Yeah, this is one of those terrible ideas even if you thought that, in theory, you were onboard with ‘anti-DEI’.

Out of the blue the wrong person gets randomly pissed at you and invokes the highly subjective clause and suddenly you owe them $1.5M…

Except how bad was it for Microsoft?

They didn’t lose share. For the people that rightfully saw Metro as a painful dumb direction in Windows design language, they just stuck with Windows 7. Microsoft didn’t have upside they wanted, but they didn’t have the downside.

They tried to pump life into their mobile platform by throughing their desktop platform under the bus. Because they have zero competitive pressure, they attempt to do that with essentially zero downsides. Just like now they can make their OS little more than an advertising platform for the Microsoft Store and Microsoft services without real repurcussion.

With many bearaucracies there’s plenty of practically valueless work going on.

Because some executive wants to brag about having over a hundred people under them. Because some proceas requires a sort of document be created that hasn’t been used in decades but no one has the time to validate what does or does not matter anymore. Because of a lot of little nonsense reasons where the path of least resistance is to keep plugging away. Because if you are 99 percent sure something is a waste of time and you optimize it, there’s a 1% chance you’ll catch hell for a mistake and almost no chance you get great recognition for the efficiency boost if it pans out.

Guess it’s a matter of degree, that was the sort of stuff I was alluding to in the first part, that you have all this convoluted instrumentation that you can dig into, and as you say perhaps even more maddening because at some times it’s needlessly over complicating something simple, and then at just the wrong time it tries to simplify something and ends up sealing off just the flexibility you might need.

The things is you really can’t be that good with windows.

Sure you can get good with registry and group policy and other stuff that is needlessly complicated to do relatively simple stuff. You can know your way around WMI and .net and powershell…

But at some point, the software actively hides the specifics of what is wrong. You can’t crack open something to see why it’s showing some ambigious hexadecimal code or a plain screen. You can’t add tracing to step through their code to see what unexpected condition they hit that they didn’t prepare to handle. On Linux you are likely to be able to plainly see a stack trace, download the source code, maybe trace it, modify the source code.

Windows is like welding the hood shut and wondering why mechanics have a hard time with the car.

Yes. Musk’s net worth including his stock is a bit shy of 500 billion, and Tesla market cap is about 1500 billion. His net worth includes all his assets that he could possibly leverage.

Actually he doesn’t. Most of his ‘wealth’ is Tesla shares already. Even if he could toss everything he has just toward controlling more of Tesla, and if the shareholders accepted it at current market value, he’d only have a third of the company.

Tesla is crazy over valued for a company that has only been able to be a car company that is in 14th place, yet assessed as being more valuable than all the 13 more successful car companies combined…

Yeah, the PayPal one is so spot on.

He had a company that I guess was like CitySearch that no one ever heard of and managed to win a lottery of selling it to Compaq who thought they had to do something in this whole dotcom thing.

Then he founded ‘x.com’, a failure of an online bank while Paypal took off. Then, somehow, in the wake of being merged in he talked the company into letting him be in charge, despite his company pretty much the relative failure in that relationship, and he nearly tanked it before being kicked out. Despite this for a long time he got credit as ‘the paypal guy’, despite his only contribution being almost tanking it after losing to it initiallly in the market. Again, won the lottery because he had such a share and eBay tossed so much money at it.

He’s supremely successful at taking credit from others when things work out.

I’d research Chilipad harder if I were in the market again. At very cursory glance it seems like less of an uphill battle. I could be wrong and they could be douchey, or their engineering somehow sucks, but maybe they are good too.

FreeSleep is what I would do if they try to force the subscription on me, but I probably wouldn’t buy the product hoping that I can change their firmware against their will. I don’t want to give money to a vendor I would just be antagonistic with.

If they announced they formally endorsed use of FreeSleep as an ‘advanced alternative’, ok, but that isn’t going to happen.

This is spot on. Note these asshats eventually caved and added local controls when customers kept saying how horrible it was to use the phone. The local controls are explicitly disabled unless the cloud service has recently approved the bed to allow the local controls to work. You have to use the phone to enable the local controls. The phone can’t do anything locally except tell it how to connect to wifi. If you don’t have the subscription or grandfathered in before the subscription, the local controls do nothing.

Well, unless you jailbreak your cover with FreeSleep.

So in my case (I didn’t want to, but not my choice, but at least it was cheap and without subscription at the time), it was about the water cooling/warming. It’s really nice and essentially inaudible.

I think Chilipad is a brand that does it without the online bullshit, though I didn’t get to try that.

None of this should ever require an internet connection, and it’s abundantly clear that’s an anti-consumer hostile forced behavior Eight Sleep did.

The designers were thinking “we want to force users to a monthly subscription”.

So against my preference, we bought one of these. Years ago and it wasn’t so crazy expensive and the basic ‘cloud’ functionality was free. Over the course of the years of the initially decent warranty, the covers sprang leaks and so we got free upgrades carrying us all the way to a generation of the product where they replaced the crappy molded leak prone water mat with decent tubes that seem to be more resilient, all without needing to get in the subscription. As a consequence, I know about their evolution.

From the onset, they were hammered with “phone over the internet control is bogus, add a remote or buttons on the base or something”, and they kept responding with vague “we are working a solution”. Well, they ultimately did, they added earbud-style 'tap N number of times on the side to adjust things or dismiss alarms". Ok, super awkward and still no buttons, but at least it has local controls, right? Well, I go to try it and it just gives the long-buzz error indication. Turns out the app has to be used to activate the bed or schedule a start time before the local controls will let you control it. When they explicitly added a local control loop, they blocked it from working unless the cloud service said it was ok.

This is not “crappy developer stupidly doesn’t know how to make local control work”. This is “developer going out of their way to screw over a customer to force them to keep paying for every single month they want the product to keep working”.

A shame, aversion to buttons aside, the hardware design is really quite good, quiet and effective and seemingly more leak resistant.

I’m not familiar with AWS myself, but they seemed to be referencing something they vaguely characterized as ‘security infrastructure’, kind of as a handwaving for why they thought it made sense to be single point of failure because to enable distribution of it would somehow be insecure…

I frankly wasn’t interested in delving deeper, because that excuse sounds pretty stupid, but I’d be trying to get details I don’t personally need about something I probably shouldn’t be arguing about. I’ve gotten burned too much by someone championing something stupid ostensibly in the name of ‘security’ to try to sign up for another one of those arguments.

I’m also skeptical that any payment processing networks were impacted. I would be surprised, but less so if they couldn’t manage their account online which might have similar effect. I’m not surprised at all of the grocery store or restaurants were significantly impacted. I know a lot of the apps were broken and I could imagine someone used to apping everything leaving their cards at home and unable to get lunch. Might have some aggressively “modern” establishments that are kiosk only and I could imagine them getting downed by aws outage.

outside a single DC?

I’m told that a lot of the companies did all the right things but still got taken down because some dependent Amazon services are tethered to that single DC and only Amazon has the power to change that.

1.1.1.1 went down for a while not too long ago

Problem is that as a provider, if you are sure you are confident you’ll get hit by an outage at some point anyway, it’s actually better for you if a bunch of other big names are brought down at the same time.

Instead of “that one service sucked”, the story is “aws sucked”. If it happens too much people will more widely say “ok they suck for using aws”, but for now the transparency gets them treated more like being affected by an unavoidable external condition.

I’m grateful a lot of sites I like didn’t use aws, but I’m not exactly a common demographic and even I won’t know if she is the services even move or not until another such outage.

So a fan of squirting?

Yeah, that’s generally the issue with a ‘Fuck<whatever>’ mentality.

Not “YayTransit” or something, but just relentless bemoaning cars and all who dare to use them. Such a community approach may serve the circle-jerk of those in agreement, but doesn’t really do anything to change the status quo closer to what they want.

Walkable stuff is nice, as is transit as it works so I’m on board for improvements to make that more feasible, but it’s kind of off putting the way they counduct themselves a good amount of the time.

If you see a polite obviously rural person who has not said anything remotely questionable, a common comment is “but you probably wouldn’t want to know their political opinion” or “you probably don’t want their take on minorities or women”. To be folksy is to guarantee progressives brand them as right wing racist sexist bigots.

When it’s totaled, then you get a cash payoff for what they declare it to be worth. It being the other person’s insurance does give you a bit more leverage than is it were your own.

At least in my case, I was able to negotiate a bit and got the other person’s insurance to at least go up to paying the blue book retail for mint condition of the car. They also tossed in a few thousand for pain and suffering and covered a full month of rental car. In my case someone in the other car was unresponsive and needed an ambulance ride, and on my part I had been very thorough in documenting everything that legally would count including damaged contents in the trunk, missed work, and other things.

However ultimately it is a check and car sales can be rough. So it may be that they were underpaid, or that the car’s general book value didn’t match their subjective value for the car, or they were thinking they should get what they paid for it. I could imagine if they bought a 2015 in 2019, they were probably getting a decent, off lease practically new car. Now they have a check appropriate for buying a 2015 of the same make and model and the 2015s now available are in worse shape than they kept their own, previous owners that neglected their car over a longer period.