ptmcc

Handling cash isn't free, either. Mistakes, theft, the labor of managing the cash box, frequent trips to the bank or fees for cash transportation services, etc.

Depending on which sources you believe, the cost of handling cash can actually exceed credit card merchant fees.

Many cashless businesses, including bars and restaurants, do it specifically because handling cash is expensive if you actually do a full accounting for it.

Because every product manager thinks they know better. I and other engineers have pushed back to "use the platform" for years and years and more often than not we get told to do something custom to please product's fantasies, because "the platform" doesn't implement some inane custom request. So we make something custom and worse at great expense of user experience/expectations, implementation cost, and maintainability.

Not that I'm bitter about it or anything.

> I still don't know why all the clothing suddenly developed that smell - I went my whole life without needing to do anything special to my athletic clothes until then.

It's the takeover of synthetic fibers (i.e., plastic) for everything, but especially anything athletic. Damn near everything is 100% synthetic, not even a cotton or wool blend anymore. From the high end to the low end, all synthetic.

I experience the same thing with any synthetic athletic clothes. They retain so much stink and it's so difficult to get out. And even using sanitizers the fix is very temporary and the stink comes back quickly.

I've switched to wool shirts for running and they do not have this problem. Unfortunately they are harder to find and more expensive, but so worth it for both feel while wearing and not retaining stink.

That's what the https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/backdoor-roth-ira.asp is for, assuming you don't have any existing traditional IRA balances

They are largely congressional jobs programs, not traditional business investments

Introvert doesn't mean one doesn't enjoy socializing, just that one needs quiet down time to recharge from it. Extroverts tend to be energized by socialization. It's also not always so cleanly binary, either.

I really hate that introversion gets conflated with social anxiety or misanthropy on the internet.

1:1s don't have to be strictly manager:report

I'm a staff eng and have 1:1s with other managers I don't report to and my peer staff/principle engs in other reporting chains and they are some of the most valuable meetings I have to keep connected with what other teams and the rest of the organization is doing, what's going well, what they might need from me, pain points, initiatives, etc. And of course just to build and maintain rapport across the org, which absolutely pays dividends.

I do these less frequently than with my direct manager, but still on a regular cadence, typically once a month or every other month.

$499 2007 dollars when the first iPhone launched is about $820 in 2026 dollars

The basic iPhone 17 starts at $799

The 17e is only $599

If anything the iPhone is getting cheaper in real terms, not more expensive

Sounds very similar to The Heroes Journey, which was a heavily modified EverQuest emulation server that got destroyed in court by Daybreak Games, the current owners/operators of EQ.

THJ was sort of like arcade mode EQ and became wildly popular (relatively, for such an old game) and started making real money off donations and in-game transactions. They likely flew too close to the sun by making money off it, but it demonstrates that there is real creative opportunity with these old IPs if only given the chance. See also the rise of classic and progression servers for the likes of EQ & WoW, which also started as a community emu effort but have now been officially launched and monetized by the IP owners.

And now Daybreak is launching their own THJ-alike but without any of the community goodwill so we'll see how that goes.

Which is short for "How do you do?"

You've never had a manager or product person take estimates, even clearly communicated as low confidence or rife with unknowns, as gospel truth? Lucky you.

The majority of Americans are W2 wage earners that take the standard deduction.

QA and SDET has been gutted as a role more or less industry-wide over the past 10-15 years. Nobody in charge cares about quality. Devs doing their own QA is like Boeing doing its own FAA certifications. Even with the best of intentions it's a setup for failure.

Yeah a lot of QA teams weren't the best, but the solution isn't to get rid of them it's to hold them accountable and improve them. But that takes effort and costs money, easier to just cut them and shift more responsibilities onto devs. The results are predictable.

Resources or the care, tbh. FOSS is a big umbrella and a lot of it simply isn't meant for "customers". Some FOSS apps clearly are trying to build a user base, in which case yeah the points this post makes are worth thinking about.

But many other projects, perhaps the majority, that is not their goal. By devs for devs, and I don't think there is anything wrong with that.

Pleasing customers is incredibly difficult and a never-ending treadmill. If it's not the goal then it's not a failure.

If manufacturers in general were serious about improving efficiency they'd stop putting huge heavy wheels on everything, instead of chasing fractions of a percent with overcomplicated and failure-prone door handles.

Side bonus, smaller wheels with taller sidewall tires are more comfortable, less prone to damage, and the tires are cheaper and easier to replace, too!

I've run many hundreds of hours with two variations of AirPods and they've never once fallen out

Yeah something is very CPU intensive on this otherwise plaintext site. The cutesy concurrent visitor cursors perhaps?

My home fiber is symmetric gigabit in Seattle, for $65/mo

Me too, the hard part is showing that this slower, more methodical process is more valuable than the flashy, quick shallow approach. And it means I might have to chew on a problem for a bit before delivering anything, even a proposal or design much less a product. But for a longer time scale it does pay off.

Fortunately I've had a few good managers and business partners in my career that recognize the value, but it's far from universal and I sometimes have a hard time communicating it myself in the face of the common move fast agile culture that is so prevalent in most of tech.

Having worked full time and saving for the past 15+ years

Honestly I'd love to check bags more often, but it's too frequently an inordinately slow and risky proposition.

I get free checked bags through my preferred airline's credit card, but still almost never do it because it adds so much time and frustration. The number of times I've had to wait an additional hour+ at baggage claim is ridiculous. And I've had bags lost/misrouted a stupid percentage of the time considering how infrequently I check bags. Fortunately never lost for good, but getting your bags days after you arrive is not great.

Even airlines like Alaska that have their "20 minute guarantee" often exceed it but get away with it because to make a claim you have to wait in line at the understaffed baggage office, wasting even more time after late bags. Get real.

If airlines/airports want to incentivize checking bags they need to do more than just make it free, but make it fast and reliable, too.

Yes, and out in the world there are many things that are called "consulting", which adds to the ambiguity of what it even means

"Consulting" is a term so generic and ill-defined it almost doesn't mean anything at all.

When I did software consulting, I was basically a decent "modern" web dev brought into crusty old companies to bring some new perspective and approach. I'd help with some project direction and initial implementation and try to get a team up to speed to continue the work. I typically embedded as part of the team for a while and did plenty of hands-on design, coding, and troubleshooting work right alongside.

But this was just a small consulting shop, not one of the big "strategic" consultancies. Very different worlds.

To some extent, yes.

Most notably, I published a little browser extension I created to scratch a personal itch. It got a little bit of attention and users, and then the feature requests started coming. Among a couple reasonable ideas were big demands like make it work on different platforms, make it integrate with other sites, or make it work entirely differently. And unhelpful bug reports that often didn't even make sense.

Not one of them ever contributed to the repo, and many of them were ungracious and demanding in nature. Fortunately nothing outright hostile, but it still left a sour taste in my mouth for daring to share a neat personal project as-is.

SMAC was a really great game, ahead of its time in many ways and laid some groundwork for ideas later worked into Civs 3+.

It's a shame the totally-not-a-SMAC-sequel Civ: Beyond Earth did not not do it justice.

It's not about belief, it's about observing, collecting data & evidence, and proposing possible explanations. As new observations and evidence are found the possible explanations are refined. No one credible is claiming hard proof of anything at this point.

If LLMs aren't already doing this, they certainly will soon. And it'll be even more insidious and "invisible" than sponsored search results.

I meant more in the general operations of running and stocking a grocery store, which Amazon Fresh struggled with for a while but has also improved significantly. Now it's on par or better than most of my local Safeway/Kroger type stores I'd say.

Fresh seems to also be their technology test bed, and I hope the good parts can spread to Whole Foods as it gets perfected.

I use the dash carts at the Amazon Fresh near me and they are pretty slick and problem-free. The overall Amazon Fresh experience with selection and stock has had some teething pains but they've been getting a lot better recently, probably learning from Whole Foods.

Sign in with the app then you scan the barcodes as you put items in the cart and I think it does some combo of weight and camera stuff to verify. You can also see/edit the list of everything it thinks is in the cart on the cart's display. If it does mess up (rare) you can fix it on the spot easily and without assistance.

Then you just go walk through the designated dash cart checkout lane, it blinks green and you're done and you walk out with the bags and the receipt is in your account history. Unless you need an ID check for something then an employee has to assist but they're generally pretty quick, but most of my trips don't require it.

Compared to "traditional" self checkout it's WAY better.

This has been my experience of successful usage as well. It's not writing code for me, but pulling together the equivalent of a Stack Overflow example and some explaining sentences that I can follow up on. Not perfect and I don't blindly copy paste it, same as Stack Overflow ever was, but faster and more interactive. It's helpful for wayfinding, but not producing the end result.