rubymancer

Cisco employee here, this is spot on.

I was at a startup they acquired ~4 years ago, by now it's just about milked completely dry.

Even though our product is close to industry-leading, they laid off our product manager, then another one, the QA team, and half of the devs. Unsurprisingly the product is falling apart.

It's not a company that attempts to produce value, as with so many others the product is the stock price.

The MBAs are showing some kind of savings on a spreadsheet somewhere though, so I suppose all the sacrifices are worth it.

It's Matt Champan! https://mchap.io/

I helped him process and visualize the original batch of parking ticket data waaaay back in 2016.

I can't believe he's still on this in 2025. We need more junkyard dogs like him fighting for what's right.

Three times now I've argued strenuously against using MongoDB and Elasticache as the primary data store in an app, as they will inevitably turn into relational databases.

They did.

For Mongo going to postgres went great, but for complicated reasons we're stuck with Elasticache forever on our main product.

T1 here. I couldn't read this, even with archive.ph.

Here's a more accessible source:

https://www.theguardian.com/society/article/2024/aug/11/scie...

Reddit thread:

https://www.reddit.com/r/diabetes_t1/comments/1eppvf5/scient...

> Average wages in America’s poorest state, Mississippi, are higher than the averages in Britain, Canada and Germany.

This doesn't sound right.

Googling around, the median income (a much better metric than average) between Mississippi and Germany are about the same.

A huge difference: Britain, Canada and Germany don't have to pay for health care and education. I'm not sure how to factor that in, but something tells me if you do you'll find our Canadian and European friends are doing drastically better than those in Jackson, MS.

> I look at a "sort of" competitor in our industry, and their rate of feature development is ridiculously slow by comparison.

Seconded. At my org, Ruby/Rails is our competitive advantage.

Our 5-6 competitors are all Java/.NET shops -- we deliver fixes and new features dramatically faster and deploy them with ease. It gets noticed.

The main downside is rails doesn't scale well re: complexity so regular refactors are necessary (ours is a high-volume big data app).

For performance/cost, it took some doing but by strategically moving business logic to higher performance techs we've even managed to get to a great spot there.

I expected it to be even more of a tome, but surprisingly it's been cut in half!

2nd edition:

Paperback ‏ : ‎ 1312 pages

Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 4.81 pounds

3rd edition:

Paperback ‏ : ‎ 656 pages

Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.71 pounds

You probably know all this as well, but for future googlers:

I used to use Libre + MiaoMiao + Nightscout, but these days I much prefer Dexcom G6 + xDrip + Nightscout.

Pros for the G6:

- No 3rd party transmitter (e.g. the MiaoMiao)

- It's smaller and can go on the stomach so it's less likely to get ripped off

- 1 less app involved -- xDrip integrates directly to Nightscout and there is no need for the Dexcom app

- Supposedly the glucose readings are a bit more accurate than the Libre

Cons:

- Sensors are more expensive than the Libre

- The transmitter is not rechargeable so you need to keep buying them every 90 days

Same. In case folks in this thread aren't familiar...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reason_(magazine)

> Reason is an American libertarian monthly magazine published by the Reason Foundation, with the tagline "Free Minds and Free Markets".

I love it for admin pages.

If only 20 internals are ever going to see it, jquery is as light as can be, can be loaded right from a CDN, needs no kind of transpilation and handles basically all you need.

> Approximately 80% of the income of traditional capitalist conglomerates go to salaries and wages, according to Varoufakis, while Big Tech’s workers, in contrast, collect “less than 1% of their firms’ revenues”.

This doesn't sound right to me, but if it is Varoufakis has a point.

Our contract, such as it is, with traditional capitalists is they employ many, produce some sort of value and keep as much profit as they can manage after labor and expenses.

If the Amazons and Googles of the world can generate their enormous revenues (and profits) without dispensing much of it to labor, essentially just collecting large rents in perpetuity, both traditional capitalists and workers are in serious trouble. That is a big shift.

Techno Feudalism, indeed.

Agreed. I was also part of the Kenna acquisition after being there for 2 years and am still there.

My equity got paid out quickly, I have since gotten raises and bonuses, and the only shittiness has been all the mega-corp nonsense (omg the trainings) and worse health insurance.

Cisco is not a nightmare acquirer, that would be Amazon. If AMZN had acquired us I'd have left immediately.

Nothing yet. I'd imagine it will go through appeals for a few years before anything actually happens, and U.S. antitrust enforcement has not exactly been a powerful force for the last few decades.

There's not much to the article.

> KANSAS CITY, Mo.—A federal jury on Tuesday found the National Association of Realtors and large residential brokerages liable for about $1.8 billion in damages after determining they conspired to keep commissions for home sales artificially high.

> The verdict comes in the first of two major antitrust lawsuits that target decades-old industry practices and seek to drive down commissions and change the way agents are compensated. The two-week trial involved claims by home sellers in several Midwestern states. The jury issued its verdict after just hours of deliberations.

> Under antitrust rules, the presiding judge could triple the damages verdict, which would total more than $5 billion. The plaintiffs also have asked the judge to order changes to how the industry operates.

> For several years NAR has been fending off accusations by U.S. antitrust officials and private litigants that it has conspired to keep home-sale costs high in the face of major technological upheavals. This verdict is by far the group’s biggest setback yet.

> An NAR spokesman said, “This matter is not close to being final as we will appeal the jury’s verdict.”

I would love for there to be some sort of competition injected into real estate commissions. I've bought and sold twice now and you get the same rate from everyone (within 1%) regardless of what they end up doing.

> Ultimately, Ellison said, Alameda transferred $100 million in payments to what she understood to be Chinese government officials to unfreeze the account, which could constitute a bribe.

Heeeey, $100 million could constitute a bribe. That's more than I make in a year!

Good. Back in 2017 I wanted to set up multi-room audio and the only options were Sonos and Chromecast Audios.

I got the whole thing done for the cost of 1 Sonos speaker.

In Jan of 2019 standalone Chromecast Audio devices were discontinued and support for them has dwindled ever since. Apparently this was around the time of the Sonos lawsuit.

Of course, Google cancels projects constantly, but it sure looks like in this case they killed something genuinely cool and useful due to patent trolling.

> So, Facebook used interoperable tools to let ex-MySpace users eat their cake and have it too. Facebook provided those MySpace users with a “bot,” an automated program that used the user’s login and password to impersonate that user to MySpace, scraping the user’s waiting messages and putting them in their Facebook inbox.

I had completely forgotten about this!

It's unthinkable today. As the piece says, if the tech giants feel the least bit threatened by a competitor they will just buy them up without any sort of regulatory hassle.

I had to read this several times and... this is a great solution.

As taxes, these are a negative incentive for hoarding housing stock and increase gov't revenues to (potentially at least) help to house seniors.

> Some of the best classic games for new people are Medieval Madness, Attack From Mars, and Monster Bash.

Those first 2 are what got me into pinball, many many years ago. The last original Medieval Madness table I saw was $15k at the Chicago Pinball Expo -- it's probably the most beloved table, with the possible exception of Addams Family.

Virtual pinball is the future. If you're interested, the easiest way to start is with an AtGames Legends Pinball machine. It's the most easily moddable... for mine I went with these upgrades which made all the difference.

https://www.buystuffarcades.com/products/deluxe-backbox-2-0-...

https://www.clevelandsoftwaredesign.com/pinball-parts/p/styl...

https://www.atgames.us/products/arcade-control-panel-for-leg...

Yes, getting it all together takes quite a bit of time and money, but everyone who has seen it has been delighted, even if they knew nothing about pinball beforehand.

Indeed. Our elevated trains are excellent (even though everyone complains) but even with recent expansions they don't serve huge swaths of the city.

https://www.transitchicago.com/assets/1/6/ctamap_Lsystem.png

If you're on the NW or SW sides in particular, you're going to need a car.

We're getting more and more bike lanes but they're also very unequally distributed and biking is...not great for winter.

25 cents/hour was indeed shockingly and delightfully cheap. I miss those days.

I suppose it still is, compared to $6/hour.

Chicago resident here. The city making more from parking tickets is not exactly a selling point if you're the one paying them.

Before the deal we had 20-year-old meters which were generally 25 cents or 50 cents per hour (quarters only). Lakefront parking was generally free outside downtown.

After the deal, rates quadrupled or more and many more meters went up, including at the lakefront. Now there is always a worry about whether you're paid up enough to finish a picnic. At least we can pay with credit/debit cards through an app (progress!).

The deal was a con from the beginning to help fill a budget shortfall and every resident who drives felt the effects, and will for the rest of their lives.

I saw the googleblog.com domain and immediately wrote it off as a future entry on Google Graveyard.

I worked on this! It's curated by a few video editors in LA who collect vintage VHS tapes.

They've been doing it for many years, the stream is the cream of the crop. You can't imagine the scope of the discard pile.

I highly recommend ExpTV for this:

https://exptv.org

It spans the vhs era, curated by hand to flip through different oddities and ephemera.

No tracking, no algorithms, just a stream of fun wierdness. It even has a TV guide type thing so you can pick when to tune in.

And if you're a tea person like me, I highly recommend this history:

https://www.amazon.com/All-Tea-China-England-Favorite/dp/014...

Tea has the larger world-historical impact, I would say.

The sculptor Stanisław Szukalski chose to die this way.

He had had a stroke and was stuck in the hospital knowing that he would never sculpt again due to partial paralysis. He just refused all food and water, and that was it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanis%C5%82aw_Szukalski

Because it's fun. If you get to work at top speed in a no-BS environment solving big problems, you'll be happy as can be.

I get paid more than enough, but what I look for is to be able to spend 40 hours a week having a blast.

That comic just made my mind bend.

Same! I came here to comment this. I run a kink-based social media site, so the Google/Apple stores are a non-starter.

Push notifs in a PWA get us about 90% of the functionality of a native app on Android and (finally) iOS.