Just two months ago, a security team member dinged one of our services for using Lets Encrypt, as “it’s not as secure as a traditional CA”.

I’ve had limited experience with slack, but the whole way conversations map to workspaces at least got to be confusing to me, and I would have liked an experience based on me as a user, rather than having my user span workspaces and have to juggle them to figure out how to talk to whoever I’m supposed to talk to at the time.

For me “it just works” doesn’t ring true. Generally at least once a day, I join a call and it won’t let me unmute, and I have to restart Teams.

Scrolling through history is obnoxiously slow.

The activity feed is mostly useless, spammed with stuff that isn’t important and it’s the only place that vaguely tries to keep track of ‘Teams’ conversations.

In my company, I’ve been added to about 70 Teams and it’s pretty much impossible to interact with them, so as a result no one does, they all just start ad-hoc chats, since that’s the only thing that vaguely gets managed in a way people can follow.

When going cross-organization, it’s a crap shoot whether or not we can use text, voice, and screen share/remote control. I know this is generally due to obnoxious company ‘security’ policies and other solutions have it, but it is a frustration. One recent call with a particularly screwed up company had us on two different meeting platforms at once as well as on an old fashioned conference call, because text was only allowed on one platform, screen share on another, and no audio was allowed on either (despite both supporting all three).

Sure, Teams suffers, in part, because like all corporate tools it connects you to generally dysfunctional work communities. However it broadly does have it’s own annoyances.

I would say LLMs specifically are in that ball park. Things like machine vision have been boringly productive and relatively un hyped.

There’s certainly some utility to LLMs, but it’s hard to see through all the crazy over estimations and being shoved everywhere by grifters.

Well, Trump specifically may not try because the risk/reward isn’t really good for him.

As it stands, he gets to declare an unambiguous “victory” where he won at life. He got to be president with ultimately a clean sweep of the swing states and the popular vote and served as many terms as he is allowed to serve. Thanks to the rules, he doesn’t need to compete again, and he can stop even pretending to work after 4 years.

Meanwhile, a push to establish him as “dictator for life” might at best buy him another few years in office before his health will fail. Such an effort comes with high risk, of him going down in history as more of a “bad man”, of personal risk for being targeted by violence.

Now JD Vance might be game to make a go of it, he’s got decades left in the tank. Of course broadly speaking there’s a balance of power, with those currently in power relatively comfortable knowing that the vote serves as a nice way to get pushed out of office before people get pissed enough to put you in real physical danger. Plenty of opportunities to be self-serving with a pretty safe retirement should things start going awry. Fanaticism can drive people to go further, but I would like to think a pragmatic person with a sense of self-interest can see the value in a peaceful voting out versus having those same millions of people losing their political voice.

I find it insane that with modern computing and displays, they still just render a vague check engine light despite being able to easily display the specifics.

They mostly didn’t have OSDs, they instead had indecipherable 7-segment and some fixed elements like ‘Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa’, with 2 or 3 buttons. The younger Gen-X/older Millennials got their reputation as ‘whiz kids’ in part by handling those interfaces on behalf of their mystified parents.

One, the volume knob is far quicker to respond than the usual ‘up/down’ slow volume adjustment on the wheel. The turn down the overly loud sound from the last driver immediately is nicer with a volume knob.

But with my car with hard A/C controls, I just reach down to the little ‘up/down’ toggle and tug it down a bit if I feel a little warm or bump it up a little if I feel too cold, or hit the big old button if I need to toggle it off to talk on speaker.

There are a fairly well known set of very common controls that will never be better and need an update. Coarse A/C adjustments, vent direction volume, and next-track are all no-brainers (unless you are Tesla…)

For example, here’s a layout that obviously has room and depends on touch for a lot of features, but preserves a reasonably sane set of audio and climate controls (and four miscellaneous functions)

With that you don’t look, you know pretty much immediately for the functions you would use.

There’s still plenty of room for touch/voice controls for those more nuanced/complicated things that don’t fit into button land well. Entering a navigation destination, managing any software updates, setting parameters like "should the car adjust cruise control based on speed limit signs, and if so, what adjustment to the limit should be applied?’

Particularly given the trend of ‘glue a tablet to the middle of the dashboard’. If you are going to do that anyway, bring up a modern successor to the DIN/Double DIN standard, where the mounting is standard and update to also include USB-C for standard power, audio, and data. Add some network profiles for standardized exchange of useful information (Car speedometer, car model, fuel/battery amount and efficiency profile, navigation information to drive dash/HUD, etc).

To the extent you are able to (particularly if trying to stay legal).

So for streaming content, much of that isn’t available to ‘buy’ at all. Even for the stuff you can “buy”, technically speaking in many jurisdictions it’s not legal to be able to rip your DVD or Blu Rays or remove DRM from a digital download.

For certain software, on-premise editions have been abolished or priced into the stratosphere because they don’t want that market to exist anymore. Some of that software has competent alternatives, but sometimes your choice is dictated by your clients and partners, and opting for a less compatible or merely perceived as less compatible option is a non starter. Even among on-premise editions, a lot of software vendors have switched to still having it by subscription as the only legal way to keep using it. Again, maybe for those software you can get away by breaking the law as a workaround, but legally…

This is of course assuming the conversation narrowly applies to software type things. Everyone is also rebranding ‘leasing’ as ‘as a service’ and are copying much of the software playbook, for the same reasons, including making purchase of equipment more expensive to steer people toward the ‘as a service’ revenue strategy.

Then going beyond the ‘tech’ industry, it’s getting really hard to buy a house rather than rent it from some company that has been pouring money into acquiring all the available real estate.

I have found my headset useful for work, when working from home and I don’t do camera on meetings anyway.

At home it’s pretty nice, and since my ears are open I can actually talk, so my wife actually prefers it over me wearing headphones. But all things in moderation, I wouldn’t wear it constantly.

Despite being a huge fan of the concept, I still couldn’t go for Apple’s headset, it’s heavy, it’s expensive, and lack of controllers are all deal breakers. The Quest 3 is lighter, has good controllers, and is more affordable. It may not have the displays as nice as Vision, but that doesn’t make up for the rest of the stuff.

I’m 6’0 245lbs - not obese mind you…

Technically obese. You’d have to lose 25 lbs to not be obese.

Of course Obesity is defined by BMI, and BMI is probably not as good as BRI and you might be closer to healthy by waist circumference. However your weight is probably not as healthy as you might think it is.

In my workplace, that happens in the moment of the blocker being incurred. When people are continually in communication, the daily standup is redundant and frequently for the sake of some manager/project manager who “technically” shouldn’t be part of the standup.

Yeah, look at the most prolific language at a given time. There’s your crappy projects or your soon-to-be-crappy projects. What are the universities and ‘coding academies teaching’? That’s going to be the crappiest stuff in the world when those students come out.

So too it goes with ‘management’, the popular ‘self-help’ style crap of the moment is what crappy teams will adopt, and no matter what methodology it is, that crap team is still crap, and it will reflect on that methodology.

"new sw development methodology seems to have a much lower failure rate than agile dev, claims people who stand to make money if new sw development methodology has a lower failure rate. "

I’m all for and good eye rolling at institutional Agile (basically checkered with bad management who doesn’t know what to do, but abuses buzz words and asserts Agile instead), but this article has a lot of issues.

For one, it’s a plug for someone’s consultancy, banking on recognition that, like always, crappy teams deliver crappy results and “Agile” didn’t fix it, but I promise I have a methodology to make your bad team good.

For another, it seems to gauge success based on how developers felt if they succeeded. Developers will always gripe about evolving requirements, so if they think requirements were set in stone early, they will proclaim greatness (even if the users/customers hate it and it’s a commercial failure).

On the other hand, assuming the social system isn’t the right one, hypothetically AI fully realized could make it more unreasonable and more tightly stuck the way it is.

That argument can be made about the tax incentives.

However, regulations about emissions are intrinsically something we want, and we shouldn’t hold back on that just because gas cars can’t get to the level of emissions we need.

To be fair, that’s an accurate representation of a human Gab user

To be fair, we saw formerly what Apple without jobs did, it was a failure. So one might wonder when the new Apple might run out. The catch being that the iPhone, app store, and iTunes are all indefinite money machines, except maybe iPhone one day. So they had a steak of ever increasingly wildly successful products that culminated in the iPhone and then no mind blowing follow-up, but they don’t need one. Folks may like the narrative that Jobs death coincided with their last big product category though

We also saw Jobs without Apple, also pretty much a failure.