Friedduck

These were marvels back in the day. Everything from spot gold prices to an expat job board. It was a news and research clearing house. It calculated accrued income on fixed income securities, it had real-time quotes and trading.

This was in the infancy of electronic trading, too. The FIX standards were still being negotiated and deployed. Broadband didn’t really exist reliably.

Truly remarkable for their time.

As much as I’m on-board with EVs this isn’t as compelling as the Ford Maverick at the price point. As you add features they’re at price parity and you arguably get much more for your money with the Ford.

I ditched them after the last incident. So glad I don’t have to go through that again.

Outlook has been an embarrassment for years. Poor defaults, bugs that have existed for years, and sub-par performance.

Search for a meeting: it shows you the oldest first.

Busy search calendars? It may or may not show working hours. It’s incapable of helpfully locating a mutually agreeable time in the way more modern agents can.

Search for mail? It’s an abomination trying to prioritize what you actually want.

The settings aren’t intuitively organized and a hodgepodge of UI standards.

It’s a huge relief. This was one of the largest frauds about to be forced upon so many unsuspecting investors. Epic in proportion.

There is so much wrong with Windows. So many neglected corners that have existed for decades and their response is to add AI.

Fix settings. Fix UI customization. Fix notifications. Fix search. Fix multitasking and network blocking. Fix sleep behavior.

I could go on. They need an entire year of house-cleaning before they add AI.

I had two friends (both PHDs, both worked for the CDC) leave the US this week.

In addition to the tumult at the agency, they were being monitored for what they did on their own time. Truly draconian stuff.

Want to collaborate with the WHO? Forbidden. Speak at a conference abroad on vacation time? Nope.

I don’t blame them. The autocratic push at the top feels different when it extends beyond work, and touches causes you feel deeply about. It’s a huge loss for the US.

You can disable windows folder type detection to speed the laggy file explorer navigation. It’s a registry hack and so limited for corporate machines.

My two chief complaints are instability and lack of consistency across the UI. There are 20-year-old dialogs lurking behind shiny new interfaces.

Search doesn’t work reliably. Right-Clicking on a file twice in a row will often present different options. Finally, inserting AI where you least expect or want it just slows common tasks. I don’t need AI to guess the next data value in a series.

They’ve left a huge opening for Google, more so than Apple, to get a foot in the door for corporate computing.

It’s shocking that this hasn’t happened sooner. At its height the cost was over $10k and at that point Tesla had all but doomed its cars by removing sensors they deemed unnecessary.

It’s also appropriate to point out: Waymo and others have been doing this for years. Tesla is a fraud.

While understanding their motivation to combat fraud they have a 20-year purchase history and have already established identity through payment methods. This is just lazy and perhaps additional data harvesting.

Amazon got so large they stopped paying attention to the details.

Funny because Salesforce grew out of Oracle and initially sought to become the anti-Oracle. What was their pitch? Rent your software?

One of the most productive project managers I ever worked with did this. He’s easily top decile.

In addition to my own text file I use the Clear app for quick lists. Recommended.

I only have a couple of services that use this pattern and I’m cancelling them out of frustration.

If i use a personal email then I can’t access it on corporate machines and vice versa.

Theres so much friction in the process it’s not worth maintaining the service.