u/into_fiction

Taking the software applications such as VLC, WinRAR and 7-Zip, these have been here for decades and yet they have not forced advertisements, advertisement software bundling, or even monthly subscription fees on users.

Most of the time, almost all modern desktop application programs get bought up, cluttered with banners, or even converted into cloud subscriptions. These are the applications that just keep surviving in their pure forms. While I acknowledge that people donate money to the developers, but just donation money cannot cover the costs. How does this happen?

Sites that remove a lot of features are much simpler to use than they were previously. Lots less mess, quicker load times, so much less for you to take a look at.

features were added due to someone saying that they needed it. A little more more to add to the sidebar and the potential for there being more options, more customization. And then a number of years later they discover that no one's using half of it and that taking it makes the essence of the experience better.

Sort of upside down. Muddy teams that months took to implement features, then months months afterwards to determine which ones to kill. The "light" version gets more positive feedback from users, than the "full" version ever did.

Every developer knows what I’m talking about here. You’re working on a project, everything is going well, and then a pop-up comes up telling you there’s an update. Of course you ignore it, because you know that the only way to turn a 20-minute project into a three-hour debugging session is to mess with something in the middle of it.

However, the trick here is to get back to the update once the project is completed and not ignore it for the next six months until you are frustrated by something breaking down because you did not update earlier.

They must have a massive number of messages stored at this point, probably trillions of messages considering the number of servers and DMs in the platform. People do use it as a drive, I have used it for that, storing images there. I wonder how they go about structuring that in their backend. How do they manage to store trillions of messages and still perform searches and retrieval of messages within seconds from years of archived chats?

When anything breaks, be it a driver problem, a strange error code, or an application that simply refuses to run, the procedure is pretty much always the same. Search for the problem online, open five tabs, attempt the solution described in the most upvoted comment, and if it doesn't work, try the next solution. Not any kind of diagnostic procedure, just random trial and error based on what somebody else found worked for their system.

It's surprising that even today there aren't any tools that analyze your system and explain what is going wrong instead of forcing you to rely on a checklist from three years ago.

Sometimes I see managers saying "why don't we just build our own AWS" like it's some easy weekend project. Thought I'd list a few reasons why that is so incredibly difficult.

You're not just providing server rental service. You need data centers with redundant power and cooling systems, backbone capacity, and enough hardware to be able to handle the spikes in usage from thousands of users. On top of that, you need the software layer - virtualization, storage system, isolation between customers, minute-by-minute usage tracking and billing, and an API layer that ties it all together.

AWS has had over a decade and billions of dollars to become the company it is today. Google and Microsoft have essentially unlimited resources and even they are lagging in many areas. And it's definitely not something you can throw together "Hey Claude, build AWS make no mistakes"

Not talking about when you're actively job hunting, I mean just in general. Is it something that you maintain updated periodically every couple of months to keep it fresh, when a new job or project ends, or is it something that you retain in place until you need it and then it's a big problem for you figuring out what you did two years ago?

Was thinking about this the other day. Things so many people encounter on an everyday basis, things we interact with where we have simply memorized 'if I do x, that's what y is going to do', without an understanding of what is happening under the hood.

This idea is analogous to DNS (a bit like your phone knowing where to look for a tower), or how your phone seems to predict what word you're using next. Most people use them frequently and are completely ok with them, but if you asked about them they would just shrug their shoulders when you asked about how they work.

Amazon achieved the $3 trillion market cap milestone, becoming the fifth company to do so after Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Nvidia. Even more surprising, retail did not contribute much to this milestone, and it is mainly because of AWS. The cloud business generated revenue growth of 37% during the quarter, which amounts to $42.2 billion and represents the fastest growth rate in over four years for AWS, and it is due to enterprise customers needing compute capacity for AI use cases.

Is it any surprise that pop-up selfie cameras have come back? A couple of OnePlus devices, and Oppo Find X. Full screen, no notch and no whitish border. They were kind of clowned on for moving parts, but in fact that eliminated a notch/hole problem better than anything since.

As much as the idea itself is not a bad one, but it was killed off primarily for concerns related to durability and waterproofing. Now we have under-display camera, people's pretend-dead eyes. Now we have under display cameras which are still a bit muddy, or everyone pretending not to notice that there are punch-holes in their face. Thinks that we took some greater risk but a cleaner Yang for "good enough and safe"

The one you know, the whir, and tick tick tick as the tray empties, after 20 years or so it was the same type of printer for all the stores, making it a strange, universal sound of shopping.

I still remember doing the full month grocery run at Walmart and just standing still listening to this thing for about 7-8 minutes while it was printing everything. took longer to print than scanned everything , thermal printers now are almost silent, just a quiet hum and the paper slides out. quieter and faster for sure but it killed off a sound that's apparently stuck in a lot of people's memory.

There's always the part of any code base that nobody wants to touch. It's maybe some low-key config parsing, error handling, or retry logic quietly in the corner...not the 'Oh, look at this cool new feature' anyways, it's the no-glamour no talkies kind of thing. In fact no one really refactors it, no one writes a post about it, but if it fails the whole thing fails.

The more "dull" a piece of programming code is, the more important it seems to be. While the interesting stuff, the part everyone wanted to build could probably go down for a day and most users wouldn't feel the heat.