You could say the same about Apple or any company over 20 years old which has had time to go through a few department leads and culture shifts.
I’ve had the Dyson DC02 (1995) - great machine, rubbish plastic in the handle which always cracked after 5 or more years. The filters were also a terrible, throwaway design.
Then bought the DC25 (2008). The DC02 still worked, but this was a dramatic upgrade, solid, strong, easy to clean the brush bar (a long haired dog and 2x daughters made this a god send feature) and easy to wash filters.
Then bought the DC16 - their first cordless. Appalling suction and batteries which died after 1-2 years of use.
Next decided to try a different brand and bought a Miele CX1 (2019) - their first bag less cleaner. Highly rated, very expensive. It had the worst brush head I’ve ever seen, required fiddly disassembly to empty the weird little dust compartment within the canister and had a very odd dust filter which was a pain to clean. Terrible vacuum and lousy design compared to our previous Dyson.
Now we have the V15 - phenomenal cordless vacuum. Can’t praise it enough. It’s just a vacuum mind but it’s very good.
As an aside we’ve also bought the Dyson fans for work. The circular one worked well the HP02 heater purifier which cost a fortune has a high pitched whine which is so irritating that everyone turns it off and this is despite Dyson reluctantly taking it back and ‘fixing’ it - whereupon a year later it’s back to whining.
Dyson himself seems a hypocrite and a little questionable - between Brexit and then incorporating in Singapore and also buying swathes of British farmland I’m not exactly enamored. Also backing out of the Dyson car seemed a low ambition move to me given he has total ownership of the company and is one of the few people in the world who can make that kind of impact.
But the article itself just seems a nothing burger.
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Could it be the language and framework determines the industry and planning/release cadence too?
I’ve worked in Java most of my career and anecdotally the Java projects were the most well run and unexciting.
The PHP/Laravel and JavaScript projects by contrast were on almost unreasonably tight deadlines, somewhat chaotic (the PHP ones anyways) and high stress.
The criticisms were telling though, Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) and many others claimed he had a rich mans agenda, seeking fame rather than improvement, paying for buildings and not books, maintaining segregation rather than open access, paying for bricks was "cheaper" than paying taxes, etc.
Not undercutting the role of libraries, just pointing out that philanthropy from the wealthy can be a mixed bag of indirect control and agenda pushing at times, wrapped up in tidy looking tax avoidance multi layered "charity" arrangements.
It's always fair to criticize, but it's also very plausible that Carnegie paid for buildings instead of books so that his charity would improve things for the longer term.
Also, as long as the outcomes are good, I personally don't care one iota whether a person is doing them for the wrong reasons.
Then he isn't rich, powerful and an unethical asshole.
People can be rich and try to do the right thing even if there seems to be no direct economic incentive to do so — and I applaud them if they do realize that money alone doesn't create a meaningful life. Yet I don't need to wonder whether a normal tax rate on billionaires would do even more for the libraries.
> Yet I don't need to wonder whether a normal tax rate on billionaires would do even more for the libraries.
I agree that tax rates should be higher, but I have absolutely no faith that politicians will do a better job stewarding money toward good causes than a billionaire who cares about them (and/or wants to brag about their philanthropy for clout)
Reducing waste is a great option! I'm not of the opinion that raising taxes is some objectively correct solution or anything, my personal viewpoint is just that taxing more across the board to invest in infrastructure and long-term economic strengths is the way to go.
> Other than power user distros (arch, gentoo, etc) Linux has been one click install and ready to go just like windows for a decade (Ubuntu, fedora, etc) and provides a very good OOBE nowadays.
So my experience with Ubuntu and Fedora on a new Thinkpad T14s Gen 3 (AMD) laptop has been a mixed bag. Lenovo state that this is an Ubuntu supported notebook so everything should have been compatible with no tinkering but that was not my experience.
You're right, OOBE with distros today is good. But in day to day usage there were three very annoying problems:
1. The display flickers due to AMD's variable refresh rate feature (doesn't happen on Windows) - fixing this required a custom kernel with VRR disabled
2. The speakers sounded very quiet and anemic due to the laptop shipping with Dolby Atmos tuning - fixing this in Linux required installing Windows (which supports Atmos), recording a special diff file in Windows Audacity with Atmos tuning on/off and then importing that into PulseAudio on Ubuntu to give it the same speaker tuning profile
3. The trackpad scroll speed was way too fast and Gnome annoyingly offers no way to customize this - the solution is to edit one of the libinput-config files
Granted the big stuff like Wifi, Bluetooth, GPU, printing and sleep all worked perfectly - even Steam + Proton worked out the box with games like Arkham Knight and Witcher running as well as Windows but little issues like those three above required a good few hours of tinkering in the command line and make things frustrating enough that I think The Verge author's point stands.
A lot of downers on AI and I can understand it, part of it is the response to things invented when we're older - new music, new movies, new technologies. I guess most of our brains are less plastic as we age and we resist incorporating these new, unfamiliar things in our lives and instead reaffirm the old attributes that make up who we think we are and what we already identify with.
Another aspect I think which makes us down on AI in particular is that it's the first thing which readily seems able to threaten our job security as programmers.
I'd propose a thought experiment where we imagine LLMs and other AI model types don't exist but everything else in computing stays the same (shift to cloud, increasingly asynchronous and interconnected systems). That world actually seems pretty bleak to me. AI upends a lot of industries and yes, it will upend some of our careers. But a world in which it exists seems a lot more interesting than one in which it doesn't.
Having had one for years they are fairly expensive, require some not insignificant maintenance and cleaning to keep them running optimally and are made almost entirely of plastic and are not recyclable.
A better option would be a carbon + sediment filter but again these are usually plastic fiber or at the least some sort of synthetic fiber and carbon in a plastic shell - a slight step up in recyclability than RO filters though.
I'd wager it's far more efficient for the municipality to get their water quality right at the source than every home fit a filter.
Use a different sediment pre filter that those cheap-o ones. It's just to prevent fouling of the rest of the system should serious sediment or scale come down the pipe.
For a final filter, it's a good idea to use a specialized filter for chemicals of concern, typically heavy metals and/or chloramines. (Example: https://matrikx.com )
NSF polypropylene should be studied more but I doubt it is a significant source of microplastics. Although, I wished pressurized residential RO systems could be 99% stainless steel or something else inert and easy to clean like thick borosilicate glass because PP does stain. It's important to use NSF listed / FDA compliant (CFR21.177.2600 A-E) O-rings and lubrication rather than random junk from Amazon. Any "water filtration" system that doesn't use RO or significant water pressure is only for taste and not a filtration system.
That’s disingenuous - part of your compensation at many companies involves the expectation that the work is rewarding or its outcome has some non-monetary compensation. This is especially true in entertainment and media industries where workers will even be asked to work at a discount for the prestige.
Otherwise why do finance have to pay engineers more (at least here in London) or why are the interesting jobs nearly always paying below market?
If the show or film was cancelled after the worker signed a contract to work, the expectation of the worker when they signed up was that said work will see the light of day. Part of the compensation would be having the work on your CV etc and the prestige of your name on the credits.
The studio has reneged on an expectation the worker had when they accepted the contract and did not compensate them fairly for this new risk.
> Otherwise why do finance have to pay engineers more (at least here in London)
Because of the demand and supply curve. If you require people in the city every day your hiring pool is less, if you require SC clearance your hiring pool is smaller, if you require some finance knowledge or experience of working on a trade floor then your hiring pool is smaller.
> or why are the interesting jobs nearly always paying below market?
That’s not true, unless you refer to startups by “interesting” jobs and then part of the deal is equity with a chance to make the engineers retire 30 years earlier than normal workers. Not a risk worth for everyone but it’s there for those you want it.
The pool available to work in CoL is higher by virtue of London's insane demographics than pretty much every other area of the UK, and that stays true for quite some distance outside too due to the availability of public transport that actually works in that area.
For the second point I think you might need to re-read what GP defines as an interesting job, they specifically give broad examples but you've narrowed that down just to startups for some reason.
I just bought a Thinkpad T14S Gen3 after evaluating a bunch of notebooks.
Compared to my Macbook Air the Mac excels in a couple of areas which Thinkpad is lacking in. Like ambient light sensor, port quality (ie. how recessed the USB-C port is and how much strain it can take), audio output quality (Macs have powered headphone jacks for high impedance headphones) and of course speaker quality which on Macs is second to none.
The Thinkpad by comparison has poor quality speakers, no ambient light sensor so it doesn't auto adjust the screen or keyboard backlight. Its USB-C ports are also not very strong so the any strain on them or wiggle will cause them to disconnect - they certainly feel very fragile.
I hear the Thinkpad Z13/Z16 is more comparable to a Macbook but again it doesn't have little details like an ambient light sensor which seems an odd omission in a luxury laptop and price wise it's practically the same.
That said, the new AMD Ryzen 7840HS and 7940HS chips are pretty competitive with an equivalent Apple M2:
Working in IntelliJ on a few Java projects (40k LOC) and a few Docker containers, works great. I've never seen it throttle outside of video games and when it does throttle it's by 5-10% so not much but then I'm just building web apps.
If your projects are bigger or if you have a front end open in say VSCode or WebStorm at the same time and more than quite a few Docker containers then I'd recommend the Pro - basically any Macbook with a fan.
I’ve had the Dyson DC02 (1995) - great machine, rubbish plastic in the handle which always cracked after 5 or more years. The filters were also a terrible, throwaway design.
Then bought the DC25 (2008). The DC02 still worked, but this was a dramatic upgrade, solid, strong, easy to clean the brush bar (a long haired dog and 2x daughters made this a god send feature) and easy to wash filters.
Then bought the DC16 - their first cordless. Appalling suction and batteries which died after 1-2 years of use.
Next decided to try a different brand and bought a Miele CX1 (2019) - their first bag less cleaner. Highly rated, very expensive. It had the worst brush head I’ve ever seen, required fiddly disassembly to empty the weird little dust compartment within the canister and had a very odd dust filter which was a pain to clean. Terrible vacuum and lousy design compared to our previous Dyson.
Now we have the V15 - phenomenal cordless vacuum. Can’t praise it enough. It’s just a vacuum mind but it’s very good.
As an aside we’ve also bought the Dyson fans for work. The circular one worked well the HP02 heater purifier which cost a fortune has a high pitched whine which is so irritating that everyone turns it off and this is despite Dyson reluctantly taking it back and ‘fixing’ it - whereupon a year later it’s back to whining.
Dyson himself seems a hypocrite and a little questionable - between Brexit and then incorporating in Singapore and also buying swathes of British farmland I’m not exactly enamored. Also backing out of the Dyson car seemed a low ambition move to me given he has total ownership of the company and is one of the few people in the world who can make that kind of impact.
But the article itself just seems a nothing burger.