kmarc

Some yes, and then all sorts of mood boosters, painkillers, etc. Basically all the stuff I later saw during a commercial break at a bar during some sports game. (this should be banned, TBH)

Above 50? My 30+ year old American friends are all running on pills, daily, many different of them. I was shocked.

So I am rather with you. It should be normal not to take medicines.

While that's true, UBS also canceled some Filipino contracts. I guess UBS just sucks in general and has to cut costs a lot, these days.

You didn't say they are clueless but I did :-)

Also, I'm not saying that it's great to have these high performant researcher-founded startups, my point is simply that because of these, the "numbers" don't look too bad.

BTW, In Switzerland "you get 80% of your last salary", as most of the people heard from this or that. Obviously this is not the entire story (it is capped, it's not necessary 80%, etc etc) - some people think, oh I made 250k, therefore I'm entitled to 200k now. With that said, in a very optimal case, here you can get around 150k as unemployment benefit, which is still enormously high compared to other countries.

To your main point: it feels like CH is losing a lot of "in-house" knowledge and mostly the managerial / leader positions are growing here. This is somewhat masked by the fact that the universities show top notch research (mainly with foreign students tho), and there are many startups that eventually make some noise. But classical business will suffer a lot from off-shoring literally any real knowledge and know how that is normally needed to create a product. As one of my ex-managers said: "it's crazy that we cannot even produce aspirin anymore in Switzerland".

And then some more anecdata:

I happened to be part of Acronis during the time when they tried helping escape all the Engineers in Moscow to Bulgaria. (I have stories, yes, I was in the HQ in Moscow too). The engineers, who made Acronis (the product) were always in Bulgaria for the past 5+ years, so that one is not like the other examples.

I also ended up working for a small banking startup, 20 of us tried to do business on the regional banking sphere. I left during the time when the company was inflated with 40+ offshore (Balkans) engineers.

To be precise, the ex googlers are not clueless about engineering (or at least I hope so), but about how the unemployment system in CH works, and they are also out of touch salary-wise.

Switzerland has something similar these days (UBS-CS merger, big tech layoffs, too expensive local workforce)

I applied to 39 jobs (mostly through LinkedIn)

Out of which 29 in Switzerland, the rest mainly fully remote in Europe and US.

I got in total around 6 companies' 20-something interviews. Exactly ONE interview ouf of those was in Switzerland. Crazy

(I might just not be enough for this competitive market, I know. Eventually I ended up with a consulting job within the EU, obviously for lower daily rate, which is fine)

Fun thing is, the local "unemployment office" (RAV) told me they have to deal with clueless ex-googlers asking for 200k+ unemployment benefits, almost weekly

Here is an example. The toolbar has subtly colored icons:

https://www.windowspro.de/sites/windowspro.de/files/imagepic...

While just because a company wants this, I doubt this is the future, however...

Just a couple days ago I was thinking about this (and in fact, started exploring icon packs for my desktop) that all the UIs I use are reduced to "black and white" icons and widgets. Colors are missing, sophisticated shapes too. Sometimes I am actually wondering what an icon is meant to represent.

At my new gig I have to use web Outlook (not allowed to use my finger-memorized mutt setup), and I must say it's a pleasure to look at the UI. Still line drawing icons, but and elegant play with colors at least. Similar to how some LibreOffice Icon packs look like.

I rather hope this is the future. Use colors as accents, leverage a "grouping" functionality with them.

The ';-- in front of Pwned is a brilliant idea but less brilliant execution. Missed opportunity, I'm wondering how many people don't realize what it is

> how simultaneously stern everybody looks with no fake smiles or hidden gazes. People were willing to just stare at something or somebody odd

FWIW, the fake smiles and hidden gazes, to me the least, were always a North American thing.

In fact, in Switzerland we have its opposite, the infamous "Swiss stare" :-)

https://www.newlyswissed.com/about-the-swiss-stare/

Choosing the bike path for bike navigation would be, although slower, much safer than what the apps propose

This would more or less follow the brown-signaled bike path at Letziground:

https://cycle.travel/map?from=&to=&fromLL=47.390987,8.478737...

(I can't tell by heart how it is beyond that, I just follow the signs :-) )

But cycle.travel seems truly amazing! It's super fast to add detours.

I just did, and liked that there are alternatives.

Farbhof => Altstadt.

Example: https://mapy.com/en/zakladni?planovani-trasy&rc=98FWsxKe1G98...

Thanks for the input.

I happened to work for a car navigation software development company 15+y ago. Cool stuff, Windows CE / PDAs as devices, android and ios nowhere. These were totally offline devices (map updates through usb / sdcard).

Even then, this offline navigation was super fast, across countries. Today I managed to wait a whole minute for a 5km bike navigation in OsmAnd. Then I uninstalled (after years of hoping for improvement. Yes, I was regularly donating money.)

The OsmAnd guys tried launching OpenPlaceReviews.

https://2019.stateofthemap.org/sessions/LBGPCD/

Unfortunately it didn't take off, was discountinued in 2023.

https://github.com/OpenPlaceReviews

Other map apps offer different routes between two points, showing the trade-off in time. Organic Maps calculates one route, and it doesn't matter if it's through a deadly car-congested highway.

My example is going from Zürich West to Downtown. Here is my experience:

* Organic maps: calculates fast, although through a street with a lot of traffic, no alternatives offered.

* OsmAnd: takes 5 seconds on a flagship phone to RENDER the current view. I try to avoid zoom and pan. What the hell. Calculating the navigation is either a couple seconds or a minute. The whole UX is totally broken, however, at least you can select to prefer byways / bicycle routes.

* Mapy: fast rendering, fast pathfinding, alternatives offered, configurable to use bike paths.

* Google Maps: totally random what happens, it's a combination of the above (I guess it tries to use live traffic data, too?)

Now the funny thing is that there is an actual signaled bicycle path (which I prefer, since it avoids traffic), and OSM does have this data. None of the app would prefer that path, unfortunately (it's maybe 20 minutes instead of 18 minutes, but much safer).

It feels like most of the apps are hyperfocused on one type of navigation / exploration / feature set (being offline is huge, though), and nothing comes close to Google Maps' "not the best, but delivers alright UX across all these features" approach.

Yes :-)

Streetcomplete is amazing; I understand it provides less polygons to render but it does an absolutely amazing job at it, even when there are thousands of quests.

this looks promising, thanks for sharing :-)

The biggest for me is definitely the lack of public transportation. This is something even gnome-maps support. Global search (eg. things that are not downloaded yet) only works for some bigger entities, that are part of the world map (although I understand that this would need some server-side support). Not having a satellite map is also a bummer.

Point-to-point navigation at places where you already downloaded maps is alright (same with osmand), but for exploration, or public trasnport, I would need to use moovit, mapy, osmand (wikipedia overlay is awesome), or google maps.

Sad to see the current state of mobile OSM-based apps. Maps.me becoming OrganicMaps, now this. Lot of development effort, great work going into it, but somehow, after years, the apps don't feel more user-friendly.

I was pushing hard to replace Google Maps, but eventually, I gave up. OsmAnd is great if you need that "swiss army knife of OSM apps" on your phone, but I rarely do. Same with Maps.me/Organic Maps, try to search for something, mistype only one letter (surprise, surprise, that happens a lot on mobile), and you have no chance to get results. Alternative path for your bike route? Forget about it. Rendering is awful, either ugly, or slow, or both.

I am trying to switch to Mapy.com (Mapy.cz before), it's a surprisingly user friendly app, however, not sure how they are going to monetize soon. So far the best on phone, I hope they will push and really become a Maps-replacement. They recently switched from a Czech-focused concept to a proper world-wide map (mapy.com); both web and mobile is great so far. (I am not Czech, and have no relation to mapy, simply really like their app)

If OsmAnd got a new rendering engine (no, not that "3D" sluggish thing it has for a couple years now), like streetcomplete has (or the Strava-built-in mapbox renderer), it would be possibly the best.

I'm working in the developer productivity space.

I think you'd be surprised, how many people do production code WITHOUT automated formatting / linting / static analysis.

Now these people and their managers are staring at the shiny new thing, the LLMs. They missing googling skills are fixed by LLMs ont heir everyday life, so they think a magic "code quality tool" (AI) would help them in they work.

To answer your question, obviously there are many linters/analyzers for Java (and for other languages too), both for static and dynamic code analysis, formatters, everything.

Hard situation to be in this post-LLM era, but a rebrand would probably not help at this point. The comments here tell a lot, the negative sentiment is quite strong in general.

Maybe this was it for them, but I would still want to appreciate what SO did for the global programming community (especially for people who have less means to access high quality information / education). Thanks!

Now on-prem Stackoverflow, (SO for teams?) now THAT is a cancer that should be killed.

The file API might not, but all major filesystems implemented some kind off Metadata attributes, IIRC Microsoft was wanting to heavily rely on that for "user space" stuff (e.g. Users leveraging it for semantic information about their files)

Don't get me wrong, I'm totally happy woth files. In fact, I'm sometimes a bit annoyed when certain apps' entities don't map to files either accidentally or to maintain the walled garden on purpose (I'm looking at you Google Photos, and the very cumbersome rclone connector to it).

On the other hand, I don't mind that full storage access is a "pain"; I don't even remember which apps I gave the permission to, and I would certainly be angry if my syncthinged files would be stolen by other app that went vicious.

All that said, as people don't think about their documents/photos/any other stuff in their homes as "filed items in folders", non-tech people also don't think about their digital items as such. And maybe this is alright, if the "file-ification" would have been so successful, better products would have emerged.

I assume this is the same "problem". Most people (not the HN cohort) don't want to transfer "files", the abstraction of the file is either outdated for them or maybe even unnatural / unknown (younger generation).

They might want to transfer (a better word: share) photos/videos, documents, etc. And for those they use specific apps and "the cloud". No "files" (for the sake of files), and barely any hierarchy of (folders etc).

As long as the entity they want to share magically shows up on the another device or at the other person they want to share with, they are happy. They just skip two levels of abstraction ("this photo is a FILE and I will use USB to transfer it"). Maybe a far fetched analogy but this is why most of the drivers of an automatic don't really think about clutches and how the torque of the engine's output is converted.

At least this is my perception (outside the IT bubble)

There are things where you don't need scaling, maybe.

Around me there are a lot of those community gardens. It's encouraged by the city, and you can rent a piece of land for yourself.

https://www.lebendige-traditionen.ch/tradition/en/home/tradi...

(with that said, I grew up on a "farm", and as a child had to do a lot of gardening. I understand your enthusiasm about the flavors, but oh heck no, I'll eat the tasteless food for now and happy to not having to deal with all the work in the gardens :) )

Oh the memories. Did the same as you, and extended my Antigua stay for a 2+ week workation (timezone is neatly lining up with US).

It is an underrated country, I remember that after Tikal I ended up at ChichenItza and it just felt boring (and way too touristy) compared to the lush jungle beauty in Tikal and Yaxhá.

Happened to me. Waking up 3am sweating, immediately back to panic mode about my boss, in the middle of the freaking night.

I did quit. No matter how hard it became later, I had enough savings and rather started looking for a new job.

I don't have any proof for you, neither for myself. But I feel I will thank my past self later, and appreciate that I didn't suffer under unnecessary stress when I was younger.

Joplin worked great when I spent 8h+ daily on my laptop (computer with big screen and physical keyboard).

During my long sabbatical, I wanted to take notes on my phone, a LOT. Joplin sucks at that, clumsy, non-user friendly android client.

Tried obsidian (first on mobile) and it is superb. I had to install a couple extensons (S3 sync, "Ink" for drawing with a pen), and it just works. It's so good, I sometimes even edit tables on my phone. With Joplin, note taking on my phone was just dumping thoughts in random formats to it and later fixing it on my desktop.

Like Joplin, Obsidian also has a Firefox extension to capture a web page I to markdown.

So after a couple days of trial, I realized that all the features Joplin has, obsidian has it too, with a much better (and snappier) UX on both my Linux desktop and Android. The only thing I wish for of it was Open Source. But oh well, I'm not dogmatic about that anymore