emursebrian

I want appliances that are reliable and last a lifetime, I don't care about smart features. I bought a basic washing machine back in 2005. Roper brand, which is Whirlpool's value-priced line. The cycles are programmed purely mechanically using a cam timer.

Since I've owned it, all I've had to do is replace the clutch which was like a $25 part at the time. Doing it yourself (or having a repair technician take care of it), is easier and more cost-effective than hauling it out and buying a new one.

Cloud enabled features on home appliances had extra complexity and the chance your device will be bricked when the manufacturer decides to discontinue their cloud services.

The new editing features will be pretty useful for sound design.

In my mind, my computer is pretty beefy: 2.8 GHZ I7 with 16GB of ram. Yet, vendors like Adobe figure out ways to consume all available resources and make performance complete trash.

Ironically, VS Code is one of the few programs that feels fast. Meanwhile, Visual Studio feels slow and janky. Between Notepad++ and VS Code, I don't notice much of a difference in performance for what I do.

Browers are one of the few applications these days that are still highly optimized and performant. This is what allowed us to replace Adobe AfterEffects with a custom browser-based renderer. We've seen a 10x performance improvement in some cases: 2mins (Browser) vs 20mins (AfterEffects).

Wow. The click the build number a bunch of times is already onerous enough. Now we're going to have to wait 24 hours to spin up a new development device?

Shit like this is yet another reason why we don't have apps in the app store. In app purchases are a non-starter for us.

As I understand it, there are ways to work around accepting payments or donations outside of the app stores.

It adds one more thing to have to do and explain to users. And even with that piece taken care of, we would need to be constantly vigilant about changes in Apple or Google policies that might eject our app from the storefront.

On my iPhone it's just 5 easy clicks:

Kebab Menu > Share > View More > Add to Home screen > Add

Android - Firefox: It's 4 clicks Android - Chrome: 3 clicks (Menu > Install App > Ok)

As a user, I don't want to install an app if I can do it on the web. Most "apps" these days are just web sites wrapped in an app. What's more, they're usually 100% dependent on REST APIs so there's little advantage to having the app anyway.

As a developer and (web) app vendor, I understand that many users still want apps. I just had a user ask when we'd be releasing our app for iOS. I explained that we did have an app and that it would be identical to what we'd release for iOS. Then I explained the maze of submenus she'd have to click through to get the icon on her home screen.

Apple and Google hate the open web so they make it excessively difficult to "install" PWAs and then in some cases, they're less functional than the website itself. More blame lies at the feet of Apple and Google than on web-first vendors who release sub-optimal apps as a delivery workaround.

We're not releasing apps yet precisely because I want us to be focusing on features. Having to target two additional platforms increases the surface area for testing and takes time away from developing features with the potential cost of releasing a "sub-optimal" app.

You could also put this CD-ROM in an audio CD player and play the music on it.

I roasted MySpace hard back in the day, but now I kind of miss it. I was all too happy to move over to Facebook and leave MySpace behind.

For me, the exodus from MySpace to Facebook marks the inflection point were smaller internet communities died and were replaced with services from megacorps.

At the time, MySpace was an echo of free homepage sites on providers like AngelFire and Geocities. My friend group had moved over to MySpace from a custom site our friend hosted on a server in his living room. His web site did pretty much everything that MySpace did, MySpace just did it better.

I don't want MySpace back, but I do want some of the cool interactive content back that seems to all but have died out.

Eki-melos are the things that I really liked about taking trains in Japan.

The chirping bird sounds to help blind users find their way to and from the platforms is also a pretty interesting design decision.

I mostly get AI slop ads for scam products, though slop videos do creep into my shorts feed.

We're using Stripe to run our marketplace where teachers can sell their language courses. It does MOST of what we want/need.

I've done numerous checkout/payment processing integrations over the years. Stripe is still pretty easy to use and full-featured compared to what I've used in the past. It does have its annoyances, shortcomings and API inconsistencies - but it's still better than the alternatives, in my view.

Support has been good when I needed more documentation on something. Their chatbot performs very poorly, however.

Most of these are common sense. As a tourist foreigner, you also aren't expected to know all the customs but it's appreciated when you try. The one about which direction to NOT point the chopsticks in was new to me. If you just watch what other people are doing, then try to do the same thing, you're probably on the right track.

Related to eating, one pro-tip I got from a local is that when you're ready to close your tab or get your check at a bar or restaurant, you can make a small X with your index fingers.

Really useful in a busy bar!

The UI for loopmaster looks really good. The color scheme is really pleasing to look at and it is easy to jump right in and start editing stuff.

I've owned a bunch of different synthesizers and used a bunch of DAWs over the years and it was clear to me where I needed to make my edits to affect the signal chain.

We do real-time client-side audio processing in Emurse, and there were definitely a bunch of challenges to overcome there, so it would be interesting to hear more about what went into building the tool.