anyfactor

I sometimes feel like functionality and longevity were hallmarks of pre-2000s manufacturing. I remember my mother talking about an old children’s bicycle that a relative had bought in Germany. That bicycle was passed across through multiple families, and an entire generation of kids learned to ride on it.

To me, they represented the highest form of functional and consumer utility at a justified price. No fluff, no marketing that bordered on propaganda. Japanese consumer technology meant something incredibly precious to people in underdeveloped and developing nations.

It wasn't just about utility. It was about social status, too, and owning a generational asset that would continue to work for decades.

A Japanese consumer device meant that you had worked hard to afford a luxury, and that luxury did not derive its merit from a brand name, but rather from manufacturing ethics, quality, and the long-term, sustainable value it offered, all while being at the cutting edge of technology.

A Rolex watch uses essentially the same mechanical principles that have existed for generations. Its merit today is largely in its brand, not in being at the cutting edge of technology. An iPhone, on the other hand, is largely seen as consumable. Most modern electronic devices are treated as disposable, depreciating products.

But a Made in Japan Casio watch in the 1980s or 1990s was an asset.

There is a beauty and a tragedy in those vintage Japanese watches.

I see it when I talk to people in their 60s or 70s who struggled to raise families in developing countries on middle-class incomes. A Casio calculator for their children when they start their high school. A Sony TV for the family to gather around and watch. A Toyota as their first family car.

These weren't merely consumer products. They were milestones. They represented years of hard work, sacrifice, aspiration, and the dignity of finally being able to afford something that was genuinely well made. Something that would last. Something that could be passed down.

I don't want to hear about GDP, artisanal blue jeans, or deer based tourism industry when it comes to Japan. I see how an industry and an economy that once produced these things on such an extraordinary scale have been diminished.

I don't want to rationalize it or dissect it.

I simply find it truly beautiful what that nation once built on an industrial scale.

My approach was always: let me fix it first, then hand over the solution. It’s entirely up to you whether you want to follow up with “how did you fix it?” In my experience, 9 out of 10 people didn’t ask. The 1 out of 10 who did were often just making small talk.

The conversation was usually about how they ended up in that situation and what they wanted to achieve. I fixed they talked mostly to vent. That is part of the process.

In software engineering and professional culture, we often ask, “What have you tried so far?” That can be frustrating. The person you’re helping isn’t someone you have authority over—you either help them or you don’t. This cuts both ways, as they do not have authority on you to have you help them.

My thesis always has been people are generally polite. It’s not about manipulation or being overly conscious of achieving a goal. Impolite people usually are struggling with something internally, so you should pity them.

I made contacts with the executive team when I had to sign them up for their ChatGPT accounts and set up their VPNs (which often just involved pressing a button). They saw a YouTube ad about how a VPN kept them safe, and they paid for a year in advance...

People of all ages can have a hard time dealing with technology. And to be honest, the IT ecosystem has become adversarial. About a decade ago, installing antivirus software would eliminate many risk factors. But these days, with sponsored content and advertisements, there are so many ways people can mess up their systems.

I created this tool (https://anftr.com/) for some of my ex-colleagues in their early 50s who were trying to navigate the world of office software. They were struggling with Microsoft Word and Excel, and I have seen them yell at ChatGPT and bash their mouses constantly, hoping the computer will load files faster.

Essentially, you focus on text and video demos. The foundational design concept for elder tech is providing clear instructions and minimizing interactions.

If you want them to sign in, you should not require them to press a button more than two times.

To address things they tend to forget, consider a human custodian or "IT concierge" model, please. The reality is that after a certain age, people really struggle to learn new things and prefer talking to a person for help. Technology has its limitations.

If you are working with users aged 50 to 80, provide them with a phone number and charge a subscription for the service or a one-time payment. It might be borderline exploitative, but I have noticed that elderly individuals want a "solution" rather than a lesson.

You explain how to do something, and if they are eager to learn, they will. You offer them a solution either way. Please do not create a monetization model for this custodian service and keep the charge as low as possible.

The money you receive from this serves purposes: it is designed to help them second guess and try to help themselves. If you do not charge for something, they will just keep asking you questions. When you charge for something, they perceive it to have more value compared to it being free.

Do not prioritize ease of operation that compromises their security.

I am using KVM from Cloudcone (their virtualization software was hacked about a week ago) and I am using RPI4.

Then I need to set up my old website again, which is a pain in the butt. I hard-coded cron and a git-based auto-deployment feature (I think).

I primarily worked on PoC/MVP development where I worked to bring ideas to something barely tangible. And Heroku's free tier decisions meant it was a barrier for developers to develop on their platform. Pay first, develop later. It was like the rest of the industry.

After that, I just exited containerized platform-based application development entirely because convenience and having that weird developer philosophy "I must not pay because I can find a way" was less of a reason than sustainability. For me, containerized application platforms was about POC and MVP. If there was growth then me or the client can pay for the convenience. But if there was nothing, pretty easy to delete the project.

Then I committed to replicating the Heroku experience with a small VPS, backing up via rsync, and moving from PostgreSQL to SQLite. I can even charge clients for hosting (+ maintenance) on my VPS.

I do not know, to me containerized application platforms are limited by commercial challenges rather than technical ones. I see tons of containerised application platforms, but the trust has eroded because of a single company.

I have changed my development facility and laid the groundwork to not commit to these platforms. Sustainability over convenience.

Sure, I understand and respect folks at fly.io, render, railway, and even the open source variants of these companies (Caddy etc.). But there is no sustainability guarantee for these platforms. It was not just about the "free tier", to me it transcends to a philosophical point about building applications in general. Sure, there could be a new era with AI making MVP/PoC development easy through hosting in containerised applications, but that is a tangent point.

If Heroku were doing everything right, there would not be a dozen application platforms out there, but they made mistakes and, in my opinion, made the entire containerised application platform model untrustworthy.

There are only 46 countries listed there. I am not intending to be critical of the idea, but having contact information of government institutions is not an effective way to get things done, in my opinion. And most government websites and contact details are quite accessible because they are centrally built through national IT system and a unified software service (usually). In third and second world country the contact details is usually quite useless. You have to find the right person and sit in front of their office.

The issue with the government contact repository is that it does not connect 'I have this problem' and 'who do I reach out to'. From my experience, you have to invest time in doing research and finding out who to reach out to.

  - Afrikaans
  - Albanian
  - Arabic
  - Armenian
  - Azerbaijani
  - Basque
  - Bengali
  - Bulgarian
  - Burmese (Myanmar)
  - Catalan
  - Cebuano
  - Chinese (Simplified)
  - Chinese (Traditional)
  - Croatian
  - Czech
  - Danish
  - Dutch
  - English
  - Estonian
  - Filipino
  - Finnish
  - French (Canada)
  - French (European)
  - Galician
  - Georgian
  - German
  - Greek
  - Gujarati
  - Haitian Creole
  - Hebrew
  - Hindi
  - Hungarian
  - Icelandic
  - Indonesian
  - Italian
  - Japanese
  - Javanese
  - Kannada
  - Konkani
  - Korean
  - Latin
  - Latvian
  - Lithuanian
  - Macedonian
  - Maithili
  - Malay
  - Malayalam
  - Marathi
  - Nepali
  - Norwegian (Bokmål)
  - Norwegian (Nynorsk)
  - Oriya
  - Pashto
  - Persian
  - Polish
  - Portuguese (Brazil)
  - Portuguese (Portugal)
  - Punjabi
  - Romanian
  - Russian
  - Serbian (Cyrillic)
  - Sindhi
  - Sinhala
  - Slovak
  - Slovenian
  - Spanish (European)
  - Spanish (Latin America)
  - Spanish (Mexico)
  - Swahili
  - Swedish
  - Tamil
  - Telugu
  - Thai
  - Turkish
  - Ukrainian
  - Urdu
  - Vietnamese

In fact, they should have done that a decade a ago.

Mozilla has been around since the late '90s and should have evolved beyond just being a browser company. They launched a VPN service when VPNs were already everywhere, and they did the same with a bookmark manager when others were already offering similar solutions. Mozilla is always catching up, never leading, and that's a common issue with many big open-source and free software companies. They often pretend to be a business that isn't heavily propped up by big tech donations.

If I were leading a browser company, my focus would have been aggressively directed towards small business software. I’d create an internet and privacy-focused affordable minimal business software suite that lives within the browser — a combination of Proton and Zoho. And I’d strongly avoid building things that should be browser extensions.

I haven't worked on these types of projects for nearly two years now. Folks I know use Retool or Softr with an API connectivity platform like Portable, Pipedream, or Zapier. If you're staring at a spreadsheet on a daily basis, the next step should be looking into an app builder combined with an API connection platform.

I sincerely commend the enthusiasm, but working in the industry as the "excel expert", I think most outsider does not understand the "cult" aspect of Excel.

Excel works. That is it.

Trying to replace excel with anything will be percieved as replacing a calculator with some alien substance that does math. Excel is like Pencil and Pen. You can not replace it.

Excel is not software it is a tool.

I have had my fair share backlash when trying to introduce replacement and complimentary tools. To replace excel, you not only need to advocate for it's usefulness and you need to be also be liable to the complaints from excel users. If anything goes wrong no how minor with the new tool, you are the one who introduced all these mess.

So, in practice what usually happens is that, when people hit UX challenges they go to a consulting firm and commission a backoffice software to address the Excel limitations. Some business may pay for nocode but that is very rare. They go to backoffice software firm and they build a CRUD software that is now not replacing Excel but compliments it.

Zuck is not a solo founder at all but what happened to the rest of the guys. Some says Google is what it is today was largely due to Eric Schimdt's involvement who is not a founder. The idea that all co-founders hold large influence in the long run of the company is not true. However, there individuals who essentially established the culture, the vision and the framework of the company.

The idea is that within the original or pivotal executive board there are people who even though left the company still holds significant influence in terms of grand strategy or vision. And those people does not include all cofounders.

Since the dawn of torrenting (and to some extent the the Silicon Valley TV show) many folks tried to launch a P2P resource pool platform. The challenge is that small amount of money being distributed to a large pool is challenging. Then there is the issue of stability. Do you penalize hoster who fail to provide a stable service?

Hosters must have "trust" in the system and platform can only afford to pay out only when the payable amount to hosters reach a certain threshold. Like you can't withdraw unless you have about $100 charged invoices.

And that is where I see the concept of crypto tokens appear because trust as a short term mechanism can be consoled via crypto tokens.

Engineering an service to take advantage of idle resources is a non-trivial task specially if the service is hooked up to doing something dedicated. For the hosters energy is not cheap, maintenance is a hassle and guranteeing stability is a pain.

I would love to learn how you would address these issues.

If you convince yourself you don't have to always write or participate or give a hot take, you will find yourself to be generally positive and more constructive and factual.

Any platform you enjoy has ALWAYS been a result of everyones kindness and politeness. Any platform that encourages impulsive behavior is not a good platform for your mental health or others. People are never impulsively positive. Even when a platform have a general thematic negative tendency towards something, avoiding negative interaction in general is the best course. Even if you can't be always positive , you can atleast be constructive, neutral and factual. At the end of the day, a good community consists friends and if you want to be part of the community, you have to make friends there.

Many residential proxy and scraping experts are pretty active on LinkedIn. But they do not talk about scraping data, just news around web scraping.

There are some communities you can find in Discord, Telegram and most professional web scrapers are pretty active in LinkedIn and Twitter. The fun communities are in fact small groups of people with shared values and interests.

These days, you do not make money by doing web scraping; you make money selling services to web scrapers. There are tons of web scraping SAAS and services out there, as well as dozens of residential proxy providers.

Most anti-bot mechanisms evolve so quickly that you can make a decent income just by working in a traditional software engineering role dedicated entirely to engineering anti-anti-bot solutions. As these mechanisms evolve rapidly, working for a web scraping company is more stable than pursuing web scraping as a profession.

Web scrapers get paid by projects, making it an unstable job in the long run. High-level web scraping requires operational investments in residential proxies and renting out servers. Additionally, low-end jobs pay very little. Brightdata hosting a conference on web scraping, which should indicate the profitability of selling services in large-scale web scraping.

Immigrants have helped a lot in building the tech sector's innovation in the last half of the century. But the defense industry often requires naturalized citizens to work on these projects. I think there is a difference between immigrants coming to North America to work and eventually settling down, and offshoring work outside of North America. Immigrants cannot work in the defense sector while private companies are more than glad to have them work on their projects. The challenge is that the current framework for innovation may not qualify for the defense industry.

In the pre-Cold War era, the concept of American innovation was largely fueled by industrialization and academic participation in government sectors. Post-2000s, I feel like American innovation is rooted in the idea of diversity and America's ability to bring talent from across the world and concentrate it in major cities.

My thesis is that the US wants one or two American companies with monopolistic nature to build their future defense sector.