For context, I live in a highly dense European country and I wouldn’t ride my motorcycle in our most densely populated city centers either. For me, a motorcycle is luxury transportation for when the weather is cooperative or I want to enjoy the journey to my destination. If I want an efficient commute, I’m gonna take the train into the city and enjoy the relaxed state of mind knowing I don’t have to navigate.

Drivers have waaaay too many distractions nowadays and I don’t trust most people to be paying attention as much as I want them to. At least out on the open highway, I stand a chance of getting away from them and putting distance between us. In a city, my options to create space often don’t make much of a difference due to congestion in general.

I hope you can find the opportunity to ride more in the future. :)

While I understand its going to be an uphill battle for XBOX after the wild ride that they’ve been on for a decade now, I’m hopeful that they can make a dent in the market and come back to really compete with Sony and Nintendo on their own terms.

Consistency has been the bane of all Microsoft products for time immemorial and I really hope they can come back and turn things around. Consumers do better with competition and with hardware costs spiraling out of control, we need more competition to keep prices in check.

This has been possible already but from my vantage point, it doesn't look like anyone really did it? Sure, there already exists tons of OSS that is built for this case, even before AI, yet it seems to me to always come back to incentives. IMO, there is no incentive to write maintainable software (and I'm not sure there ever will be one at this pace). Businesses are only incentivized to write enough software to accomplish the task within their own defined SLAs and nothing further. But even that doesn't seem to be a blocker at this point if Github is used as an example.

Good software comes from people who care deeply about solving the problems in way that they are invested in. If your employees don't care about your product, you're already starting on the wrong foot. AI isn't going to incentivize bad-average developers to write better software or a good developer to push back harder against their clueless manager. When they make the decision, AI might help (assuming it doesn't make a bigger mess) but it's not going to reduce technical debt in any meaningful way without a sea change of perspective from product managers around the world.

So far, I just don't see it happening in theory or in practice. I hope I'm proven wrong!

Totally spitballing here. Strava being a website that requests battery does not seem wildly outlandish to me, albeit it is a bit suspicious in general.

The team working on drivers is doing a good job playing catch up and I hope intel will continue to invest in cards that focus on graphics workloads and not just on AI inference.

If anyone is wondering how to escape this cycle, the solution is pretty straightforward; don’t buy things you cannot afford with cash/debit.

If putting your credit card balance on autopay is scary to you, you probably shouldn’t have a credit card. Also, having a credit card doesn’t mean you can ignore the charges and settle up at the end of the month. Credit is a tool that can be abused and misused like any other tool.

Personally, I’m anti credit in general and don’t have credit cards or a credit score. But I also moved to Europe where credit is not nearly as important as when i lived in the US.

Better hardware ensures that software that is “finished” today will run at acceptable levels of performance in the future, and nothing more.

I think we won’t see software performance improve until real constraints are put on the teams writing it and leaders who prioritize performance as a North Star for their product roadmap. Good luck selling that to VCs though.

Will be trying out DB Pro again in the near future!

The first and arguably largest is exactly what you describe. Little sites for small businesses who just want an online presence and maybe to facilitate some light duty business development with a small webshop or forum. These sites are done by fly by night marketers who are also hawking SEO optimization and ads on Facebook and they’ll host your site for the low low price of $100/mo while dodging your phone calls when the godaddy $5/mo plan they are actually hosting your site on shits the bed.

The second, and more influential group of WordPress users, are very large organizations who publish a lot of content and need something that is flexible, reasonably scalable and cheap to hire developers for. Universities love WP because they can setup multisite and give every student in every class a website with some basic plugins and then it’s handsoff. Go look at the logo list for WordPress VIP to see what media organizations are powered by WP. Legit newsrooms run on mostly stock WP backends but with their own designers and some custom publishing workflows.

These two market segments are so far apart though that it creates a lot of division and friction from lots of different angles. Do you cater to the small businesses and just accept that they’ll outgrow the platform someday? Or do you build stuff that makes the big publishers happy because the pay for most of the engineering talent working on the open source project more generally? And all that while maintaining backwards compatibility and somewhat trying to keep up with modern-ish practices (they did adopt React after all).

WordPress is weird and in no way a monoculture is what I guess I’m trying to say.

I got my start in webdev slinging WordPress sites like a lot of self taught devs and I definitely see the pain points now that I’ve moved on to more “engineering” focused development paradigms but the value proposition of WP has always been clear and present.

Given how WP leadership is all over the place at the moment, I can see how Cloudflare sees this as an opportunity to come in and peel away some market share when they can convince these current WP devs to adopt a little AI help and write applications for their platform instead.

Let’s see if it pays off!

One of the reasons Vue has such a loyal community is because the framework continues to improve performance without forcing you to adopt new syntax every 18 months because the framework authors got bored.

There is a non zero chance that the company I work for pivots into some weird crypto niche (low, but we’re already fintech-y). If that happens, I’m out, but no way in hell am I gonna pivot my work personality overnight because of a business decision made by the company’s board and investors.

If I need to put on a happy face for my boss to keep my job, then I’m gonna do it because I can’t afford not to at the moment. That’s not to say there is no line, but being a generally positive person in the workplace is a role I’m fine with playing. It costs me very little personally and opens a lot of doors because let’s face it, nobody likes working with a loathsome human being, even if they’re right.

Am I a sucker? Maybe by your definition, but I don’t feel like one currently.

I’d take vibe coded vanilla js slop over npm dependency hell every day of the week.