I worked for a firm that opened an entire office in southwestern India. Many years after this office opened, our one senior QA Engineer's job had turned into reviewing the work of our overseas QA analysts every day and explaining all of the ways their test plans were insufficient or identifying bugs they had missed. In order to improve domain expertise we brought over two QA analysts to our state-side office for hands-on training. This work was in the mortgage industry, a domain that doesn't exist in India in the form we are used to in the USA. Not two weeks after arriving, one of the analysts we brought to train with us confidently announced during our daily scrum that he had mostly onboarded to the software we were working on and within two more weeks would be a complete master in all technical and business matters related to it.

Of course, when he left he was just as lost and confused about the system as he had been when he arrived.

The way it was explained to me by a colleague, employees at many (not all) Indian IT firms will receive just enough training in a given technology or business domain to be entry level at which point they are considered to have gained the required expertise and then are immediately shifted to another tech stack or domain to gain "expertise" in a new area. This way they can claim to be experts across a very wide range. It seemed to me a lot of the rank and file of these developers and QAs were just as frustrated as we were because they never got a chance to become truly skilled in any area while their managers racked up favor for having such a "skilled" team. It seemed to be just a difference in cultures, but bravado and gusto as substitutes for expertise in a complex business domain don't really take you far. They just lead to drops in quality, frustrated colleagues, and irate customers.

I ditched my Google Home Minis after Google nuked a bunch of functionality from my devices due to the various patent trolling going on. I still have a large form Google Home in my kitchen that basically just serves as a voice activated timer, and might be on the way out soon too because I am sick of it responding with unsolicited suggestions ("By the way, did you know") every time I give it a command. It was my real wake-up call as to the problems with any smart-home tech that vendors can modify or nerf at any time.

I have a Nest 3rd Gen thermostat and in Illinois ComEd used to do exactly this. There was an opt-in program where during peak load you gave the utility permission to reduce air conditioning usage to smooth out the curve, and if you opted in you could get a small credit on your account. They killed the program after just a few years and I've never understood why. It seemed to me like grid coordination would be one of the major benefits of smart devices that handle home utilities like a thermostat.

I assumed he meant "dogfooding" but decided it wasn't pretty enough language for general public consumption :/

My employer is remote until at least January and possibly later. I'll be surprised if we're back before spring to be honest.

Possibly dumb question, but isn't the problem here less one of fuel efficiency and more one of energy density? Regardless of overall fuel economy I thought the problem was that the weight of the batteries needed to support powered flight was simply so much more than the equivalent weight of avgas due to the lower energy density of rechargable battery cells.

I'll have to give that a try thank you! That is the behavior I see, yes.

I'd prefer not to grant location permissions to an app that doesn't need location data to do its job for me - but lacking an alternative in Android like a cron substitute it's what I'm stuck with. Some apps I simply need to be able to run in the background like the run tracker.

I wonder how this will impact apps that use the background location permission to run in the background. One app I use, C25K (a running trainer), asks for location so that it doesn't get marked idle and killed if it's running in the background while I do something else like listen to music or YouTube. If I take away Location, Android will kill the app eventually. I don't know if there's a proper/better way for an app to run in a service-type manner but I hope it's addressed before the permission startrs getting revoked.

Tim Sweeny: Android and iOS are too closed, and it's bad for consumers!

Also Tim Sweeny: We are helping the industry by shelling out millions for EGS exclusives in our closed ecosystem, and it's good for consumers!

There was a post on the Stadia subreddit that blew up yesterday titled "Stadia has officially gone 40 days without a new game announcement/release, feature update, or real community update". Complaints included (ripped from the page at time of writing):

- As expected, there haven't been any further updates in January after the "120 game mystery bonanza" (other than February pro games, which we still don't know)
- Still supposedly 2+ months out until 4k on browser, any Assistant functionality at all, and the true wireless controller functionality advertised
120 games coming but none revealed so far
- Pixel phone remains the only Android phone with Stadia functionality
- Still no mention of iOS
- Still no mention at all of Stadia base
- Still no mention of family sharing
- Still no acknowledgement that they've read and/or are listening to the community (or plan on bettering their communication model)
- Daily updates, scrapped for weekly updates, scrapped for... bi-monthly updates?

They also lied in official marketing about Destiny being included in the Founders Edition, and stripped a lot of functionality out of NBA2K20 which is pissing off a lot of sports gamers.

A lot of home routers are about to have a very useless dynamic DNS integration.

For landings out in the ocean, the incoming trajectory intentionally targets a point away from the droneship. If the on board computer determines a drone ship landing is possible and within safety margins it executes a maneuver in the last leg of descent to target the ship - that way if something bad happens midflight it can just follow momentum down to a watery grave and not need to execute a last minute maneuver to avoid damaging the ship.

"We believe people should be able to talk to anyone anywhere", as long as "anywhere" is inside our walled garden where we can troll for advertising data.

Emulators are great but now that Nintendo has shut down EmuParadise's ROM hosting (along with other hosts) it's become much harder to reliably get clean ROMs to play, so I'd say yes we do care.