tennis_80

In the UK there’s a lot of screens on pedestrian walkways, and small adverts on roundabouts but very few motorway (highway) adverts.

On the motorway there’s signs for services (rest stops) with all the major brands logos on, and maybe one or two billboards every 30 / 40 miles outside of city centres, then more as you come into a city centre.

I’ve also recently noticed a massive vertical screen on the side of a building near a busy interchange in my city (Manchester).

Public transport is littered with small adverts - on underground’s / metros there’s a lot of posters on escalators and buses have a lot inside, plus usually a big banner on the side (or a full skin of the bus but they’re fairly rare at least in my city).

Political advertising is capped at £20 million per party, but our newspapers do most of the real political propaganda come election time in terms of what stories they cover / who they endorse in their editorials (or sometimes they allow a major candidate to write one). The BBC also lets all parties with some traction do a 5 minute party political broadcast.

When I’ve watched some live US TV channels I’ve been amazed by how many “Vote X for Y, paid for by Z PAC” adverts there are and am thankful UK parties can’t spend anywhere near the same amount.

This is a reason I’m very keen on making sure tests are focused on requirements rather than code.

A few jobs ago I would often be in a team where the entire team had turned over several times, we would be asked to do large updates to a legacy application or bump lots of dependencies and just not break anything. When pushed the product owner wouldn’t be able to describe what the app was supposed to do, particularly for unusual types of users (the account / user modelling was chaotic so say, several billing accounts per user, each with different products and access levels). At that point “foo calls bar” doesn’t clarify much intent.

They're ignoring start up successes within Europe. I suspect most complaining about this use Spotify - started in Sweden. Revolut is also very popular for people after a crypto-friendly bank. Monzo is credited with revolutionising bank accounts within the UK.

Afaik, until recently it was difficult to send money between two bank accounts in the US for free - hence the proliferation of "tech solutions" like Cash App and Venmo. That just isn't a thing in the UK, banks have supported free instant bank transfers for years. So, maybe just maybe - we have fewer startups because our systems aren't as crippled as the ones in the US?

Are the testimonials real?

They’re all either freelancers or have very vague company names (Tech Innovations Inc, Dynamic Web Solutions) and the project looks brand new.

I started my career working on gambling apps, and it’s one of my red lines now when looking for work.

It’s an evil industry - full of dark patterns. I remember implementing a “cancel withdrawal” feature where essentially: the casino could deposit money in a customers bank account in a day when they request it. They instead choose to hold it in a pending state for a week, and allow them to cancel the withdrawal at any point in that week to immediately play with. Presumably so it didn’t feel as real as money leaving the gamblers bank account.

Pretty standard for most cloud services, especially as you get more "cloud-native." If you adopt DynamoDB as your DB of choice - you'll struggle to get off AWS should the need arise, without rewriting parts of your app.

But in practice - is this important? The hyperscaler clouds are similarly priced, and if you're able to leverage the proprietary tech in one to speed up development, or simplify operations, maybe it's worth being locked in.

It looks pretty clear cut to me - and just because MS is massive doesn't mean that someone somewhere hasn't seen this as an opportunity to improve their personal / department KPIs.

I'm not familiar with hardware business models though, so what do you think it is about instead? Reducing hardware cheating?

Eh, in my current role (engineer) we have a PM but they’re not all that useful. In theory, they do what you describe, but because they don’t have a technical background they struggle to identify blockers & engineers drive most prioritisation sessions.

They may jump in occasionally to tell us another team needs X or the business wants to see more Y so we should re-think what we work on next, but I struggle to see why that couldn’t be handled by our technical team lead.

Spitballing here but perhaps it's because people don't realise the DevOps work that can be done in a team, rather than just what has to be done.

I work in a cultural DevOps place at the moment, and often spend my time improving CI workflows, improving the local dev environment and upgrading dev tools to make it easier to write features when requests come in. I could easily spend my entire week doing things like this, and it seems to pay off as we have a very low cycle time and fix bugs within minutes.

However if you have a non-technical manager - they struggle to see value in this work. DevOps becomes "the way we get the project we built into our production environment" which is usually quite a small piece of work compared to actually building the project. So it becomes - we don't need one per team, hmm, maybe they should be centralised so we can share their time between teams, and then you lose the culture DevOps was supposed to create.

ThePrimeagen did some benchmarks on stream recently - he found Bun to be slightly better in terms of average response time, but the biggest gain was P99 / P99.9 values under heavy load.

NodeJS seems to drop the ball on a handful of requests when it's getting slammed, i.e. upwards of 10s vs average of 100ms. Bun had a much smaller P50/P99 spread.

The article says a few passengers continue on to the final destination, so they’re not saving much in terms of crew / logistics.

Maybe it’s an attempt to avoid drawing too much attention from the regulator? If they started offering internal flights in Australia they’d be stepping even more on Qantas toes.

This doesn’t surprise me. A user has a need - in this case a food diet app. They find this app, think it looks good, and registers their interest. Good.

Launch day comes around, they’re nowhere to be seen - why? Well, they may have found another app, or decided they don’t need the app after all - say they lost interest in the diet / health kick.

I feel like app registrations would only work for “special” apps that don’t have close competitors or have a particular buzz - e.g. Threads, ChatGPT etc

EDIT: I’ve misunderstood - the app was supposed to auto-download on launch day. It didn’t. This story makes a lot more sense now! I assumed it just sent a push notification / email.