I really wanted to stay in the google chromebook / googlebook echo system. But the hardware was expensive for what you get. Apple announced the macbook neo and I picked one up. Great hardware. can run light weight mac software. I don't run much beyond chrome and wahoo SYSTM (bike trainer app). It's really solid hardware and cost $600 or so.
I use gemini extensively (and claude). But - do I need this integrated in my laptop? Don't quite see it. And it's hard to beat Apple on hardware now.
this post will probably never be read but.. I was on the team that was trying to make the marriage of S3 and EFS work a year ago. it's a pretty hard problem. At one point we proposed this solution (which seems like a caching layer) but it got shot down for a more complex system that would have attempted to rebuild EFS on faster S3 blob storage. I left before this engineering monstrosity made significant progress, and it clearly died at some point.
Looks like they went back to a simpler solution they could deliver but with some obvious warts. good to see something get launched but the sausage making her was brutal.
The reality is that if you read https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2026/04/s3-files-and-th..., it sounds like the great minds at S3 figured out that a caching layer was the way to go. We (EFS) fucking proposed that years ago. But we had to deal with Seattle and the S3 braintrust who didn't want to do that. I know we wrote a PRFAQ that was close to this concept probably four years ago. The political story is that EFS was taking over by S3 and the EFS folks didn't have the agency or political backing to build a more workable solution. So we wasted a shit ton of time tackling something that was never going to work and many of the tenured EFS engineers left.
somewhat off topic, but I really am not sure that adding chromebooks to every school has made education better. hard to block youtube when they bring these home (I know you can, but the average person can't).
If you don't want to go through your insurance company you can check out an app we built called RoadClub. You get points for safe driving behavior - and you can get the hard brake alerts. Is it a bit annoying? yes. You can't just drive agressively - you need to give space to slow down. I still struggle with it.
Nice research. This is fairly well known in insurance circles. Most auto insurers that do telematics consider hard braking the strongest indicator of risk. One of the things that we do at work (Cambridge Mobile Telematics) is build tools to deal with this risk. We have apps that monitor driving and we play a tone to indicate that a hard braking event was detected. Simply letting people know that they had a hard braking event is an effective mechanism for behavior change (other companies have similar tech)
I am confused about what Tesla is doing. They have effectively two automobile products now with one failed product (cybertruck). reading various articles about this doesn't make it more clear. Do they not want to be a car company?
Full disclosure: I am pretty sour on the current Amazon/AWS leadership as I think, well, they couldn't lead a company out of a paper bag (former manager at AWS). Is there data that Amazon/AWS is still hiring junior devs? I've heard it's very hard to get into student programs these days but I don't have the data. My grumpy position would be Garmin saying one thing and doing another.
If I were to summarize how we attacked this when I was on AWS (different team)
formal methods. Some of this started a long time ago so not sure if it was TLA, TLA+, or something else. (I am a useless manager type)
fake clients / servers to make testing possible
strict invariants
A simulator to fuzz/fault the entire system. We didn't get this until later in the life of the service but flushed out race condition bugs that would have taken years to do.
We never got to replaying customer traffic patterns which was a pet idea of mine but probably the juice wasn't worth the squeeze.
not quite true - there are some regions that have a different set of AWS users / credentials. I can't remember what this is called off the top of my head.
I think this is an astonishingly dumb take. Regardless of what you think of Musk, SpaceX is building a fundamentally important reusable lift technology that can be the underpinning of some many future developments. Who cares if China gets to the moon first? This is how NASA historically gets into a mess with its launch system - political pressure, conflated goals and requirements (see the Space Shuttle - does it launch people?, military payloads?, oh goodie - let's do it all). If anything I wish NASA would do more to make sure we have a decent starship competitor which its hard to see blue origin being anytime soon (but I am not an expert on this topic)
Sounds more like an object system (immutable) with the veneer of a file system for their use cases. I sort of read the doc - sounds like data is replicated and not erasure encoded (so perhaps more expensive?).
I think many people have said this, but "file systems" get a lot easier if you don't have to worry about overwrites, appends, truncates, etc. Anyway, always interesting to see what people come up with for their use cases.
I use gemini extensively (and claude). But - do I need this integrated in my laptop? Don't quite see it. And it's hard to beat Apple on hardware now.