NBJack

HR, particularly recruitment, was one of the biggest hit departments when the blood-letting started at Meta in 2022. The hiring freeze that followed didn't help.

Not all marketing is bad. Many of the beloved cartoons from decades ago were meant as marketing materials for toys and various kid items (i.e. lunch boxes). It doesn't mean it's automatically soulless.

In this case, I finally understand why they chose their most iconic colors, and appreciate the time they take on precision engineering.

Can't say I have had such a productive dream for work, but I have had dreams that helped me process emotions. For example, on separate occasions many years apart (thankfully), I've dreamt I saw a recently departed pet or family member one more time. In one specific instance, I had been so caught up in other things I hadn't actually processed the grief of the loss. Can safely say it was super helpful, if painful, and necessary.

There's research out there that supports dreams as places we process emotions. I wouldn't be surprised if that tied in to other kinds of problems.

Leaders both influence their followers with, and tend to hire those that reflect, their own values. I'm not surprised.

Most people don't run around holding out their smartphone directly in front of them. It has to be pointed at the subject, and tends to be obvious.

Smart glasses, however, are always aimed at whatever the wearer is looking at. They may or may not be recording (note the reports of people hiding the LED indicators), and at a fair distance could easily be mistaken for a normal pair.

The general populace is much more likely to notice the former recording rather than the latter.

I'm surprised you picked XP as the falling point. I didn't enjoy the days of reinstalling 95/98/ME every 6 months to avoid driver weirdness and seemingly random failures. XP was built on the foundation of 2000, which tended to make it more robust vs. its predecessors.

Vista on the other hand...

Note that it is very likely this market can't sustain this level of competition for long. We are all still chasing the carrot of AGI, while hardware costs skyrocket.

To be frank, I thought this was an elaborate April Fool's joke, particularly when I saw that. It suggested to me 'you could charge for anything' while subtly implying you should also be paying them (within a handy deploy button every few paragraphs) for the privilege of running their stuff on their hosting solution.

I suppose this is the world we live in.

This still baffles me. Never mind Windows; I can get sub-pixel font rendering with the ability to fine-tune it on virtually any major Linux distro since around 2010.

Meanwhile, Apple had this but dropped it in 2018, allegedly under the assumption of "hiDPI everywhere" Retina or Retina-like displays. Which would be great...except "everywhere" turned out to be "very specific monitors support specific resolutions".

To be frank, it's kind of embarrassing if an entry-level Windows laptop with a decent integrated GPU handles this without much effort.

Apple is free to make its own choices on priority, but I'm disappointed when something that's considered the pinnacle of creative platforms sporting one of the most advanced consumer processors available can't handle a slightly different resolution.

It's a bit nit-picky on my part, but this bizarre world of MacOS resolution/scaling handling vs. other operating systems (including Windows 11 for crying out loud) is one of my biggest gripes with using Apple hardware.

I remember having to work hard to make my non-Apple display look 'right' years ago on an Intel-based mac due to weirdness with scaling and resolutions that a Windows laptop didn't even flinch handling. It was a mix of hardware limitations and the lack of options I had to address the resolution and refresh rates I had available over a Thunderbolt doc that I shouldn't have to think about.

I honestly hope they finally fix this. I would love it if they allowed sub-pixel text rendering options again too.

You need the right ones.

Xreal One glasses anchor the screen (i.e. it stays in place as you look around), have specific (and adjustable) tech for text clarity, have low chromatic distortion, and do things entirely onboard in the hardware. I've been able to use them for hours comfortably, and have gotten corrective lens inserts to avoid having to use my glasses with them.

They now have a 32:9 mode for ultra wide resolution, which is a real boost to using my work laptop. My aging phone doesn't play as nice as it used to with this mode, but it's a real win having 3 windows arrayed comfortably.

I code and read documents for a living, and I love these things.

If ATT had been applied uniformly, sure. But Apple has exemption from its own rules. So, less trickle down benefit, and more tilting the playing field wildly in their favor. Its new advertising system is doing great!

A return to laserdiscs (with CD or BluRay technology and information density) would be wild.

Most high end headphones have a replaceable cable. What have you tried on the expensive end of the spectrum?

Legitimately listening to this book for the first time after a coworker recommended it. It's rapidly becoming one of my favorite books that balances the truly alien with the familiar just right.

Not so ironically, it came up when we were discussing "software archeology".

It has been a while, but I remember a project of mine trying to port a FTP client to a 'secure compiler' (this was long before Rust and probably a distant ancestor of Checked C). In theory, if I could successfully port it, it would be much more resilient to particular kinds of issues (and maybe even attacks). This was in the era where formal proof coding was trying to take off as well in the industry.

After wading through an impressive number of compiler errors (again, it was technically compatible) and attempts to fix them, I eventually surrendered and acknowledged that at the very least, this was beyond my abilities.

I probably would had gotten much further just rewriting it from scratch.

I'm not sure anyone at the company can say that with a straight face anymore.

The age old tactic of vilification. It's easy to overlook all the nuances on all sides; it's a whole spectrum with plenty of overlap.

My hope in the US is that folks at least take the time to evaluate their options and/or candidates; voting a straight ticket just because someone calls themselves something can lead to undesirable outcomes.

Admirable, but short of a local credit union I used to use (which I am no longer with as they f'd up a rather critical transaction), I can scarcely imagine a business that fits such a model these days. The amount of transparency needed to vet this would be interesting to find though, and its mere presence probably a green flag.

Ugh, yes. Normally, you can theoretically pair someone up with a stronger engineer and watch as they learn and grow through their mistakes, while the stronger engineer keeps them on the proverbial straight and narrow with what they produce, through code reviews, documents, etc.

But now, I can't trust any of the models to be that reliable. I can't delegate that responsibility. And since context and prompting is such a fickle thing, I can't really trust any of them to learn from their mistakes, either.

I think you missed the joke: he isn't an organization at all, but the error message claims he is.

Citation needed. Talk, especially in the 'agentic age', is cheap.

In what ways? Apple, IMHO, has been jumping on every proverbial band wagon. And some of its 'better intended' changes like ATT seem only to have been to stifle competition while they set up their own solution.

Real-time multi-directional communications over massive geographic areas with tens of thousands of physical cell sites connected to ~140M devices vs... public text messages with media.

I realize your point, but its fair to say maintaining a nationwide physical wireless infrastructure may not be the same as hosting tweets, particularly when outages strike.

I like the idea of someone getting an agenda item promoted because they bought a boost or used a server tag.

Which is fine until they pick the wrong window to fire back with creative insults at their guildmates.

For now. Let's not forget MS Office had a period like that as well. I give it five years max.

It will be interesting to see how RAM prices affect the behavior of all companies.

I wouldn't mind if this finally lights a fire under certain software companies to also actually optimize their shit for memory use, but... I'm not that optimistic.

I will pile on here and claim Apple is shockingly hostile to accessibility. From the weird way tabs work for focus to the limited options for text clarity, to the lack of control for mice customization, it feels like it has been a low item on their priorities for some time.

Those are great but often expensive mice. I wish the Apple tax didn't extend to third party hardware, but here we are.