This was a(n internally-)famously hard and lengthy process for them with ExactTarget (read: Marketing Cloud) because ExactTarget employees identified strongly with "ExactTarget orange" culture rather than "Salesforce blue", which mostly meant being appalled at the technical and process swamp that Salesforce represented and pushing hard to keep their own tech stack and their own culture and standards as long as possible.

Heroku had an interesting arc, as they were the bright spot people would point at internally as where actually good engineering somehow happene even at Salesforce. There was a whole effort to let Heroku be the business unit that paved the path to AWS and PaaS for the entire company (which was at the time operating datacenters themselves), and so Heroku got a bunch of investment and freedom for a bit.

Then there was some weird power struggle, and the executives inexplicably decided not only to take that out of Heroku's hands despite their expertise, but also to basically shove Heroku in a corner to be ignored unless stripmined of its customer base through upsells or its staff through reallocations of headcount.

For folks who don't know, here's the best explanation I can offer from growing up in the Atlanta area (but well outside the perimeter):

"Bless your heart" is most commonly an expression of sympathy.

Sometimes, it's sympathetic towards the hardship someone's going through (e.g. "and right after his grandma passed, bless his heart.")

Sometimes it's sympathetic to the trouble someone went through (e.g. "oh bless your heart, you didn't have to go out of your way to bring extra! Thank you so much!")

And yes, sometimes it's an expression of sympathy for the fact that life must be hard for you because of your ignorance, stubbornness, stupidity, or arrogance (or some other such stunting quality) (e.g. "and he thinks he can graduate from Tech with those grades, bless his heart," or "bless his heart, I just don't think he's ever had anyone tell him no in his entire life.")

This feels like a koan about the subjectivity of which details are important to include.

Uh-huh, and what makes that any different if someone else is doing it?

This feels like someone who discovered package managers for the first time.

Our Pardot leadership translated for us and provided the necessary context: Pardot is being killed. The plan was to start building the product that would replace it, stop selling new contracts, rename Pardot in the meantime so the change wouldn't be as noticeable, and in a timeline of "by 10 years from now" Pardot wouldn't exist anymore.

This is Salesforce for "last call for the lifeboats, we're gonna capsize the boat."

It was basically crowdsourcing the military. We've been running through all the various problems with that idea ever since, including:

- oops, turns out not enough people volunteer and our whole army got nearly wiped out; maybe we need to pay people to be an army for a living (ca. 1791)

- oops, turns out allowing the public to arm themselves and be their own militia can lead people being their own separate militia factions against the government, I guess we don't want that (e.g. Shay's Rebellion, John Brown and various slave rebellions fighting for freedom)

- oops, turns out part of the army can just decide they're a whole new country's army now, guess we don't want that (the civil war)

- oops, turns out actually everyone having guns means any given individual can just shoot whomever they like (like in hundreds of school shootings and mass shootings)

- oops, turns out we gotta give our police force even bigger guns and tanks and stuff so they won't be scared of random normal people on the street having guns (and look where that's gotten us)

Honestly, the whole thing should've been heavily amended to something more sane back in 1791 when the Legion of the United States (the first standing army) was formed, as they were already punting on the mistaken notion that "a well-regulated militia" was the answer instead of "a professional standing army".

It's an entire chore I never have to do. That time savings is significant when I'm already underwater all the time.

It's not a hard sell: no more oil changes, no more annual emissions-testing bill, no transmission to ever worry about, and a massive chunk of storage under the hood where the gas engine would be – plus a bunch of outlets all over for powering or charging tools. When I then tell them that I spend about $30/month on charging the thing (at home) compared to my former gas budget of ~$150-200/month, it becomes even more of a no-brainer.

And none of this has anything to do with climate change. It's just plain and simple practicality.

They tend to ask about range. I get around 300 miles on a full charge when road-tripping, and Buc-ees has some pretty cheap chargers (still cheaper than gas would be) that get me back on the road in about the time it takes me to use the bathroom, grab and eat some brisket, and change the baby's diaper. I've done some shortish road-trips a few times now, and not had any problems. I've got some longer ones planned this year, now that I know that I can find chargers along the way.

Ultimately, it was way more worth it to go all the way up to an F150 Lightning than to go with a good PHEV, partly due to up-front cost, but mostly due to ongoing cost: I will need to change the oil on the electric motors maybe every 150,000miles, and I never need an emissions test again. PHEVs require keeping the gas engine up, and getting it emissions-tested.

A whole category of cost just straight-up disappeared, for cheaper than I could get a RAV4 Prime too.

A `Result` return type is way better.

This feels like it'll be viewed like Java's `Date` class: a mistake to be avoided.

Beyond that,

>there are hallucinations and issues

seems like a deal-killer for a religious text. Yes, all translation by humans is an act of interpretation on some level, and so there's lossiness in all translation – but the difference between a human carefully weighing their reasoning for a particular choice of rendering vs. an LLM that is basically weighted dice that might land totally wrong is a categorically-different thing, not a question of degrees.

It worked to get our attention partly because of the time it took to say all that, and partly because it was so idiosyncratic that it sorta became a running joke.

I remember one session in particular.

This was a summer class, and as such each class session was around 2 hours long. The professor would typically give us (and himself) a 10-minute break in the middle of the class, and generally if you hung around the room, he'd strike up a more casual conversation in the room.

This was also not long after Michael Jackson died. The conversation got onto him and his life and his mixed legacy of scandal, went on for a while, and somehow made its way to one student observing that (and I quote): "he lived the American dream – he started out as a poor black boy and grew up to be a rich white man."

The room sorta hung in uneasy suspense at how the professor would respond.

"...and SO IT IS that we see that the Mongol conquest...", he said, launching noticeably-abruptly (and with a bit of a knowing grin) back into the course material.

He was generally a good-natured dude like that. His voice sounded a little unusual, and I guess some students thought he sounded like Kermit the Frog. He came back into the room after a bathroom break once to find someone had drawn Kermit on the whiteboard behind where he usually stood when speaking. He saw it, stopped, visibly pondered what to do with it, and drew a speech bubble from Kermit saying something like "the Silk Road" (or whatever it was were about to cover; it's been quite a few years and I don't remember the specific topic).

And also, our whole military recruitment strategy here outside of drafts has been "the GI bill" – paid tuition in exchange for lining up to go to war.

I don't know that the gap in morals is as wide as you think.

You don't buy a vehicle from Ford; your local Ford dealership buys a large number of vehicles from Ford, and then you buy one of those.

Yes, an argument could be made that eliminating the dealership keeps the same customer base while eliminating the middleman (see also: Carvana), but now you have a lot more cost and logistics (shipping individual cars to individuals' homes, for example, rather than shipping truckloads to a single well-known spot) and unless you're willing to do the Carvana/CarMax thing of offering a 7-day return window (which adds even more cost and logistics and risk), the average American customer won't feel as comfortable buying a vehicle sight-unseen from across the country as they would if they could sit in the thing while a salesperson pitches it to them.

That means you're taking on whole new category of cost and risk, while assuming that you won't lose any of your incoming revenue.

That's kinda a big assumption, and the major established/legacy/whatever-you-call-them automakers aren't known for having a high risk appetite.

To me, comments like "the entire arc of Scott Adams is a cautionary tale" rings less of vitriol and more of a kind of mourning for who the man became, and the loss of his life (and thus the loss of any chance to grow beyond who he became).

That rings empathetic and sorrowful to me, which seems pretty decent in my book.