juliansimioni

For me it was “the results speak for themselves” and then simply a (large) number of automated tests run that never had human eyes.

Yes, quantity famously has a quality all its own, but perhaps not where correctness checks for something this central is concerned.

I think the warning in the article is a little more subtle.

The author isn’t placing a moral judgement on certain goals or whether the result of reaching that goal has a large enough audience.

They are warning against doing things that work against achieving our goals in ways that are hard for us to notice by ourselves.

It’s really a great conference, the OSM community is great and strongest in Europe. I’ve been to many and always come away inspired.

Sadly (or, really, amazingly as it’s good to have so many options), another great, major geospatial conference is also happening essentially at the same time: FOSS4G in Hiroshima. They are certainly different conferences but a lot of overlap.

So, in other words it’s a great week to be in geospatial software working on open source and open data.

I am literally on a flight to Japan right now, and one of my main goals is to add a Suica card to my collection of transit cards from around the world (currently 31 cards large).

Sadly physical cards may only have a few years left, for the most part using tap-to-ride is superior. So I really have to get out there and grab them while I can.

Yes. And the fab companies and their suppliers are deliberately and wisely slow to scale up production to meet short term changes in demand. They've seen the history of the semiconductor industry, it's constant boom and bust cycles. But they have the highest op-ex costs of anyone. So when the party's over they are the ones who pay for it the most.

Fellow bootstrapped founder for 8 years here, and I love and agree with your responses here.

Having previously existed in the VC-backed startup world, one thing I don't miss is the belief that its the _only_ rational way to run a business. In reality there are a lot of dangers to that approach, like you pointed out.

VCs _need_ promising businesses to join their portfolio, so they'll always be trying to convince you to raise money and have a tiny shot at making it big. If you fail, well, you're just one business in their portfolio, another one will pick up the loss. But it's the _only_ company you have, so you are doing the right thing by growing sustainably.

There's something extremely freeing about running a bootstrapped business and knowing you don't _need_ anyone to keep it running. Cheers to the next 10 years for you and your team.

I think it's more than unwilling, we're straight up unable. Not in principle, but because it's a coordination problem.

Think of how many parents now want their kids not to have a smartphone or social media. There's genuine, well researched evidence that this would be good. But there's also real harm to kids who see all their friends with iPhones and Instagram. It might sound silly to us but it's definitely real feeling to the kids.

A lot of the parents who let their kids use smartphones and social media probably could be easily convinced that it's a bad idea, they just don't know. Or they don't know how bad it is, and so something else, like displaying status via a nice phone, they value more highly.

But until we can reach critical mass, and fight the (not insignificant, and quite intentional) momentum to use social media, it will be hard.

In my social and meetup circle, COVID coincided with all the organizers of my favorite meetups reaching the age where one generally starts to slow down, have kids, and possibly move out of the city for more space and calm.

At that point they had all been running their meetups for 5-10 years, so they were also established in their careers and didn't NEED them anymore. So while keeping an existing meetup running pre-COVID was not exactly easy, it was doable and familiar.

But now, 5 years after COVID, all the longstanding meetups are long enough gone that people nearly have to start from scratch. It's starting to happen, but is a huge uphill battle. For the most part, I suspect it will be a new generation of organizers, but they'll be learning all the same lessons again, in a much less interesting and more hostile tech environment.

Similar to this: if you want to optimize your productivity*, do so on a timescale of at least weeks if not months or years.

Simple example: Can you get more done working 12 hours a day than 8? Sure, for the first day. Second day maybe. But after weeks, you're worse off in one way or another.

It's easy to chase imaginary gains like automating repetitive tasks that don't actually materialize, but some basics like sleep, nutrition, happiness, etc are 100% going to affect you going forward.

* I actually hate that word, and prefer saying "effectiveness". Productivity implies the only objective is more, more, more, endlessly. Effectiveness opens up the possibility that you achieve better results with less.

It's wild, and absolutely worth writing about, that at some point in recent years, the concept of "AFK" basically ceased to exist.

Yes, we aren't technically near a keyboard most of the time today, but we are never AFK in a conceptual sense. Even when sleeping.

It's interesting that internet infrastructure is so interconnected that failures of what _should_ be separate systems seem to coincide.

Do we think it's possible the GCP outage caused the Cloudflare outage, or vice versa?

For DownDetector, I know it's not exactly foolproof. I imagine a lot of sites use something like CloudFlare in front of AWS infra, which could easily be automatically flagged as an outage for both in their system.

Another vote to confirm that AWS appears to be working fine. At least EC2 and S3 which is basically all we use (highly recommend this simple setup using base primitives, as some of their higher level services have significantly lower reliability)