> I do sort of suspect a fan thermal control curve is a PID response curve written out in long hand but don't really have the math to prove it.
No, a fan response curve is kinda-sorta a P controller. It does not take into account 1) how quickly the temperature is rising or dropping (D) 2) the time passed since the system has drifted from the target temp (I).
"In my previous blog, I revealed that Oura data is not end-to-end encrypted. That means that an Oura user's health data can be unscrambled at certain points as it travels from a person's ring, through their phone app, over the internet, and as it lands on Oura's servers."
Very strange -- it seems to be conflating end-to-end encryption with encryption-in-transit.
> And then there's explorative testing, where I always found a good QA invaluable.
Yes, I agree. We do this too. Findings are followed by a post-mortem-like process: - fix the problem
- produce an automated test
- evaluate why the feature wasn't autotested properly
"Before I weigh in further, I’d like to make sure you’re familiar with the testing pyramid."
The testing pyramid is a par excellance SWE kool-aid. Someone wrote a logically-sounding blogpost about it many years ago and then people started regurgitating it without any empirical evidence behind it.
Many of us have realised that you need a "testing hourglass", not a "testing pyramid". Unit tests are universally considered useful, there's not much debate about it (also they're cheap). Integration tests are expensive and, in most cases, have very limited use. UI and API tests are extremely useful because they are testing whether the system behaves as we expect it to behave.
E.g. for a specific system of ours we have ~30k unit tests and ~10k UI/API tests. UI and API tests are effectively the living, valid documentation of how the system behaves. Those tests are what prevent the system becoming 'legacy'. UI and API tests are what enable large-scale refactors without breaking stuff.
Isolated QA should not exist because anything a QA engineer can do manually can be automated.
So prices will need to increase -- if it makes a senior engineer 10x more productive then coding assistants could easily cost 20x-100x more then what they cost today. Same for video generation.
Recently I've been using AI for some stuff that service providers don't want it to be used for (specifically: medical diagnosis). I found that Grok (4.1) is superior to most of the others when it comes to this, because it doesn't go out of its way to support my own hypotheses.
I believe that syncophancy and guardrails will be major differentiators between LLM services, and the ones with less of those will always have a fan base.
I'm using Gemini in general, but Grok too. That's because sometimes Gemini Thinking is too slow, but Fast can get confused a lot. Grok strikes a nice balance between being quite smart (not Gemini 3 Pro level, but close) and very fast.
For example he made the back then very-very brave decision to completely getting rid of Windows as the leading Microsoft brand. He had a very clear vision for Microsoft and the industry even if the outcome is not super exciting products for you and me. He’s not squeezing Azure - he was the person who made Azure into what it is now.
So he changed Microsoft fundamentally - a very difficult thing for such a large company.
I don’t see Pichai changing Google so fundamentally. I admire Cook though.
This is exactly how sound studios do mixing. They don't just use top-end monitors -- they generally also listen on low-end speakers that color sound in a way that's representative to what people have at home (hello, Yamaha NS-10).
I think compliance is one of the key advantages of cloud. When you go through SOC2 or ISO27001, you can just tick off entire categories of questions by saying 'we host on AWS/GCP/Azure'.
It's really shitty that we all need to pay this tax, but I've been just asked about whether our company has armed guards and redundant HVAC systems in our DC, and I wouldn't know how to do that apart from saying that 'our cloud provider has all of those'.
> I really don’t get having all of your images in a a library and not in a file structure
Immich can store your photos in a file structure you want. It can also reorganise your files on disk based on EXIF data, and so on.
> I can’t injest, say my iPhone photos and then later categorize them and move them to the folder structure for more secure and stable long-term storage
Example: if user IDs are not random but eg Bigserial (autoincremented) and they're exposed through some API, then API clients can infer the creation time of said users in the system. Now if my system is storing eg health data for a large population, then it'll be easy to guess the age of the user. Etc. This is not a security problem, this is an information governance problem. But it's a problem. Now if you say that I should not expose these IDs - fine, but then whatever I expose is essentially an ID anyway.
> Despite an excellent memory, I forget the names of most of my colleagues after a month's break. If I leave the company, they are never mentioned again. Apart from the usual exceptions, "standard" working relationships, especially in large companies, are tenuous, easily broken, and easily forgotten.
I think this is just normal human self-regulation. Extreme example, but people are mostly OK and functional a month after their mother passes away. If the best and most critical person in my team would leave today then I would focus on filling the gap, etc. and I would not think of them very much after a few days, but this doesn't mean that all that they're a fully fungible cog.
I disagree and I am sad that we're teaching each other to be skeptical and cynical.
The company is not your friend and not your enemy, I agree. However, people _do_ develop personal relationship with each other. Sometimes even across the different levels in the company hierarchy. Yes, as with any other relationship, circumstances and interests might override this, but relationships still do matter. People have emotions, and there are managers who're not psychopats and find it very hard to e.g. let people go.
And yes, value yourself, absolutely. And your job is not your family or your identity, and manage risk, and there are bad bosses and bad company cultures. But it's not uniform.
But please don't think that nobody cares about you in your workplace and you're a completely fungible cog. It's a horrible life to live. Let's not tell the already cynical young people that this is how the world works.
Even at big, bureaucratic companies like big investment banks, if you're at a certain level (not that high), eventually you'll mostly be taken care of. Not everyone and not always, but e.g. if you're an ED at an investment bank, you can have a job for life, maybe not at your current place forever, but the industry will take care of you. Similarly if you've been at dunno, Mercedes for 15 years and you're not the bottom 20 percent in terms of performance, then it's kinda guaranteed that you'll have a job in the auto industry forever.
People who have been let go from Google today can have an extremely lucrative job forever in the industry.
The problem is that (HN) sentiment is generally lagging behind reality -- usually many-many years. There are still tons of comments on HN that refer to the evil Micro$oft as if 2022 MS was the same as the 1991 MS (while it is 'just' a large enterprise cloud company), etc. When anti-<some company> comments peak on HN then the company is usually already very different.
So if you're betting on a product / service, then relying on Internet sentiment is generally a bad idea.
Analogy: the best time to buy a car from a specific manufacturer is when everyone knows that the manufacturer is only producing crappy cars. Because that's when they're likely doing everything they can to rectify their reputation. (And the other way around.) Examples: French cars manufactured around 2010 have really good quality (especially the PSA models), because they produced crap around 2000 so by 2008 everyone knew that they should not buy a Citroen. BMW's from 2008 have incredibly many quality issues as BMW's reputation peaked around that era, so they reaped the profits that they could (and this was all based on the all-around great cars from a decade earlier).
This is not a universal rule. Really not -- there's an important exception that people (especially managers) tend to forget.
Reflect on issues where they happened.
I.e. if someone is an asshole on a meeting, you (as a leader) need to reflect on that on the meeting. You can address the details in private, but not reflecting on it in front of the people who got hurt/offended is wrong as it approves the bad behaviour.
USB-C bashing threads represent the 'HN echo chamber' for me. :)
I understand the problems of different cables, I've run into them already. One cable can do Thunderbolt, the other cannot. One cable transmits 4K video signal, the others doesn't transmit anything. And so on.
However, it is sooooo much better than anything before because at least _most of the time_ stuff works. Chargers charge. Sometimes slower, sometimes faster, but things mostly work.
No, a fan response curve is kinda-sorta a P controller. It does not take into account 1) how quickly the temperature is rising or dropping (D) 2) the time passed since the system has drifted from the target temp (I).