I think it's a question of integrity - I have reached a comfortable ceiling in my career, but doing the dumb shit would have got me further, faster. I don't begrudge the peers who have sold out when the delta is $1m+ a year but I personally got into CS for the art, not the money.
A lot of people know the exec bandwagon things are going to fail and do it anyway because of incentive misalignment.
There are good PMs out there watching in horror as their peers make changes and features that are obviously doomed (to anybody with a functional brain). I also write as much code as the median engineer on my team (skews junior). Please don't write off the entire profession based on many (most?) being awful - if you work with a good PM some day I promise you will find there is an important point to the job.
A lot of OEMs will have a shortcut to enable screen reader mode even if the display is cooked (I think maybe both volume buttons at once for 5s?). OTG keyboard can be a lifesaver too, and many modern phones will let you use a USBC to HDMI cable. Way easier if you've pre auth'd for ABD though!
I don't know how scientifically valid this is (I hope very) but when a friend told me my USB hub / switcher would be introducing a lot of input lag, I bought a USB to eth adaptor and did a few thousand pings to the router, from direct to mobo and then from via the switcher. Unsurprisingly, there was no measurable latency (I had to use a 3P tool because Windows wouldn't go lower than ms by default).
I am aware that admitting to using Windows in these hallowed halls is a terrible sin, but the anecdote was too relevant to pass up and that's an important detail for anybody looking to repro.
> I know so many people who made that same argument, if you can call it that, about smartphones.
Sure, but people also told me I'd be using crypto for everything now and (at least for me) it has faded into total obscurity.
The biggest difference for me is that nobody (the companies making things, the companies I worked for...) had to jam smartphones down my throat. It made my life better so I went out of my way to use it. If you took it away, I would be sad.
I haven't had that moment yet for any AI product / feature.
I think that's a slightly orthogonal issue - I'm talking Google Search vs other search providers. I doubt there's a significant gap between Chrome and Chromium.
Windows is still the most popular desktop / laptop OS, and while it might come with a Chromium browser it defaults to Bing. Users who want Google search need to either change their browser settings, or install a new browser (two things this community claims that no average user would ever do on a platform where the default was Chrome and Google web search).
I know it's imperfect, I know it's getting worse, I know it's an obscenely profitable money making machine. But a lot of people seek it out because it's a functional product that (at least for me) is free and still outperforms the competition.
I don't want to like Google, but I'm not going to pretend the product sucks just because I'm unhappy with the business model and the decline in quality.
I'm being a bit contrary, but: it sounds like 80% of your traffic was coming, for free, from Google. Is the claim here that if you killed SEO, some more equitable, consistent method of content propagation would spring up to take it's place? Because I have a feeling people - especially young people - are abandoning Google, but for more opaque, less equitable algos (like Tiktok).
Tl;dr Google is imperfect but for a while it was helping people find your site. I worry there are darker paths in our future.
Yes. I think my core thesis is that if noise and pollution upsets you, then I would spend less time complaining about a niche hobby that barely effects anybody, and a lot more time getting annoyed about really common hobbies, business patterns and lifestyle choices that are destroying the planet.
And I think the obvious counter is "that's whataboutism, you can care about lots of things at once" but I personally am pretty fatigued with just causes, so when I see people complaining about hobby aviation in ultralights I just see it as a distraction that pulls time, focus and attention from bigger problems.
All of this is, of course, completely subjective. But that was the intent behind the comment.
A lot of people know the exec bandwagon things are going to fail and do it anyway because of incentive misalignment.