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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> In that sense technology is becoming a feed back loop of society itself.
I had a discussion recently with somebody about how it feels as though the 70s, 80s, 90s had a distinctive style but from the early 00s onwards there appears to be no distinguishing character to the recent most decades.
Their conclusion was that it was due to 'the increase in technology use, less creativity - more sat about consuming media in one way or another'.
I wonder if that's true - we no longer have to suffer silence or boredom thanks to an endless stream of 'content' available to us.
It prevents rumination and leads us to have every thought impressed upon it variations of patterns from the past.
Sure - it sucks doing self-learning and working in your own time but when else are you supposed to polish your skills beyond what work projects give you latitude to do?
For example I was in a tech company where XMPP was the core of every one of our products. There were almost no REST based APIs in the company and we had our own protocols and APIs which made much of what I did very specific and non transferable. Day in and out I worked with XML, asynchronous messaging and increasingly niche tooling as XMPP became less and less relevant and HTTP based APIs like REST-JSON and WebSockets displaced it.
It wasn’t hard to move jobs but it wasn’t easy either. I had to spend a month or so in my own time learning REST, JSON, WebSockets and Spring MVC in order to pass interviews.
I think constant productivity culture leads to burnout but there’s got to be a middle ground between doing nothing after hours and hustling non-stop.
I have a T14s Gen 3 and whilst it's a fine laptop it has minor quirks which make it a compromised experience vs a Macbook Air.
Screen resolution caps out at 1920x1200 which feels blurry coming from the 2560x1600 a Macbook provides.
Its speakers are awful - they use EQ under Windows (provided by the Lenovo Vantage software) to sound vaguely reasonable. Under Linux no such EQ exists (even though Linux is supported by Lenovo on this laptop) so the speakers sound like a smartphone (not exaggerating).
The trackpad is so-so, to get a trackpad in Lenovo's lineup comparable to a Macbook Air you'd have to buy their Z13 which costs £700 more.
Pluses are the AMD CPU and graphics are good enough to actually play games, like Flight Simulator 2020 at 30 fps on low settings, or older titles like Witcher 3 or Arkham Knight on high settings also at a constant 30fps.
The laptop itself is good value, I picked it up on sale for £1200 with 1TB SSD and 32GB RAM for £1200. A comparable Macbook Air (M1) is £1600.
For context running Slack with a medium sized company workspace:
* Slack takes 6.5s to load on my 2021 Macbook.
* Slack consumes 366MB of RAM - if I browse around that rises to 744MB of RAM.
For the longest time Slack would kill my machine if colleagues posted gifs in messages. I'm no fan of Teams but I think there's plenty of shame to go around living in a world of eight core CPUs running large Electron apps.
As an aside the article title is sensationalist to say the least - according to the article the US saw a 18% rise in pedestrian deaths in the same period.
Out of curiosity I looked up cancer rates in Islamic countries (which typically) have far lower rates of alcohol consumption. Seems there is a significantly lower rate of cancer there by as much as 2-3x compared to countries in which alcohol is more widely consumed: https://jenci.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s43046-022-0...
There are doubtless other factors at play but the data at least seems to correlate with the WHO's recommendation.
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.