 15 traffic coming from Apple servers instead of individuals is causing trouble with Google's current AMP implementation somehow, so they check the iOS 15 user agent and disable it?

IMO more likely Google just has a user agent whitelist or regex that misses iOS 15 and AMP was just showing up initially while Apple was sending an old user agent during the iOS 15 betas or something.

It's true there exists a "fat burn zone" where the ratio of fat burned to calories spent is higher. It's not true that's it's beneficial for people trying to lose weight to limit their calories burned to that zone, though. What governs weight loss is total calories in vs. total calories out: https://www.whoop.com/thelocker/fat-burning-heart-rate-zone/

I've never had an issue with my $200 used bike for commuting 45 minutes to work, honestly. Those multi-thousand dollar carbon fiber things are just for racers and status symbols and minor improvements, basically. There are people at my company who use their bike for the Malibu Triathlon, etc. but if you are cost conscious, it's not actually necessary to pay so much.

It's true that "unlimited" is just a scam so that the company doesn't have to pay accrued unused vacation. I think most people just read between the lines and understand it is "unlimited with manager approval." 8 weeks is quite a lot. I don't know anyone at my unlimited vacay company that has taken that much. 4 is normal. 6 is kind of pushing it. I usually take 2. This is the US, though, I've heard Europeans expect more.

Maybe instead of demanding 8 he should have just offered to take 4 and use family medical leave for the other 4. Seems like a fair offer that works out to 50% salary. FMLA is more legally protected than PTO as well, since the PTO could have fine print, essentially, saying it is with approval.

I've definitely been in the position before where my SO needed more care than I could give when going through a tough pregnancy and after without getting negative comments from management about my availability. In my case I hired a nanny. Could be tough for him if he's more cash strapped, though. Still have my job, however.

Also, he might be better off removing a lot of the informal language about "lies" and "shit". People will take him more seriously if he makes the tone a bit more objective while still pointing out the employers' legal obligations weren't met if they violated FMLA, or the weaker argument that they didn't provide what offered in the job listing if that's the strongest argument against them, etc..

> While you notice immediately that something is on time, you'll also notice really quickly that something is of bad quality, unreliable, inconsistent, low performant, etc

Not in my experience. Our team has a couple core perf metrics that are alarmed, like page load and missed frames, but it's easy to do really bad things that won't trigger the alarms. Or do them such that the automated tests are using different content for the pages they test than the real users who will see the commits weeks later. E.g. someone commits a change to feature x that locks up the screen, but the test user pool never uses feature X, or never puts content into it and just sees the empty state screen.

Quite common for developers here to write stuff that works for 99% of users, but falls over otherwise as well. Like today I fixed an issue where tapping a button on one screen to go to another really fast, like under 1 second, crashes because of a race condition. Testers aren't going to notice that. It just shows up in the company's overall crash rate which is spread across 4000 developers. Automatic UI tests caught it, but the responsible team had just filed the crash stack trace JIRA into their backlog and left it to sit for months. Similarly, today, we had a production issue because someone wrote some code that only works for certain users who had already accepted a certain terms of service screen.

Shipping a feature is rewarded heavily. Not screwing up the app for edge cases and perf and people who have to implement the next feature after you? Good test coverage? Not at all. If you dare to give an estimate that includes full test coverage, PMs will just take you off the project and pick a developer who doesn't do that.

Maybe this is a cultural thing? My girlfriend is Chinese and I've never seen her do a "call" that wasn't actually a video call on WeChat. Japan also has had video calling for much longer than it took Apple to popularize FaceTime over here in the West. They were also ahead on VoD, for long train rides, I suppose, due to mass transit being more popular.

It wouldn't. Their immune system already has a sample of the virus. Giving them a vaccine would give them nothing they don't already have.

The idea behind a vaccine is the give the immune system a sample before it encounters the real virus, which allows it to respond quicker when the real virus arrives, which allows it to prevent the virus to replicate sufficiently to make the person sick.

For someone who already has the virus, the vaccine won't do anything.

It doesn't seem like a bad thing that they do care. The end result in the study was that people trusted the person who doesn't make time for them less. But that's exactly the right result. You should be less close and show less trust toward someone who won't make time for you, since they are, by definition, not going to be there for you as often when you need it. It seems quite natural to move trust and closeness to a party that, for whatever reason, isn't going to decline invitations to engage. Nothing wrong with the other party if they have other priorities, but it does mean they aren't a good person for the inviter to depend on. Sort of avoiding codependency.

I consider journalist sensationalist as well, but in this case:

1) Tesla is a stock market darling, so a lot of people have a lot of money riding on it. Some of those people may make different decisions with extra information they didn't have previously like the commonness of electrical fires. So we're not always talking about industry experts here. Could just be Joe Smoe software developer who plowed his equity grant into the stonk after vesting.

2) Tesla does market big battery packs to go in the home as well, which means this is a safety issue for people considering that. It's not like they are replacing existing battery packs and know the details. They are replacing either nothing or a diesel generator from Home Depot, so they may not be familiar with the advantages and disadvantages. Tesla doesn't have a good reason to be more forthcoming than is legally required either, leaving it to journalists.

So yeah, journalists just want eyeballs to sell ads to, but Tesla just wants to sell electric stuff. The latter has less reason to be truthful about the dangers.

Yeah, that was kind of strange. The kidneys naturally turn off while sleeping anyway, so you shouldn't need to pee in the middle of the night. I worry he's going to get a slipped disc later limiting his fluids like that.

They likely don't implement any BTC support themselves, just have some other company do it that only supports exchanges?

Was kind of strange making up the crow dropped a USB stick lie. I assume he can't say he pirated it because the article would get taken down with a DMCA notice, but I would have preferred he just not mention how he got it. There was interesting content there about reverse engineering the game data format.

Seems like a valid approach. The cheapest way to do self driving is to just have a drone pilot from a call center driver your car remotely through a video feed. An hourly fee enables that. As long as they take fault as the driver in accidents, seems superior to computer control as well.

> The vast majority of images are jpegs, which are internally 420 YUV, but they get converted to 32 bit RGB for use in apps. Using native YUV formats would save

...

> You can do it today, but you need to do the color conversion manually in a shader, which can be a big ask for some devs

Where the perf. really matters, and shaders are involved, doesn't everyone use texture compression formats like ETC1 and PVRTC? https://developer.android.com/guide/playcore/asset-delivery/...

Strangely enough, Apple's most advanced ear pods/headphones and the like change the audio you hear as you move your head. Kind of gimmicky, but they do technically have a way to render spatial audio even though they only have two speakers.

In this case, though, it's more like protecting the user from streaming higher bitrate than anyone can hear a difference in on that hardware anyway - which will help their battery life. We're talking about things like ear pods here, not a hi-fi stereo system.

He actually didn't even cover one of the worst parts about the whole process - fake buyers who just want to steal your tech. I was working at a startup with a ground breaking product no one had released before, we had shipped hundreds of prototypes and gotten good reviews and had plenty of orders, but board redesigns and setting up a factory assembly line for the production models was eating into our cash and runway. A big company in an adjacent space made it known they were willing to buy us. We set up a data room, gave them tours of the office and technology, intros to all the staff, and they liked everything they saw. Offer never came through. A year later they announced they would be developing a knock off. Entire process just seemed like a way to get internal development info for their own clone they were starting development on.

Amusingly, I've seen this process go the other direction in the finance world. Sometimes an employee will go out and interview with another fintech company, pretend they are willing to jump ship, and pick up as much information on how their competitor works as they can at the fake job interview. Employee then happily continues at the fintech startup with the extra knowledge.

You could always pick one language to be an "expert" in and just study up on the book learning for that language for your interviews. I've shipped products in a dozen languages myself, but for an Android interview I'll only claim to be expert in Java and Kotlin, for iOS I'll only claim to know Objective-C and Swift, and for server I only claim to know Java and Go - even though I've shipped PhoneGap and React Native JS mobile apps, JS Node servers for startups that got funded, Amazon lambda functions triggered from Unity, etc.. Just not up to speed on the book learning/pop quiz/mind teaser type questions I'd get for those.

The article said not using the phone before bed helps:

> avoiding smartphone use before bed can improve your sleep.

Night Shift enabling makes me hate using my devices because the screen becomes dim and red and annoying to use. So I stop using them earlier. Win!

> I've interviewed at Google, Facebook, Dell, NSA, CIA, DoE (E=Energy), Airbnb, Palantir

Those are some pretty impressive names for places you've interviewed at, but they also have the highest bars to get in. Why not try just some average, run-of-the-mill companies off job sites? There's nothing embarrassing about starting at those. I worked for a no name exercise tracking app company my first job out of college, who later threw out all the work and became a diet tracking app.

Sometimes when I've been between jobs I've even grabbed some bottom of the barrel project work off remote contracting sites. If you can write clear English and are willing to work at 3rd world country rates, you can get infinite work there. It still pays enough to get health insurance through someone like Freelancer's Union.

> I tried improving my interview skills. Reading Meyers, Knuth etc. books

I don't think reading books helps with that. I'd recommend practicing interview problems on sites like LeetCode. I have a CS Master's degree and can easily write an A* pathfinding algorithm on a white board and give you the time complexity of any algorithm, but it's not super useful for the sort of interview stuff I get asked. Typically you are just asked to hammer out a design or implementation for some specific set of requirements that complies with some set of performance criteria, so it's not really book learning being tested. More just that you can you sit down and write the right code/design - which is what you'll be doing every day on a programming job outside meetings collecting those requirements and scheduling the work.

> dropped out my freshmen year at a top 40 college. Was on the cyber security team etc. too expensive so I had to dropout.

Lack of a degree would disqualify you from 95% of programming jobs I've worked at. I don't think it's important myself, but I'm not a hiring manager. The only person I saw hired without one had an amazing project portfolio with hit apps in the app store I would have trouble writing. So it can happen, but it's like being a star baseball player. Outside the reach of most people.

If you really want to be a full time, salaried programmer and don't have a star portfolio, or large bodies of open source code to show off, I think you'd have to take out a loan and get that piece of paper from college first. Project work, or work from contacts or friends at tech meetups, generally is less strict re that. But companies that don't know you are going to just filter you out for no degree.

As a developer, having an open source client side is hugely beneficial. With closed source mapping libs you often know what is wrong with the providers library from your stack traces, but have no way to fix it. Open source means trivial bugs handling things like nulls and deallocation and even more serious bugs like CPU use regressions (which are easy to introduce with an incorrect condition somewhere and can slip through the cracks until end user's batteries are dying) become trivial fixes instead of: notify provider, provider may or may not road map a fix, provider may or may not provide the fix weeks later in their next closed source SDK update.

> once unions disappeared in america, the working man lost wages

I've worked the same role in union shops and non-union before. Non-union paid more and had less deadbeat co-workers to navigate around. Depends on your profession and skills, honestly. Probably a benefit for amazon pick and drop workers.

Really sucks at mixed union and non-union tech companies, though. At my current company programmers aren't even allowed to move our own computer between desks because only union people are allowed to do that, and getting the union people to do it will take over a week and be done at an inconvenient time interrupting work.

Most theories like this are starting from the place of trying to solve the Fermi Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

As time goes on, and we find no evidence of aliens, the dark forest model is more and more likely vs. the kindly lumberjack model. In the kindly lumberjack model, we're more likely to detect other civilizations.

As a developer 70% of my time is in XCode and Github. Guess where the rest is? Google Calendar and Google Hangout. I discount Gmail because I just use my phone for that, swiping away messages while compiling. Want to know where my boss is from 7am to 7pm every day? Google Calendar and Google Hangout.

Calendar is a really bad product that needs disruption as well. I imported my victor ops on call schedule the other day and it imported wrong, so then I had to go through an entire year of two meetings a day fixing it, something that would have taken 10 seconds if they let you search and delete results.

Re Mac only, the first stage of a startup is finding product market fit. It isn't about making your product work on every platform. In fact that's counter productive. The goal is to have the shortest build-release-learn cycle, if you are porting to multiple platforms, you just increased your build time, which increases your cycle time, which means you will take longer to reach product market fit. Once you do, you can go port to every platform, but it's harmful to do it early.

I'm too young to have played his games, but looking at the wiki page for Balance of Power, it looks very similar to Plague Inc.. You have a world map and you react to events. Plague Inc. is so super popular even my kid nephew plays it on his iPad and can talk at length on it for hours.

Personally, I played a lot of XCOM which is a similar world map UI with random alien invading events you react to.

So anyway, writing the books might have been a waste, but people seem to copy the game format quite a bit. Very influential. Probably should have written more games instead of the two books.

USB-C is super slow for this. You need to use Thunderbolt NVME enclosures which can run the NVME at PCIe 3.0 x 4 speed. I have 5 and RAID them together, which handily beats the internal drive for speed by about 2x.