waylandsmithers

I did some star gazing at an official "dark place" and was really amazed at just how much constant motion you can see from satellites flying around

This rings so true to me. I've had about a dozen jobs in software and exposure to another dozen through consulting, and I've generally found that the more mundane the application, the more the company's leadership and many employees had deluded themselves into thinking they were truly changing the world (a sales productivity tool in the most extreme case). Like the bigger the elephant in the room that the project was actually pretty boring, the more overcompensation there had to be.

I should start by saying I am a huge fan of spotify, been a paid subscriber since close to the beginning of availability in the U.S., etc. But today I went to the Song Radio playlist for Help by the Beatles and found a link in the header I hadn't noticed before: "About recommendations and the impact of promotion" - clicking it shows this disclaimer:

"In some cases, commercial considerations may influence our recommendations. For example, Spotify offers a promotional tool that enables artists and record labels to highlight priority songs, increasing the likelihood of them being recommended in specific algorithmic playlists: Radio, Autoplay and certain Mixes. This can help artists be discovered by new listeners and grow their fan bases, including prior to a new release, as part of a cultural moment, or in celebration of a milestone. For streams of those priority songs generated in impacted playlists, Spotify charges a commission. This tool is not active in other playlists, such as editorial ones."

What?

I'm disappointed but I suppose this is the endgame of any service: to squeeze every last nickel out of every corner of the application. And in this case they took the term "Radio" literally and realized there was payola money to be made (which is legal with disclosure).

Hey this is a great game. Nice work

Anything you search for, the first thing at the top of the list is an ad from a competitor!

Did we all have a Mandela moment that what we all thought was "The Farmer's Almanac" with the yellow cover actually has OLD in the title? And there is randomly this other farmer's almanac?

I think my expectations for apple intelligence were just too high. All I've really seen it do on my macbook is suggest "Sounds great!" or "See you there!" as responses in Messages, and it's like, really, it took the best engineers on earth working round the clock to come up with this?

> After I had done this test, I asked myself why I decided to do a test on something that would convert a joyful activity into a soulless one

This is how I feel at the moment about AI coding tools. Programming is the fun part of my job

I was really surprised to hear this because I feel the exact opposite! I've worked mainly with project managers who ran all the ceremonies, held people accountable, dealt with planning and doling out tasks, handled stakeholders and generally protected the devs from distractions, and took real leadership and accountability in the project.

Whenever I've worked on a team where a developer is the team lead and has to do all that stuff on top of coding- or worse, it's just a free for all with no leader- , things in my experience go much worse, communication breaks down, and things slip through the cracks.

Tangentially, the company I worked for years ago used ZenPayroll/Gusto. Seemed fine enough with a nice design and definitely friendlier to the end user than the gray boxes in ADP.

I started a new job recently that also uses Gusto. They added a bunch of things like a Gusto wallet you can get paid into instead of your own bank account and another feature that basically looks like a payday loan. I guess it makes sense for them to expand their offerings of financial products since they're already involved with your money but it just made me feel disappointed.

Meanwhile, the overall results don't make it seem like the sky is falling

> For the quarter, Microsoft reported earnings per share (EPS) of $2.95 on revenue of $64.7 billion. Wall Street was anticipating EPS of $2.94 on revenue of $64.5 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.