Shacklz

PRs are the final chance to avoid mishaps; be it some junior overdoing DRY, be it someone in the team misunderstanding (or insufficiently understanding) a requirement, something being forgotten, edge-case missed - practically anything! Before/During PR, a single person owns the code, after merge it's everyone in the project.

Someone who just rubberstamps PRs works either in a completely different setting than anything I can imagine or it's just someone who doesn't take ownership & responsibility as serious as I'd require people I want to work with; I can't quite see much room for gray area there...

Very well put. A PR is the final (and ultimate) chance to say "no" to a change - after that it's part of the software, it needs to be maintained, it can have impact on stability/quality etc.

I don't quite understand how someone in charge of a software (techlead or similar title) can't take this serious; I know a few such people and I generally prefer to avoid working with them...

We're at a point where the biggest possible contribution to humanity of many PMs in big corps would be to just... drop dead. Feature-freeze rather than furthering the enshittification, as that seems all they're capable of.

I'd wish the world would just become boring again.

Tao can use LLMs on his own terms, on his conditions. Under those circumstances, it's an absolutely fantastic tool.

In an enterprise, everyone gets to use LLMs. Everyone can create slop. In an enterprise environment, this can lead to weird situations where the senior has to put in extra efforts to contain the slop of others... so I can kind of see where the "hinders seniors" is coming from.

> + the whole "I am a elite Path of Exile"-saga

That was the most "the emperor wears no clothes"-moment I've ever witnessed in my life. I play more PoE than I care to admit, and it was obvious within mere seconds that he has absolutely no clue what's going on.

It was absolutely surreal to watch.

Possibly just a case of having seen "AI-language" too often and just starting to use it themselves?

Honestly we should define 80% as the new "100%" on such batteries and label "charging to full" as "overcharging".

Psychologically, people understand charging a battery to "125%" (or whatever) a lot better: Do it when you really need to but if you do it all the time it wears down the battery a lot faster.

No nagware but, at least on the machines of my colleagues, an even worse enemy: Microsoft Defender with all the checkboxes ticked. Grinds the machine to an absolute halt for any development work - sometimes the responsible security department has mercy and gives exceptions for certain folders/processes, sometimes not.

Ubisoft launcher being so bad that people prefer the cracked, launcher-free version should go down in the history as example of some of the worst product-management there is.

I'm totally in the same boat; I've not bought several Ubisoft-games I was interested in playing because their launcher is such a cancer (if anyone from Ubisoft is on HN: What on earth are you guys smoking?).

I'm too lazy to bother with pirating games these days (I have more games than time to play them anyway), but younger me would've certainly went to the high seas to circumvent their ridiculous insult of a game launcher.

As an avid gamer myself, I fully agree with your point. I guess in this thread there are a lot of people who, due to them being in tech, have a bit of a relationship with games but it's not really a big hobby. And as it happens, Steam has a few policies that trigger some intellectually motivated objections - nice in theory but practically irrelevant for gamers who play games on a regular basis.

As a matter of fact, in case the nostalgia itch really does hit, Steam actually enables a relatively easy 're-release' of old games that many publishers started doing - often with no further addition except the promise that it'll run on modern hardware/OS hassle-free.

I've re-bought games I've played in the 90s/2000s on Steam even though I already owned them and probably still have the CD lying around somewhere, but I just can't be arsed to go through the troubles of installing from them. Pay a few bucks, click a button and I'm up and running.

I typically think of myself (and try to act like) a rather rational person. The amount of hours of my life that I've done silly, mindless and occasionally annoying things because some Steam achievement required it is something I can't quite square with that. There's something oddly satisfying about getting them.

It's certainly not a primary purchase decision factor but I've not bought games because they did not come with steam achievements.

> It is complacency or is China just accelerating?

Specifically in the case of Roomba complacency certainly played a role. I have one of their robots for several years already, and while it mostly works fine for my usecases their app is a complete mess. Sometimes the roomba has an issue and aborts a run but there's zero to no detail visible in the app as to why that happened. I seem to be unable to look at old runs, see statistics over time, basically anything that might be useful other than the bog-standard basics, and even those are lacklustre at best.

I wouldn't be surprised if someone actually reverse-engineered their APIs and made a better app on top of them; the app is comically bad with little to no improvement since I've started using the product.

They absolutely earn it though. Steam just works.

Heck, I've not bought games because they were not on Steam or required another launcher. Ubisoft and Rockstar are so bad that I held off on buying some games I really wanted to play; they're just that awful. EA's Origin was also pretty bad last time I checked.

I guess it's an actually hard problem to make a somewhat decent launcher in big companies with too many PMs playing turfwars, but still, almost everyone except Valve is shitting the bed so hard that as a consumer I'd happily pay quite the markup if it would allow me to avoid other launchers. They're that bad.

One of those "I have never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure."-moments.

Time to rewatch "Vice"; Bale is incredible.

> It's a common rhetoric from someone who has no clue about financial markets (the person you replied to).

I think what OP meant is that producing all this fancy advanced tech just to play the financial game isn't all that much benefit for society.

And when looking at societal development in the last couple of decades with the increasing gap in distribution of wealth, social mobility and overall life expectancy declining and other such metrics, I think it's a valid standpoint that maybe, the collective smarts of our society could be allocated a bit better than putting them into companies like Jane Street; as impressive as their work is.