Language and date time services like Moment and i18n. Huge productivity gains from having off the shelf solutions for multi-language features.

Node.js and Express got rid of all the cruft from backend API development. It’s a breeze to spin up a new API, whereas years prior needed a fairly strict environment setup to run reliably.

(I'm being sarcastic... I think...)

We have a very small, rock solid front end. Most of our work is simply updating content. It's very straightforward work and you have to try very hard to introduce bugs. But when you staff a team of 6 people and tell them "it's your job to find something wrong with this website", they WILL find something wrong. I have a meeting this afternoon to explain to my Product manager why the content looks different on a mobile screen than it does on desktop because the QA team thinks line breaks are a bug ("the content document didn't break the line here, but the mobile view did, it's a bug").

When you empower people to take others down via subjective rules, then it's always a moving target. You can never reach a point where people are safe and happy. Check out the shuffles deck subreddit for some egregious examples of cancel culture gone wrong, https://www.reddit.com/r/Shuffles_Deck/.

There's a correlation between parents who are both "systemizers" and their child having autism.

I've also heard the theory that Austism is basically what we've been genetically selecting for over the last 100 years or so - the world wants brainless consumers - what is better than someone with sensory disorders, who can be primed to get up and buy with a simple prick?

"Take it to the Apple store".

Are you fucking kidding me? You want me to send my staff out during the lockdown to get a piece of YOUR hardware fixed? No option to ship it, no drop off desk at our office or something.

You're absolutely right that when you setup a department called "IT" they are now a group of people that need to be catered to as much as the other staff.

"We don't want to expose IT staff to risk, so send your own staff to get the computers repaired. Then it's your fault if they get sick and die." was the message I got.

“Find creative ways around standards, limits, laws, processes, morals, etc. so I can make a quick buck and pass you some table scraps”

Same shit, different process.

My company recently moved away from animated characters back to using humans in their ads. Most of the people in our ads are mixed race, you can't really tell if they're asian, white, arab, or "tanned".

So it's the same promotion of a genetic look, just with a different group of people.

Retail investors do a couple of trades a year.

A tax like this would end high frequency trading overnight.