• 14 Posts
  • 132 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • Every time I read any Xbox news, I immediately remember the email that Phil Spencer sent to Satya Nadella when PS5 was announced. The email gets funnier as the days go by, and as additional context gets added in the form of news like the OP.

    Inserting below part of the email thread that I like the most:

    Even as I type this I know I shouldn’t but I can’t help myself.

    We’ve all lived with 7 years of starting off a generation with a price and performance (and messaging)disadvantage to PS4 with Xbox One. I have to admit this morning when I woke up knowing the PS5 reveal was today that the stress level was higher than normal. Now after almost 12 hours of soaking in their unveil, taking apart their specs and looking at the community responses I just wanted to say that I’m proud of our team.

    We have a better product than Sony does, not just on hardware but equally important on the software platform and services on top of the hardware. We have the ingredients of a winning plan. I felt the feedback from the BoD discussion on being too confident and maybe this will just reinforce that perception, I get the need to be humbly confident but today was a good day for us.

    We haven’t won anything. And I know we have hard discussion about pricing, P&L, investments etc. This mail isn’t trying to scoop any of that, those discussions really matter. But we can take confidence in our product truth hereand I do believe any conversation needs to start with believing in that. This was a good day for Xbox.

    Thanks for indulging me.

    Phil






  • That may be a good idea. However, people have had around 25 years of familiarity with all things centralised on the internet and the conveniences associated with it. If anything, we are doubling down on the centralised nature of the internet.

    It will take a great amount of time and effort to build a equivalently convenient decentralised alternatives, and to overcome the inertia to migrate to it.

    The latter I believe is only possible when something enormously drastic happens. We had a good number of drastic events happen in the last decade (Twitter poisoning, Meta privacy breaches, Reddit shenanigans), but none enough to convince people to move to alternatives.

    Another possibility is for regulations and/or governments to support the alternatives, but that may have unintended side effects of its own.


  • Call it the network effect, or the momentum of becoming a staple in the tech community, or whatever; GitHub is here to stay for a while, and the leaders in charge of it are well aware of this.

    GitHub has gained enough attention that it is almost impossible to ignore. Projects on GitHub tend to attract a level of engagement (code contributions, issue reports, and feedback) that other code forges do not enjoy.

    One unfortunate consequence of this, which I have experienced recently, is when recruiters ask for links to my past work or open-source contributions but refuse to accept links to relevant repositories on GitLab. The number of companies where this occurred was significant enough for me to set up mirror repositories on GitHub.

    Another frustrating but silly consequence was when I was questioned during one of the interviews why my activity graph on GitHub was empty: I had simply not enabled it.






  • lol.

    To rile you up a bit, I wish I could say it is a subjective thing but 4:3 is the better option for laptops.

    More vertical screen estate, given one would mostly be doing their reading, writing and browsing – activities that are traditionally vertically oriented.

    Even most websites just centre their content and leave behind swathes of white/empty space on both sides.

    Anything beyond those activities, one should be using a bigger screen (desktop or a TV)^^^.

    Jokes(?) apart, Framework laptops are the best option for folks like us as it ticks the most boxes. But it is not available in the country where I live, and I don’t want to import it as it would be meaningless without its broader ecosystem. FWIW, I have dropped them emails every year requesting them to expand their presence in more countries.

    Till then, old ThinkPads. They are cheap, have enough spare parts on the market even after almost 2 decades, and even come with the kind of keyboards and screens that I like. :-)


    ^^^This, unlike the text above it, is a subjective thing

    P.S.

    I always wanted to use superscript, subscript and horizontal line. Thanks to you, I got to use 2/3. :-)