1. Hack together a proof of concept
2. Works well enough that management slaps a “done” sticker on it
3. Pile of hacks becomes load bearing
4. One or two dependencies change, the whole thing falls over
5. Set evenings and weekends on fire to fix it
6. Management brags about moving fast and breaking things, engineers quit and become cabbage farmers and woodworkers
7. New graduates are hired, GOTO 1

Hopefully not as a bunch of really good question posts full of mod-deleted answers.

The labrats subreddit was kinda fun. I’m a chemist, but the chemistry subreddit was overwhelmed by people asking for homework advice, showing off bad caffeine tattoos, and getting upset when they couldn’t talk about drugs or explosives.

Yeah, that sounds like seizing Russian assets and selling them to the west with more steps.

At work, my work PC laptop drives two 1080p monitors. I don’t keep it open to use the onboard one because Windows is so terrible at handling displays of different sizes, and the fans run so much when driving three displays that I think it could take off my desk. So I know what you’re talking about.

But. Have you ever used a Mac with two displays? A current-gen MacBook Air will drive a 6K@60Hz and a 5K@60Hz display when closed, and it’ll do it silently. Or both displays at “only” 4K if you want to crank the refrsh rate to over 100Hz. You think that’s not enough for the least expensive laptop they sell?

I’m really tired of people who don’t know what they’re capable of telling me why I shouldn’t enjoy using my computer.

What percentage of people who buy the least expensive MacBook do you think are going to hook it up to more than two displays? Or should they add more display controllers that won’t ever be used and charge more for them? I feel like either way people who would never buy one will complain on behalf of people who are fine with them.

limit it

There isn’t some software limitation here. It’s more that they only put two display controllers in the base level M-series chips. The vast, vast majority of users will have at most two displays. Putting more display controllers would add (minimal, but real) cost and complexity that most people won’t benefit from at all.

On the current gen base level chips, you can have one external display plus the onboard one, or close the laptop and have two externals. Seems like plenty to me for the cheapest option.

I have a Mac with multiple monitors. It handles them a hell of a lot better than my PC at work.

The axe forgets, the stump remembers

It’s not AI, it’s PISS. Plagiarized information synthesis software.

Let’s be real, everyone has a number that they’d be willing to sell out for. But this one hurts. Affinity make great software.

Non-profit organizations, educational institutions, and governments are exempt from the fee. The full policy is here: https://developer.apple.com/support/core-technology-fee/

If you don’t plan to charge for it, you can also just publish through the existing App Store infrastructure, where there is no fee.

(I’m not being an apologist. There are so, so many shitty things about Apple’s implementation here, but this isn’t one. I believe the EU should blast Apple as hard as legally possible for the rest of their implementation which is intentionally terrible.)

Oh, right – I definitely scrubbed the tracking stuff too. I wonder if that’s how all the clones were being found?

I cloned the original website (it’s just a bunch of JavaScript) once the NYT deal went through and still self-host it. I changed a bunch of the UI text, specifically removing all the references to “Wordle,” and I think it’s just me and my friends that use it. Still works!

This is commonly known information

My least favorite thing about these tools is that they are great at providing information that people don’t feel the need to look at critically.

“ChatGPT generated this, and it pretty much lines up with what I already thought, so it’s good to copy and paste” is not great for making conversations better.

Beats me. I’m just a chemist who managed my facility’s NMR magnets (built like MRIs but with different electronics for chemical analysis) for a few years. We had to pull some stunts to keep those magnets alive sometimes, but it was always a matter of how soon, not if, a shipment of cryogens would arrive. Can’t imagine trying to keep MRIs from quenching in a war zone.

No idea, but if it were up to me I’d spend that rationed power on ventilators and such keeping patients alive. Losing cryogens stinks, but you can top them off without any power as long as you have stock or deliveries. And I’d rather a magnet quench than have to explain to a dead person’s family that their loved one’s life was less valuable than some helium and a chunk of ceramic.

The cryogens boil off at a pretty consistent rate no matter what, but the recovery/recompression systems do require power. So once power is cut, any boil off isn’t recovered.

Superconducting magnets (like in MRIs) can run effectively forever when at the right temperature. Turning them off requires a complex process of draining off that current slowly and carefully so that the magnet isn’t damaged. Hard to do on a normal day, and profoundly harder if there’s no power.

I appreciate your thorough response, but I think it’s clear that “maximize individual freedom” is a BS marketing phrase given how much nuance you had to use when rejecting the “freedoms” I proposed.

But also. No problem with coercing workers to do 80 hour weeks? I don’t think you’ve ever been in a situation where someone had that kind of power over you.

And selling junk but “safe” medicine is as dangerous as selling cyanide labeled as aspirin. Or are you content suing the drug company after your kid’s asthma rescue inhaler was actually just full of nothing and they asphyxiate to death?

You’re forcing a black-and-white dichotomy where one does not exist, which is a nice oversimplification that’s the exact sort of thing I’m talking about.

Everyone loves freedom! Like the freedom to:

• pay a child to work in a mine
• schedule workers for 80+ hours a week
• drive without speed limits
• use as much water out of the local river as desired
• dump waste into that same river
• sell unregulated, untested medicine

So obviously there are “freedoms” that mainly serve to infringe on the actual freedoms of others. Those just happen to be the ones that libertarians don’t talk about so much but are really what they’re after.