Heh. I have a somewhat related story.

In the market we sell into, mergers, acquisitions and spin-outs are the norm. People shift employers all the time without changing offices. It's a whole Thing.

USUALLY this is somewhat drama-free, and USUALLY there's not an issue with email addresses, but this is not a story about the usual case.

Most places now seem to use the firstname.lastname@corp.com style of address. This is a good idea, and creates collisions less often than flastname@ style addresses would. However, one of my customers -- someone who had been happily a first.last@companyA.com user -- got acquired by an org that insisted on the old style flast@companyB.com addresses.

I will not provide the name of my customer, but the problem that ensued was of the same type, and yet a bit more severe, than it would have been if his name were "Steve Hithead."

To this day, though, his address honors the local convention. STANDARDS MUST BE FOLLOWED NO MATTER WHAT, apparently.

Which country are you talking about? I believe it's legal to pay donors on the USA.

Presumably a European county given you quoted euros?

Looks like the EU encourages member states to encourage unpaid donations:

> Furthermore, Member States should take measures to promote Community self-sufficiency in human blood or blood components and to encourage voluntary unpaid donations of blood and blood components.

From https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2002/98/oj/eng

I just started reading this. Only 42 people in this study and only 36 completed the activity. I am a bit skeptical about the findings with such a small sample size.

That’s not a valid argument. There is no reason why people in Japan couldn’t start their workday at 03:00, or people in France at 22:00

It changes nothing about the current version of the library though. It only impacts how quickly or easily one would be able to get a fix in case some issue does come up. But I’m questioning the expectation that such issues will come up, and the associated expectation that one will have to regularly update the library because new issues won’t ever stop coming up.

It seems like the days of revolutionary consumer electronics are over.

This looks nice, for sure. But it’s really more of the same. Not surprising. It does surprise me that there’s such emphasis on it, though. There’s the name, of course, and then the entire video is based around “it’s the same thing but a little better.”

Game console updates used to be big deals. The SNES was a revolution. PS2 was huge. Now… PS5? What’s different from PS4, again? Is there a 6? What’s different about that?

I don’t blame Nintendo or the others. I have no idea what they could do here they would be revolutionary. I think the design space has just been thoroughly explored by now and that’s where we are.

This pattern repeats all over the place. TVs are maxed out, with better visual quality than people care about, and size limited by wall space. Computers get a little faster every year. This year’s phones are last year’s phones with a minor performance bump and slightly better cameras. And again, I don’t see what they can do better, and that’s probably how it has to be at this point.

But it’s still a little shocking to see a company lean so far into the theme of “we made incremental improvements to this thing we released 8 years ago.”