sneakymichael (u/sneakymichael)

sneakymichael commented on Moving Back to London and 2023 Review mccormick.cx/news/entries... · Posted by u/rcarmo

jimbokun · a year ago

The elephant in the room for me reading this article, is that the income the author reports for his projects is nowhere near enough to live in London.

Does he explain that elsewhere? Is he living off savings while building new income streams?

sneakymichael · a year ago

“Work has continued apace on my existing projects and client work of course.” (Emphasis mine)

sneakymichael commented on Apple's use of Swift and SwiftUI in iOS 17 blog.timac.org/2023/1019-... · Posted by u/ingve

sbjs · 2 years ago

Having written ObjC since 2009 or so, honestly it's a fine language, and although I wrote a fair bit in Swift, I don't really see it as a significant improvement over ObjC, which is Good Enough™ to keep using. Something has to cause serious friction to be replaced with something significantly better, and ObjC/Swift just don't fit that pattern.

sneakymichael · 2 years ago

Oof, hard disagree. I absolutely hated writing Objective-C for years– I felt like I had to write unnecessary 'glue' with header files, handling of 'nil' was always jarring, and square brackets at the start and end of every call felt horrendous, to me at least.

I relished the day Swift was announced, and have been using it ever since.

sneakymichael commented on Show HN: Planlike.pro – New Estimating Tool planlike.pro/... · Posted by u/avdept

sneakymichael · 3 years ago

FYI: I just get redirected to an "Oops" (/not-found) page when I try to sign-up. Tried twice

sneakymichael commented on Threeuk is blocking Tutanota tutanota.com/blog/posts/t... · Posted by u/starsep

sneakymichael · 3 years ago

The support chat transcript is so uncomfortable to read– the person on the other end 'at Three' (aka a contact centre on the other side of the world, contracted out at the lowest possible cost) might as well be a bot, but the chat reads as if the person at Tutanota genuinely thought that they were chatting to a logical coherent human.

Having used Three UK on and off for two decades, this support chat lines up exactly with how I remember– 'robot humans' that say any ol' tosh to finish the contact session.

Avoid Three.

FWIW: all UK consumer telecoms services seem to have horrendous contact experiences (Though Three, of the prominent handful of providers, tops the charts in my opinion), but I've used EE for the last few years, and it has been consistently solid and fast, and thus I thankfully haven't /needed/ to contact anybody there. I cannot say the same for Three.

sneakymichael commented on Removal of Heroku free product plans help.heroku.com/RSBRUH58/... · Posted by u/countspongebob

pbreit · 3 years ago

This line is humorous: "The priority going forward is to support customers of all sizes who are betting projects, careers, and businesses on Heroku. Our customers include PensionBee, who helps people manage their pensions, and Softgiving, who uses Heroku to engage with donors."

People bet on Heroku for easy deployments are getting hosed.

And those are your best two reference users??

sneakymichael · 3 years ago

Yeah, this stood out as odd to me also– "these are who you highlight?"

sneakymichael commented on Stripe down for 4 hours (and counting) for all those with Stripe Tax enabled status.stripe.com/... · Posted by u/whyleym

tomnipotent · 3 years ago

You're better off with Adyen.

sneakymichael · 3 years ago

Their offering perfectly fit the bill for what we needed, but they turned us away; citing a requirement of transacting €5M per year, despite us needing a payment handler /for launch/.

sneakymichael commented on Stripe down for 4 hours (and counting) for all those with Stripe Tax enabled status.stripe.com/... · Posted by u/whyleym

icelancer · 3 years ago

Even I can see the humor in it. You are right!

I hate to switch off Stripe, but the premium I'm paying is theoretically for better support and developer-friendly actions. I'm not getting that right now, so... why am I paying a premium?

Years ago their customer service slashed our rates because of our increased volume and even pc himself reached out to me about a technical matter (and the company was not small). Over the last year the customer service has gone to complete shit in our experience and the rates are still uncompetitively high. Frustrating.

sneakymichael · 3 years ago

Anecdotally: I've been looking to get answers from Stripe, about fees-related questions that either make my proposed use viable or unviable, and I've received nothing but copied & pasted email replies, a week+ later (or not at all), which essentially ignore what I've asked. Incredibly frustrating.

When I mention the experience to friends, they joke that I have Stockholm Syndrome; to want to continue pursuing them, despite their complete disregard.

sneakymichael commented on Unofficial Spotify Client for the Nintendo Switch (PoC) gbatemp.net/threads/90spo... · Posted by u/mogery

quenix · 3 years ago

I was under the impression that all audio Spotify serves is heavily DRM-ed and can only play with special hardware decoders which respect the DRM?

How did was this person able to play the encrypted audio? Does this not let them effectively rip music from Spotify?

sneakymichael · 3 years ago

Just some context: Spotify's official iOS library used to serve streaming [unencrypted, 'raw'] PCM data to the app for playback[1]

"The good old days"

[1] Trace of this, from 2013: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20614360/does-the-libspo...

sneakymichael commented on Anyone else feel the constant urge to leave the field and become a plumber? old.reddit.com/r/cscareer... · Posted by u/wallflower

01100011 · 4 years ago

An old, cynical engineer I once worked with left me with two indelible quotes:

- If it was fun they'd charge money at the door.

- If you can't write it down you can't do it.

You can argue about the accuracy of those ideas, but more or less I've found them to be true.

sneakymichael · 4 years ago

"If you can't write it down you can't do it." - elaborate?