zeptonaut22

Definitely true, but back in the day that was sort of the fun of it -- similar to putting up an AOL Instant Messenger away message, it was just... a blast of a funny thought to the people that you knew.

Over time, that network got stale and it included "people you sort of used to know", and then it included your grandma and uncle and rest of the world. There are few things that are at the intersection of the Venn diagram of "things I want to share with all of those people", especially as I get older.

--- *40 minutes* Time it took Rankin to descend, due to a thunderstorm’s vertical air currents forcing him upward ---

Can you imagine the sheer terror of skydiving for 40 minutes through a thunderstorm? Jeepers.

Cool project! I think there's a way to add a button to the README that turns a repo into a template -- maybe that would decrease friction further?

Mark Zuckerburg's superpower is being like Jack Sparrow at the beginning of Pirates of the Caribbean: he steps off one boat just as it's sinking onto another, and he has the humility to not really give a damn which ship he's on. (I say "humility" even as someone frustrated by his net impact on society.)

I think on the How I Built This Instagram episode the Instagram founder said that Zuck was basically reading the data from Facebook's interactions and saw that the demographics and sharing tendencies of Facebook users meant that it was in a death spiral: people were moving interactions to private channels, reducing the available "friend" content. IMO, the causal factor here is that people became wary of public oversharing and the result was FB pivoting away from "social network" (OG Facebook) to "social media" (2010-2015 FB) and eventually just "media" (Instagram, Reels).

Looking back at what I posted on FB in 2008-2012 is like observing an alien from another planet: it was a completely different platform.

That's amazing. Thanks for sharing a more informative link than the one I found!

Interesting to read: I've always heard of Chrome and Gmail as two Google products that were the shining examples of "look at what these wacky engineers went off and built!"

It seems like that notion may be a bit romanticized.

I wanted to share this post with any other engineers that have struggled with the transition from "building what you're told" as a junior engineer to "figuring out what to build" as a senior engineer.

This post talks about a super pragmatic roadmap I came across from an experienced indie game dev dealing with exactly this problem: how do you balance between "building" and "figuring out what to build"?

Very cool idea! I could definitely have seen this being really useful at my last startup.

A few quick thoughts:

- I definitely would have loved to see some common travel filters (which I know as a programmer is easier said than done"). The recommended flight for me was spirit airlines, which sucks in the US and I wouldn't really want to force my employees to take that.

- Both origins and the destination that I tried were in the US, but the price was still listed in euros.

- In my head, I imagined that the suggested destinations would include some reason that they were compelling, not just a generic picture of the city. My suggested destination was Atlanta, but I don't know why we'd want a team offsite in Atlanta. I'm looking for something on the right continuum between "cheap" and "interesting", and this seems to really only help with the "cheap" aspect.

Very cool tool though! I'll keep it in mind for future work travel needs.

Just a thought: this tool looks cool, but I'd love to see a demo video of it in action as the hero item at the top of the page. Without that, it feels a little... theoretical and hand-wavy.

If I were to guess, the one of these that has by far the most impact is the Google featured snippets. There's constantly a tension between Google and online publishers about Google wanting to serve people answers quickly (with "on the search page" being the fastest version of that), but that not actually helping the publishers.

I couldn't agree more about the toxicity, though. I don't pretend to know much about who's right in the Stack Overflow vs. moderators debate, but every time I visit an answer on Stack Overflow and glance at the right sidebar I feel like a kid who's just walked in on his parents fighting. The tension between the company and the community is palpable and it makes the site feel like an icky place to be.

In my experience, the web has bifurcated between "web applications" (owned by React) and content sites (owned by Jamstack).

One dilemma I've faced is when you find yourself in the middle of those two areas and might want to develop an MVP in Jamstack to later add more web-appy features. Jamstack always left me feeling like it was sufficient for my current use case, but with much more complexity I was always one errant feature request away from running into something I couldn't do and having to rewrite everything.

Furthermore, just doing simple things can require significant creativity on how to achieve that. It's fun, because the end result is something that's significantly more performant than anything you could squeeze out of React. I happily use Jamstack for my blog (FCP of 0.8s, Lighthouse score of 100!), but would feel reckless suggesting it for any professional work that I do outside of company blogs or something.

Thanks for sharing your insight in #2: definitely an interesting view that I wouldn't have access to myself!

As for #3, the same thing occurred to me with regards to the supply chain shortages during the pandemic: the highly optimized, just-in-time supply chain that we'd work so hard to build meant that there was almost no room for extraordinary events. When those events do inevitably happen, they're far more disastrous than they would otherwise have been.

I don't think that _all_ continuous improvement needs to be this way: the classic example of "letting the factory floor worker work with a toolsmith to design a better wrench for their job" probably doesn't have negative consequences in extraordinary situations. However, I do think keeping in mind "is this a pure improvement or are we making a tradeoff, and at what cost?" is a worthwhile question to ask.