I have been working all day every day in Claude. I loathe their bug-ridden UI. Every release is a new crop of bugs, sometimes the old ones get fixed, usually not.
Any kind of scrolling back, copying text, using their menu system - basically anything that isn’t typing characters has had/still has unaddressed bugs.
OpenAI shipped a competitive model and I’m over in Codex now. I have yet to hit a bug.
If you’re holding the SOTA crown, people will put up with your buggy mess. As soon as that crown slips your pile of trash becomes a huge liability.
Meta is straight evil. It undermines the institutions of democracy and it negatively impacts its users mental health, all in service of selling your data to advertisers so they can better goad unnecessary consumption.
If I learn you work at Meta, I will judge you as at best lacking a moral compass and treat you appropriately.
Apple has problems, but is a lot closer to morally neutral. Ditto for Netflix.
Amazon has hollowed out local retail/is also bad for society, though not on Meta’s scale. But you sell your soul more cheaply there.
Internally, it’s important to understand that every ask should have a business goal associated with it. The thing being asked for is rarely (never?) the only way to accomplish that goal.
Great engineers focus on the customer or business need and find/propose alternatives that are possible.
I’m taking it as a given that any sufficiently large social network is a gigantic propaganda machine of interest to domestic and foreign nation-state actors.
Entertaining the thought experiment where all the normies join the fediverse: now you’ve got a big juicy target maintained by hobbyists.
When it’s Lazarus Group vs Randall, the over-worked sys admin who stood up a node in his spare time, who do you think wins?
Social networks are cancer. Just ban the lot of them and move on.
Oregon decriminalized drugs in 2020 and the experiment is widely viewed as a failure by both sides of the political spectrum. The Democratic legislature rolled it back four years later.
It doesn’t necessarily follow that it’s impossible to have a legalized or decriminalized regime that works, but it is non-trivial to get right.
You should probably be more worried about the flame retardants in the rebond carpet pad. Better these days, but older installed stuff had non-trivial PPM.
I got a Zune on clearance when they were shutting down the whole mess (a nice fugly brown one for 80% off).
Build quality was rock solid, UI felt premium, and it mostly just got out of my way/let me play tracks. They were great little media players, as good as or ahead of the equivalent iPod.
Hardware was really good out of MSFT at the time, although when mistakes were made (e.g. the RROD Xbox 360 debacle), the broader organization seemed allergic to making thing right.
https://www.iangmcdowell.com