the_snooze

7 ms·

61.
by the_snooze 9mo ago
Microsoft is staffed by highly educated adults. They have agency to do better and actually serve their paying customers well. They choose not to.
62.
by the_snooze 9mo ago
A lot of digital tech produces more waste than actual value. Just look at your email inbox: odds are, the overwhelming majority of emails you get aren't useful correspondence from real people.
63.
by the_snooze 9mo ago
The level of entitlement and irresponsibility tech companies (especially the largest and most well-resourced ones) is just astounding. You'd think that proper engineering requires some degree of care and stewardship, but these aren&#x2
64.
by the_snooze 9mo ago
>One evil thing they were doing that they've suddenly given up on: they spent a ton of money buying up gaming studios (highly anti-competitively) to win on the console front and to stymie Steam's ability to move off Windows. Th
65.
by the_snooze 10mo ago
Original MegaLag video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCGT_CKGgFE You'd think that if you were an engineer building and maintaing a system like this, you'd have an "are we the baddies?" moment, but gue
66.
by the_snooze 10mo ago
Yeah, I feel like our form of representative democracy is the least bad option. At the very least, office-holders aren't entitled to their office beyond their term unless they're re-elected. The fundamental problem is that governi
67.
by the_snooze 10mo ago
There are different degrees of "exposed to the internet." You don't need to make your self-hosted services fully accessible by anyone from everywhere. VPN, IP whitelists, mTLS, HTTP basic auth, etc. change the calculus of sec
68.
by the_snooze 10mo ago
Maybe I'm missing something here: the great thing about self-hosting is that you choose if and when you update your back-end software. What's stopping self-hosting admins from simply staying on a known good version and forking tha
69.
by the_snooze 10mo ago
When your computer does what you tell it and it doesn't actively try to undermine your intentions, computing becomes fun again.
70.
by the_snooze 10mo ago
I'd argue it's more than "just inertia." It's that end-users don't have any real meaningful choice. If you deviate from the standard in your field (MS Office in my case), you take on immense costs for minimal g
71.
by the_snooze 10mo ago
I never said it was Microsoft's problem. I'm just showing you that "oh, switch to something else" is a naive view if you actually have real work to do.
72.
by the_snooze 10mo ago
That's an incomplete view. Office is a strong incumbent not because it's a good product, but because there's decades of processes built around it. To take a small slice from my world, if you do any kind of government-funded r
73.
by the_snooze 10mo ago
The most reliable way you get ahead is boring: small levels of effort, done consistently over time. You don't notice the progress day-to-day. You don't get much to brag about on social media. But it adds up.
74.
by the_snooze 10mo ago
>And yet here we are, able to talk to a computer, that writes Pytorch code that orchestrates the complexity below it. It writes something that that's almost, but not quite entirely unlike Pytorch. You're putting a little too mu
75.
by the_snooze 10mo ago
I think it boils down to knowing what your values are. If you're constantly saying "no" to your team or organization (or vice versa), then that's a sign of a values misalignment. At that point, your options are to push t
76.
by the_snooze 10mo ago
It's toddler-level thinking. Replace the complexity of leadership, humanity, and values with "make line go up," because the latter is way easier to measure, especially when you ignore the costs that aren't yours.
77.
by the_snooze 10mo ago
Parking apps don’t seem to care much for that. They know you’ll jump through their shoddy UIs and data collection because they have a local monopoly. Often with physical payment kiosks removed and replaced with “download our shitty app!” no
78.
by the_snooze 10mo ago
Eh, it's way simpler than that. AI doesn't know when to STFU. When I write an email or document, I don't need modern-day Clippy constantly guessing (and second-guessing) my thoughts. I don't need an AI sparkle button pla
79.
by the_snooze 11mo ago
For anyone still in school, networking is easy for students who take initiative . This doesn't mean going to networking events. It means actually doing things with actual people: get involved in undergraduate research, sports, arts, G
80.
by the_snooze 11mo ago
I think the utility of voice commands is marginal at best in a car. In isolation, voice commands don't make sense if you have passengers. You basically have to tell everyone to shut up to ensure the car understands your commands over a
81.
by the_snooze 11mo ago
Alexa is in the same boat. Compared to old-fashioned finger-and-screen interfaces, maybe voice simply isn't a great way to interact with computers in the general case. It's inconvenient, unreliable, and even if it works quite slow
82.
by the_snooze 11mo ago
It basically boils down to "I want the external validation of being seen as a good writer, without any of the internal growth and struggle needed to get there."
83.
by the_snooze 11mo ago
Ad SDKs exploit OS bugs to get location data. These specific ones have since been patched, but historicaly they read ARP tables, EXIF geo tags, and colluded with other apps that legimately had location permissions to get that info. It would
84.
by the_snooze 11mo ago
You see this in public libraries in major cities. They're open to everyone, so they become shelters of last resort for homeless folks. The large presence of homeless people discourages the public at-large from using the library as a li
85.
by the_snooze 11mo ago
They will go out of business, in the long-term. What PE does is hot potato: they "trim the fat" off an existing business to goose up margins in the short-term, unload it to someone else, and that someone else is stuck with a busin
86.
by the_snooze 11mo ago
> Apple's extreme of restricting the installation of anything outside of the App Store... is a step too far. This is the key for me right here. I think it's fine to offer preferred services and distribution platforms on a piec
87.
by the_snooze 11mo ago
>In other circumstances, they make avoidable mistakes, such as deploying confusing user interfaces or choosing greed over customer delight. This is exactly what got me to stop using Spotify (for their insistence on spamming podcasts on t
88.
by the_snooze 11mo ago
>For example, if you ask ChatGPT’s Agent to book a travel, it’ll open Chromium on Linux in an Azure container, search the query, visit different websites, navigate each page and book a flight ticket using your saved credentials. An AI Ag
89.
by the_snooze 11mo ago
Windows has strong engineering bones, but the business cancer has long spread throughout. Microsoft has been ratcheting up the extractive practices and disrespecting user agency since at least Windows 11's release in 2021. It's a
90.
by the_snooze 11mo ago
Yeah, the "you're using it wrong" argument falls flat on its face when the technology is presented as an all-in-one magic answer box. Why give these companies the benefit of the doubt instead of holding them accountable for w

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