http://killedbygoogle.com/ - most Google products are for the temporary career advancement of some exec or product lead.

Their only real product is advertising, everything else is a pretense to capture users attention and behaviors that they can auction off.

Most of the AI products are not for the end user, they are just signaling shareholders and possible investors that the company is on the hype.

Fun story. I worked at a large food tech company. For products like Yoghurt you’d like Bactria that make the yogurt very quickly at high temp. But grow as slowly as possible at low temp (stays fresh longer).

They’d mutate the s out of these Bacteria, in smart calculated ways. A basepair here, a gene there. When they hit a jack pot. They’d document the mutations, throw the engineered strain out and start blasting them with UV. Afterwards you just scan for the same mutations and voila, now it’s classical strain enhancement!

Same was done for yeast for all kinds of food applications.

There is something to be said for it because you never need antibiotic resistance for selection that way. But you also don’t really know what you are doing and you could edit the resistance genes out. Anyway, this was >20 years ago. Maybe they do it differently now.

The reality is that this is all solving a problem that people don’t have.

Forced air is a terrible way to heat a building yet thats how most homes are heated, and it is good enough for most people.

If you perfectly size a furnace for the coldest days of the year, it is now oversized for the other 90% of days.

The cheapest way is to install a multi stage heating/cooling system that works on first stage most of the time, and second when it needs to, like having 2 small furnaces. This passes the ‘good enough’ test for the vast majority of homeowners.

I play on and off. It's crazy hearing people talk about how they've spend thousands on a skin.

People generally don’t take the time to learn the framework and miss out on the tooling it provides. select_related for example. If I had a dollar for every project I’ve been hired to work on that didn’t use it, well, I actually do.

Also, people in general don’t seem to be able to do more than very basic SQL, so creating views is seen as a little known performance “trick”.

In general, people who don’t read the manual.

Love me Django and excited about this release. It’s been quite a journey through the years. I started working with it a little before 1.0 and continue to do so. Nowadays as an independent consultant which gives me the ability to really help keep Django systems up to date.

Yes, there’s some rough edges. Like updating can be tricky sometimes, and performance relating to DB queries is a skill in itself, but in general it’s a great framework to build most web software out there.

This is referenced in a sci fi book "The dark forest" of the series "The 3 body problem". It sets a convincing narrative that because of time taken for observation and response and development speed of society it is most likely that all civilizations that announce themselves would likely be a threat in terms of technological supremacy eventually to observing civilizations. In other words, we don't hear anything because any sufficiently advanced civilization would not want to risk being discovered. I.e., the "dark silent forest".

I totally agree. Early days Cloudflare was a great example of this. We treated IP addresses as data, not as configuration. New subnet? INSERT INTO and we're done. Blocked IP? DELETE FROM, and tadam. This was a huge differentiator from other CDN's and allowed us extreme flexibility. The real magic and complexity was with automatic generating and managing HTTPS certs (days before SNI).