The reality is that a lot of old western europe was built for a climate that no longer exists. Houses are built to prioritize holding on to heat and rebuilding entire cities is definitely not possible if we're already bickering so much about adding heat pumps.

Yes, heat pumps may create a rise in temperatures in cities, but there are other things we can do as a society to also lower temperatures as to create a net-neutral impact.

During this past month with the heatwave, my electricity bill was only about €50 despite running airco all day most days. I have 6 solar panels on my roof for reference (was 3k installed I believe). If I was willing to turn off the A/C at night, I could have easily cut the bill in half since most of the billed usage was between 18-21:00.

With more disciplined engineers we are slowly cleaning it up but it is taking years to realize because management won’t allow work to be stopped on feature development. If we’re lucky, we get two sprints a year to fix things, usually around holidays when half the team is afk anyway so not a huge chunk can be fixed. Then on top of all of that, if you break something when trying to Boy Scout rule improve things, you get chastised and management clamps down more on “scope creep”.

Add in LLMs and now engineering management is convinced that they will solve our problems. Except it can’t really because the project is so spread out and disjointed that it’s impossible to reason about. You’d spend tens of dollars just to have it follow all possible branches of our most critical user flows (and then with hallucinations on top!).

I’m not saying the bots aren’t useful, but they cannot comprehend a disaster zone architecture in anything more than extremely targeted chunks. Without being able to see the entire thing, having it reliably refactor is just not possible without weeks of manual testing or taking a risk and being prepared to rollback on short notice. Writing tests would also take many weeks and if the point is to rearchitect to something sane, a snapshot test is not really going to cut it.

It’s a pickle of a problem for sure… and I’m not sure I will survive at this company long enough to see the end (though I’ve been here years already).

We have some and sometimes marketing comes back with some extra revenue from a partner if we build out feature X Y or Z for their new product launch. The contracts are signed so engineering has to do it or we’re blamed for lost revenue.

A few of those a year and you eventually end up in a similar situation.

Personally, I'm starting to lean more and more towards this approach.

Though, I have to admit, for a well defined bug ticket, AI can be super useful to knock those out.

Subtle, but it allows them to make some fun marketing claims!

Said another way, mandating safer intersections will apply to all motorists and pedestrians equally when they interact with each other at a crossing, but if the bus driver forgets to take their crazy pills that morning and the voices in their head say to run someone over, there's no amount of safety systems or auto-stop that are likely to really prevent harm from being done.

In most Western European nations however, we are fully capable of designing and enforcing travel networks that should rarely produce fatalities when it comes to interactions between cars and pedestrians. The reason many countries don't is a matter of political will.

Also worth pointing out that most Americans don't have passports and getting one can take anywhere from 6 weeks to 6 months.

Also, you'd have to be smoking something to assume that the three letter agencies are not going to be combing through Anthropic's customer list and assessing for fraud and foreign bad-actors. If you lie, they'll probably catch you eventually and most people are not stupid enough to lie about their identity to the US government and think they'll get away with it forever.

Identity theft also paints a clearer picture of what is required to remedy the situation. If your details have been pwnd hard enough, you might need to get new government documents entirely in order to protect yourself long term.

If a contractor takes my money to install a pool and then disappears, I don't need to reset my entire financial identity. I think it's worth having a separate idea to describe the situation as a whole and not just the specific vector in which a crime might have been committed.

The other thing I find most Mac people appreciate is a shared understanding of hotkeys and if your app goes against the norm, one of the first feature requests will be to add configurable hotkey support.

Unfortunately, Apple has dropped the ball with their newest native apps in regards to UX and it will take years for them to go back and improve things. The new OS this fall is aiming to start that process, but it will still be a band-aid in some respect.

If you set the target resolution to 1080p, not much changes in the render pipeline except the that final upscaling step. To get better quality, the lower resolution is bumped up so there is more data to work with for the upsampling, but the scaling performance can be very hit or miss depending on the game as the engine itself often can play a huge role in rendering performance.

As far as rendering the 1080p image at 4k, yea it works fine, but there will always be little artefacts that remain for those looking for them. 1440p seems to be the sweet spot for gamers today, but 4k is really nice for when you're not gaming as most online video is now made for dual use on televisions.

Some people might say, "Why do you need all that oAuth complexity? Rip it out and use a cookie like God intended."

We, the devs/ICs, don't often get to make those decisions. We're placed into teams working on specific features/apps/tools and we often have to integrate with a myriad of business systems by default.

Yea, I would love to work on a simpler system, but I don't get to make that decision. Especially not when my company has been acquired by unbounded VC cash three times in the past 5 years and now I'm forced to fold in my lovingly crafted baby into the behemoth.

When the startup is trying to attract customers and also impress investors, sometimes there is a lot of effort spent on the investors just so they keep putting money into the machine. "See! We have an ultra modern/sleek site so it must be some other variable that is causing customers to churn..."