Siri is really a pretty useless product. Its annoying that sometimes I can say “siri is x y” and it will answer me but other times it will respond “sorry I cant google this while youre driving” or whatever response. I see no reason I cant say “siri read me the wikipedia page on the thirty years war”. Why cant I query with siri? “Siri where is the closest gas station coming up?” I basically only want siri whilst driving and half the features are turned off then.
My favorite is when you have Siri off but CarPlay on. You can be actively navigating, but say “find me the nearest X” and it’ll say “I’m sorry, I don’t know where you are”
Yeah there should just be a global option when you're settling up the phone called "I want my shit to work and don't care that Apple has my location", and then allow all the relevant apps location access, rather than the piecemeal per-apple-app setting. I mean, as a developer I can understand the difference between the weather app always having my location and apple maps only having my location when open, but what the hell Apple? Just have a button for "make it work" vs "I'm paranoid", and let the paranoid micromanage to their hearts desire. (Not pejoratively, other people have a different threat model from me. I know people who have legitimate reason for enabling lockdown mode.)
Eeeh ... the gap between "full access for all apps" and "lockdown mode" is wide.
Casuals are in there--nontechnical folks for whom "brick breaker deluxe wants to access your contacts" might raise an eyebrow. The stalked are in there--malicious apps that track location of the install-ee are unfortunately not uncommon. The one-device-for-multiple-lives folks are in there (if your work email/contacts are on your phone, it's a good thing that your dating app has to ask permission before acquiring your phone's contacts). So are the forgetful--that periodic "hey, this app has had permissions for ages, do you still want it to have that access?" thing not only helps folks clean up their perms, it reminds lots of folks about services they forgot they paid (or worse, forgot they are still paying) for.
I write almost all of the code, but I love AI for getting boiler plate out of the way and getting docs. Chatgpt is way faster at giving me a switch statement for all Tif Tags than I could make myself, that's not mentally stimulating code.
I kind of have to disagree. I have really learned to love the explicitness of a big ole' switch statement. Its fast, no misdirection, all available in one place, and its easily readable where you need it. All of the "clean code" options for something like this I have seen that used more abstraction ultimately just split up the fact you have to keep a list of 100 something hex code values and some value there.
I don't think that anyone, much less someone working in tech or engineering in 2025, could still hold beliefs about Chinese not being capable scientists or engineers. I could maybe give (the naive) pass to someone in 1990 thinking China will never build more than junk. But in 2025 their product capacity, scientific advancement, and just the amount of us who have worked with extremely talented Chinese colleagues should dispel those notions. I think you are jumping to racism a bit fast here.
Germany was right in some ways and wrong in others for the soviet unions strength. USSR failed to conquer Finland because of the military purges. German intelligence vastly under-estimated the amount of tanks and general preparedness of the Soviet army (Hitler was shocked the soviets had 40k tanks already). Lend Lease act really sent an astronomical amount of goods to the USSR which allowed them to fully commit to the war and really focus on increasing their weapon production, the numbers on the amount of tractors, food, trains, ammunition, etc. that the US sent to the USSR is staggering.
I don't think anyone seriously believes that the Chinese aren't capable, it's more like people believe no matter what happens, USA will still dominate in "high tech" fields. A variant of "American Exceptionalism" so to speak.
This is kinda reflected in the stock market, where the AI stocks are surging to new heights every day, yet their Chinese equivalents are relatively lagging behind in stock price, which suggests that investors are betting heavily on the US companies to "win" this "AI race" (if there's any gains to be made by winning).
Also, in the past couple years (or maybe a couple decades), there had also been a lot of crap talk about how China has to democratize and free up their markets in order to be competitive with the other first world countries, together with a bunch of "doomsday" predictions for authoritarianism in China. This narrative has completely lost any credibility, but the sentiment dies slowly...
IMO Middle Class = PMC (Professional Managerial Class) in Marxist terms. They are the members of the working class (they have to work or they will starve, go homeless, etc) but are highly compensated because they are essential to functioning of the system and have rare skills. Engineers, Lawyers, Doctors, Managers, Accountants, etc.
I was a laid off in the beginning of the year from my remote job, landed several interviews, and I found a new job in <2 months. My resume is less impressive than yours, ~10 years of experience.
I was able to land interviews with some remote companies. I used to work at Shopify, a got some interviews at Ruby shops from that.
Some possibilities:
1. Ageism, this is a distinct possibility.
2. You held very senior positions. I think a lot of people don't like hiring people that were more senior than them. So that CTO is being held as a negative. They are not saying "Hey I get the experience of an EM and a CTO in a Senior Engineer for a bargain salary", they are worried you will overshadow them. This is sub optimal behavior for companies.
3. Talking to people I think non-tech markets look like they are doing fine. People I know in Rochester, Syracuse, and Cleveland aren't having issues getting jobs. I think the huge layoffs in big tech have left a big supply in tech cities to less demand.
> 2. You held very senior positions. I think a lot of people don't like hiring people that were more senior than them. So that CTO is being held as a negative. They are not saying "Hey I get the experience of an EM and a CTO in a Senior Engineer for a bargain salary", they are worried you will overshadow them. This is sub optimal behavior for companies.
---
Not only is there the overshadow worry, but there's the overqualified for the position.
You were CTO once, and now you're a IC again... are you looking for a CTO position still?
I had an experience (post dot com crash) where the team hired a senior engineer... who left the team within a year to be an engineering manager somewhere else in the company and our team was back to interviewing for the position again.
From our team's perspective we wasted the time interviewing and onboarding a person when they job-hopped (even within the company) in under a year. Despite being qualified as a senior engineer it wasn't what they wanted to do.
To that end, overly qualified candidates are similarly risky to hire as under qualified ones.
I've also been in situations where someone in a senior or management position is hired with previous Big Tech or startup experience and tries to make the regional retail company's internals into a Big Tech engineering department which ended poorly for everyone involved.
---
To your third point, the desire to stay on the coasts and around Big Tech companies is also a thing. Being willing to move to and within the midwestern states (some companies have return to office... others don't want to create a tax nexus in another state - if you don't hire anyone in California or Colorado you don't have to follow those laws... so hire everyone in one state and only deal with one state's payroll tax and insurance options).
> I had an experience (post dot com crash) where the team hired a senior engineer... who left the team within a year to be an engineering manager somewhere else in the company and our team was back to interviewing for the position again.
Same reason I struggled to get a job at McD's or Home Depot years ago when laid off. They knew I'd be gone ASAP and that I probably wouldn't eat shit the way the local rube demographic would. These are crappy service jobs but they still want you to stick it out for at least 6-12 months.
My career started in the south and then we moved to Seattle - it feels like everyone is laid off in Seattle - I could probably find something in the south again
can't comment on west coast but from perspective in NYC, i think the market for SWEs willing to work in office here is very good. might be different since there's lots of different industries hiring for SWE roles in addition to typical tech "startups" here.
i've noticed that folks who want to work remote having a tougher time if they're looking for tech jobs. makes sense if you look for jobs at a local non-tech company, you might have better luck.
generally seems like remote jobs have the most competition so if you can find jobs localized to your market, you will have more luck there.
If you play older games, Linux ironically works better than windows now for stability. The only game I have seen any issues with (note I don't really play multiplayer much) is the Harry Potter game, but proton eventually fixed that.
Recently on reddit /r/art the mods collectively quit because people were making fun of them for gatekeeping someone. Everyone made fun of them more. Stack overflow are reddit mods gone extreme, they believe their job is to stop all activity on their boards apparently.
Outside of console or handheld like experiences, I am not sure what this distro gives that Mint, proprietary nvidia drivers and Steam dont give me? I basically just download windows games as external applicationd through steam and use proton. Though I suppose a one click like “run this as proton” and “run this in this proton environment” could be useful. But once you learn how to change targets its not super complicated.
The entire point of Bazzite and other immutables is that you get a rock solid system that you never ever have to worry about breaking.
Atomic updates means updates either apply or don't: there's no partial/fail state that can stop your PC from working. And in the rare event that an update has issues, you can instantly boot the previous two images, without typing any commands or using any fancy restore tools. And if you're a bit tech savvy (ie you know how to type a single command), you can even go back upto the last 90 days worth of images (via github).
The best part of atomic updates is OS upgrades, they work flawlessly. In fact since updates are delivered as images, an OS upgrade is no different to any other regular update, unlike regular distros like Mint where you have to cross your fingers and hope that your system still works after a dist-upgrade (and I believe Mint's official stance was that they didn't support dist-upgrades, they recommend you to backup, format, clean-install and restore with every OS release. Not sure if that policy has changed now, but that used to be their stance for a very long time).
Mint does support upgrading the OS, both to minor and major versions.
I personally installed Mint in 2014 and used the upgrade path until a month ago, when my distro finally started showing bad signs of being experimented on (by me, for 11 years) and it was easier to do a fresh install instead.
I know the OS itself does, I meant it wasn't recommended by the team. See these instructions written by the founder Clement himself, especially under section E where they say "We do not even recommend this on the command line, so to have it triggered from the click of a button is just not acceptable to us. It's easy alright, but it's not the right solution."
I know, which is why my original comment stated "and I believe Mint's official stance *was* that they didn't support dist-upgrade" and furthermore, I went on to state "Not sure if that policy has changed now, but that used to be their stance for a very long time".
Would have been better if instead of "that used to be their stance for a very long time" you would have written "that used to be their stance a very long time ago, not sure about currently". Additionally, it would have been nice for you to spend a couple of minutes and check the current official stance.
Like I said, I have been using Mint since 2014 and the upgrade was an official stance at least since then.
I think 3-5 years (let alone 10 years) is a long enough time to pass after which one should check before posting old information. Imagine someone talking about how few games Linux has (pre-Steam) or how impossible installation of Linux is (because one needs to order physical CDs).
Atomic OSs are such a massive improvement. My experience with traditional Linux disros is the major upgrades failed as often as they worked. And always prompted me to merge config files or other insane stuff.
Bazzite just works like I’d expect an iPhone update or a Nintendo switch update to work.
For things like appliances (home theater pcs, gaming consoles etc..) you'd want an immutable rootfs that's resistant to random reboots, power cuts etc..
You'd also want stable, atomic, updates that can go from "one version of system software to the next" without breaking the system.
Recently, i had to reinstall my 7 year old arch install because a system upgrade after a year or so broke it... It's not like i can't sit down and fix what went wrong manually, it's just that i wouldn't want to ever worry about these things on my home theater/"gaming console" pc...
There's nothing any UniversalBlue image tweaks that you couldn't tweak yourself. It's just adding/removing packages, adding/removing drivers, a few configuration scripts, and a bunch of tweaks to fix well-known gaming-related issues.
But the point is that, if you want to game on Linux, you probably want to perform exactly or almost exactly the same tweaks that Bazzite already does. So why bother doing them yourself?
It's not even a linux-from-scratch situation where you'd do it for the sake of learning. Googling "my controller doesn't work right", finding some discussion threads, and copy-pasting a bunch of fixes isn't particularly interesting.
The gamepadui mode that allows you to use the system with only a game controller connected, effectively turning it into a console-style experience, is the main draw.
I don’t really care any desktop environment. I use i3. Otherwise I don’t really have much preference between how Firefox, terminal, and Steam are displayed.
I am suspect that ads will be able to cover the cost of inference, much less model building, salaries, product development, etc. The ad industry is built upon _and priced for_ websites that return results for virtually zero cost. That isn't going to be true for rendering AI.
Define "attracted". I believe porn and gambling both do incredible amounts of damage to society. Ads probably do some damage to society, though I can recognize some benefits in being able to advertise and market products and services. I don't believe there is any benefit to the other two.
I grew up on the unrestricted internet, it doesn't mean I believe it was entirely good. I did (and DO!) many things that I realize are not beneficial, and do not want my children doing.
reply