Think about what you would like to remain in the world after you are gone. Then think how you can connect with and advance those things, and act accordingly in your life. To me this has been a reliable way to find meaning in life. But obviously I don’t claim this is unquestionable or works for everyone.

The iPad is particularly bad in this respect. For a decade it would not support the most obvious use case for a device like this: Have it in portrait mode like a notebook, show a video or book app on the top half and notes app on the bottom half. A use case that was solved by the original Macintosh. The most infuriating thing was that you could split the vertical screen into two useless, thing vertical strips---a configuration I have never seen any use case for. Even today now that there is some more configurability and you can vaguely put two apps in this configuration, there is still massive wasted space on the sides and the apps overlap.

To this day I’m grateful I stumbled across the Hotline software and the server.

How do you communicate with the rest of the organization? What is the lifecycle and release process like? Do you write requirements and specs for others (like validation or integration) to base their work on? Basically, what does the day to day work look like?

Over a decade later I read the Autodesk File and it was a major inspiration for founding my first startup.

He was an inspiration to generations of hackers.

For some reason I cannot comprehend, I can split the screen horizontally, which results in two thin strips side-by-side that are useless for anything that I can think of. It is not possible to split it vertically so that I would have two reasonable aspect ratio apps on top of each other. Now they added a convoluted "multitasking" mechanism that kind of lets me solve this for reading, where I can have two 3/4 sized apps overlapping each other, but I still cannot just split the screen or have freely resizable apps (which, again, is a problem solved already in the original Macintosh).

This type of terrible UX has become endemic, and is even worse in non-Apple products. The root cause I believe is "authoritarian simplicity", where some UX designer or team thinks they know the best and force a single, over-simplified, over-specified solution on everyone.

It's cultural. Living in Europe, I've always been confused how salaried workers would not have set hours per week in the US.

I'm literally selling my working hours to a company. Of course the contract is going to have to include exactly how many hours I'm selling and how much money I'm getting in return.

It is an employment contract. I'm not selling the completion of a specific task or a project (that would be a different type of contract and I would price it very differently), I'm selling specific hours my time.

Let me try to add some more concreteness to this. I work for a major US tech company in Western Europe in a "second class" tech hub (i.e., not London or Zurich, but with most of the major tech companies present). Total compensation is low six figures, which is over 1.5x what I was offered by large European companies.

On my payslip, my net is about 55% of the gross. I then pay 25% of the net as my half of the rent, and 20% for childcare (in theory you could get it much cheaper, but in practice there are no available spots). On average I've paid 10% of net out-of-pocket for extra healthcare costs not covered by the mandatory insurance (which costs 15% of gross).

Compared to my previous job, my gross is now 2x but net 1.4x. My lifestyle is not meaningfully different than when I was making half the gross, I just accumulate some modest savings instead of breaking even. I still have no chance to own a home anywhere near the city I live in. I don't know how I could "work my way to a great lifestyle" here. Maybe I'm just doing it wrong.

Overall, my peers in the US have a significantly better lifestyle than me. What I do get that my peers in the US don't (AFAIK) is 30 days of paid holidays. Also my wife can get a year of maternity leave with reasonable benefits.

The worker benefits are pretty theoretical, since in practice I have to work well above the tracked hours to be competitive on the career track. I can also still be laid off on reasonably short notice if the company decides to cut costs. I would get 60% of my salary for a year from the state as unemployment, but I would typically not get any severance from the company.

Based on what I've read and heard from hiring managers, I optimized two things: CV and video call setup. My CV was customized for every application, a single page dense with information but designed to be easy to skim and pattern match to the role requirements. For video calls, I had a high quality camera, microphone, lighting and background arrangement. There are tons of guides for YouTuber setups, which I followed.

I have no control experiment (it could be due to a hot job market or my experience profile) but I was honestly quite surprised how effective it all seemed.