If you look at Wikipedia's list of forum software, it's all ancient except discourse, and discourse seems unlikely to ever be something great for users
Its performance is famously terrible. People often point out how unusable it is unless you have a fast phone and the founder's response to this has been to rant about how Qualcomm sucks and need to make faster processors
I wonder why programming culture is (on average) so enamoured with smartness over reasonableness.
It's particularly striking if you hang out with people who have the opposite values (e.g., trades, which, on average, strongly value reasonableness over smartness). By contrast, programming culture seems quite ridiculous?
What's gotten more and less reliable & durable over time?
I'd be interested in seeing a breakdown of this by category, the way people break down inflation and find that some things have gotten cheaper while other things have gotten more expensive, but I'm not sure that exists?
I think it's clear that some things last longer and are more reliable than they used to be (cars, computers, lightbulbs, etc.) and some things are less durable and reliable (jeans, some small kitchen appliances, etc.)
I wonder when (if?) driver behavior will get back to normal. Despite barely driving, most of the most reckless driving I've ever seen has been since the pandemic.
You can see this in the data: 2019-2021 had the biggest (%) increase in U.S. per capita motor vehicle fatalities over a two year period since 1944-1946, which was due to people coming back from the war. Normalized for miles travelled, 2019-2021 had the largest increase over a two year period as far back as there's data (1921).
I wonder what practices that are considered reasonable or at least common and defensible today will be considered moribund and obsolete in a decade and what extreme minority practices today will be widespread in a decade.
We've seen quite a few practices come and go. A lot of people will say it's all basically fads, e.g., as when Alan Kay derisively says "programming is a pop culture" but, IMO, that's pretty obviously untrue and it's easy to name sweeping changes that are massive improvements.
Am I missing something, or is cost saving work systematically undervalued?
Pricing cost savings as breakeven at 25x seems high, but it's a common sentiment. Before joining Twitter, I had a "sell" call with the then-CTO who said the same thing: if a senior eng saves $10M/yr (25:1), that would be considered poor performance and should be a no hire.
That's incredible! Twitter had maybe 2k eng at the time. If each made $10M/yr at the margin, the company would increase its profit by $20B/yr/yr.
I think part of it is the circumstances that would compel users to construct such a list. Until that thread, it hadn't even occurred to me that someone would present a case against the existence of negative literals that required a rebuttal.
Something I really enjoy is seeing how products signal their quality in funny ways to appease consumer preferences. A few examples below, but if you have other examples, I'd love to hear them.
A simple example is any kind of handheld product that's deliberately made to be heavy because consumers associate heft with quality. In extreme cases, adding a weight for no other purpose than to signal that the item feels "well built" or "solid" or whatever it is people like about heavier items.
Wow, people really don't like iTerm2 adding an optional AI integration which requires you to enter your OpenAI key to use, calling it "no longer fit for purpose", etc.
Someone pointed out that this feature is optional and not only has to be enabled, but it requires you to enter a key to use. That user was, apparently, reported on gitlab and is now blocked.
I wonder why people get so fixated on "meme" solutions to company problems, e.g, with tumblr, people inevitably bring up how banning (some) porn doomed tumblr even though this doesn't appear to match what happened.
And the idea that you could just add porn back to tumblr to restore its former glory. It was acquired for $1B in 2013 and then reportedly for $3M in 2019.
Why would someone think that filling tumblr with porn will turn this $0 property that's losing $30M/yr into a $1B property?
A site with ranked feed has somehow decided that I want to see viral UX/designer content.
In every viral UX comparison I've seen so far, the "good" version looks more "modern" but is also less legible / usable. E.g., below, the contrast is lower and legibility is sacrificed for cleanness.
I often see people site Brooks's comments that development can't be sped up by adding people and, in fact, adding people slows things down but, in practice, I've generally seen adding people speed things up and, in a 20 year career across multiple fields, I'm not sure I've ever seen an example of adding people slowing things down whether or not the project was late.
It's so weird to me to be in a "nice" neighborhood
A neighbor saw, via their doorbell, someone trying to open their door, so they called the police, who investigated and eventually determined that it was a handyman who had the wrong house. Another time, when someone "suspicious" was reported (looking into windows), so the police knocked on doors to warn people and patrolled to find the person
When I was in NYC, a friend of mine called in someone being actively beaten and the police didn't show
I wonder if we'll ever go back to the level of verification effort Intel used to put in. I suspect not in my lifetime. Historically, AMD was much worse than Intel w.r.t. serious stability bugs and, rather than AMD catching Intel, Intel seems to have caught AMD.
Intel has not caught up to Nvidia in bugginess, but maybe that's something to look forward to in the next decade.
Interesting to see the rise of ChatGPT-enabled Github spam.
The screenshots below are from one account, but if you search a bit it's very easy to find other examples.
Github doesn't appear to be on top of this at all, e.g., the account mentioned in https://github.com/swarna1101/VeChain-Thor/issues/1 has been spamming repos since last year and hasn't been banned (I reported a bad account once and got no response and nothing happened and haven't bothered since).
Now that you can make a ton of money on insta/youtube/etc., there are famous examples of this, but what got me were the mundane examples, e.g., this seemingly successful businessperson would constantly post about her business acumen, and then one day she starts posting about being a realtor, which seemed weird. Years later,
I find it odd how easy it is to make money buying and selling consumer goods, up to and including cars. You used to be able to do this on craigslist and you can now do it on FB.
I'm not excited to do this for the money, so I only do it when there's something I or a friend wants to "rent" and it happens to be offered for free or negative cost. I know a few other people who do the same and they easily make 2-5 times minimum wage per hour.
Why doesn't "the market" make this opportunity go away?
I feel like people consistently underestimate the size of "web scale" things unless they've had specific exposure to it. I'm curious if other people have noticed this or if this is some kind of bias on my end.
Some examples below (I can't think of any examples going the other direction off the top of my head):
At Google orientation in 2013, an instructor asked people to guess how many servers Google had, and no one was even close (everyone guessed quite low; I didn't guess but wish I did!).
Are there fundamental reasons that a company the size of FB can't provide much better support than they do?
The most common explanation I've heard is that support is impossible due to cost, but I don't find this plausible based the profit FB-sized companies make per user. If you just naively look at how many support people they could pay, it's quite a lot, not including things like diverting money from the ~$50B that's allegedly been spent on the metaverse
It's so funny to talk to people who run and own local businesses who, in the same rant, complain about how businesses are unfairly profiting by charging unreasonable prices and that it's impossible to hire because you'd have to pay people a wage that makes your business barely profitable if you don't want to be shorthanded with overworked staff
Of course these are technically reconcilable, but the people I've heard this rant from would clearly raise prices if they had the market power to do so,
A perennial viral complaint I've seen on FB, reddit, etc., for ~5 years is parents saying that kids the same age as their own kids have weird/ridiculous/bad names.
The comments of these posts are full of people saying things like "don't these parents realize how stupid these names are? Not like my kid, who has a normal name like Gary". But if the complaint is that almost all kids in the class have a "weird" name, aren't these "weird" names going to be normal for the kid and the kid's peers?
