stephenhuey

Makes me feel like we're back in the era of SGI workstations in the late 20th century! I got to play with a few of those in college.

I used to get it at Cafe Brussels in Houston. They used to have a dish with braised rabbit leg called Le Lapin aux Pruneaux. Instead of a beer stew they made it sweet and savory with prunes, raisins, onions, and carrots. Sooooo goooood.

Right. In a global financial services organization, a strategic analysis app used by thousands of internal users was pretty high touch. SME business analysts would sit with the users to make sure they liked it and had no trouble. Every user generates significant revenue. Worldwide B2C is a different ball game, and Google barely makes money off of each individual user.

Very insightful. I've worked in only one company of Google's size, but it was a vastly different industry. I personally never got to speak with a user on a massive internal application my team worked on for years. :)

Throughout my career, I've almost always been close enough to the user that I hear about it quickly when something is wrong. It's a tough problem that so many Google engineers are typically so far removed from end users. Or maybe it's just that a small part of the company has long subsidized the rest of the employees to the point that it doesn't matter how good their work is because they'll get paid anyway.

Bringing up Google Maps here does nothing for your point because on web or native mobile you pay money to use the API for Google Maps (outside of the store fee). Offering a free version to end users does financially benefit Google.

There are numerous examples of people needing a smartphone to do things in their daily lives. I’ve read compelling stories of people who ran into trouble after ditching their smartphone.

There are lots of parallels to the railroad monopolies. Choice is not as available as you say it is.

Good point. Most of us at the conference are still trying to make a living with Rails. That's not a concern for him. Can he remember what it was like to have to do that? Probably, but he feels very differently waking up each day than the rest of us.

Here is the description for the Rails World 2026 Opening Keynote:

"Opening Keynote highlighting what's new in Rails, what's coming next, and where Rails is headed in the future."

DHH literally did not cover that. Not even close!

The first response in the conference chat described it as the "worst opening keynote possible to setup the Rails World conference." While someone soon disagreed with that, another guy later said he felt it undermined the later talks, and someone else said the Laracon conference had more about what the framework is doing in the AI age. He barely mentioned Rails. I get how he was excited about his experiments but I certainly wish he had focused more on what Rails is doing for this new era.

Here in Houston, my friend who works at UH has excellent insurance. A quick search online confirms that it is much better than average. Different structure for employees at Rice, my alma mater, but still excellent. Gemini describes these employees being in a kind of "benefits bubble" here in Texas, and they're getting something way better from what most Texans get.

You said FAANG, so perhaps you're in California, a state that has laws regulating health insurance to an extent that make it unique in the USA?

Around the turn of the century, my grandmother lamented how Wal-Mart had ruined the shopping experience in her small town. When the local hardware store and other stores closed, she ended up only with Wal-Mart where she said the employees didn't know anything and couldn't really help you. Anecdotal, I know, but this is a common refrain throughout the country, that by using their monopoly power they're able to undercut local businesses until they go bankrupt. The assumption is that we're left with is a net win due to lower prices for the consumer, but let me tell you another story.

An older relative had a very successful small conglomerate of businesses. One of them manufactured something costing close to $100 that Wal-Mart was interested in selling in its stores. After extensive negotiations, my relative told the Wal-Mart VP no because Wal-Mart was pressuring them to use cheaper parts that would make the product wear out more quickly. Wal-Mart didn't care because they'd be able to make the sales and then consumers would come back to buy again sooner, but my relative felt that was dishonorable. The VP said it was the first time a potential supplier ever walked away from him. They are notorious for their abuse of suppliers, and the ethical concerns are often very palpable. You might suggest this is simply market forces playing out, but we decided long ago that monopoly power often leads to a market we don't want to see in this country.

We the people get to decide what kind of society we want to live in. Their monopoly power means that in so many of the rural areas where they are, they might be one of the few viable employers. When people are poor, it's not so easy to just tell them to relocate to another geographical area, so it's easier for the entities benefiting from that to maintain the status quo at the expense of others. If we decide that for Wal-Mart to stay in business in the USA they need to pay employees more, with health insurance, then so be it. If they can't, then they can just go out of business and be replaced by a company that is able to navigate that balance better, offering pretty low prices while paying a bit more in wages.

California is the only state that regulates wait times for specialists. When you uttered the words "Bay Area" it signaled that you enjoy better service than most Americans. I know people in states very close to yours (as well as my own) who have had extensive wait times.

FAANG employee health insurance? Something like 1% of American workers get that, if even that many. Then throw in my oil company friends here in Houston and a few other industries which give premium benefits and you still have a tiny subset of the American workforce getting exceptionally strong benefits. Not at all indicative of the experience of most Americans.

Urgent care would not be urgent if you had to wait months. Hang out with a few elderly people who actually need to see specialists more than people like me. Over the years, I've heard plenty of stories from people I know waiting multiple months to see specialists.

When I was at Rice a quarter century ago, I took a 300-level linguistics class called Structure of English. Half a dozen of us sat around an oval table in a little room and I was the only one not majoring in linguistics. It was a delightfully geeky bunch. One of the students later worked on speech recognition at Microsoft. The professor was an older tall thin man who always wore suspenders and a bow tie.

I had always been good at grammar in high school, but this was a different world and I had no idea what I was in for. We spent the first two weeks discussing the differences between the and a, and the next two weeks on the differences between this and that, and the rest of the semester felt more abstract. It was quite illuminating for me.