owenwil

Amazon shut down their API for this and doesn’t provide any third-party integrations, but they clearly don’t give a toss about their shopping list feature in their app—it barely works and loses state constantly. But we like using the photo frame Alexa to track stuff. So I finally had Opus 5.5 figure out a way to make two-way sync work, which has been working well! It needs an always-on Mac, but then you can add/edit/check off on either side and it stays in sync.

4 months in his _current_ role, but he’s not going anywhere—he’s remaining on as Chairman, which is still very much involved day-to-day.

Yeah, this isn’t great today. We have been exploring Webhook bundles/groups for common integration shapes that make a bit easier to make the right choices based on what you’re doing and hope to have something out here to help soon.

My experience (I’m a hiring manager) is that a LARGE number of big US-based tech companies are only hiring in Canada right now for pretty obvious reasons, and are competing aggressively for top talent here. Many companies are backfilling American roles with remote Canadians when someone in the US exits right now. It’s the best I’ve seen in the ten years I’ve been here.

This is great! AFAIK our Stripe Docs were first to ship the copy for LLMs button about 14-16 months ago, which Mintlify copied the pattern (and some other patterns at the same time) from and proliferated everywhere since everyone uses them for docs out of the box now. It’s really cool to see how it’s quickly become a standard now to have that button! I do think we can do deeper integrations with LLMs that are probably more useful over time.

I can give you a number of locations to visit in B.C. and the time of day for the shadows if you want to experience it for yourself! Hasn’t been fixed in four years yet. It has gotten less frequent in general though.

I am confident that two things can be true: a) it can be better significantly in some places than others, especially like Florida, which has a lot of large, wide roads, that are probably mapped more than a lot of places which creates a more stable experience and b) Their choice of hardware and software approach is obviously less safe given their limitations, and has a number of compromises that introduce unpredictability vs other approaches.

It definitely has come a good way since I first got my car, but it's still _unpredictable_ and even seems to progress, then randomly regress, between releases. The big one is just navigating unpredictable environments, which is where Waymo is clearly far, far ahead.

In the real world, I think their approach has clearly hit a ceiling and I definitely feel a lot safer sitting in a Waymo than a Tesla, I'm not sure the gap is going to narrow unless something drastic changes.

100%—I enjoy telling life-long Roomba users about how far behind the technology is when they try to convince me to buy one! I've been using Roborock for a long time and it's pretty astounding how far ahead they are; full on item analysis + avoidance (including poop!) being the big one for us, let alone just knowing their exact location within the house. And there's a number of others that have pushed it a whole bunch... the folks at Matic seem to have pushed it even further (not ironically, with just vision, which actually feels appropriate here) it's a shame it's not available in Canada and no obvious plans to roll out here, would love to buy one: https://maticrobots.com/

Meanwhile Roomba seems to have done...pretty much nothing? Reminds me of the death of Skype when everyone transitioned to literally everything else while they floundered around.

I don’t think this is a surprise to anyone who actually owns a Tesla (I own a Model Y). Full self-driving is just _bad_ in comparison to technology from Waymo et al; it slams on the brakes suddenly for shadows, veers into the wrong lane, hesitates in pretty standard intersections, and doesn’t even understand basic concepts like school buses or trains. Here in BC, it completely ignores the 30kph school safety zones, which seems pretty basic.

My experience with FSD is that while it feels “magic” at times, it’s like a teenage driver that you have to baby sit constantly. It’s genuinely impressive how well it works given the really limited hardware, but if you use it routinely you know it will make at least one weird/dangerous choice on every trip.

Generally, I really don’t trust it in most situations except properly delineated highways, but even then it can be a crapshoot. If you’ve experienced FSD then get in a Waymo, they are night and day different—a lot more predictable, and able to navigate uncertainty compared with what Tesla has built. It’s likely down to a combination of both software and their insistence that radar doesn’t matter, but it clearly does.

I would never get in a Tesla that purports to drive itself, there’s no way it’s safe or worth the risk. I won’t even use it with my family in the car.

I know a handful of others who own Teslas and feel the same, despite what the fans spout online. I generally like my Model Y, but I definitely do not trust FSD—I find it hard to believe that it’s even being taken seriously in the media. Not a great endorsement if even your own customers don’t trust it after use it.

I’m talking about intermediate to senior—we haven’t had junior roles for a while, and junior roles have never _really_ been good for immigrants anyway. I’m a hiring manager and can tell you that it’s true in my experience that it’s not about money or being ‘cheaper’ but who is the best fit.

The weirder thing that’s going on right now that’s counter to all of this is US-based companies _only_ hiring Canadians, rather than Americans, when people leave because Canadians are cheaper overall—even though American companies tend to pay more. It’s kind of a paradox, but works out well.

I was coming in as a ‘normal’ developer design manager, but that is likely fairly specialized. I’m guessing that was in my favor. I know others with a couple of years engineering experience under their belt having a similar experience. But yes, the lack of jobs can be an issue. Lots of folks I know, myself included, now working remote for US-based companies.

In tech in Canada, usually we aren’t hiring immigrants because they’re cheaper—visas, moving someone, etc, is a huge expense. It’s often more that they’re the best possible fit for the role. After Covid with remote work etc, I don’t think there’s as much of that immigration going on, though—I don’t know of many Canadian companies sponsoring right now.

The market is still going, it’s just pretty tight right now, yeah. For what it’s worth, I lived in Europe for 5 years (NL) before this and honestly I think you’ve made a great choice there too. I learned a lot working in the Netherlands, and there’s lots of great things about living there you can’t find in North America. I miss not being bound to a car!

In my experience, Canada does an excellent job where this program fails. I entered on the high skill “express entry” visa for a tech job. After 18 months we had permanent residency. After 3.5 years, we had citizenship. It was all online and easy enough for us to do ourselves with minimal stress.

During the express entry period where you are employer sponsored, unlike in the US, if you get fired, you have until your visa expires to find another sponsoring job (the visa is valid for 5 years IIRC).

I’m pretty happy with how it went and glad we can settle, I’m not sure we would have chosen Canada if a rapid permanent path hadn’t been clear up front.

I’m only on my first Model Y, and it’s a great car albeit a bit cramped with a kid and a dog, and some pretty dumb UX/design choices. Rivian seems to be the only company building thoughtful, well-sized EV SUVs rather than trucks. Definitely going to choose the R2 for our next car; nice to see some competition while Tesla is asleep at the wheel with the cybertruck.

Disconnect that 2022 model as soon as you can. Samsung can and does deploy permanent, unremovable ads on the system menus that are cached even if the connection is lost. It’s terrible! The only way to avoid them is to not receive one in the first place.

I don't think this is true. I live in Canada and the worst costs involved in charging my Tesla at a supercharger are maybe $20 for a full 'tank' but compared with $100+ for a gas car given gas prices here there's no way this is true. Here in BC there's a ton of charging competition too, so you can find far cheaper than superchargers—plenty of places where I live offer free fast charging right now if you look for them.

Also, most of the time you're charging at home. In BC, electricity prices are $0.09/kWh... so dirt cheap.

Ideally, yes—it’s very close to downtown and accessible by public transit. A lot of people in cities don’t need or want cars, and this type of development will attract them because it’s likely to be cheaper than an equivalent with a parking space.

People here might own cars, but it’s up to them to find parking and pay for it themselves, rather than building it into the cost of buying/renting for everyone in these buildings—building without minimums means much cheaper building costs. It’s working in other cities where it’s being deployed and is a great way to incentivize cities to invest in car alternatives.

It is fairly expensive to fix a Tesla panel too. I received a small dent on our trunk thanks to a driver nudging it while parked and it cost $8,800 to fix just that panel.

This was an interesting post, but it’s very transparently written for search engine optimization rather than readability. There are some great stories in there but the formatting was really hard to read as a human all broken into obviously search-friendly questions rather than an an actual flow—just makes it come across as robotic. It’s a bummer that blogging is in this state.

This is what's happening in Canada, very aggressively. One of our biggest petrol companies (Parkland, who owns Pioneer, Columbia Fuels, Ultramar, Chevron, and many Esso franchises) has an aggressive plan to install fast chargers at basically all of their locations—and convert their retail to destinations with stuff to do while you wait[0]. They're already aggressively executing on this; where I live in BC they're already installing them up and down the highways, so I use them frequently already. One interesting thing they do is give you discounts on things like coffees or burgers if you're charging; smart way to get you inside.

[0] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-parkland-ga...

Doubt it. It’s not only about money, and Canadian salaries are improving dramatically. I moved to Canada in 2019, already have permanent residency with plans to get citizenship this year. There are many non-monetary reasons to live in Canada (healthcare, Childcare for $10/day, etc).

This is a great article with a lot of lovely detail and photos…and yet I was left wondering how the author actually connected it to the e-bike’s battery—was it directly? Via the bike’s charging port? I’d love to know more about the actual mechanics of _that_ and how they went about it because I’ve long wondered why these modern e-bikes don’t offer more ways to charge other devices from them (with a few exceptions in the Bosch lineup, with the ‘smart hub’ that they sell).

It _is_ excellent, but it is annoyingly ignorant of integrating with phones. If you have an Android phone you can send and receive texts, but no other notifications come in and nothing else is projected there either. If you have an iPhone, it works _sometimes_ but I am rarely able to reply to messages using voice successfully. I wish it better extended into my phone, but it's largely because of Apple's rules, which I guess aren't Tesla's fault—but are a side-effect of not using carplay.

That was the case a few years ago—now you just associate your personal Spotify account with your Tesla driver profile. It auto-switches to the right one based on the driver, which works great!

This is awesome—I love that you're building a tool that makes something that was previously scoped to a 'developer' tool available for regular users. Something like this for querying internal data would be a gamechanger for folks who struggle with SQL but need user insights!

I wish I was in your shoes! I also had no issues with HDMI until recent years--but HDMI-eARC is so buggy on Samsung TVs, especially when being used with surround sound or a sound bar. I had no problems before I moved to a surround system/beyond ARC, but with eARC I need to reboot the TV at the wall once every two weeks or it will "forget" it's plugged into a sound system, it's very annoying. It was far worse when I first got the TV and updates have improved it somewhat, but it's still very annoying. I don't hold out hope for Samsung updating the TV for much longer, my last one from them they abandoned it after the first year. :/

This is not my experience with an EV (and I'm a relatively new EV owner). My range is ~480km (300-350 miles) to a charge–the same as my previous ICE car. I can charge from ~20% to 80-90% in about 15 minutes on a 250kW charger, which is not rare where I live and more are being installed regularly. By the time I've gone to the restroom and grabbed a coffee, the car is fully charged again–I've never found myself standing around waiting for it to finish, and even faster chargers are already being installed out there en-masse right now. I have to stop every 4ish hours for a quick break/stretch legs/bathroom or it's unsafe anyway, so it's really never been a hassle.

On top of that, I always leave my house with a "full" tank and 90% of the time I charge at home...when I need to charge out in the world I've never had a problem finding a fast charger. The "damage" from fast charging over the lifetime of the car is minimal at best, most older Teslas (10+ years) still retain more than 75% of their capacity despite using superchargers regularly.

Why wouldn't it improve over time from here, which is pretty good and acceptable for most people's usage? It seems odd to assume that the technology won't get a lot better quickly, as it has in the last few weeks. It might take thinking about it for 5 seconds longer than an ICE car at the start of the trip, but overall it's not changed much about the realities of roadtrips for me.

Right–that's what I found so weird about the Amazon acquisition of iRobot is that Roombas are clearly a few generations of technology behind their competitors like Neato, Ecovacs and Roborock...but they must have a bunch of similar technology currently under development and on the way to market. What Roomba does have is name recognition, which seems to mean that most people think that robot vacuums aren't very good–I suspect Amazon sees they get tons of sales on their platform, has a good R&D team/patents, and smells an opportunity to own the space by pouring money into it and helping them compete (and, of course, putting them to the top of Amazon results, as they always do).

I don't disagree, but I see it as more of a forward-looking acquisition, not a backwards looking one. Sure, they don't have the data now but It's easy to imagine Amazon killing off the old basic models in the future and selling the data-gathering camera-enabled ones at a loss, to kill off the competition and get much larger market share, once it's acquired the company. Why wouldn't they?

The past isn't exactly an indicator of the future, though. Competition like Roborock's vacuums are laden with cameras and can do full object categorization, including furniture type and layout, but also what's lying around anywhere up to waist height. Mine has detected shoes, cables, power strips, pets, clothes, toys and so on–that is pretty useful data and tells you A LOT about the house and its owner–pretty easy to imagine them eventually detecting the brand of the shoe and how worn it is or something.

If Roomba isn't working on something like this, given the competition is clearly much further ahead, I'd be completely surprised.