I still haven't figured out why they no longer make wired trackballs. The thing never moves, why do I need it to be wireless?
Have been happy w/ an Elecom not having found Kensington or Logitech options that I was happy with.
Readit NewsGlyptodon commented on Building the mouse Logitech won't make samwilkinson.io/posts/202... · Posted by u/sammycdubs
Glyptodon commented on Building the mouse Logitech won't make samwilkinson.io/posts/202... · Posted by u/sammycdubs
For anyone who prefers trackballs, I've been pretty fine w/ Elecom models, though they're not all the most "updated" designs.
IMO this stuff happens frequently because the layers between engineers and users (IE product, project management, executive leadership) are crap and blaming the engineers for it.
Not that engineers can't be problematic. But product people who aren't technical enough and badly manage trade offs they don't understand or invent out of thin air outnumber engineers who are pigheaded know it alls more obsessed with technical minutae than product success.
Another one I see in the same ballpark is hiring a bunch of outsourced coders and then wondering why velocity and quality goes down. (Because you're multiplying the mythical man month effect by the skill difference between a day laborer from Home Depot and someone with significant skills/domain knowledge like a welder or electrician.)
Glyptodon commented on What could have been coppolaemilio.com/entries... · Posted by u/coppolaemilio
More less you could say similar things about most of the crypto space too. I think maybe it's because we're at the point where a lot of things that tech can do, it's more than capable of doing, but they're just not easy to do out of a dorm room and without a lot of domain knowledge.
Glyptodon commented on Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy theguardian.com/film/2025... · Posted by u/nemoniac
The black market is only more competitive because it doesn’t bear the costs of actually creating the content.
Creating the content is a sunk cost.
That said, the evidence on content creation and financial incentive is quite blurry - there's some relationship but there are also lots of people who create lots of things without tremendous financial incentive. And the genesis of copyright wasn't to protect authors, but publishers who had significant costs for producing first editions compared to those who might just copy a first edition.
Glyptodon commented on Did California's fast food minimum wage reduce employment? nber.org/papers/w34033... · Posted by u/lxm
Having lost a job suddenly, any employment is better than none. A perfect job that provides everything you need is pretty far detached from "this is sufficient", or even "this will slow my fall while I work something else out", and this kind of bitter resentment towards anything less than a job that pays out an idyllic American existence is what causes them to be priced out by legislative fiat like the minimum wage.
More to the point, not every skill level or job is _worth_ that kind of compensation (as uncomfortable as it might be to entertain), and attempts to circumvent market forces by making lower wages illegal at some arbitrary point have substantially more damaging externalities than 'low wages' -- which are as much a system of slavery as gravity or magnetism, and just as resilient to ideation.
I agree everything people might want done isn't worth the cost of having a human do it. But I don't see why such jobs should exist. I also don't think the base level of welfare needs to "idyllic," but enough for everyone to act as good citizens without being trapped in cursed doom cycles of impoverishment.
In general, though, it wouldn't matter what the minimum wage is if everyone had a sufficient level of general welfare without working...
Which goes to show that rather than minimum wage we ought to have a welbeing floor, perhaps with UBI, perhaps based on keeping key costs, like food, housing, healthcare, and education minimal.
Glyptodon commented on Did California's fast food minimum wage reduce employment? nber.org/papers/w34033... · Posted by u/lxm
>Low wages have massive negative externalities for society.
The alternative to low wages isn't necessarily high wages. It could also be zero wages, as the study in the OP demonstrates.
Which goes to show that rather than minimum wage we ought to have a welbeing floor, perhaps with UBI, perhaps based on keeping key costs, like food, housing, healthcare, and education minimal.
Glyptodon commented on Did California's fast food minimum wage reduce employment? nber.org/papers/w34033... · Posted by u/lxm
I find it weird how people care so much about employment overall rather than sufficient employment. Like if a job doesn't pay enough for people to comfortably have a family and leasure time, to me it's somewhere in spectrum of slavery, indentured servitude, and poverty trap, and not compatible with a society of equals and representative government. Which is to say it's a job that shouldn't exist. While I don't think minimum wage is really the ideal mechanism of determining this, it's obvious that paying somebody federal minimum wage is an immoral exploitative joke... But also it'd likely be even worse without it.
But more to the point, why do these people obsessed with work and jobs always think anything that creates any kind of job is "good" no matter how bad, dangerous, or poorly compensated? Jobs that amount to licking poison for nickels in a country where you we could probably quarters the lowest currency denomination without issue somehow being "good" for the lockers is ludicrous. Low wages have massive negative externalities for society.
Glyptodon commented on Mexico to US livestock trade halted due to screwworm spread usda.gov/about-usda/news/... · Posted by u/burnt-resistor
One more thing where we're going back in time. Sure seems like a new decline and fall is coming bit by bit.
I don't consider myself a 10x engineer. The number one thing that I've realized makes me more productive than other engineers at my company is thinking through system design and business needs with patterns that don't take badly written product tickets literally.
What I've seen with AI is that it does not save my coworkers from the pain of overcomplicating simple things that they don't really think through clearly. AI does not seem to solve this.