My experience with German colleagues is not efficiency; but they do have a remarkable ability (in my field) to read a 400 page regulator rulebook and overlay it on a 200 page design document and pinpoint the rulebook edge cases not covered by the design...

Days of our Lives is staged and so is The Godfather.

Yet one is not like the other.

Valve staged a scene of two people playing a game like how most people play a game. Just like that, there are many small human touches to this Steam Machine page. The messy cable picture where they show off the led strip, the honest and plain FAQ. Etc.

We don't have to glaze Valve for doing this, but we can still appreciate it.

Beautifully said. Engineering is often just a cost center and I often have the feeling management is suspicious that the engineers are just wasting time and throwing up roadblocks for nothing. This in turn makes managers always on the lookout for "the shortcut" to cut out as many of those engineers as possible.

There is a definite lack of appreciation for the often repetitive grit, toil and maintenance work required to just have profit generating working software running reliably in production.

Always appreciate people answering their own questions in great detail!

I bought my parents a M1 iMac in 2021. Connected a drive to it for Time Machine. Set up an admin account and wrote its password on a sticky note. Set up auto update. Gave a 5 minute instruction.

I haven’t had to look at it for 5 years now. It’s still 200% more powerful than what they need.

As a “power user” Apple’s recent output has been frustrating. But for casual users it’s an unbeatable ecosystem.

+1 for Fastmail.

I migrated from Gmail a few years ago. Setting up your own domain is peanuts. Migrating all your mail from Gmail is literally just clicking some buttons in the UI and then it all happens in the background. The interface is fast, robust, and can be configured to have pleasant early '00s levels of contrast.

Me too. To be honest, I am not that interested in reading the first 5-10 search results to find what I am looking for. If Google can do that for me and summarize the main points, that's another 10 minutes of my life saved.

Apart from the tone which is not my cup of tea either, I think what these types of articles/advice try to convey is that we (the working population) are still the monkeys we were thousands of years ago.

Sometimes we do stuff well because we like the other monkey we're doing it with. Sometimes we do stuff badly because we are an angry monkey. Sometimes we do the right thing but we cannot really explain why. We can sort of predict what the future will be like but not really well.

Management is pretending to "execute programs" and "align value chains" and "strategize on market trends" because the suits they wear are very expensive. But the reality is that they are also monkeys, who try to manage the emotions and urges and pitfalls of other monkeys by guiding interactions between the monkeys.

This kind of slightly wooly, slightly look-at-me-being-business-y kind of writing feels to me like selling your "I'm a monkey who can sometimes make other monkeys interact more effectively" as some cold hard logical skill.

May the world extend Americans the hospitality that the US has extended to the world in the last year.

As a naturalized American citizen, I hope the world extends Americans who leave the same hospitality the US extended for decades before the last year.

When you say world, do you also include the Middle East and South America and various Asian countries that were invaded, bombed, or couped by America?

As a non-American who has to live in a world that's deeply affected by the schizophrenic convulsions of your current government, I hope you stay in the USA and work on fixing your mess.

Does it occur to you that we too are deeply affected? Stop piously telling a whole country of people how to live their lives.

You're a USA citizen, I'm not. It is your responsibility to clean up this mess, not mine.

That is an absolutely fascinating worldview. I don't know what country you're from and what pain and suffering you've been through that was caused by the US govt., but you've managed to get me to stop caring. Sparkling incompetence. While we're exchanging unenforceable opinions about what random people on the internet should do, you should go help your own country -- by leaving it.

Me, I'll continue doing what I want kthxbai.

That would be amazing.

The US is an extreme outlier in accepting migrants. The current situation is effectively what the vast majority of countries already do. Some go beyond that, and gun down people with machine guns at their border.

The idea that the US is not a country that belongs to its citizens, but some sort of abstract global entity that everyone in the world is entitled to is farcical, and it's coming to an end. The US owes absolutely nothing to non-US people.

If people don't like it that can go anywhere else (keeping in mind that other Western countries are starting to do the same) or, you know, stay in their own country? (Crazy, I know)

> The US is an extreme outlier in accepting migrants.

The US is currently at a recent peak of approx 15% immigrants, much as it was in the 1860-1920 period.

This is less extreme than, say, Australia at 25% population born overseas.

Congrats, you found a more extreme outlier. You can bring up Canada too, but that doesn't change my point.

The US is more or less the same as France per capita.

Your "extreme" is commonplace.

Does adding Spain, Germany, Belgium, Sweden, Austria, Switzerland, Singapore, Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Israel, etc. change your point?

I’d be fine with America not wanting the world to feel “entitled to” it, if at the same time they’d stop feeling entitled to the rest of the world themselves.

Vietnam. Middle America. Afghanistan. Iraq. Greenland. Venezuela. Iran. Now Cuba.

Stop it.

Oh I agree so much.

All day every day my iPhone makes me feel like an idiot. I need to correct every other word I type (or at least what my iPhone thinks I typed). While correcting, autocorrect introduces new and even more baffling misspellings.

Sometimes it gets to “fever dream where you’re suddenly unable to successfully perform everyday tasks” levels of insanity.

And the worst part is: it used to be fine. I’d type more or less on full keyboard levels of speed and accuracy on my iPhone 4S.