Tivo broke Civilization.

The olds will remember.

In the early 80s, every American watched the same TV programs at the same time. LIve, broadcast TV. It was the national American culture. Everyone at work and at school the next morning talked about their shared experience and varying reactions to the BroadCast that The Party had shown them the prior night.

Cable TV - by offering a few more channels - had _some_ impact on the "breakup" of America.

But it was Tivo - mass-scale consumer time shifting. Americans no longer watched all the same propaganda at the same time.

The monoculture started to crack.

The rest of it is downstream from there. The bigs tried to retain their control of culture and opinion, but it became too fragmented and too decentralized. They couldn't.

Nobody is mad about the internet. They are mad they don't control the internet.

If we build it, then it will frictionlessly tell us what to build.

Also, is there a point, when any app uploaded to one of these app stores would have to basically comply with the same terms and conditions as apps on the Google Play Store, from the looks of it?

Google is trying to claw back some of their precious per-sale revenue loss by charging that $10K, and increasing the barrier to entry to the point where only serious businesses will attempt it. It's obvious that having third party app stores provides no benefit for Google, so they are doing everything they legally can to stem their losses. With monopoly app stores, Google and Apple basically have a license to print money. The incentives are not great for consumer freedom.

Honestly most pickups never tow. According to companies that make them and have a vested interest in knowing what they need to build. Less then half of pickup owners ever tow anything.

The under half that do tow are still people though and still have needs and dollars. I tow, I early tow more then about 200 miles, I mean why would I fill a dump trailer with dirt from two states away and haul it home? We have dirt here! Most of my towing is under 50 miles. Occasionally it is 400 miles (not for dirt though).

you can make a successful product that doesnâ(TM)t address the needs of every single person.

Or to be less dismissive, people that tow a lot? My EV is fantastic to drive, and gets pretty decent range, until I tow a many thousand pound and worse yet physically large travel trailer, and then my efficiency drops to about 1.7 miles per kWh, which gets me about 166 miles on a full charge (and 0% to 100% charging is slow).

Which mostly means I don’t plan on any trips to locations much over 100 miles away with a big travel trailer. Which is ok, it is a big EV, I can sleep in it if I want. Not quite as nice as an actual TT, but it works. Other people maybe actually tow enough to that they can’t just decide to “not do that”.

Well for me it is a rare problem, say 0-3 blackouts a year, and 0-1 lasting more then a few hours. So less important then say “how does it deal with a long trip I make once a year”.

On the other hand a 3 day power outage in the winter (not normal, but not unusual) is no joke. It is enough of a “no joke” the most houses around here have an external input for a generator or other 240V power source. Mine in particular will power the house’s heating (well the water circulation pumps and the furnace ignition), as well as the kitchen fridge/freezer, and the wall outlets & ceiling fixtures in a few rooms. Which is nice because it means for around 500W you get heat, lights, and a way to keep the beer cold. You don’t get the stove (electric, high draw 240V), or the microwave (I mean you could drag it over to an outlet that has power, but a microwave is pretty hard on a portable generator), or the coffee maker (again it can be dragged to a outlet, but it is hard on a generator).

I have a big ass APEX battery something like 3kWh and does 240V output. It is way happier with the coffee maker then my little generator. It is decent in general for running the house’s limited “backup power” mode. Except it will only run it for around 6 hours. On the other hand my EV does have 120V 15A out, which won’t run my home heating system, but it will power the APEX. The EV has around 100kWh in the battery, so it’ll run the APEX and indirectly the house for a very long time.

Or to be fair a really crap Harbor Freight portable generator that will last one outage and then die a horrible death could be used to feed the APEX, and the APEX can weather all the rough loads and ramp-up/down and generally make life easier for the generator.

However that is all a bit of a diversion from my main point. It may be a bit uncommon to have a 3 day winter power outage here (although the power outages tend to happen during rough weather, so -20F ice storms tend to bring the power outages, and the bad weather makes it harder to get linemen where they need to be and equipment to them, so yeah the long outages tend to be winters!)...but they aren’t even rare. Live here for a decade and you will have about three of them. Having it well below freezing and no power and no heat means whatever water you have is going to freeze and expand. A lot of heating around here uses water to transit the heat, so the normal “nothing will freeze and burst in the first day, maybe two” you get “well at least one of those pipes runs in the low insulation areas under the roof to help clear ice sheets...and that one will freeze in a few hours. Plus others will freeze pretty early as well, maybe not day one, but you arne’t getting through much of day two without many thousands of dollars of damage.

So try not to over generalize from your local power stability and lack of winter power oriented damage. This kind of feature can be worth tens of thousands of dollars every few years.

I’m less sure that there are a lot of places you can save enough from buying power at low rate times and using it from you down battery at higher rate times (I think there are clearly places with a 3x rate difference, but even so it is around 20 per kWh, and most EVs have more like 40kWh batteries, not the 98kWh battery I have, so the savings tops out around $8/day and that isn’t a lot even if it doesn’t put any noticeable extra strain on your EV’s lifetime it has a super low payback. Then again maybe some places have a much larger kWh cost and a bigger off-peak discount? I definitely don’t know any place it is a fast payback though.

This reminds me of a segment I saw about 15 or 20 years ago on a show called "How It's Made" that played on a channel like the Discovery Channel (before all cable became reality TV).

The segment was "How CRTs are Made". I was kind of surprised that CRTs were still being made, but I was especially surprised by the fact that they appeared to be American workers in the factory. They were doing everything pretty much by hand with no automation, and they were making some rather skinny looking CRTs. The show never elaborated on what the CRTs were for, but they sure didn't look like TVs.

I dug into it a bit after that using some clues I noticed in the show, and found out that these were cockpit displays for F15s or similar military aircraft. It's probably an item that you just don't go changing the specs on, and they understandably aren't going to farm out to TCL. I can't imagine how much each one cost, though. And I certainly wouldn't try to rack it up as a "win" for any of GWB's or Obama's trade policies.

While this is true, being the subject of an experiment to see what happens when you do that is not something most people would choose for themselves. It's not *irrational* to be concerned. Absence of evidence on a largely unexplored question like microplastic infiltration in human bodies is not the moral equivalent of absence of evidence in an extensively studied question like a vaccine-autism link.

We're running a business here. We need real software, not toys created as a fun weekend experiment with a chatbot or burning money to run an agent and get 50% (or more likely 5%) of the way there.

Firefox was never there for the "Good Ole Days"

Firefox was a reaction to Mozilla becoming too ambitious and too unfocused.

The Netscape/Moz split was already after things had gotten bad. Moz completely jumping the shark was already bad.

The Good Ole Days were NCSA Mosaic and Navigator 1.1. Before the AOL invasion. Before people on the internet expected you to care about their feelings, and before politicians and mega corps knew how to screw it up.

Once upon a time, having friends on irc or usenet was like the nerd equivalent of _living on a pirate ship_

(except the avg pirate was at least +1SD on the IQ scale.)

It was the last vestige of freedom.

There is no "good internet" with Tay Zonday on it. Or girls.

>I find this very stupid.

I agree with you.

>Some people are good, reliable, and experienced "worker bees" who either don't want to be in management or are not qualified for it. I see no logical reason to get rid of such people, do you?

Agree completely.

>I'm not sure if "Sr. Engineer" means quasi-management at MS

It doesn't.

The people manager track and individual track are separate tracks, and both go all the way to the top. There were hundreds of Partner Software Engineers who didn't have any people management responsibilities. These engineers, because they were Partner level, had a minimum of $1m total comp some years. (The higher your level at MS, the more of your pay at MS is contingent: bonuses, stock, etc. MS has a "low" guaranteed salary and a wild bonus/stock award range, all based on your performance and overall company performance)

There are level 70 people who are not people managers; the job title changes to "Distinguished Engineer" somewhere up there, and somewhere past that becomes "Technical Fellow".

There is a level floor for being a manager; but (effectively) there is no level ceiling for being an individual software engineer.

IIRC, When I left, they wanted people to be Senior level before being people managers. But there were more senior level engineers than senior engineering managers...

Here's some quick lingo: an "M1" is a manager who only has engineers reporting to him. An M2 is a "manager of managers", e.g. an M2 has M1s that report to him - and may have 1 or 2 engineers engineers or support staff. There are also M3s, but M1 vs M2 is the main useful cutline.

MS generally wants an M1 to have at least 5 people reporting to him, but not more than 15. So the "span" is pretty narrow; MS R&D is pretty management heavy, with an M1 typically having around 8 people or so.

(I was an M1 for a few years, then went back to being a normal engineer with no people management responsibilities.)

Being an M1 at Microsoft is kind of a dual mandate: you are given a staff of engineers to go work on a problem that is (was?) too big for one person. The M1 has engineering & product responsibilities (e.g. make sure the right thing gets built on time and works correctly). The M1 also has people management responsibilities (coaching people in their careers, rewards and promo justifications, delivering bad news, etc)

Good M1s wrote code and reviewed code, but also burnt a lot of time in meetings ("what are the other parts of the company that are near me doing?") and individual meetings ("i have 8 people who report to me and I need to have a dedicated meeting with each of them every week to see how they are doing, give them career feedback, etc)

M2s rarely wrote code. They would occasionally write code for some demo or prototype, and then show it to people. If the idea had legs it would get spun off to underlings to flesh it out.

I say all this in past tense because I don't think how it was in 2022 necessary holds in Oct 2026. I know that I am not developing software or managing software engineers the same way now as I was even at the beginning of 2026. AI has changed all of it.

An article says:

>Employees at internal levels 64 and below received one week of base pay per six months of service, for example, and employees at levels 65 to 67 will receive two weeks of base pay per six months of service, according to offers reviewed by Business Insider.

Within MSFT, here's what those "levels" mean for software dev positions:

68-70: Partner & Above [entirely different comp structure; limited quota]
65-67: Principal
63-64: Senior
61-62: Engineer 2
59-60: Engineer

When I left in 2022, you unofficially had a limited amount of time to make it to the senior band. The "up or out" philosophy very much applied to junior engineers; if you didn't have the potential to make senior engineer (because you hadn't made it yet after x years), you were managed out.

People who made it to Principal could park their careers at the principal level and stay there indefinitely, so long as they were providing good results (but were still subject to random layoffs not based on their own performance)

The VEOs and other "voluntary" downsizing plans have been targeting older, higher-level folks. Yes, those folks are more expensive. They are also more male, more American, and more white.

>I believe the future will include AI but it will be small models that are self-contained and that people have on their own equipment and not not spending vast amounts of money on paying for tokens to third-party companies

Why do you think there will just be one picture of the future?

For sure, self-hosted models will be part of the future (even if they are illegal). But I think paid services will also be part of the future.

Self-hosted and unencumbered workflows are a key part of the future for freedom / autonomy reasons. And for some, economic reasons.

But paid services and private models are also going to continue to exist.

Right now, 99% of humans don't even self-host their own _email_. Not only do they not run it on their hardware/environment, they don't even manage the service on other people's infra. They have no involvement whatsoever in their email service.

Some businesses are going to choose to pay an AI subscription, just like some businesses use cloud services today. In both cases, operating local IT infrastructure isn't their core business.

While it's true every issue has its own dimension, even if those dimensions are linearly independent, they're not necessarily orthogonal. Independent basis vectors can still have a non-zero dot product—in other words, issues which are distinct from each other can align to some degree.

Who's going to be able to scrounge up an extra 12KB of RAM in today's market?