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Xe Services rebrands yet again to eXe

I’ve always thought that this principle explains all sorts of cultural phenomena, from the tech industry having a poorer work-balance compared to others (the pace of development is only limited by how many hours you must sleep!) and programmers seemingly having worse engineer’s disease than in other disciplines (if software can do anything and know everything, how could we, the lever-makers, be any less than our creations?).

How do using autonomous vehicles benefit their claims-settling? Wouldn't it make it unpredictable- in an accident between two self-driving vehicles, who is liable? What if both vehicles are from the same company? Doesn't this lead to extreme variability?

It has Touch ID

Yes, I think this is an artifact of the new under-display camera (at least on the inside). The official copy states:

> iPhone Duo uses Touch ID, which is integrated into the side button. This gives you an easy, secure, and consistent way to authenticate iPhone Duo, whether it’s closed or open.

Probably no way to do FaceID from under a display yet.


And thank goodness for that. I loathe, hate, despite, reject Face ID. The Duo is too pricey for me, but Touch ID makes me reconsider.

It is also enormous and costs $2,000.

Shutup and take my money!

/s


Why do you like that over Face ID?

Not the person you're replying to, but Face ID just works much less reliably for me. I usually wear glasses, and when I get up in the morning and am not wearing them yet, it usually takes a number of tries before my phone will unlock. Sometimes it will also randomly not work in the middle of the day, maybe because of glares or something. Touch ID always just worked.

After jumping from an iPhone to a Pixel and back, the only thing I miss is fingerprint unlock which is way faster and more convenient than Face ID. You don’t need to adjust the phones position or anything if it’s too close to your face or in a position where it can’t scan your face.

I echo what lutoma said. I hateHateHATE the endless having to tilt and/or move around the phone all the time (especially, but not only, after awaking) to get Face ID to "work". Give me Touch ID any day.

I prefer TouchID because FaceID doesn't work when my phone is flat on the table and away from me. That's is how I use my phone most of the time, I don't really hold it up to my face.

I could’ve sworn that Robinson had already replaced Mercator by the ‘90s, so I was surprised to see defenders of the latter.

What general area did you live and work in? Was it actually Silicon Valley or a tech hub?

With remote work, you don’t have to work at home. Many simply work at a co-working space or similar environment that isn’t the actual office.

The colocated collaboration you’re talking about is also highly variable. It’s possible to be on a team where you’re working on projects that actually primarily involve others from other teams not in the same physical offices, or even the same company. So you’re describing benefits that are also highly personal, not a universal good. Software is an industry that would seem to have outgrown in-person communication.


Worked in San Francisco. Lived a 20-minute walk away from work, in a 1-bedroom apartment. My mortgage + HOA cost about 16% of my gross pay. This is in the mid-2010s.

I have done coworking, most recently for about 2 years of full-time at WeWork. Coworking is, depending on how busy the venue, just a quieter version of the home office, or, like working in a shared workspace at a very large university that you just transferred into: There are dozens of people around, but you don't know any of them, and they're all busy doing their own thing. You have no non-recreational business even talking to anyone. You can make a point of trying to chat people up around lunchtime, but you're starting from scratch, and also, as a 'stranger' subject to people wondering if you're talking to them with a motive to either sell them something or flirt with them. This is no substitute for social contact, except for the most extraverted who truly LOVE talking to new people.

> It’s possible to be on a team where you’re working on projects that actually primarily involve others from other teams not in the same physical offices,

I did this when working in person, a decade ago. Yes, we had zooms often. But also we travelled and met those people periodically. I learned important things from observing them using the software that I wouldn't have otherwise. I would not have scheduled zoom meetings for each of them to share their screen while they worked in the software. That would have felt burdensome. Today, most companies won't approve any travel for engineers, product managers, etc. Maybe for sales guys to take people to steak dinners. But they assume that for us, Zoom is an equal substitute.

> Software is an industry that would seem to have outgrown in-person communication

This is an idea that makes no sense at all to me. Look, I totally respect that some people really dislike all or most of these things: in-person talking, small talk, reading (or being aware of your own) body language and tone, wearing pants and shoes all day, being away from family, commuting... Maybe fully remote work is totally best for you! I'm just saying that it's not best for everyone, it's not an automatic 'most efficient choice,' it's not automatically best for morale, it's not best for all families. And to top it off, while businesses pushing RTO seem like the ones being cynical, it shouldn't be hard to see that the other businesses that are refusing to have a physical office today have their own cynical reasons that aren't for the workers' benefit.


> Worked in San Francisco. Lived a 20-minute walk away from work, in a 1-bedroom apartment. My mortgage + HOA cost about 16% of my gross pay. This is in the mid-2010s.

Sounds reasonable for someone earlier in their career. More difficult later on, especially with an expanded household.

> I'm just saying that it's not best for everyone, it's not an automatic 'most efficient choice,' it's not automatically best for morale, it's not best for all families.

> it shouldn't be hard to see that the other businesses that are refusing to have a physical office today have their own cynical reasons that aren't for the workers' benefit.

Perhaps, but given that the pendulum has shifted towards RTO and away from remote work, the latter seems like a much rarer practice, less worth critiquing.

The core problem is whether in-office, remote, or hybrid (personally, I would be most in favor of a hybrid compromise, but at a less frequent in-office cadence than current industry standards), management is setting mandates rather than giving teams, let alone individuals, the flexibility to figure out what's best for their workflow.

And more often than not, it's companies that have physical offices that are mandating use of them, rather than remote work, for obvious reasons. And it's most likely true that most companies have physical offices rather than have eliminated them.


Whenever there’s a debate on unionization in the software industry, I have to ask: if engineers have so much leverage, why couldn’t they hold on to remote work benefits that were bestowed upon them during the pandemic?

In my experience, (fellow) engineers conflate the importance of the work their doing and the importance of their role as their personal importance to the company. They think that because they build (part of) the product, the product can't be built without them but most engineers (and employees) are fairly replaceable. How many times has someone put in a two week notice and the company went out of business?

The only thing that's really irreplaceable in a company is creativity and personal skills, something engineers typically don't value.


It shall be us, the audience

This is the correct answer. We'll be amusing ourselves to death.

He who laughs at last, laughs best.

Isn’t Mearsheimer a crank these days anyway?

Heavens forfend that those who work in an industry that preens and postures about innovation and reinventing every facet of life to be better try to build a better union. Oh, so taxis, software tools, the very act of courtship, loans, the concept of socialization can be innovated upon, but not labor unions? How unfortunate.

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