Fair enough. I use plenty of disposable stuff in other contexts.
The habitual part is what makes a difference for me with my local coffee shop. I usually walk over around midday when I WFH, mostly to move around and re-energize for the second half of the day. Since I know I will be coming right home after, it is easy for me to adjust my ritual to include the cup.
My local Starbucks offers a 10 cents discount and extra loyalty points for bringing your own cup. I've started bringing an insulated one that keeps coffee hot for longer & doesn't sweat with an iced beverage. I seldom see others bringing their own cups, even regulars I see there every week, even when Starbucks themselves sell reusable cups. It is almost like there is a weird stigma about handing the barista something that doesn't come from behind the counter. I encourage trying it, especially if you visit the same coffee shop habitually like I do.
The Cambridge, MA location still has an aisle of keyboards and mice outside of their packaging. It's very nice to be able to hold and feel those peripherals as part of the shopping experience.
From my experience: re-orgs and limiting backfills for attrition can lead to these awkward states. Someone starts off with a sensible number of directs, but it can devolve over time.
> In limiting the number of bidders, Google inflated the prices for ad inventory.
This part doesn't make sense to me. Limiting bidders should drive the price down, because fewer advertisers are competing for the same potential ad impression. The article describes Google's influence as "Google controls the auction-style system," which is a bit more open-ended about the specific alleged practices.
I think it does because a researcher can pick up context about the quality of their sources through the course of web research. The BigCo chatbot AIs are marketed to represent that BigCo, and people generally trust Google, in this case. It's good when they cite sources, but a major point of the chatbot is to abstract that legwork for most people.
"Lack of obstacles" really resonates. If we're talking about software dev, it's fun to get into a flow state and solve problems. Whether you actually get to do that at a BigCo seems like a roll of the dice. For every team that seems happy & effective, there are two encumbered by lack of agency, bureaucracy, pointless meetings, etc. Most people who got into software dev will work hard when there is actually something to do that is fun and engaging.
Most people don't decide about their own medical "needs." They trust doctors, who are by and large expert and professional, yet frequently discredited by insurance companies.
Insurance companies have too much power in this dynamic, and there should be limits to what they can deny once doctors deem it needed.
A lot of BigCo people's (myself included) perception of Java is tainted by the challenges of old, inherited code bases. Java has been ubiquitous for a long time, and it's not surprising to accumulate code bases that have been underserved maintenance-wise over the years. Updating dependencies on a Java 8 codebase isn't much fun, especially because semvar wasn't widely followed back in those days.
Early-in-career folks are more vulnerable. Even before major family/life costs start to play a role, it can be difficult to save enough for a safety net after moving to an apartment (even w/ roommates) from college & managing student debt, etc. I remember it took me a couple of years of stability to not feel at risk.
I've observed that the quality of third-party SDKs for Microsoft office formats improved substantially. The .xls format was notoriously fickle to process or produce from outside of Excel. As of .xlsx, the open source community produced myriad SDKs in various languages, and the ones I have experience with worked quite well. The format becoming less arcane and better documented was important to enable this.
Assuming the query language for the graph DB you have in mind is declarative like SQL, I recommend templated queries. I have found this technique scales pretty well for query complexity, makes it relatively trivial to "get to the query" if something needs to be debugged in the details more easily outside of the app, and it makes performance-oriented optimization work far easier.
I've had my share of headaches with the various flavors of ORM and GraphQL and always come back to query templates, e.g. MyBatis in the JVM ecosystem or Go's template package. There is still value in abstracting this from the REST web service interface to make it possible to change the app<->database connection without disrupting REST clients. It's possible to reuse parameter structs/classes between the REST client and DB+template client layers to avoid a lot of rote translation. It seems simple and repetitive, but actually saves time compared to the GraphQL/ORM complexity as apps & query complexity scale, in my experience.
The habitual part is what makes a difference for me with my local coffee shop. I usually walk over around midday when I WFH, mostly to move around and re-energize for the second half of the day. Since I know I will be coming right home after, it is easy for me to adjust my ritual to include the cup.