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Microsoft made something similar, years ago, at the presentation of their azure cognitive services. A camera randomly picked a live face from the audience, passed it through azure cognitive services and displayed the mood of the person in a video overlay.

You're more or less describing what happened to me when I changed from dev to dev team lead. I couldn't affort the time anymore to make code reviews, left that to my colleagues and only tested the resulting software. When it didn't work, I returned a bug task and then we iterated this until it worked.

No more joy in writing software. Instead my time is spend in writing user stories and specifications as good as possible.

Thanks for writing this. I couldn't agree any more. We've worked with .NET for decades and it really just works or lets you debug easily. Then we've started working on projects with Angular, React and Docker and it's just a nightmare to get a stable version.

What version are you using? Click 'Settings' -> 'Profile' (huge button on top) -> 'Subscriptions'. I don't know how it could be easier than that. Ah wait, pull down on the home screen for search, type 'subscriptions' and tap on the result for direct access to the setting. From there you can see and cancel any subscription made in the App Store.

I so badly wish we could change a big Windows business application to use PostgreSQL rather than Microsoft SQL Server just because of the licensing costs. SQL Server is a fantastic product, but restricted to 128GB RAM and a few CPU cores or you have to start paying so much, that not even our biggest customers can justify it.

Migration isn't easy, as this venerable application uses ADO.NET Datasets with TableAdapters and plenty of stored procedures. The syntax is almost compatible though. But not enough unfortunately.

For our next product, we're sure to bet on PostgreSQL instead.

Don't laugh, but we still have a big software solution based on jQuery Mobile up and running, used daily by hundreds of users on tablets and smartphones, and getting new features every few weeks.

(yes, a successor is planned, but it will be a huge amount of work)

Used that for years on my Gentoo installation back when I had more time to spend on my home computer. Can't recommend it enough.

It's indeed getting worse and worse driving cars.

I drive a Tesla Model 3 daily and agree to the critism about it's interface. On my last holidays I rented a Suzuki Vitara. Indeed it's much easier to find and operate the standard controls like for climate. Also cruise control with its 6 buttons took only a little learning.

The worst turned out to be CarPlay, a feature I always thought I'm missing with my Tesla. Occasionally it just didn't work, even though the phone was connected. So you get no navigation or you stop/start/wait until it works. And repeat that after every car stop situation. And when it works, forget about zooming or seeing anything more than the next step on this tiny display.

All in all I was happy to return to my Tesla again. But then I know all important controls from memory.

Anyway: Analog cars ruled indeed. I'd just use a simple phone holder too rather than anything like CarPlay.

I have great memories of downloading MIDI files found with Altavista, Yahoo or even something like midi.com, then putting them on a floppy and have them play back on my Technics KN-2000 keyboard. Then MP3 happened.

Woah! Standby is working fine too?

I'm a huge XPS15 advocate at work and really love these machines as a Windows developer. But the standby just doesn't work. If I close the lid and throw it in my bag, then the battery will be empty and the bag will be hot as hell. This is a huge failure and makes me shutdown my XPS15 every evening. Which is just nonsense. I'm a Mac user at home and just never shut these laptops down ever.

I second this. My best friends are still the childhood friends. Every time I'm getting closer with someone new it fails sooner or later because of other duties we already have in life.

In relation to the formulas near the end of the article, I find it tragic that even in 2024 they are still PNG images.

I fully agree. Yet I'm in the same boat.

Started as a Windows line of business software developer almost 20 years ago. At first we got clear specifications with UI mockups and a description what each and every button should do. When there were questions, these specs where updated and we implemented and tested and fixed until our boss was happy.

Over the years we got more and more customers yet less and less time for tests and fixes. So we switched to "agile" and dropped the specs, instead wrote quick notes about what must (roughly) be done. At first all were happy. But now we have a huge amount of features that not one dev knows. You have to ask and search around until you find all the lose specs.

Now I'm managing such a team of developers and have the same issue. I don't have the time to write a clean specification, yet alone discuss it with the actual customer, which anyway doesn't really understand all the implications. So they start coding by adding more if and else blocks to an already bloated code base.

Pity the days we would start with a class diagram or just some quick drawing about how the components would interact and be testable.

I was wondering because the toothbrushes I know use BT(LE) and aren't connected to the Internet. However, some light bulbs do have WIFI and sure one day could be exploited. And there are definitely more light bulbs than toothbrushes around here.