Friedduck

These were marvels back in the day. Everything from spot gold prices to an expat job board. It was a news and research clearing house. It calculated accrued income on fixed income securities, it had real-time quotes and trading.

This was in the infancy of electronic trading, too. The FIX standards were still being negotiated and deployed. Broadband didn’t really exist reliably.

Truly remarkable for their time.

As much as I’m on-board with EVs this isn’t as compelling as the Ford Maverick at the price point. As you add features they’re at price parity and you arguably get much more for your money with the Ford.

I ditched them after the last incident. So glad I don’t have to go through that again.

Outlook has been an embarrassment for years. Poor defaults, bugs that have existed for years, and sub-par performance.

Search for a meeting: it shows you the oldest first.

Busy search calendars? It may or may not show working hours. It’s incapable of helpfully locating a mutually agreeable time in the way more modern agents can.

Search for mail? It’s an abomination trying to prioritize what you actually want.

The settings aren’t intuitively organized and a hodgepodge of UI standards.

It’s a huge relief. This was one of the largest frauds about to be forced upon so many unsuspecting investors. Epic in proportion.

There is so much wrong with Windows. So many neglected corners that have existed for decades and their response is to add AI.

Fix settings. Fix UI customization. Fix notifications. Fix search. Fix multitasking and network blocking. Fix sleep behavior.

I could go on. They need an entire year of house-cleaning before they add AI.

I had two friends (both PHDs, both worked for the CDC) leave the US this week.

In addition to the tumult at the agency, they were being monitored for what they did on their own time. Truly draconian stuff.

Want to collaborate with the WHO? Forbidden. Speak at a conference abroad on vacation time? Nope.

I don’t blame them. The autocratic push at the top feels different when it extends beyond work, and touches causes you feel deeply about. It’s a huge loss for the US.

You can disable windows folder type detection to speed the laggy file explorer navigation. It’s a registry hack and so limited for corporate machines.

My two chief complaints are instability and lack of consistency across the UI. There are 20-year-old dialogs lurking behind shiny new interfaces.

Search doesn’t work reliably. Right-Clicking on a file twice in a row will often present different options. Finally, inserting AI where you least expect or want it just slows common tasks. I don’t need AI to guess the next data value in a series.

They’ve left a huge opening for Google, more so than Apple, to get a foot in the door for corporate computing.

It’s shocking that this hasn’t happened sooner. At its height the cost was over $10k and at that point Tesla had all but doomed its cars by removing sensors they deemed unnecessary.

It’s also appropriate to point out: Waymo and others have been doing this for years. Tesla is a fraud.

While understanding their motivation to combat fraud they have a 20-year purchase history and have already established identity through payment methods. This is just lazy and perhaps additional data harvesting.

Amazon got so large they stopped paying attention to the details.

Funny because Salesforce grew out of Oracle and initially sought to become the anti-Oracle. What was their pitch? Rent your software?

One of the most productive project managers I ever worked with did this. He’s easily top decile.

In addition to my own text file I use the Clear app for quick lists. Recommended.

I only have a couple of services that use this pattern and I’m cancelling them out of frustration.

If i use a personal email then I can’t access it on corporate machines and vice versa.

Theres so much friction in the process it’s not worth maintaining the service.

Our Enterprise Chrome doesn't allow me to access the page to disable this behavior. Signing out of Chrome (but leaving extensions and bookmarks) is the only way I've found to stop the never-ending Google sign-in prompts.

If someone's found a setting page that does what he describes please reply here. This makes me crazy and seems incredibly risky.

If I recall correctly project 2025 had an item about targeting pornography. I could be wrong but it wouldn’t surprise me if the payment processors wanted to avoid the ire of the current administration and preemptively took action.

Free speech is dead. In case we’re keeping track.

Teams has never been as good as Skype at calls, even in the very early days.

I was shocked at how good Skype was when my son called a friend in a French village where he was an exchange student. The quality rivaled the best local calls on a landline.

Teams still feels disjointed and awkward, is slow as hell, and manages to make the simplest tasks (adjusting volume) incredibly difficult.

Having talked to a couple of people in the CDC I fear the worst. They’re not allowed to participate with the WHO outside of the agency (even on their own time). The employees are largely censored from expressing their opinion on any topic, anywhere.

They were talking about getting work outside of the States. These are smart, dedicated people who are boots-on-the-ground for crises like Ebola, and I wonder about the purpose of the agency and our ability to respond to the next event (with bird flu looming on the horizon).

So research aside, our incident response has already been compromised, and we’re just seeing the beginning.

I don’t know if it’s widely known but now that we have TikTok back it’s irrevocably altered. Content amd actions are being policed for anti-right wing sentiment and people are being TOS’d or prohibited from that action.

Examples that have been posted: warnings or prohibitions from posting content. Limits placed on sharing content (no bulk-sharing and a hard stop on sharing).

We’ve lost one of the only venues that wasn’t under control of an American oligarch, and it’s now clear what we’ve traded to retain access to TikTok.

Voidtools’s Everything is indispensable. Alas with no more admin rights on a corporate machine I’ve had to let it go.

The dems failed at messaging, as they have forever. Both parties have abdicated their role enforcing antitrust regs (esp as it relates to the food industry).

Additionally mis-handling COVID and implementing a 25% tariff on some commodities had a massive impact on prices.

Then there’s just the evolution of some markets: PE buying housing inventory + short-term rentals + Rental yield-management (thinly-veiled collusion on pricing) have transformed the housing market.

The biggest impacts: consolidation and a deregulation mandate. Companies can do whatever the hell they want.

If you ever deal with elderly parents you’ll learn the full extent of this. It’s shocking how many worthless subscriptions my in-laws had.

Services I’m not sure even exist any longer. An AOL account!

The fact that we even have to have this conversation tells you how far afield from our stated values we have drifted.

Some municipalities are just corrupt. If your cops are going to conferences to learn how they can seize property, they’re criminals. We should start treating them that way.

In addition to the obvious, Windows feels like a neglected ecosystem. They pile on new, half-baked features without fixing what’s already present and broken for years.

Try searching for a file by name. Third-parties have had this figured out for years and yet Microsoft can’t deliver accurate or quick results.

Two different interfaces for settings since the failed Metro experiment. The jarring introduction of old NT menus where they haven’t updated a setting to the new UI.

I could go on, but the author has done a good job of cataloguing a broken product.

I used to use Apple keychain and lost access to it at one point when I switched phones and no longer had a known device associated with my account. Even when I had the correct credentials, I could no longer access the keychain.

It may be my own ineptitude, but I won’t use it again.

Insurance companies have been doing this for years. Feed data into an algorithm controlled by third parties (and what’s more, share data about people who’ve been terminated, coordinate benefits, etc).

This isn’t talked about enough.

Microsoft still can’t manage file and email search so I’ll remain skeptical of any and all announcements about being able to locate what’s on my PC.

What you say is true, but it’s because their pricing is deliberately complex and they’re performing yield maximization. I get that. However, it feels more like a new car negotiation that wastes everyone’s time. If you’re willing to accept X price at Y volume, just say that. If you offer discounts at certain tiers, provide those tiers.

Mutual Fund companies do it, and successfully, even if you’re only signing a letter of intent and aren’t buying at the higher tier today.

The charade involving salespeople, and let-me-talk-to-my-manager isn’t as productive as it seems. I’ve walked from several vendors (or discounted them in an RFP) due to that behavior.

Is there any market or sector that PE hasn’t made worse?