Each round of Chinese tariffs had an exception for smartphones.

That wasn't by chance. iPhones going up in price 50% would kill Apple very quickly.

Seattle has its equivalent in Harborview. It is where you go to watch loved ones die, where you stand by the bed as life support is unplugged, where you sit and wait as doctors attempt heroic life saving measures.

Often enough the doctors do succeed, and there is plenty of good news there. But a hospital that is capable of treating the worst of the worst gets a reputation for sorrow.

I remember spending hours just trying to properly define the XML schema I wanted to use.

Then if there were any problems in my XML, trying to decipher horrible errors determining what I did wrong.

The docs sucked and where "enterprise grade", the examples sucked (either too complicated or too simple), and the tooling sucked.

I suspect it would be fine now days with LLMs to help, but back when it existed, XML was a huge hassle.

I once worked on a robotics project where a full 50% of the CPU was used for XML serialization and parsing. Made it hard to actually have the robot do anything. XML is violently wordy and parsing strings is expensive.

There are a lot of good arguments against the XML ecosystem, but "I'm too lazy or dumb to understand it" is not one of them.

It is called DevUx and it is certainly a thing.

If the tooling sucks and the entire ecosystem is hard to understand, people won't adopt a technology.

XML was forced down everyone's throat for a decade! The second something else came along literally everyone who could jumped ship.

Interestingly, I've never heard the term 'DevUx' before. I suspect it's the same concept as Developer Experience, which I also find supremely important and historically underappreciated. Companies like JetBrains for example make a killing by being a company that really takes this aspect seriously.

On the other hand I've had a fellow developer laugh at me when trying to explain how this is important, so I'm unsure this is as important to others as it is to me.

Yeah devux is just short for developer experience.

The apple app store had an amazing initial devux, vs the blackberry app store which famously was a huge pain just to apply to and all the tooling was horrible.

Pixel 10 pro has "pixel snap" which works with most mag safe attachments.

Back when MSDN subscriptions where a thing and people still used Visual Studio, the tools were a lot better. Debuggers worked and did impressive things (time travel debugging! Rewind your entire program state! Step through from your website code all the way to your database queries within the same debugging session! Easily debug remote servers!). Developer documentation was professionally written and edited.

Now everything is free and we get what we pay for.

People forget that there was a period of time during which the Java runtime installer tried to install actual adware. You had to jump through hoops to deselect adware from being forced onto your machine, it was infuriating.

Setting up a new machine, I could choose between Eclipse (free, took forever to open, slow, asked me a million questions before it let me start working) or Visual Studio (cost money, incredibly powerful, written in C++ and was really damn fast.)

Visual Studio is mostly written in C# btw.

Back in 2005 it was mostly in C++ and it was blazing fast. IMHO VS 2005 was the most performant edition. I never liked VS 2003, felt bloated in comparison.

I switched to VSCode because it has a free editor with a really great jump to file hotkey.

I remember when the big VS added jump to file but it was so damn miserably implemented as to be useless.

Having worked at Microsoft for a decade, the most frequent way I navigated a large source tree was dir /s *partialfilename*.*

Then again while I was there, most code bases couldn't even open in Visual Studio. (highly team dependent, I was mostly on older C/C++ code bases.)

Some teams at MS paid for an editor called Source Insight, which indexed your code and could also parse C #defines and other preprocessor macros, which was super unique and powerful. It had an incredibly powerful symbol and fuzzy filename search capabilities, I'd frequently have Source Insight open just so I could find where in a folder structure a file was and then I'd open it up in my preferred editor.

Back when I got my first SSD the largest boost to my dev productivity was not in compile times (large C++ code bases tend to template bound more so than IO bound), it was how fast I could find files in the directory structure.

I'm sure Vi/Emacs users have some magic set of plugins that do all of this for them, but as someone back on Windows back in the 2000s and 2010s, the supported MS tooling was horrible at all this.

Then VS Code comes along with amazing fuzzy file name matching. Holy cow. Sure it is missing 90% of the power of real Visual Studio (being able to have a debugger step from front end web code to your backend and then into stored procedures in SQL, running on a remote machine, that your debugger transparently auth'd to, is something Microsoft had working 20 years ago and would be considered impossible dark magic with today's tooling), but wow can I navigate a project quickly!

Site license to source insight was something I missed badly after Microsoft. Bought my own copy. It did wonders when looking at Snowflake monorepo, which was otherwise impossible to understand . Great piece of software, still going strong too.

Same here! Easily jumping between files is one of the best features. I always have VS and vscode open simultaneously, doing about 99% of the work in vscode and only using VS to compile and to debug.

Back on /. (way back when!) I read an article about optic nerve regrowth in mice. IIRC a lattice was built, stem cells shot onto it, and some other stuff was done, and a new optic nerve ended up growing.

It involved removing the poor mouses existing eye, so there was no net gain (still had a mouse with only 1 working eye), but I was hopeful progress would be made so I could get myself a working optic nerve.

Nope. No progress in 20+ years. Someone got a paper published and went on and did something else.

It is a relatively uncommon problem, for ~98% of children with a problem with their optic nerve, patching the opposite eye works to force the optic nerve to grow. I'm in the (un)lucky 2%!

Admittedly not the worst rare health problem to have.

The rear window in trucks and SUVs is above the head height of a small child. w/o a backup camera there is literally no way to see if a small child is behind you.

So many parents ran over their own child that backup cameras are now mandatory in the US.

Crazy to think that multiple countries chose to solve the danger of cars all turning into giant murder tanks was to add cameras rather than to classify the murder tanks as being too dangerous to drive.

Unfortunately children playing in the yard have ample time to get behind the car between you checking it, entering the car, starting it, and reversing.

Yes, in principle one could take whatever other measures necessary to prevent such accidents. In reality, backup cameras save lives. Just like seatbelts, anti-lock brakes, crash safety standards, and other safety features that "Real Manly Drivers" protested against back in the day.

Children tend to move around.

> Whenever I am moving a car backward to park or unpark my car, I ask everybody to stand at a specific place where I see them, regardless if they are adults or kids.

How does that help other people walking down a sidewalk?

or reversing in public where random kids could end up behind you I guess

I use a Mac daily, have for years now. I did not recognize that the icon in the article was for "pages" until it came to the icon with the word pages on it.

The icon is horrible and generic and has failed to leave an impression on me over multiple years.