betteryet

Software Engineering is not dead, damn it. Anything research and original is not dead. Are these things fantastic at connecting concepts, producing digital work products, and putting out derivate hypotheses? Sure. But proper original thought is still firmly in the realm of humans. Though speed of propagation of new ideas probably did change massively.

How did the board plan pull this off if Mullenweg has 84% of the voting shares? For that matter, what is even the purpose of a board in a multi-class share structure with the founder holding above 50% voting shares.

The dictators part is false, the EU is not a structure you can easily dictate. But this encryption backdoor thing is somebody's pet project and extremely alarming. The UK has a similar bend they've already put in place with IPA and TCNs. The US is way gone on decrypted stored data and metadata, but not on encryption backdoors yet, though legislators have tried.

Many countries including European now have just scan a QR code. The EU payment scheme Wero is bringing that cross-border for EUR. Instant and very low fees.

This stuff is important and can only happen at this level through legislation.

If you don't do it this way to apply for everyone, then any good actor products will be crushed by profitmaxxing competitors. Or any good actor executives and workers will be pushed out by profitmaxxing shareholders.

Legislators need to be careful to keep requirements tight and manageable, but it's better to limit negative externalities than outright ban something. Banning infinite scroll or any particular pattern is nonsense, but restricting addictive design (e.g. TikTok) and algorithm weaponization (e.g. TikTok) is very sensible.

Back in the day, Heroku, Stripe, and GitHub were iconic engineering organizations. They had this culture rooted in Unix ethos with a sprinkle of modern minimalism and style that was outstanding. You could really see people give a damn in the careful design and polish of their APIs, docs, primitives, and overall output.

Now Heroku and GitHub have been gutted in spirit by their acquirers, which is such a damn shame for our field. We still have Stripe and Apple to some extent, and maybe some new places, but I personally feel a real sense of loss from Heroku and GitHub exiting their status as places you could admire.

Exactly, societies need to be stronger than states too and really need to act early. States can become one person or party and it's game over for a long time. Actually, the American Constitution is pretty great at preventing this exact outcome and I still have a lot of faith in it.

EU is holding, but the fact that every authoritarian (US, China, Russia) is trying to break it apart should tell you something. It's like the only one remaining, and they don't like it.

You may not agree, but VDL and KK have more balls than most men who have run the EU in recent history.

Not my point. The original comment said the tech industry can decide to break up the federal government because they don't want to be forced to clean up their act. Societies should be stronger than any industry and fight to maintain freedom, health, peace, and prosperity. If the tech industry is against that, then they should be the ones broken up.

How about we break up the tech industry instead?

This muskian "I am above laws so I'll break up the USA/EU" is asinine and societies should come down on it like a ton of bricks.

Love the use of space weather

Neon is a great product because they are run by Postgres enthusiasts. They have decent customer-friendly pricing, real serverless HTTP endpoints, and they're always on the latest version of Postgres as soon as it is stable. From what I can tell, no other provider has this positioning, driven by dedication.

I really hope they can maintain this dedication after acquisition, but Databricks will probably push them into enterprise and it will lose the spark. I wish Cloudflare bought them instead.

Same thing with Gandi, which is a shame. Domain renewal price silently went up 3x or so last year after getting acquired.

San Francisco is fantastic, but you can't use it outside of Apple platforms. Anything in this style better than Inter, even commercial? Graphik, Circular, Neue Haas Grotesk, Proxima Nova have been popular at various times, but are not as refined and versatile. Some brands have custom fonts that come close in my opinion, but they keep them to themselves.

Prompting an AI for 5 seconds to write a bunch of paragraphs that your human counterpart has to then read and think through is incredibly disrespectful of their time.

AI assistants that summarize and enrich information for you, fine. That actually saves time. But this feeding of generative output to humans is way off the mark. It feels like the product people are not sitting down to think what they're doing and just riding the GPT hype wave.