BurritoAlPastor

I can’t believe nobody’s brought this up yet, but the HomeView fundementally exists for one reason: to be a Matter hub for smarthome stuff. No iPad – or any portable Apple device - can be configured as a home hub for managing Matter-protocol devices. There’s no significant advantage to a HomeView over an iPad if you don’t have any Matter devices.

That’s why this device has multi-user support: you’re only supposed to have one of them, which everyone uses. The Apple TV also has good multi-user support, because Apple doesn’t expect you to connect one Apple TV per user to your television.

Only if you’re so rich that your degree doesn’t need to pay for itself.

I think it’s perfectly germane. When a medium is both a means for making a good living _and_ a form of artistic expression, there’s a natural tension that emerges from people who pursue both those paths at once, in addition to the people who eschew either path entirely. Obviously many people avoid cynical reasons for doing the things they do - I’m among them - but you can’t fail to recognize that there’s always a demographic that doesn’t care about the art.

> What’s the point in generating writing … if it gives next to zero feelings of accomplishment?

Getting promoted, getting a better job, generating sales leads, things of that nature. A depressing number of blogs or LinkedIn posts exist only because the author is under some vague belief that it’s part of what they’re supposed to be doing to get ahead in their career.

The language pattern the author refers to is called litotes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Litotes), but to say that English doesn’t use them is… not quite right.

I don’t think BART employees really have any say in where BART stations do and don’t go, or how many trains they get. Try city councils instead, although none of them take BART anyways so they won’t know the difference.

I generally find that Waymos are cheaper than Uber/Lyft including tip.

I’ve also seen that, although Uber and Lyft peak times seem correlated to each other, they seem uncorrelated to Waymo peak activity. But this might be stabilizing as Waymo ridership increases.

Note that, at least in Thomas Malory’s telling, the arm holding Excalibur out of the lake is not the Lady Of The Lake, who is nearby on the lake. The arm holding Excalibur is neither named nor explained.

San Francisco’s “Main Street” is in no way a major artery, however. Market Street served that function.

Here’s an 1853 map https://rumsey.geogarage.com/maps/g3463000.html in which today’s Main Street is only a block long. The map calls it Front St, although there’s another Front St nearby which kept the name – perhaps it was renamed Main to disambiguate once the streets connected?

Ooh, we got a doxastic voluntarist over here!

Clement Greenberg wrote that "Hopper simply happens to be a bad painter. But if he were a better painter, he would, most likely, not be so superior an artist".

As a careerlong DevOps guy, I’ve heard many times that “if your job title has DevOps in it, your company is doing DevOps wrong” – overwhelmingly from people with “DevOps” in their job title, delivered with a mordant laugh.

People are also not really expected to be individually responsible for mitigating flood or fire risk; they buy insurance. People can’t buy insurance for getting locked out of their Google account. We’re currently in a “well it’s your own fault for not owning and furnishing a second house in case the first one burns down” situation for digital property.

I do live there. I can hear the foghorns from the bridge at night. It’s nice!

The fog doesn’t hide the beauty; the fog is the beauty.

In my experience, the business use of retaining years-old metrics is overvalued, because changes in the system tend to prevent any kind of long-term apples-to-apples comparison. You’ll have changed your metrics engine, or your collector, or your tagging strategy, or your hosting strategy, or your containerization, or your deployments, or etc. etc. Even if you can find the like metrics from last year, you can’t trust that they meant the same thing then that they do now.

We didn’t make software engineer money when we didn’t have “engineer” in our titles. I would be perfectly happy to be a “senior systems administrator” or similar if it didn’t impact my earnings potential.

Are you suggesting that it might be just coincidental that companies stopped putting chalk dust in milk at about the same time that doing so became illegal?

Fine, you pedant, it’s ironic that a textually sympathetic review of a memoir lionizing the virtues of secondhand brick-and-mortar bookstores, while fretting about their continuing viability as a business model, would link to the book on Amazon, a online-only store commonly considered to be the primary disruptor to that business model. Happy?

Ironic that this review of a memoir about bookstores starts off by linking to it on Amazon.

When did “koan” become a synonym for “aphorism”?

I changed jobs at the end of 2020, my new job has better pay and better work-from-home arrangements, and I don’t regret a thing.

My hypothesis is that a significant chunk of the people who changed jobs circa 2021 are people who would have changed jobs in 2020 if there hadn’t been a pandemic, but held off for about a year while things shook out.

On the contrary, Twitter’s users generally seem to believe that Twitter’s moderation is abysmal, and they have clamored for years for it to be better than it is, on a variety of axes.

People largely haven’t moved off Twitter because the people they want to follow haven’t moved off Twitter; the people they want to follow mostly haven’t moved off Twitter because why would they move away from where their audience is?

You’re saying “takesies” does not rhyme with “backsies”? As a counterexample, what would be a word that would rhyme with one but not the other?

The core point about people systemically underestimating the complexity of any field outside their own is well taken. Joseph Conrad writes: "Men earning their bread in any very specialized occupation will talk shop, not only because it is the most vital interest of their lives but also because they have not much knowledge of other subjects. They have never had the time to get acquainted with them."

However, if I were to decline to speculate on any matter on which I lacked an expert-level understanding, the number of subjects on which I could hold a conversation would dwindle to virtually nothing, and I'd be much more boring to talk to at these cocktail parties. So, I intend to continue to spitball blindly, just for fun.

> And the D&D Beyond software is clearly a first attempt at an Apple App Store style walled garden from which to extract rent forever and ever.

Second attempt, actually. WOTC had a monthly-subscription webapp offering in the 4th Edition era, with (digital) subscriptions to the magazines, a character builder, and promises of a virtual tabletop that AFAIK never shipped.

Mid-senior is more like $300-400k.

They did; it’s called the iPhone Upgrade Program.

I really don't see how you can look at the changelogs for the weekly releases of the AWS provider and think that nobody's working on it. If you want to see what a neglected provider looks like, spend some time with the poor Vault provider, where I have a two-year-old bug report about a reproducible crash condition without so much as a reaction emoji on it.

Developers have more responsibility than ops for knowing their apps, for the simple reason that each developer owns a small number of apps, but ops owns the infrastructure for all the apps.