> And, those people are often trying to leverage worker passion to staff their companies.
Is there usually a good reason for an average employee to pour their passion into work? Seems like it's better to do a better job than your peers/coworkers but not shoot for the moon, unless you're getting a significant amount of that profit.
Most passions I see are usually poured into something separate from your earning potential, i.e. working a service job while writing music, auditioning for a movie or play, etc.
Unless they can afford to go all in, via startup funding or savings while working on their own project.
I guess there is a lost art of writing for optimal code/memory/execution time, especially as our resources increase.
I think the idea here is to write code quickly that's inefficient, and re-write it to be efficient if the performance is required down the line. For companies where there's bigger fish to fry, i.e. customer acquisition, it's more useful to pump out more features (even at the expense of bugs) because that draws customers.
But in places where performance is important, you do see developers squeeze out more cycles/memory. I.e. kernel/OS development, database servers, video games. It's just that most developers aren't in those areas of specialty anymore.
Btw, have you heard of https://handmade.network/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene ? Wondering what your thoughts are in those areas. There are probably more communities like the ones I mentioned, where developers are interested in writing the kind of code that you are talking about.
This is like the Kindle with Ads model from Amazon. You can pay Amazon an extra $20 (or request via support) to not have advertisements on the device forever. Or save a few bucks and deal with the occasional ad. And from what I can tell, the Kindle with Ads is still a pretty popular product.
The thing is, you can't pay extra for a TV without ads - that option simply doesn't exist like it does for the Kindle. At best, you can buy a completely different TV from a digital signage vendor for 10x the price, but that's going to be a completely different product.
And what if I want the smart features, just without the ads and tracking? Where's the "unlock ad-free version" button that Android apps figured out a decade ago?
I have paid to turn ads off and the infuriating thing is you still get ads for Amazon services, usability hints and a tonne of other junk that cannot be turned off (like “you haven’t bought washing liquid in a while, want to add it to your list?”).
Recently, they reprogrammed every Kindle Paperwhite so the UI is almost completely different. Ever since I first saw one in a shop, Kindle Paperwhites have always looked and functioned a certain way… and now it's different. Instead of the “book” that I have muscle memory for, it's now interacting with a computer interface again. If I wanted that, I'd read on my laptop.
Looking “clunky” and “old”, more like a dictionary-bookmark than an iPhone, was a feature, to me. It doesn't need to be slick and rounded with a main menu. You certainly don't have to move everything around so that there's a × button in the top-right corner of things that aren't modal popups; that just breaks the pre-existing “top-left corner to go back” idiom (which still exists for the “library” and reader mode).
And whose idea was it to make it so the “change brightness” menu also drew a cross-hatched pattern over your actual book? That makes it so you have to repeatedly enter and exit that menu (which now takes up nearly half the screen, for smaller buttons than before), unless you've memorised the brightness level numbers. You also can't judge at a glance where to touch for the correct brightness level if you do know it, because they replaced the custom 15-little-boxes interface with a generic slider widget that only uses the middle of the range – making it behave differently to every other identical-in-appearance slider in the OS. So what's the point of making it look the same?
The one improvement is that they removed a banner ad (presumably because they wanted the space for extra UI padding). I don't think that's worth it – but I have no choice, because I don't control my own device.
(They also removed the “experimental” from the “experimental web browser”, which might be an improvement, even though it seems the same; there's less UI space thanks to the pad-pocalypse, and it still can't do Cloudflare DDOS-walls properly. Not that I blame Amazon for the latter problem; my browser can't, either.)
In general, I'm beginning to feel that habitually updating software is a risk.
I have a paperwhite, but I haven't connected it for a while. Generally when I do connect it to a PC to upload more books, I'll habitually update the software. Its good practice right? Guess I'll now have to remember in perpetuity not to.
Recently I updated my Raspberry Pi setup to find that the latest version of Raspberry Pi OS does not support the official Raspberry Pi cameras (it does add a ton of functionality, including a speed boost for Raspberry Pi 4, but nothing that adds stuff in my setup). So I rolled back everything. And I'll have to remember not to update unless they (or someone else) has added camera support back in.
The point is that I used to laugh at the old guys who refused to update their software. Now I'm turning into them. If everything is working the way I want, why update? Especially for personal devices where the impact of "security vulnerabilities" is so low.
Have you ever tried learning a spoken language by doing this? Like another commenter mentioned, it sounds a lot like Anki Spaced Repetition. It's very cool that you just rediscovered it, though.
Duolingo certainly takes this method to an extreme. I’m not sure about spoken but I’m much better now at reading Spanish than I was this time last year
I think there's a point to make on good PMs. Those are totally worth their weight.
The issue I have with bad PMs is the same issue with bad engineers. They can cause so much damage to a product or codebase, especially when they have free reign and an ear from higher management.
Maybe MacOS isn't a good push for gaming for either developers or Apple. I definitely think iOS is. The Apple Arcade Subscription plan seems to be part of that for gaming. I've seen a lot of people on the subway and even at work sometimes playing mobile games on their iOS device, from Call of Duty Mobile to racing games to tower defense.
I imagine when Apple expands their desktop and laptop lineup to M1 chips, it's going to include many of the games that are available from their mobile catalog.
Are you talking about the Superfish vulnerability? It's never affected the business class Thinkpad lines [1], but it has affected a lot of the other laptops that Lenovo has shipped.
Is there usually a good reason for an average employee to pour their passion into work? Seems like it's better to do a better job than your peers/coworkers but not shoot for the moon, unless you're getting a significant amount of that profit.
Most passions I see are usually poured into something separate from your earning potential, i.e. working a service job while writing music, auditioning for a movie or play, etc.
Unless they can afford to go all in, via startup funding or savings while working on their own project.