I believe the author's thesis is that if they had invested in innovation over a couple decades, the product probably would have sucked less.
It does seem like that upon reading the article, but it’s not what the title of the article suggests.
Readit Newspgwhalen commented on Wall Street ruined the Roomba and then blamed Lina Khan thebignewsletter.com/p/ho... · Posted by u/connor11528
pgwhalen commented on Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship kerrick.blog/articles/202... · Posted by u/Kerrick
One of the author’s primary reasonings for why remote work sucks is apparently that they find it difficult to treat other people like human beings without close proximity to them.
That’s pretty weird and uncomfortable and I don’t know that I would want to work with someone like that in or out of office.
I think it’s pretty mature of the author to recognize that this is the way they (and most humans) work, rather than acting like they always have the ability to treat others with their absolute full capacity for respect.
Selling puts is a long position. Purchasing puts is short.
It’s all a matter of perspective I suppose, and of course I understand why you say this, but no professional options trader I’ve ever met would speak in these terms.
As someone who works with firmware, it is funny how different our definitions of "bare metal" is.
I don't work in firmware at all, but I'm working next to a team now migrating an application from VMs to K8S, and they refer to the VMs as "bare metal" which I find slightly cringeworthy - but hey, whatever language works to communicate an idea.
pgwhalen commented on Alaska Airlines' statement on IT outage news.alaskaair.com/on-the... · Posted by u/fujigawa
Hell, you could run a high quality airline on the tech of the 60's. You could run a high quality airline on the tech of the 30's nothing except radios and the planes.
It's not a tech problem, it's a culture problem. Just because the infrastructure is old does not mean that it is bad. The main deciding factor is how well it is maintained. But that is to hard for many people. So much easier to say "It'S bAd bEcAuSe iT is oLd" and walk away.
I am by no means an industry insider, but I’m skeptical of your claims about running a ln airline on tech from those eras. The visible side of airline IT (ticketing) perhaps, but surely there is a lot of behind the scenes software that facilitates the efficiency of operation (plane positioning, route planning, maintenance tracking) required to compete on price in the modern era.
It’s easy to complain about modern airlines (and I do), but it’s still true that’s never been cheaper to fly, and IT infrastructure is surely no small part of that.
What’s going on with the formatting in this article? Why is every other paragraph broken by another authors byline? Is this some anti-ai posturing by NYT? They’ve made the article harder to read for no reason.
It’s not an article, it’s a live feed. They do this when a story is breaking to make it clear that they’re adding information as they learn of it, and to match the style of the rest of the internet generally.
pgwhalen commented on Rating 26 years of Java changes neilmadden.blog/2025/09/1... · Posted by u/PaulHoule
Can someone explain why developers like var?
It reduces (often repetitive) visual noise in code, which can make it more readable. I wouldn’t recommend using it in all cases, but it’s a good tool to have.
pgwhalen commented on The murky economics of the data-centre investment boom economist.com/business/20... · Posted by u/1vuio0pswjnm7
BlackRock just bought a data center for 40bn last week. BlackRock. The animals that bought all the housing once. They must be stupid I guess.
BlackRock did not buy “a” data center, it bought a data center company with 78 data centers. I have no comment on whether or not it was a good deal, but your framing is silly.
More new programs should be written in Java/on the JVM.
Most of the reasons Java dropped out of popularity no longer apply, and at this point it is an incredibly stable and mature ecosystem.
I can come back to a Clojure program I wrote ten years ago and it runs great, meanwhile a TypeScript program I write 6 months ago requires a bunch of updating and cleanup.
Java's biggest risk towards continued adoption, by far, is the culture surrounding it - old Java programmers and old Java programs continue to be needlessly verbose, even if the language now has the tools (pretty much) to be as terse as other popular, modern languages.
It's an uphill battle, but it might just climb the hill because it's still such a behemoth.