Re bullet 2. Irresponsibility.

My theory is that it is isn’t the badge on the car, it’s the fact that people’s grocery getter now was the performance of a high-end sports car from a decade ago. And, like a with a sports car, Teslas are designed to encourage users to have “fun” driving. Every test drive from a Tesla store ALWAYS includes a segment where the store rep encourages people gun it onto or on a large open road.

Before Telsa it was the German manufacturers who dominated the commuter-car-with-sports-car-performance market. And guess what? Those people drove like a-holes.

When I was in middle school I thought “warez” was pronounced “juárez.” I’m not a smart man.

Good point.

Luckily Apple uses UPS in my area, and there delivery windows are inaccurate as fuck.

People like long battery life and computers that don’t cook your crotch.

If you look at who is manufacturing silicon, the numbers look even worse for Intel. All of these competitors are using TSMC fabs. AMD, Apple, Qualcomm, etc.

TSMC is the real 500lb gorilla in the room.

Most internet users have no idea what it is.

Have you thought about upgrading to an aftermarket stereo or a one of those CarPlay / aa units that connects to your car’s existing auto inputs? I had CarPlay in a 2001 Subaru.

Exactly. These systems have been around for a decade and my new phone still works on an old Alpine CarPlay head unit from 2014.

Base alpine software may feel dated, but once the phone is in, I get the modern version of all my mapping, listening, and communication software.

Projection systems rock. I was an early adopter and I refuse to go back. Docking a phone on an air vent is janky.

Yeah, but most manufacturers support CarPlay and Android Auto these days. Your car’s dashboard experience inherits whatever your phone’s OS projection system sends.

My old car’s onboard infotainment may be a decade behind, but when I plug my phone in, it’s 2024.

After rolling to CarPlay and Android auto for a while, I’d rather not use a tiny handheld UI when I drive. iOS and Android’s auto UIs have bigger buttons and are more glanceable. If I’m using a screen while driving, I’d rather the screen that was designed for peripheral vision and less precise button targeting.

I’m sure Trump and his new auto industry advisor, Elon Musk, will get right on that. 😔

Oof. I can’t imagine how devastating it would be to lose a down payment. Many people, especially first time home buyers, are throwing every spare bit of savings, and need to borrow money from friends and family, for that payment.

I don’t know if they’re already doing this, but they need to find ways to make security so robust that it is architecturally impossible for the business to handover useful data.

And here’s hoping courts continue to allow people to plead the 5th and not fork over passwords. If that protection falls, I don’t know how you’d design a digital workaround that would keep people out of contempt of court charges.

These autocrats have always wanted to drop NATO.

Let’s not pretend like X is their reason. Supporting autocracy is their reason, and now they’re trying to come up with excuses to get the public onboard.

K.

All I can say is that for many of us in people management here,

a) we could’ve paid our mortgage just as comparably on an IC track, and we do this job because we enjoy working with people and roadmap strategy, and

b) I don’t care whether you’re building a fintech bro trading app, public housing in the USSR, or are conducting an orchestra. You get enough people in one place trying to achieve a shared goal, and you need people to manage the people. Otherwise the work becomes messy and miserable.

I say this as someone who has worked for small companies, large companies, NGOs, and non-hierarchical collectives.

When you start working on something that is complex, and has a lot of moving parts, you need conductors. If you’ve got a better real-world example of an organizational model that works, I’m all ears.

Even in Leninist Russia, workplace structures had people managers in place to facilitate planning and to ensure that a team was aligned and set up to successfully accomplish a goal.

I’ve only ever seen one org structure that didn’t need some sort of people facilitation layer. And that was a tiny commune that a buddy of mine lived on. And everyone knew each other for years before they established said commune.

A lot of us here work in software. Often times there are two tracks, IC and people management. Often times both of those tracks pay similarly.

The good people managers and directors are usually folk that were identified as being good at mentoring people and good at providing air cover so people could do good work.

I’m sorry you’ve never worked at a place with good middle management. It does exist in many places, and many people selected it because they like working with the people and the strategy more than the product directly. Often times these people could’ve been paid comparably by working as a staff or principal track engineer or experience designer.

I don’t know about nobody. Did you see what “one horny user” wrote?