135 karma · joined February 2, 2011
I'll tell you why; the Pixel watch manages to combine all the disadvantages of a fitness tracker and a smartphone. Now I have to log in to my watch, the display is too small to read anything on, and I can't increase the font size. The Android fitness app is a walled garden inside a walled garden, and I still can't transfer my metrics to Sheets.
People had long been trying to remove the fake trail from Maps, contacting Google, posting signs at the trailhead saying there was no trail to the waterfall, all to no avail. The fake trail was at last removed in November 2023: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/google-maps-...
Google will be transitioning their courses to Skillshop at https://skillshop.withgoogle.com/
It introduces the now-common idea of a “work triangle”; organizing everything needed to cook a meal around a single station.
We hard-coded data into a base service, pushed it to production, restarted services that depended on it, then services that depended on those services, etc.
The book “How Round Is Your Circle?” includes some interesting solutions to this problem. https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/2449815
It's hard to describe this book; look at an excerpt at https://blog.honeypot.io/if-hemingway-wrote-javascript/. The source code actually runs and really does capture the writing style and idioms of the purported writers. I remember a factorial program by "Richard Feynman" that used numeric approximations that was just brilliant.
One idea I thought promising was audio games and household assistance delivered through devices like Google Home and Amazon Echo. They could be programmed and controlled though a natural-language API like Inform7, which is used for interactive fiction.
I do not know of any working tools for developing these, but I heard of a BBC experiment called "The Inspection Chamber" that allows playing audio games solely through voice. There is an article at https://www.bbc.co.uk/taster/pilots/inspection-chamber
The game teaches you to build a simple game for Win32 from scratch. The graphics would be pretty dated now, but the scripting system for enemy AI and quests is a Turing-complete programming language. I learned more from that book than from my compiler course in university.