I can't shake the feeling that they knew which headline would generate the most shares and wrote the article to fit instead of acknowledging where they went wrong.

The US uses about 2 billion gallons of water per day on golf courses.

If an initiative produces only 80% of the previous results and you’re paying large token bills on top of the same wages, the AI is going to get cut off.

> i've seen a number of articles claiming things like "devs self report they'er +x% more productive with AI, but actually they're -y% LESS efficient!".

Are you thinking of the old METR evals? Their more recent evals showed an actual performance improvement.

The old report is still circulated as bait for AI skeptics.

If this is happening it would be easy to detect by the upload bandwidth spiking during AR mode.

The 3D scan mode is a specific feature you have to use in the app that uploads 100s of megabytes afterward. It advises you to go on WiFi to do it.

If the AR mode was secretly uploading images that would be a scandal in itself.

The Pokémon Go data is for small little islands around their points of interest (pokestops).

It’s not a detailed city map. The data is extremely sparse and only covers little tiny bubble around their sparse in game POIs.

The way it was represented as some sort of high resolution city map or world model was quite ridiculous.

If you’ve played the game, the scanning function is only for what they call Pokestops: These are points of interest that you can walk to and get items in the game. The game gives you points if you walk in a circle around one and take a short video.

They’re relatively sparse. At most, they captured some 3D models of some things like signs, small landmarks (up close) and the fronts of some buildings.

The images captured by something like Google Maps are a million times more useful for someone trying to construct a world model with a lot of coverage. The Pokémon Go captures would be useful if you wanted something like a detailed 3D scan of the sign in front the student building or something.

The 1:1 is great when needed. It’s a waste of time if everyone is already communicating everything. The most efficient teams communicate effectively without having to force it into recurring, pre-determined time slots. Topics like performance reviews and career progression are better discussed in quarterly meetings dedicated to that topic, not a weekly time slot with a fluid agenda.

Looking up ideas to discuss with your manager is a good idea. If you are being scheduled for time slots and have to search for ideas to fill it every week, that’s a symptom of a broken meeting that should be reduced in time, frequency, or both.

> I guess shame on either the manager, you, or both.

This culture of shaming people who aren’t doing the performative thing of filling up the meeting time is why so many of us are so tired of this rigid 1:1 dogma. Business and communication practices should meet the team’s needs, not be a game of following steps you found on the Internet about what to talk about in meetings.

Schedule meetings when communication is needed. Stop wasting everyone’s time by searching the internet for conversation ideas for arbitrary meetings.

This is why so many people find themselves in performative 1 on 1s: It's assumed that the time must be spent, so managers and reports alike start searching for things to fill up that time.

The best 1 on 1 formats I've had were quick and to the point. We cancelled or ended early if there was nothing to discuss that hadn't already been discussed.

The worst were a game of finding things to talk about for 50 minutes because some manager read a few management books and decided they must fill up the time to bond with employees. So we'd go through silly questions from lists from books or do bonding exercises while I had to pretend to smile and enjoy it.

That leaves $100 for everything else on the Pi, including the hardware, building it, transporting it, and retailer margin.

That leaves $500 for everything else on the MacBook Neo.

That's why you can get so much more from the MacBook Neo. There's 5X as much budget for everything other than RAM.

The 2GB model is now $65, so don’t get too excited.

The cheaper 4GB or even 1GB versions ($50 for the latter) are what most people should be looking at for their projects.

I’m glad they’re making it available for the rare cases where it’s needed, but for PR purposes it would have been better if they just discontinued the 16GB model until RAM prices came down. I’m getting tired of hearing “Raspberry Pi 5 costs $300” now from people who have no reason to buy the 16GB version.

The 1GB version works well for simple Linux shell work and embedded projects. It’s $50.

The 4GB version works well for GUI work. Let’s be real: It’s a slow device and not a desktop/laptop alternative in 2026, so 4GB goes a long way for the use cases where you want to do basic GUI work. $110 for the 4GB model (if you shop not at Adafruit)

EDIT: Adafruit prices are higher for some reason. 16GB Pi 5 is $305 on other sites.

Many teams can and do function well without rigid weekly 1:1s. The best performing companies I’ve worked for didn’t have anything resembling scheduled 1:1s. Everyone talked to their managers during their work and managers were available for conversations if you asked.

It’s interesting to hear from people who have only experienced these rigidly structured 1:1 situations who can’t understand how anyone could communicate without scheduled 1:1s.

I agree wholeheartedly, but this company culture had different ideas than you and I.

Their idea of a 1:1 was that it was the formal and correct way to synchronize people. It wasn’t limited to managers and their reports.

This shows up a lot in companies with matrix-style org charts. You end up with product managers and designers assigned to 3 different teams and setting up 1:1s with their managers and certain ICs to sync. Then their managers set up 1:1s with the managers of the other teams. Instead of being a tree it turns into a giant graph with edges everywhere.

> And if your manager _wants_ to talk about their weekend, they can, but the recommendation is to always let the direct set the first 10m of the agenda

Now imagine this multiplied by 10 1:1s. That’s almost two hours of a manager keeping people captive on Zoom repeating stories from their weekend. Now imagine this practice was semi-standardized as the ideal way to run 1:1s at this company, so each employee had to spend the first 10m of every 1:1 with their manager, their product manager, their design lead, their team lead, and other people following the template listening to their weekend plans. Now imagine that you get pressured to reciprocate because after they spend all that time talking about themselves they need to ask about your weekend and pull a response out so they don’t feel awkward.

Sounds insane? It was! I almost wouldn’t have believed it until I experienced it. I couldn’t believe how many people at the company acted like it was normal and good.

> es, managers go to meetings but they're not all 1:1s and if they are, the problem isn't too many middle managers, it's not enough of them.

I was in a manager role at the company I’m describing. I got reprimanded on my performance review for not having enough 1:1s and for declining 1:1s with people who were not my reports (they tried to claim I was shutting them out and preventing them from doing their job)

Trust me, the problem was not a lack of managers. It was the giant interconnected graph of too many managers trying to set up recurring meetings with each other because that was the expectation.

I worked at a range of startups before joining my first corporate style company. This 1:1 meeting ritual was hard for me to adapt to.

At the startups, particularly the high performing ones, issues were addressed immediately. If a problem arose you talked to the people involved quickly. If it needed a meeting you got everyone together as soon as they were available or you messaged your manager to get it in front of the right people quickly. If you saved things up for the next recurring meeting then it was a problem.

When I joined a corporate-style company, that immediate and direct communication style was discouraged. Everyone was so busy with their meeting schedules that you were burdening them by bringing something up out of the regularly scheduled time slot.

The 1:1s had a performative agenda you had to follow with the classic ten minutes of obligatory chit chat or ice breakers before it was acceptable to bring up the work issues that you had been holding on to for 3 days for this scheduled meeting where it was permissible to bring it up.

All of the managers thought it was such a brilliant invention that this 1:1 format was surfacing the “REAL shit” that was “INSANELY actionable”, as if this was the only way to communicate. It seemed so absurd to me, having come from high performing startups where everyone just communicated to get their job done and was coached if they weren’t. Now I had to queue up all the issues and then follow the weekly ritual of chit-chat first, business second before I had a chance to bring it up in the culturally acceptable time slot.

I think these rituals are really comforting and provide a sense of routing and predictability that some people like, but I also think it can become a performative replacement for good communication when it becomes THE acceptable way to surface the real issues.

Like you’d try to talk to someone about an urgent issue and you’d be told to save it for your upcoming scheduled 1:1 on Thursday because they don’t have any time until then. Why don’t they have any time? Because they have so many 1:1 recurring meetings scheduled each week that they don’t have time for anything else.

1:1s started as a good way to formalize manager to report communication on a predictable schedule. This is good if the team isn’t regularly talking organically. Some company cultures take it too far and turn it into an excuse to make recurring meetings the focus of all work. I was requested to set up 1:1s not only with my team, but with each of the other teams we interfaced with, team leads on those teams, designers, stakeholders, interns, product managers who wanted to interface with us, the security team, and an endless list of other people.

All the managers were just shuffling from one 1:1 to the next. Many never had time to deal with issues from the 1:1s because they were so busy moving on to the next 1:1.

Middle management was always congratulating themselves on the success of their 1:1s because they said it was when they heard about all of the real issues they didn't know about. They didn't realize that by making themselves unavailable except for the 1:1s they were forcing this result.

It was even worse when the problems involved multiple people or teams, which was almost always the case. Now you had to wait until Thursday to talk to your manager about it, who promised to add it to the agenda for his 1:1 with other team the following Tuesday. Then in that 1:1, the other team lead would say he'd bring it up with his schedule 1:1 with the person the Friday after that. It was like every communication queue only got processed once a week, so each hop added more delay. The managers would always tell is it wasn't supposed to be like that, but trying to direct would get you hit with "Let's talk about this in our next 1:1"

The worst were the managers who had silly agendas for every 1:1, like my manager who blocked out the first 10 minutes for us to talk about our weekends with each other in a performative manner, 5 minutes per person. I could be dealing with an urgent issue in prod and he’d get angry if I tried to rush past the forced chit chat about our weekend to get back to business.

If you haven’t seen calendars stuffed to the gills with performative 1:1s then this is all probably hard to believe, but it happens. Some companies got so fat with middle management that performative meeting rituals were the primary use of everyone’s time and you would be chastised if you tried to break the mold.

You could argue that the constraints of using HTML-first (as they call it) helped them stay away from the bad patterns they were using before.

But you’re right: The user change came from fixing the design, not the technology used.

This is a lot like those bad resume bullet points where someone tries to claim an increase in business was due to their code change. “Increased visitor count 100% by rewriting website to be HTML-first”. Then when you ask them about that point they concede that the entire site was redesigned to fix some design problems or add a feature and that’s what drove the visitor increase.