- I'm old enough to remember having an individual office (and, a bit later, two-person offices). Great for collaboration, because it had a whiteboard and enough space/furniture for a few people to huddle, and for focused individual work, and for meetings with remote people without disrupting anyone and without taking up a meeting room. Nowadays we have unforced poor conditions and outcomes, mostly for pretend savings on facilities.
And, of course, serendipitous collaboration rarely happens when everyone is sitting with noise cancelling headphones, focusing on hitting their ambitious individual goals for the quarter/half/year.
- On your desktop/laptop, most tasks probably don't run inside VMs or containers. Perhaps some applications use Flatpak or snaps or similar, but the default state for many currently popular Linux distributions is "no sandboxing of any kind".
Linux holds on to a negligible share of the overall desktop market OS, but it is marginally more popular among tech savvy people, which have plenty of disposable income, meaning the platform has steadily growing interest for malware authors and distributors despite its relatively low usage.
- TL;DR chronic underfunding of the system, here's one example article:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ambulance-response-ti...
The federal government shifts the responsibility to the provinces, the provinces in turn try to download as much as possible onto the cities. There's not enough money for everything on every level of the government.
This also reflects on 911/dispatch systems, where there indeed might not be easy visibility of when an ambulance might be available, and even then it could be preempted by a higher priority call -- although a heart attack has to be close to the top of the list.
There are also occasional weather events, like the storm two days ago, that cause a surge in demand (>300 crashes reported and many of them needed attending to).
- "The people in the middle of the bell curve face a dramatically less promising future than the tail end" is also the key message of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average_Is_Over, 13 years ago.
- This is one of key points of _Team Topologies_ (https://teamtopologies.com, also a book). Close collaboration between teams saps resources from both and should be either time-limited (a shared project, and then step back) or scope-limited (this team will only do close collaboration with one other team at a time).
- As a personal Wise customer, I have a small issue with a name mismatch. It happens every time, I need to submit extra documentation every time, and when I raise the issue with support I get the same response every time - they got the documents and the transfer can go ahead, so there's no problem. They are incapable of the simple act of looking the history and realizing there is an issue. Wise excels at low fees, not at customer support.
- Books are rapidly dropping in relevance. It could certainly be that that's exactly how this went down a decade ago, but I'd be willing to bet on Amazon stipulating "no DRM to be on Amazon" (not just Kindle; bundle all the first party distribution together) now and at least some of the big houses folding.
- US is the outlier. Canadian tech salaries are much higher than European, and when working remotely for a US company the compensation overlaps the US salary bands very substantially.
However the ceiling in the US is so much higher that it still makes sense for many to tolerate the chaos and uncertainty of moving here for work.
- "In recent months, both broadcasters have announced their intent to buy or sell local TV assets — Nexstar is in the process of effectuating a $6 billion merger with peer broadcaster TEGNA, and Sinclair is executing on a mixture of station acquisitions and sales — all of which require the approval of the FCC."
https://thedesk.net/2025/09/nexstar-sinclair-jimmy-kimmel-fc...
- Now available on BART and coming to other Bay Area transit agencies.
https://www.clippercard.com/ClipperWeb/contactless-payments....
- A simple, open-source spam filtering approach gets rid of 99.99% of spam. My total filtered email volume in a day is in the single to low double digits in the personal account and double digits at work. This is very much in range for LLM filtering of mail that passes the mechanical spam filter.
- Regular spam isn't really a problem.
For work email, various salespeople reaching out to sell things, often things completely unrelated to my job title, are highly annoying. I report all of them to spam to Google and block their emails, but the approaches of modern salespeople are increasingly indistinguishable from those of mass spammers (burner domains, "prewarming", multiple scheduled human looking followups, etc.)
Things I do intentionally subscribe to (such as airline offers) tend to switch their send-from address or title or something else every so often and are no longer caught by filters. At some volume, this becomes an occasional annoying toil to deal with. Note, I don't use Gmail, unlike ~90-95% of people in my circles.
- This is rather likely to get worse.
Reading comprehension is declining. Emphasis on individual "impact" and deadline pressure, common at both premiere companies and "non-premiere" companies mindlessly copying the former, both consume time that could have been spent thinking, writing, and engaging with optional things others wrote. People who avoid documents because they might get outdated create systems with no documentation at all. And now, LLMs promise a world where documents don't need to exist a priori -- a model will look at your code and generate a plausible description of possible intent and system architecture on demand, if someone implausibly happens to ask for documentation. If nobody happens to ask, that's even more time saved - a win-win!
Leadership can either support or inhibit the culture of writing and reading. However, modern managers are not immune from the rising pressure. Their response is to shift from thinking and deliberate information processing to rapid-fire pattern matching. Some of them don't see documents as "real output" to begin with, and operate solely in meetings without any written record or documentation whatsoever. Of coures their staff will pick up on the pattern. I have a vivid memory of engaging with a full team working on a substantial project in the absence of their senior leader, getting the tactical picture and then asking the team about the project's goal. You could have heard a pin drop. None of the people working on the project could speak about anything but their immediate assigned tasks.
- Several North American older systems go down to 10-11 meters, although perhaps the tightest curves are getting upgraded over time:
LRT systems on which the existing minimum curve radius falls below 15 meters include:
• Boston—10 m (33 ft) and 13 m (43 ft) for the Green and Mattapan lines, respectively;
• Newark—10 m (33 ft);
• San Francisco—13 m (43 ft); and
• Toronto—11 m (36 ft).
https://onlinepubs.trb.org/Onlinepubs/tcrp/tcrp_rpt_02.pdf (1995)
- Might have been a retelling of https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/ai-fakers, which is only about two months old.
> "The candidate did not speak Serbian, despite graduating from the University of Kragujevac, in Serbia."
- As we learned from COVID-19, manufacturers really don't like building new factories or even changing the tooling to support a different kind of product (such as commercial vs household toilet paper) for a short-lived surge in demand.
An antifragile solution would be learning to use a bidet.
- "A Jewish man goes into the synagogue and prays. "O Lord, you know the mess I'm in, please let me win the lottery."
The next week, he's back again, and this time he's complaining. "O Lord, didn't you hear my prayer last week? I'll lose everything I hold dear unless I win the lottery."
The third week, he comes back to the synagogue, and this time he's desperate. "O Lord, this is the third time I've prayed to you to let me win the lottery! I ask and I plead and still you don't help me!"
Suddenly a booming voice sounds from heaven. "Benny, Benny, be reasonable. Meet me half way. Buy a lottery ticket!""
- The best way to tackle "Security Questions" is to generate a passphrase, store in your password manager, and use that for the answer.
In the unlikely event you ever need to recover your account with the Security Answer, it's much easier to read out a few words than a 16+ character random password.
- CarMax / Carvana earn money on promising and delivering a better buying experience. They have other issues (such as missing simple maintenance items and overpricing their extended warranties) but the buying process is shockingly straightforward and upsell free.
None of the last several cars I owned were from a regular dealership buy. One was a private sale. One was an ex-rental, bought from the rental company's sales division. And the last one was from CarMax. Of course, the price was right every time to seal the deal, but articles like these certainly did influence my choice.
My iPhones typically get a fresh battery around the 3-year mark, or whenever the battery health dips below 80%, and do a second tour of duty with someone in the family. In all cases so far, the OS goes out of support and apps stop working before the second battery degrades.