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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Imo, the term “buy” for all goods should pass some sort of litmus test. Eg:

    does the product being sold have the same properties as a brick?

    • can the product be resold privately?
    • can the product be lent to another user temporarily?
    • would the product still perform its function when the manufacturer stops supporting it?
    • would the product still perform its function if the manufacturer ceased to exist.

    if the product does not pass all these tests, the customer is not buying. Consider using terms such as ‘rent’ or ‘lease’ or ‘subscription’








  • Yale’s Assure SL doesn’t have a key, but you can power it externally with a 9v battery. (And, keys are just another failure point). They also make some keyed variants.

    It out of the box doesn’t have any network capability. You can plug in a zigbee or Wifi module to give it connectivity.

    Zigbee support is pretty primitive. Basic functionality works fine. Lock, unlock etc. afaik, you can do whatever the unit can do through zigbee commands but I’ve not seen (nor really looked) for a usable interface to it.

    [edit] realised I mixed up zwave and zigbee.


  • I had an appointment booked at my GO. Get there 10 mins early. Everything’s normal, one other person in the waiting room.

    Other person gets called in. Still normal.

    Receptionist walks through the waiting room, locks the front door, then shuts the shutter to the reception desk. “Uh what”

    20mins pass, haven’t seen another soul. Not tooo unusual to wait 20mins.

    40mins, sunk cost fallacy sets in. Can’t leave anyway as the front door is locked.

    50 mins later, receptionist comes in “the doctor will see you now, sorry for the wait we had our weekly staff meeting”

    You fucking what. You booked me in at the time you have your fucking weekly staff meeting?!


  • I used to love ‘the cloud’. Rather, a specific slice of it.

    I worked almost exclusively on AppEngine, it was simple. You uploaded a zip of your code to appengine and it ran it at near infinite scale. They gave you a queue, a database, a volatile cache, and some other gizmos. It was so simple you’d struggle to fuck it up really.

    It was easy, it was simple, and it worked for my clients who had 10 DAU, and my clients who had 5 million DAU. Costs scaled nearly linearly, and for my hobby projects that had 0 DAU, the costs were comparable.

    Then something happened and it slowly became complicated. The rest of the GCP cloud crept in and after spending a term with a client who didn’t use “the cloud” I came back to it and had to relearn nearly everything.

    Pretty much all of the companies I’ve worked for could be run on early AppEngine. Nobody has needed anything more than it, and I’m confident the only reason they had more was because tech is like water. You need to put it in a bucket or it goes everywhere.

    Give me my AppEngine back. It allowed me to focus on my (or my clients) problems. Not the ones that come with the platform.