Presumably by streamlining development so they can quickly deliver functionality to paying customers.
3,991 karma · joined October 8, 2009
Working on ZJIT & TruffleRuby at Shopify.
¹ -- https://github.com/Shopify/spoom
The CFPB statements outline where BloomTech was misleading at best. You can’t dress up a loan as some other name and skirt regulations, no matter how much small print you use.
Also, thank you for linking to a particular commit. I wish GitHub would do that by default. The web is littered with GitHub links that either no longer work or highlight incorrect lines.
Consequently, I wish more sites used Bootstrap. As an end user I don’t care a whole lot about a brand’s identity or style. I don’t want to have to guess and check to figure out what’s a tab or a menu or how to access settings. The number of custom layouts I’ve had to memorize is staggering and often gets invalidated when someone gets promoted and decides the site or app needs a new design.
Desktop window frameworks may have been bland, but they were based on actual usability studies and I think we gave that up too readily.
For what it’s worth, I think we’re going to see a slide in quality. Maybe there will be a niche for some. But, I think companies will settle for 70% quality if it means eliminating 100% of a full-time position.
* Invested in quality audio equipment that they'd like like to continue using without a crappy dongle
* Bluetooth dongles don't have the same level of integration that EarPods do, for instance (e.g., button presses don't work the same way)
* Lightning or USB-C headphone adapters are easy to lose track of
* Lightning or USB-C headphone adapters are awkward sticking out of your phone and risk breaking the port
* Dislike like the environmental impact of moving to a model of disposable equipment with non-replaceable batteries
* Tired of the inconvenience of dropping wireless ear phones and not being able to find them (e.g., this happens frequently on flights¹)
* Weary of dealing with Bluetooth issues (e.g., my AirPod Pros randomly disconnect from my iPhone with regularity and I have to click multiple things to switch from my phone to my work laptop)
It's fine if these don't apply to you, but they're a little more substantive than the Luddite hand-wringing you suggest.. And for them the trade-off to get a slightly slimmer phone wasn't worth it. That's not to say there aren't advantages to wireless headphones, but supporting one doesn't mean having to preclude the other.
¹ -- https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/16uuyse/...
No, of course not. There isn't an enumerated list of weird cases and if your weird case doesn't match you can get a tax advantage. There are rules about what is and isn't deductible and if you're unclear, you can ask the IRS for a clarification. If you don't get that clarification you better be prepared to adequately defend your tax theory when you get audited. What I suggested is what they're doing may not be in line with the rules about what is deductible. It seems like something should be evaluated.
> There's no way that you can save taxes by doing this.
You absolutely can save taxes by doing this. They're not only not paying any tax, they're offsetting tax they would otherwise pay on a profitable film. I think what you're saying is that they couldn't get enough tax deductions to offset the money they put into the film development. That's a claim I didn't make. I do think it's possible they could get back more money than they otherwise should. It's not like tax fraud is a rare occurrence. And that situation could make this maneuver more attractive. I think it's worth an audit.
To be fair, I saw "Wish" with my family and we all enjoyed it, but it obviously didn't come close to "Frozen 2" numbers. They're not all hits. With animated film taking years to produce, those perhaps aren't the metric to use. It'll be another few years before the next major animated film by Disney is released.
The Marvel movies release more frequently and seem to print money. "Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume 3" came out last year and has done $845MM¹.
Most people aren't solving deep societal needs in their free time. If you want to limit it to software, most of us have jobs that hardly improve society or the planet. Most open source code isn't advancing society. What I don't understand is why you've singled out the participants of this particular project for your ire.
I don't know any of the individuals involved personally. My guess is they're not the ones that built physical products with PFCs, ran coal-powered factories and operated strip mining operations, designed nuclear weaponry, or even fly personal jets. I'd hazard to say your average front-end developer chugging through batteries with inefficient frameworks is doing more harm than this project.
If your aim is to clean up the tech industry, I think that's laudable. I believe tech people have for the most part shirked their own contribution to our carbon footprint or other societal needs. But, I think you'll find there are much bigger targets actively doing harm (or certainly not helping things) regularly because it's profitable and/or convenient.
In contrast, many of us treat computers as a magic black box. The abstraction is great for productively building web apps. But, we've lost sight of how things work and I think that's led to steep decline in performance and, perhaps, security. I don't pine for manual resource management in all things, but knowing how syscalls work can help build context on when and why you should use them. Revisiting how to build an OS that isn't rooted in decades-old Linux or BSD code could be really instructive.
I had found someone else scammed by the same seller and I was annoyed enough to go to the police. The police called it a civil matter and refused to do anything. Obviously I didn’t have the seller’s real name so I couldn’t pursue that angle. I saw from another Facebook account that the seller is still hawking counterfeit goods. So, I guess that’s effectively legal.
> However, those hyper-detailed commit messages that some people seem to like? High cost, very low payback. Better to put all that effort into other docs instead.
I guess I'm one of those people? I don't think the cost is very high. It's certainly no higher than putting them into another document. I don't get the emphasis on "very low payback" though. I've had to dig into projects where those detailed comments saved me weeks of effort. I love reading the rationale and any associated pitfalls with a nice code diff contextualizing the whole thing. And it's right there, easily accessible in my SCM log, where it integrates with the CLI and IDE. No 404s or issues because the startup that created the project died or was sold and the domain is no longer in use.
I've seen this comment repeated in most discussions about this topic and it doesn't align with my experience. I'm trying to better understand that. Are you talking solely about web apps with continuous deployment, maybe with things blocked by feature flags? On many projects I work on splitting a PR by commit would grossly complicate things. And not using multiple commits makes it harder to track changes. I rely quite a bit on being able to read through source history and piece together what changed and why. But, I also work on compilers and runtimes which have a different deployment model and don't generally have a high amount of code churn.
I find source control rather unhelpful on any project I've participated in using squash merges. It helps distribute changes, but little more than that. I can't learn anything looking at the history. It requires access to GitHub because I can't access the original individual commits otherwise, making "git log" useless. It makes the mechanics of bisecting easier, but actually doing anything about it much harder, unless I want to revert the entire changeset. I find there isn't often an appetite for that, so we end up with follow-up commits that undermine the benefit of a single commit in the first place. You can't cherry-pick. Etc.
I can see some domains where you never really rollback and where things get replaced frequently enough that having access to the source history may not be valuable. But, I don't think it's a one size fits all situation. We have decades of experience prior to the squash merge feature in GitHub that demonstrates the utility of smaller commits.
Individual, logical commits are an incredibly powerful tool when stepping into a large codebase where the original author is no longer around. It's an opportunity for the author to document the rationale or design for a scoped change. Squash merges often add too much noise. Sure, you can roll up all the commit messages into one, but without access to the original commits that's of limited value.
The situation isn't much better on Android. Yes, there are multiple stores, but since Google Play Services are locked up you effectively have to use the Play Store. Of course, there's more to consider than just the store and there are other reasons, some involving lock-in, to want to use an iPhone.
> While this presents a few problems, my chief concern is that it unwinds some of the great features that Apple essentially lobbied for on behalf of customers. Features such as Sign in with Apple, and other privacy oriented features.
Using Android as an example, that just didn't happen. Granted, part of that is the hoops Google has you jump through to sideload anything. Samsung and Amazon both have stores and outside of Amazon Fire devices, their adoption is quite minimal. So, I don't think this future where everyone abandons the Apple App Store is apt to happen. Having competition in the space should spur Apple to deliver more. And as a consumer I have the option to sideload apps on my computing device if I'd like.
> With multiple app stores customers have no bargaining power or anyone bargaining on their behalf. It’s a marriage of corporate interests united against customers.
I don't know what power I really have with Apple's App Store. Some parts are nice. Some aren't. I have no ability to influence that. I can't "let the market speak" without using a completely different device.
Moreover, other app stores need to have an actual proposition to get adopted. Assuming companies still want to make money, they'll likely still sell apps through the Apple App Store.
> I’m struggling to see the benefit to customers. It seems like we’re trying to screw normal people so a few big companies like Meta can make an extra buck and grab up more of your data.
I don't care at all about helping Meta make more money. I think you'll find that's true for almost everyone. I'm not looking to screw myself or anyone else for that matter. I do care about the grabbing more of your data part. But, that's an argument against mobile apps. In Apple's locked down ecosystem I have no control over the data collected. In a web app I can run a blocker, at least.
I care that mobile devices are the general computation devices of this generation and we ceded control of it to Apple and Google then let them add a 30% tax onto it and control what we can run on our computers. If Microsoft did this with Windows applications, we would rightfully call out their anti-competitive behavior.
The common retort at this point is "just don't use a mobile device." That was a valid answer for a while, but particularly with covid, a lot of things became mobile apps with no web alternatives. I had doctor's appointments that required using an application on one of those two platforms.
As a consumer, I also dislike that Apple and Google don't really need to respond to market demands. Changing platforms is a huge upheaval and can be quite costly, since there's really no cross-platform licenses available. You just need to re-purchase all of your apps and any media. They also lock you in with their cloud services. Sure, I could use Dropbox, but Photo shared libraries only work with iCloud. They have a captive audience and get away with a lot that they wouldn't with a competitive marketplace.
I get it. Plenty of people like the gilded Apple path. But, we're well beyond the point of platform being limited to peripherals for Apple enthusiasts. These are primary computing devices that are essentially unavoidable. Switching to Google is an impractical solution and doesn't address the core problem anyway, so that's a non-starter. If the cost of opening up the platform is you can't get Fortnite in the Apple App Store, I can live with that. In the unlikely event Apple nailed every aspect of this, from pricing, to store presentation, to content restrictions, then its massive population of happy customers will ensure the App Store is the primary destination for applications. Otherwise, competition should force Apple to improve its service or decrease its prices to actually compete.
I think it’s rather optimistic to believe the Epic Games Store going to overtake Steam. If that’s the criteria for raising their cut, I wouldn’t expect it to happen anytime soon. Outside of annoying exclusive distribution rights on some games, having another store has given game developers another way to sell and players a way to purchase games cheaper. With that said, I’d guess their real gambit is to create enough pressure to drive the standard 30% down.
Maybe 30% made sense at one point. Maybe it does now. It strikes me that there have been efficiencies that haven’t been passed along to the consumer. Having a competitive market would let us find out.
Having another “store” doesn’t necessarily mean having to get apps elsewhere. E.g., the one platform app store has severely degraded my ability to enjoy audiobooks. I used to be able to buy books directly in Audible (on Android anyway). It was convenient and Audible offered daily deals. I’d get books on a whim and discover new authors that way. Once Audible had to start paying a 30% tax, that feature went away. Now I have to browse & purchase in a web browser, which is far less convenient.
Incidentally, both Apple and Google sell audiobooks. Presumably they aren’t paying a 30% tax themselves and can use that as a builtin price advantage. But, then I’m tied to that platform.
In this case, you'd be making an "in-app purchase" with your Amazon account. There's no new annoyance in payment management and there's no new store to browse. You just get a more convenient way to buy content.
In many cases, taking performance into account up front adds little overhead and won’t appreciably affect the design. But, if you codify some algorithmically inefficient approach into your public API, you’re going to find that hard to unwind. The engineering team should advocate for that when designing the product.
> That is going to cost me more than a Franklin per year. Life is short, my time is precious, and my money is ultimately expendable.
When you're looking at cloud services, you need to perform your own off-site backup. Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc. will maintain copies that they'll restore in the event of a hardware failure. But, if your account gets compromised or a buggy sync or bad API event happens, your data is gone. They're not going to go restore it from tape for you. This is a big part of why I do have an in-home NAS. Maybe you have everything sync'd with a laptop and that has you covered, but Apple's expanded storage options are outlandishly expensive so I doubt many with the 2TB+ plans are able to do that. (Yes, you could use external storage, but that's also rather inconvenient for a Photos.app library.)
We could both get what we want if these storage operations weren't wrapped up in proprietary APIs. If I use iCloud I get a seamless experience on macOS, but no access at all on Linux. If I use Dropbox I get access on Linux, but little more than photo sync on an iPhone. Given the decades of precedent with filesystems and I/O APIs, I suspect we could have an abstraction layer and an implementation layer that would allow for interoperability. Anyone that wants to pay for iCloud are free to do so, others could use their preferred storage engine. But, allowing access into the walled garden is far less profitable.
For most people, storage needs are going to increase over time (more + higher resolution photos & videos, larger apps, document storage, etc.). 6TB for a family is not unreasonable and that's what? Three Franklins and three Jacksons per year + whatever for an external drive for your offsite backups. What comes after the 6TB option? Storage costs have decreased drastically over time, unless you're using a proprietary service; consumers are not benefiting at all from those gains in efficiency.
Even if I’m dead wrong and there’s a throng of people just waiting for a Segway fire sale, it doesn’t invalidate my point. If your product solves the problem by ignoring the economics of your target customer base that’s just as problematic as building the wrong product.
Electric scooters have seen a lot more traction. Both teams can’t use the supposed Henry Ford quote to say the customer doesn’t know what they want. Or, rather they can, but that doesn’t mean they have any more of a clue than the customer does.
My point is maybe we should stop being so antagonistic to the customer. You’ll find no shortage of instances where the customer is wrong. But there’s plenty of others where the customer is right and the product team is wrong. I’m tired of dealing with products that think they know better than me because they think they’re inventing cars.
I look at the Segway as a counter example. Maybe people really did just want a faster way to walk through a city. No offense to Dean Kamen —- he has a very impressive set of accomplishments.
I fully support performing user studies to better understand the problem domain and the feature space. I think your bullet points illustrate some of the challenges in finding the right balance. Unfortunately, I’ve run into way more Segway builders than I have car inventors. They build something based on founder intuition or just bad user studies and then glibly dismiss customer requests as calls for faster horses. I lack the time, energy, and desire to adapt to whatever custom workflow is added because I supposedly don’t know my domain well enough to know what I want.
There’s probably a B2C and B2B split in there, but I’ve never seen that distinction made in application of some of this advice. I know you aren’t advocating for the outright dismissal of user feedback, but I’ve seen that interpretation time and time again. I’d love for us to get a new metaphor or apocryphal story.