ryan

It’s amazing how something so innocuous can provoke such a viscerally disgusted reaction in me.

Technology was a mistake. It’s time to return to the wilderness.

LaTeX resume templates exist if you wanna get extremely fancy with it. Otherwise, any text editing document that allows some basic level of formatting and headers will do the trick. If I get sent an extremely beautiful and well-formatted resume to read, it’s a “good attention to detail” footnote in my mind but ultimately the actual content is much more important.

Since we’re on the subject of resumes though, an open message to anyone who might be reading… Don’t have an LLM help you write your resume. It’s extremely obvious and makes your resume worse because it gets real generic and wordy with it. I’ve seen them, I’ve not been impressed by them, it makes me think this person may not actually be able to write coherently on their own.

And remember, a resume is a personal advertisement for you - make it punchy, and keep to bullet points highlighting impressive things you want a recruiter and hiring manager to know. Include buzzwords as pulled directly from the job posting to get through automated screening. Highlight projects you’ve done and what positive effect they had on the intended audience.

@ISometimesAdmin@the.coolest.zone Let me know if you need rehab.

But seriously… yeah, I get it. Especially this part about the workplace:

Nevertheless, [addicted programmers] can also pose significant risks, especially because they frequently deviate from the planned course. They follow their own agenda, introducing challenges where none were necessary, or dedicating hours to minor, tangential aspects of a project. In the process, they diverge from the project plan, programming what they believe is necessary rather than what the project itself requires.

I have been that person before, and now I’m in a position where I have to keep those folks on a tight leash and remind them “our goal is to deliver a product right now, and we can enhance it in future sprints. Let’s just focus on what our primary goal was right now.” It’s easy to fall down rabbit holes, and that’s where having proper planning and a ticketing system to backlog and prioritize future enhancements is so critical.

This happened to me. I got a very angry call from someone asking why I was spamming them and had to explain that someone was spoofing my phone number to call similar phone numbers, and that it could be happening to his number or anyone else’s as well. I look forward to being globally blocked. :(

As we’ve been tracking, Google is now beginning to roll out “Profile discovery” in Messages for Android to establish your name and photo across the RCS app and others.

This is part of “Profile discovery,” which appears in Messages Settings > Advanced once rolled out to your phone. It is a Google Account-level setting that you can turn on/off. Google notes what phone number is associated with your name and profile image, with the ability to change things.

Ok, so good things:

• I’m glad it’s not auto-pulling from your Google profile, because you may not want that data actually visible to everyone who has your phone number.
• I guess it makes it more like iMessage which is cool (?)

Thoughts:

• So our text messages (which, I know RCS technically isn’t but for all intents and purposes it is a replacement and serves the same purpose) are becoming more chat-like.
• At the same time, Google has made Google Chat more like Messages, visually.
• If the intent is to eventually combine the two, the advantage is that Google has a stronger and more unified messaging platform, but the downside is Google’s RCS implementation is even more customized to the point it’s harder for others to hop on.
• If the intent is not to combine the two, I don’t see why making them look almost identical and yet having two separate apps is at all a good thing for Google. Their user base remains fragmented.

Hopefully this is some secret ongoing messaging solution cleanup plan by Google. I won’t hold my breath, but a small part of me still longs for the return of a Hangouts-esque combined system.

Looks like I’ll be part of the family soon! The Vivosmart does look like what I’m after - small activity tracker for small wrist that provides me all my bodily metrics for my weird metrics-loving self so I can cross reference it with MyFitnessPal (calories and macros) and Daylio (mood).

So… let me get this straight. Google sucks and Pixels are only sold in some countries, so their solution is to reduce Fitbit devices to those same countries?

This is foreboding. Could this be the start of either a rebrand of Fitbit or, worse, a culling of the line in favor of Pixel smartwatches?

Google, I swear if you fuck with my Fitbit I’m adding it to The List (right under Play Music and Inbox). I don’t want a smartwatch, I never wanted a smartwatch. I want my compact little step tracker that gives me a ton of metrics data.

I haven’t used a Samsung and I know the settings options are different, but on Android it’s Settings > Battery and then you can check which apps are draining the most battery. You can check for anything you don’t have open that might be draining in the background.

If the phone is draining that battery only in use though, it might just be the screen. What if you reduced screen brightness?

2024: Google Assistant formally deprecated in favor of Google Bard, now appearing on all new Android phones
2026: Google Bard development ceases and is left to languish as Google promotes their new Google Mobile Co-Pilot
2027: Bard finally ends service, Google Mobile Co-Pilot is rebranded to Messages Co-Pilot and is integrated into the Google Messages app for some reason so you have to basically text it for help
2029: Google Assistant is relaunched with new technology and Messages Co-Pilot now only responds to tell you to use Google Assistant instead

bendy phone: goofy as hell, but I imagine the tech would eventually be used in smartwatches and such. Imagine a smartwatch where a larger portion of the band is the display and it can be wrapped around both big and tiny wrists. Kind of a neat idea.

moto AI: oh boy, another copilot. I hope one of these ends up being the phone assistant I was promised last decade. Is it so much to ask to have what is essentially a phone secretary that will tell me if I have conflicts when trying to schedule a meeting, or remind me that I told someone I would follow up with them via text, or suggest to me at bedtime that I need to set my alarm earlier because I have a morning meeting I haven’t accounted for and I usually set my alarms one hour before the first meeting of the day? Just. All the data is there. Please, big tech, you can read all my data anyway, just make something useful out of it. I will buy whatever stupid phone with a stupid custom OS that has an actual semblance of proper assistance.

“transforming crinkled receipts into pristine documents” yeah that’s neat, I don’t really scan and keep paper documents but I can imagine it will be very useful to a certain market.

Let him play in the legacy code. You can just hose him off later before letting him back into the office so he doesn’t track it everywhere.

Frankly, I like the idea of connecting this stuff up, even the silly ones like refrigerators and washing machines, for two reasons:

1. monitoring - if my fridge is having temperature issues, I would like a warning
2. notifications - my ADHD brain tends to forget to empty the dishwasher or laundry dryer and having a notification on my phone would help me remember.

Of course, my appliances are not smart enough to actually connect in the first place, and it’s not worth buying new ones simply for this functionality, but if it’s there then I can see some of the appeal. :)

Yeah, I don’t know how I feel about the new app. The old one was basically the same but still somehow a little interesting. I don’t know if it’s the new font, or the sickly grey-green they decided to use, but the redesign just looks kind of anemic and sad.

And yeah, the whitespace sucks, everything is so spaced out and you have to scroll. I always thought good web design (and now app design) was ensuring all the important stuff was visible before having to scroll. Google has apparently gone to a rival school where the tenet is “always be scrolling”.

Trust me, I still haven’t gotten over the untimely deaths of Inbox or Play Music, and my comment history will show me raging about Google’s inability to have a coherent messaging strategy. (By the way, you forgot the original Google Chat which was killed off before Hangouts!)

It’s the same story every time. An app/service with excellent potential, left to stagnate for years, retired. It’s at the point I don’t bother trying anything new Google puts out because I can’t trust that I won’t be rugpulled again.

Edit: my mistake, it was called Google Talk, which was renamed to Gmail Chat, which was killed off in favor of Hangouts.

I just tried the photo sphere mode again for old times’ sake. It sure hasn’t gotten any better. Maybe they’re removing it so they can make and release a better version, but I won’t hold my breath.

Oh man, you’ve got me itching to get into the intricacies of JavaScript…

One fun example of the difference: when doing arithmetic operations, null is indeed converted to 0, but undefined is converted to NaN. This has to do with null being an assigned value that represents empty, whereas undefined is not actually a value but a response indicating that there was no value assigned in the first place.

I love my Charge 5. I’m glad Google is keeping the series going. Whenever they inevitably sunset the tiny Charge watches and start pushing the big ol’ smart watches that don’t work for my tiny wrists and have a bunch of features I don’t care about, that’s when I’m bowing out.

Ok, I’m gonna get into this.

2005: Google Talk released.
2013: Google Hangouts released.
2015: Google announces Google Talk shutting down, encourages people to move to Hangouts.
2016: Despite Hangouts being a one stop shop for SMS and Chat, Google discourages people from using it for SMS, asking people to use the Google Messages app instead.
2016: Google Allo released.
2016: RCS adoption begins.
2017: Google Talk shuts down.
2017: Google Chat released.
2017: Hangouts is re-targeted for business and moves to some sort of consumer freemium model?
~2018(?): YouTube Chat released, a 1:1 messaging system inside of YouTube. No idea when it was discontinued but it didn’t last long.
2019: Google Allo discontinued.
2022: Whatever was left of Hangouts is discontinued.
2023: RCS through Google Messenger is now default instead of SMS and group messages are finally encrypted.

Compare this to:
2011: iMessage released. As far as I can tell, it’s been e2e encrypted since at least 2012 and potentially since release.

Google, you have no fucking leg to stand on. Get your shit together. If you had had a coherent messaging strategy, maybe Apple would have been amenable to working with you, but what incentive do they have right now? For all anyone knows, you’ll drop RCS by 2026 in favor of moving everyone to Google Heythere, the new ridiculous app for messaging!

This whole thing is absurd and overcomplicated - they could have just copied Unreal and slightly undercut them.

It isn’t too complicated, but for example, a game which made $2 million in gross revenue would owe Epic Games $50,000, because it would pay 5 percent of $1 million, keeping the first million entirely—minus whatever other fees are owed, such as Steam’s cut.

There should also absolutely have been a grandfather clause for games already released.

I get Unity needs to make money. They’ve never been profitable. But they’ve seriously overcomplicated the whole thing and gotten people angry at them.

I’m just looking at Wikipedia here but their net income in 2022 was US$ –921 million. Granted I’m not a financial wizard but I am at least somewhat confident that a negative number for net income is bad, like they’re not actually making money after their expenses.