The old web isn’t a platform, an aesthetic, or a technology. The old web is people creating and sharing because they are intrinsically motivated. Everything we hate about the current web comes from extrinsic motivations. Good luck removing them.
Talking of cheap and powerful devices one can also look at Chinese UZ801 4G LTE (Qualcomm MSM8916) dongles. They cost like only $4-5 and pack quite impressive HW: 4GB eMMC, 512MB RAM, actual 4G modem sometimes with 2 sim switching support. Since it's actually old Android SOC there is even GPU and GPS in there. And a lot of work was already done on supporting them:
I think the fair way to read any CEO's comments about AI reducing their workforce at this point has nothing to do with the capabilities of AI and more to do with the revenue outlook or the growth outlook. Basically, they are "narrative shopping" to save face with the stock market... and IMO it might work.
Just a basic sniff test though - If AI enables developer productivity that would translate to more revenue, reduced costs, reduced risk, etc. The bottom line numbers would get better. With more resources available your next move is to decrease spending on more productivity enhancements or revenue opportunities? They don't want more revenue? Doesn't add up.
The better headline would be: "Amazon CEO Andy Jazzy faced with poor financial outlook tries to convince the public that downsizing is due to improvements in AI"
Cursor (and Garry Tan’s X post) has shown us that the VC money is propping up these companies astounding growth, the only way for them to become profitable is to increase the cost per a request, which means they need to innovate like crazy.
The moat is paper thin.
GitHub has open sourced copilot.
The open source community is working hard on their own projects.
No doubt Cursor is moving fast to create amazing innovations, but if the competition only focuses on thin wrappers they are not worth the billion dollar valuations.
I love watching this space as it is moving extremely fast.
Have any of the people who noisily joined X to make a big impact fast actually had a big impact over any time frame? Remember when G. Hotz said he was going to fix Twitter search in 6 weeks, and then it turned out that G. Hotz is just another midwit like anyone else and Twitter search is still as bad as ever? Yaccarino said they were going to transform Twitter into the "everything app" with payments, marketplaces, and even banking. None of which it turns out was within the abilities of Linda Yaccarino.
Entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games where you throw darts or something.
Middle class kids can afford one throw. Most miss. A few hit the target and get a small prize. A very few hit the center bullseye and get a bigger prize. Rags to riches! The American Dream lives on.
Rich kids can afford many throws. If they want to, they can try over and over and over again until they hit something and feel good about themselves. Some keep going until they hit the center bullseye, then they give speeches or write blog posts about "meritocracy" and the salutary effects of hard work.
Poor kids aren't visiting the carnival. They're the ones working it.
I’m surprised not many people talk about this, but a big reason corporations are able to do layoffs is just that they’re doing less. At my work we used to have thousands of ideas of small improvements to make things better for our users. Now we have one: AI. It’s not that we’re using AI to make all these small improvements, or even planning on it. We’re just… not doing them. And I don’t think my experience is very unique.
Why are you so certain that flaws will be fixed? Seems like there is a giant leap between a machine spewing words based on probability and actual deep understanding of the code it's suppose to write
Doing a bit of investigation with github_events in clickhouse, it is quite clear that the accounts used to perform the attack was "2ft2dKo28UazTZ", "mmvojwip" also seems suspicious:
I think it's a combination of Amazon murdering any competitors that can work at scale, Germany's general conservativeness around payment systems, and not-so-great shipping companies (when we lived in Germany, companies like GLS and Hermes were really bad).
In The Netherlands and we have a healthy ecosystem of larger retailers (Bol.com, CoolBlue, etc.) and smaller local shops. Everyone uses the same frictionless payment system (iDEAL) that just works with your bank account and is supported by all Dutch banks. Most companies have next-day delivery, many companies do so if you order between something before 22:00 or 23:00. Bol.com has same-day delivery for some products when you order before 12:00. Some shipping companies also deliver on Sundays, etc.
The conservativeness in Germany really jumped out at me: people still prefer paying cash (can't remember the last time I used cash outside Germany), lot of people hated internet banking (not sure if it's still the case now, but certainly was in 2018 when we left Germany), there are no store openings on Sundays, etc.
I can relate to the first thing you mentioned, and I never really took action. Layoff was thrust upon me, with the privilege of a severance, and I had been working for decades, so I figured "why not try now?" I'm not sure if I ever would have been brave enough to proactively try, but that's just me. Video games in particular are brutal, economically, and not something I would ever recommend someone take a risk on in hopes of a payday.
Regarding art: don't get distracted by art. The original prototype of Ballionaire was made using Twemoji -- you can see a video of it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwIwcGewZME Later I switched from Twemoji to images sourced from https://www.flaticon.com/ When I signed a publisher, I was lucky enough for them to hook me up with an in-house artist. I knew the style I wanted (the style you see in the game) and luckily the artist Hanja absolutely nailed it.
I would recommend avoiding art as long as possible if it's not your strength. You will go much further on making something feel really fun then making art that's one click above terrible. If you get traction, the art can come later. For future prototypes I am working on straight up text mode (or near to it, in like stock Godot UI) right now.
My suckless stack is Niri (Wayland WM), Foot (terminal), and Neovim. The suckless folks wouldn’t call it suckless, but it does suck less than anything else I’ve used on Wayland.
One big privacy issue is that there is no sane way to protect your contact details from being sold, regardless of what you do.
As soon as your cousin clicks "Yes, I would like to share the entire contents of my contacts with you" when they launch TikTok your name, phone number, email etc are all in the crowd.
And I buy this stuff. Every time I need customer service and I'm getting stonewalled I just go onto a marketplace, find an exec and buy their details for pennies and call them up on their cellphone. (this is usually successful, but can backfire badly -- CashApp terminated my account for this shenanigans)
> The trick is to not care enough about your job to get hurt but not care so little that you could short-term be hurt.
It really depends on your personal psychology. After I burnt out in a demanding role that I adopted as a big part of my identity, I joined a new company vowing to not take work as seriously (I remember telling myself, "if excess effort isn't rewarded, the optimal strategy is to maximize compensation, minimize necessary effort, and eliminate excess effort").
After a few months of recovery and ruminating on why I still felt so bad (plus therapy), I learned a few things about myself:
1. I feel like garbage when I'm half-assing something at work or not giving my all -- especially when the people around me are putting in the work.
2. When I am giving my all and I feel like I'm not being recognized, I begin to lose motivation and burn out. Simple tasks become very laborious. This is a gradual, months-long process that is difficult to recognize is happening.
3. When I start to burn out, I am forced by my mind and body to half-ass things, which makes me more demotivated, which exacerbates the burnout.
Putting these insights into action, I've so far been able to keep burnout at bay by finding roles where I can give work my all, receive recognition, and be surrounded by others who are putting in similar effort. This doesn't mean blindly trusting the company or destroying my work-life balance -- I believe that "recognition for hard work" includes proactively protecting hard workers from their workaholic tendencies and giving them the flexibility to take breaks. I'm lucky to work with really great people where I frequently pass along responsibilities or take work from others to avoid over-stressing any one person and enable things like multi-week vacations. I have no idea how I will change my approach if I lose this workplace dynamic or pick up more forcing functions on my workday (e.g. having kids) in the future, but it's working pretty well for me right now.
All of this is to say: for me, the low-trust "do the bare minimum to stay employed" approach didn't actually help me get out of burnout into fulfillment -- What helped was finding a work situation where I could give my all and not feel taken advantage of. People are wired differently, so I want to caution against a one-size-fits-all approach.
> But if I had any kind of point, it would probably be that spending the time to do things like write tools and explore the debugging space is pretty much always worth it.
> Strangely, I've found that there is a not-insignificant number of people are against this - especially in a professional environment. I think this has something to do with the JIRA-fication of development process, where all work is divided and sub-divided, and anything that does not directly check a box and produce a deliverable is wasted effort. It's disheartening that there is a whole group of people - developers and managers alike - who do not understand or see the value in exploration as part of the process.
So true, being able to create your own small tools is a superpower which is often at the heart of 10x programmers. It is sadly an art often practiced in the shadow.
Don't miss the https://github.com/nophead/NopSCADlib library for OpenSCAD, which includes a tremendous amount of useful shapes, functions, and the ability to produce exploded diagrams, assembly instructions, etc.
Early on in my career (I was a late bloomer and already in early 30's) as a developer, I got burnt out pretty bad twice. After the second time and teetering on a third, I knew I had to do something to change what I was doing and how I managed my work load.
I just focused on getting MY stuff done and that was it. I stopped taking on other's people work. I stopped taking on more work once I got my stuff done. I would do exactly what a Sprint called for. Nothing more, nothing less. If I finished early with my tasks, I would stretch out the time and just tell the scrum master I was close, but not done yet, but always finished on time. I basically just did what was required of me. I wasn't out to impress anybody, I just became "Mr. Dependable" on any of the teams I worked on.
This was the approach that changed everything.
Now, some ten years later? I'm never too high or too low. I still do the same thing, I still just do what is asked of me and that's it. 5pm every night? Laptop gets turned off. Friday at 6pm? Laptop is off for the entire weekend. I turn it back on right before my meetings on Monday. Separating my personal life from my work life with a hard delimiter was paramount.
I found out that if you don't protect your sanity and your own well being, people will take advantage of you and your time and it will never end. Once you break the cycle and get that time back for yourself? You'll make sure you never willingly give it to someone else ever again.
Protect yourself. Protect your sanity. Once you lose it, like OP said, it's very, very hard to get back.
I hope this helps someone else struggling to break this cycle.
For anyone interested in something closer to the feel of the original Bold keyboard, the Fairberry[0] uses the keyboard from the BB Q10, which is excellent and can be had for about $5 a piece. They can look pretty decent[1][2] and are more easily removed.
If anyone wants one PM me, I'll mail you a couple. I've got like 30 of them.
The good old fashioned Job Resources / Job Demands 2x2 strikes again.
- Low resources * low demands = low motivation + average stress. You don't really give a shit about the job, but it's also not taking a lot out of you either.
- High resources * low demands = high motivation + low stress. The dream!
- High resources * high demands = high motivation + average stress. You've got a lot on your plate - but you also feel well equipped to take it all on. This is a really nice place to be, especially if you're hungry for professional growth.
- Low resources * high demands = Hell. People expect you do build everything from nothing, and nobody's giving you any help at all, and you're bottlenecked by weird insane corporate BS, and on and on and on.
Being at low resources, high demands for too long will lead to burnout. Full stop. If you're there, try to get out. If you're not there, try to stay out.
JS snippet to sort and return Play Store app reviews by helpfulness:
var nodes = [...document.querySelectorAll('\*[aria-label="Number of times this review was rated helpful"]')];
nodes.sort((a, b) => (parseInt(b.innerText) || 0) - (parseInt(a.innerText) || 0));
nodes.map(e => ([
parseInt(e.innerText) || 0,
e.parentNode.parentNode.parentNode.parentNode.parentNode.children[1].textContent.toString().trimStart(),
]));
On macOS this can be really useful, change the current terminal to the top most folder in Finder, do not recall where it came from:
# Change to the Front Folder open in Finder
function ff {
osascript -e 'tell application "Finder"'\
-e 'if (0 < (count Finder windows)) then'\
-e 'set finderpath to get target of the front window as alias'\
-e 'else'\
-e 'set finderpath to get desktop as alias'\
-e 'end if'\
-e 'get POSIX path of finderpath'\
-e 'end tell';};\
function cdff { cd "`ff $@`" || exit; };
re: the performance review: don't know about your work place, but the first quarterly review I got at [insert name of large known company], my manger sat me down and explained she is budgeted a certain amount of bonus points for her 5 team members, and required to "grade on a curve". Hence, 1 team member will be "above average", 3 will be "average", and one "below average" every quarter. And for fairness, she rotates the names. I was deemed "below average" since it was my first quarter, but the good news, she said, is when she nominates me for "average" next quarter, she'd add a "shows improvement" comment to it!
Bare in mind, real actual money was tied to this stupid scheme, and you had to spend at least 2 hours writing a document explaining what you've done for the company, the team and the product, to justify your "averageness".
I lasted 3 quarters in that social experiment. And I'll laugh in the face of corporate recruiters till the day I die.
This shows that the articles by those who uncovered the plans were right [e.g. 1] - even though this is a political campaign paid for by the UK public (via the Government), and developed and coordinated by the Government, they have big logos of community groups and charities at the bottom and minimises the Government's involvement -
> "According to the [M&C Saatchi] presentation, the push will appear to be the result of grassroots action and children’s charities, while downplaying any government role."
The whole thing is just a pile of emotional manipulation, while compeletly ignoring the far, far greater number of legitimate uses of end to end encryption, and the actual dangers to everyday people of personal information being stolen, accessed, leaked, etc. if it's banned! Extremely dirty tactics.
Buttcoiners' "future" is all about financializing everything. They have ZERO claim to "good old web 1.0 decentralization" because the original web was all about information wanting to be free!
If I buy a license of a game, I gain the legal ability to play the game.
If I buy a print of and associated license to art, I gain the legal ability to look at and resell my copy the art.
If I invest and buy the copyright to something, I can sell the above rights to others.
If I pay to record on a blockchain my ownership a hash, I gain...nothing. I guess I could brag about how I paid money for a hexadecimal string when no one else was willing to? The theoretical advantage is that I can try to pawn it off on someone else for more money by convincing him that he can do the same to someone else.
For those who may be curious, how two very similar products (USBNinja and the O.MG Cable) exist, there is a bit of history.
Both products are based on the concept of a HID attack: most modern OSs (MacOS, Linux, Windows, Android...) trust HID (Human Interface Devices) implicitly. This means that when you plug in a Keyboard, Mouse, Storage device or Network device, they work instantly. You don't need to install drivers or explicitly enable them. The newly attached devices work instantly - even on a locked device.
The advantage here is obvious. The disadvantage is more subtle, but was exploited by the Hak5 "Rubber Ducky". By emulating a HID device (or even worse, multiple HID devices simultaneously..) - you could essentially control a computer and deploy / execute anything, as if you had full control of the device.
"The Classic" PoC is the Windows "Creds" attack [1] - which unlocks locked windows machines - later turned very, very nuclear by Samy Kamkar with PoisonTap [2], which essentially exfiltrates data, exfiltrates cookies and credentials, and permanently backdoors a locked PC.
The idea of moving from a dedicated device (Rubber Ducky) to an embedded device first came to surface with the BadUSB device [3].
The idea of moving it into a cable came from the NSA, a device called COTTONMOUTH [4][6], which was leaked during the NSA document dumps [5]. MG, the designer of BadUSB, built a prototype of this with today's resources.
RRG, the company behind the latest iterations of Proxmark 3, ChameleonTiny, etc prototyped and built the USBNinja. Their device is built on the Arduino (Ducky) framework, as opposed to the ESP32 Framework.
There is / was drama between MG (behind BadUSB) and RRG / Kevin Mitnik; MG claimed that it was his prototyped device was brought to market first by RRG.
Drama aside, both products exist, both serve the same purposes, and from a hardware point of view, they're both incredible devices that we could have never imagined 10 years ago.
Personally, I find the framework of the USBNinja to be slightly better in practical purposes, (Non-degraded USB-C charging and performance, non detectable wifi etc). I believe there is also a "pro" version slated for release that adds significant functionality.
Source / disclaimer for all of this: I source products for https://Lab401.com - so we performed a deep dive on both products before deciding which to stock. I also had the chance to visit the factories and witness the prototyping - absolutely fascinating.
It's worth underlining that when the COTTONMOUTH device came out in 2009, it had a value of over 1MUSD. 10 years later, arguably better and smaller devices are literally 0.01% the price, and you can have one in your hand. Progress is amazing.
