matrix_overload

Google is sadly known for doing cool proof-of-concept stuff with no regard for profitability, and then axing it when the hype is over.

How does it work given the 500-year half-life of the DNA?

Well, the elephant in the room is that an app these days is a packaged version of a website with one twist: notifications. Unless you explicitly disable it via settings, it will try to get a small chunk of your attention every now and then.

- Would you like to enable notifications to see when your EV finishes charging?

- Yes.

(in a couple of days when you're thinking about a completely different topic)

- SPECIAL OFFER! 20% OFF THE FATTY FRIES IF YOU GET A CAR WASH FROM US!!!

And that's everywhere. It pays off due to the scale, just like spam. It costs nothing to send an annoying notification to a horde of users, and even if 1% of the users go for it, it is still 5+ figures of revenue out of a handful of characters pushed to users' devices, and hours of human time wasted dealing with useless annoying distractions.

They are not paid 6 figures to add fields to JSONs. They are paid 6 figures to brainrot into obsolescence instead of going out there and creating a competing product.

The last part is working very well. Most of the innovation these days is coming from China.

Well, if you are annoyed by a particular maintenance task related to your business, find a way to automate it!

In this case, you could create examples for your API in common programming languages, publish them on the product website, and even implement an automatic test that would verify that your last commit didn't break them. So, most of the non-programmer inquiries can be answered with a simple link to the examples page for the language they want.

As a bonus point, you will get some organic search traffic when people search for <what your API is doing> in <language name>.

It's not you, it's the industry. For every non-trivial task there is a long line of people within the company willing to do it for some visibility. But in order to get promoted to the position where they can do it, they need an army of button-moving monkeys working underneath them. So, they will say whatever they need to say in order to get you to sign up. Because that increases the head count and gives them more internal weight.

If you want to play the corporate game, you need to get used to having 5 meetings to move 1 button. And it's not about the button either. It's about asking Alice how her daughter is doing, and asking Bob on how he feels after that surgery, and casually hinting to Carol that you really like her choice of coding style for that new project. You play that game for a few years and you'll be allowed to have some monkeys of your own.

Or if you find the game soul-draining, you need to beef up your sales skills and connections, and become a consultant. One of those guys that gets invited to unwind a particular clusterfuck, gets paid $500/hour and quickly moves on to the next gig. This means less stability, more control, and a totally different skill set. Ultimately, your call.

Got 2 of those. Same behavior, otherwise both work just fine.

I had that problem as well (8TB Seagate). It would write some data, then get completely stuck to the point where Windows would report an I/O error. So I wrote a small tool that writes data in smaller chunks, monitors the write speed and allows throttling it if needed.

Weirdly enough, just using the tool instead of copying files with Explorer somehow stopped the weird hanging from happening, even without having to enable the actual throttling. Probably some bug somewhere along the driver/firmware stack triggered by the write block sizes.

Overall, I wish the drive vendors would expose some API to directly manage the SMR/CMR areas via software, just like the FLASH memory chips do. That would make the job of appending new backups + overwriting the old ones actually manageable with predictable and consistent timing.

They still have valid use cases like backups or unedited video footage. It's just kinda lame that the manufacturers don't market them as "slow backup devices" clearly listing all limitations, and that you have to find it out first time you use it.

TLDR: building projects with Clang is now about 4% faster due to optimizations in the way it internally handles assembly.

Why does this comment read like it's written by AI?

Not the developer, but chances are, they are either using a fine-tuned ChatGPT, or cloud-hosting something in the likes of Llama. So they are getting quite a bill each month from one of the 3 cloud landlords.

So until they find a good product/market fit, opening the floodgates to free users would just drain whatever money they raised faster than they would get any meaningful market response.

TL is lining you up for PIP/termination. The other guy on the team is likely his buddy. Come review time, you will be shown as an IC that struggles to deliver, and the other guy will get all the credit.

Been there, seen that. Start looking for other teams internally ASAP.