Wouldn’t it be great if this finally breaks the Microsoft stranglehold. We could pop open the champagne and toast to liberté égalité and digital sovereignty ;)
My gosh yes please! This is so annoying. Last time I checked it’s impossible to disconnect your email address from Google auth if you used that to sign up. And no way to delete the account and recreate with that email address.
I'm subscribed to the Premium Family plan to get rid of the ads and for the music service, which I think at the current price is a great deal. I just wish they would add more options to the premium plan, like:
- add proper filters (e.g. for sponsored content, low effort content creators, any content about spending/winning money, other obvious nonsense which exists just to increase views, etc. etc.)
- detect and filter generated and other low effort crap content
- add proper parental controls (it's a family plan, after all and YouTube Kids does not count, it sucks)
- disable Shorts (if there's one thing that's going to make me cancel my subscription it's the cancer that is Shorts)
> - detect and filter generated and other low effort crap content
> - disable Shorts
Absolutely. YouTube Premium has been one of my most used streaming service and the one where I've gotten the most value, but no more. I'm not sure if they changed their recommendation algorithm but it insists on pushing Shorts, auto-generated garbage, it doesn't react to any type of input and I'm afraid that the content it pushes is starting to affect my mental well-being.
I've been avoiding YouTube for a few days now and I now considering just cancelling, the ads will keep me away in the future, so in that sense it's nice that they help me not to return.
Or, if you’re building for clients with a traditional “enterprise” and “secure” IT infrastructure: add refresh buttons and call it a day.
If there’s one thing in my experience that consistently fails in these environments and cannot be fixed due to endless red tape, it’s trying to make real-time work for these type of clients.
Clearly I don’t know what your application is, but many heavyweight “web apps” don’t cope with a simple refresh, kicking back to a default screen or even login screen in some cases.
Sometimes this is to scope logins to single tabs for security reasons (I think that's why Userify does it that way). It's annoying but for infrequently used apps, no worse than getting logged out every three minutes.
I fondly remember playing Doom with my brother. Our dad had made a serial cable for us. One of us was playing on the PC and the other one on a laptop with a grey scale display and terrible ghosting. We had so much fun and it felt like magic indeed :)
My dad had a similar laptop. Playing video games on it was pretty trippy with all the ghosting.
Back then a cousin and I found a cheat exe on some BBS that gave you infinite ammo in Doom 2, it also gave us a virus (Michaelangelo, I think?). My dad somehow disassembled the exe to remove the virus so we could keep our infinite ammo cheat. I'm spoiled - I would struggle to do the same without online resources.
- Platform sounds like "everything that doesn't fit into a vertical slice of business" - that is a _hell_ of a lot of work for any team.
- Business hates and underfunds these teams because they are often blamed as being a blocker because of the previous statement. They are a pure cost center too. Career suicide joining them.
- Unless you have a very motivated team lead you will end up doing the work of the most aggressive and loud team leads from other teams. Anyone good at playing politics will dictate your roadmap.
- Given the first statement, how do you hire someone for these teams? If they are responsible for platform evolution, upgrades, CI + CD, making frameworks, writing scripts, improving developer experience PLUS you are the backstop for the full backlog of every other team so need a lot of domain expertise. You would need to pay someone a lot to do this right? Well no - because of point 2.
The idea of a platform team is one of those weird things that sounds obvious and clearly needed - until you marry the idea to that of any org that has layers of management + politics and a misunderstanding of the long tail effects of platform work.
An interesting thing that happened at our company when we ended up having a platform team was that the "Can do" attitude of our previously homogenous group of mobile devs stopped over night - "That's a platform role" became a common refrain.
> An interesting thing that happened at our company when we ended up having a platform team was that the "Can do" attitude of our previously homogenous group of mobile devs stopped over night - "That's a platform role" became a common refrain.
This has more or less been the case for my entire tenure at my current company. Sure, I want to do X, but we're crunched for time almost always. And there's another team that probably handles X. So it would be irresponsible/wrong of me to work on X when someone else can handle it faster and "owns" it. Except, who owns it? Whose team do I contact? That, I never know. It's a shifting, amorphous creature that lives around the app development team; I am required to communicate with it but I don't know how. Ultimately I end up with many micro-blockers where I don't know if a given task is something I should be learning myself or passing off to someone else.
The platform team you describe sounds more like DevOps ("upgrades, CI + CD, ....").
The platform teams I've seen at scale are more focused on providing APIs and services for a business domain. Such as, you can have a platform team for KYC/KYB that develops integrations to document verification providers, and then have stream aligned teams that sit on top of that platform and use it in a product to onboard users. Or in payments, a platform team can manage all of the underlying banking integrations, and then a product team can use these APIs to develop a product that lets users pay for things online. I once managed a platform team that managed the internal ledger for a virtual wallet/venmo type company. There weren't many product features there, but they had to deal with scaling our transaction processing capacity, ensuring idempotency of money transfers, and providing an easy to use API for product teams to integrate with. For more academic/research minded software engineers, it's an awesome team to be on.
You stopped just before the bit that made your comment pointless, the very next words;
> making frameworks, writing scripts, improving developer experience PLUS you are the backstop for the full backlog of every other team so need a lot of domain expertise
That is the root problem with Martin Fowler and his ilk, always ignoring management, politics and existing reality.
See Project Managers becoming 'scrum masters' rather than neatly disappearing.
Platform teams are similar, they sound plausible, but as you say the reality is pretty miserable. 'Enabling' others to do work eventually looks a lot like doing the work.
Interestingly, I've seen the exact opposite. Platform is the team that they see, and they do a tremendous amount of the total work. I guess maybe that's the difference; the teams you worked on didn't write much useful code.
What I've seen is platform being the "elite" place to work, or at least the one where you can do cool things. Otherwise you're working with "cookie cutters". Most specific content, in our case written for individual customers was not as important! There are many customers and projects, but theoretically only one platform. Projects come and go. However, platform being responsible for most of the code that determines basic functions, puts you at their mercy.
The infrastructure and base code was a huge deal. The other teams were fat... it does cut either way though.
All of those are downsides, yes, but platforms still need to be built for organizations that are at scale so the focus needs to be on how to improve the process of building them, not on how to avoid them.
Only small companies can silo everything into verticals.
I'm really curious about the usual inter-team patterns .. (or even in-team). Politics is a morbid fascination.. cause I hate it but I have to walk around it so.. the more I know.
My 2c's are that platform teams are a silo for expertise on how anything is run at a company and can become a bottleneck for other teams when getting things done. In an ideal scenario the product team can consume resources via an API, but in my experience resources are only assigned via a ticketing system and the associated communication barriers this creates leads to friction.
Having worked at smaller companies (~ 500 people) in different stages (series-A, unicorn and post IPO) I very much like the idea of a lean platform team that defines the interfaces that are used to control interaction between different modules, and with external services.
Yes it creates friction and reduces velocity at ticket level but it prevents misalignment errors in UAT and production. This can be solved somewhat by having dedicated product owners in each module but it's often not feasible for smaller companies and brings in too much non-technical chatter.
For example, if your product acts as a metadata repository as well as a task execution engine it is important that the execution engine modules access the metadata only using streamlined (and maintained) internal APIs and not hit the database or maintain duplicate metadata for different engines. This way you actually improve velocity at milestone/release level because you're free to make changes to the metadata codebase without breaking features in various downstream execution engines.
In my experience, with a well-scoped platform team, the integration phase of a release gets significantly smoother with fewer defects. YMMV based on product type and company size.
I led a large (50 people+) platform org - Organizations struggle with modern backend systems and cloud, and find themselves in a cyclical loop of hiring, reorganization and reprioritization. I just wrote about it here a few days ago: https://klo.dev/evolution-of-cloud-infrastructure-and-platfo...
Exactly. I haven’t upgraded my Macs since Mojave, for this and other reasons. I’ve grown increasingly disillusioned with the direction of the Mac under Tim Cook. What happened to the Macintosh emphasis on building software for creators that was easy to use? Last year I moved on to Windows 10 on a Surface Pro and a dual boot Windows 10 and FreeBSD with KDE on a Ryzen 9 workstation. I still have my 2013 MacBook Air and Mac Pro whenever I need a Mac, but my Surface Pro and Ryzen 9 workstation fit my needs.
With that said, this is an interim solution; I’m actually working on my own desktop environment as a long-term solution, since I’m disillusioned with what modern personal computing has become, devices and software that promote consumption over creation, and environments that encourage walled gardens and large moats instead of interoperable, interchangeable components. What I want is essentially the classic Mac interface with Smalltalk- or Lisp machine-style underpinnings; the power to mold my environment to my taste, but with user applications that abide by the 1990s-era Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines, when Apple had UI/UX heavyweights like Don Norman and Bruce Tognazzini influencing the Mac’s direction.
Microsoft at least made a semblance of sense because some Windows laptops have touchscreens and some even can be turned inside out into tablets. They wanted to embrace those hardware capabilities but did so at the expense of the remaining 95% of their users.
There are no macs with touchscreens and no plans to release any from what I gather — that's what iPad is for, after all.
My worry though is that when Windows fucked up, Mac OS was a viable alternative. Now that Mac fucks up, what's the alternative? Linux has its own challenges.
Windows is absolutely not an alternative. The UI degradation we're complaining about in the Mac has already happened in Windows - I mean they've now got 3 different UI paradigms for system settings and the newest one is this disgusting phone-style UI full of whitespace. Ads and "suggestions" everywhere don't help either.
Still crazy.. I want to use my keyboard. My shortcuts, and do proper bulk operations. It's just pure laziness from their devs.
They don't know, they don't care..
> I have to go to the Desktop app, search, find, and copy
Agreed, the Chrome browser extension and the Safari inline menu are garbage.
Fortunately the classic extension is still available and still works great for me, as well as Safari with the inline menu option disabled.
Same for the iOS extension, garbage. But luckily the classic password autofill on iOS still does work great.
I use the Firefox extension on desktop and have no issues. But the iOS one, I have to agree with you, is pretty garbage. It only works half the time for me. It doesn't prompt when I'm in a username field consistently, and sometimes doesn't fill the password on the first time, forcing me to hit it again or copy paste. I find myself more often having to physically navigate to the app, type in my username, and copy paste my password.
If you are using the classic autofill don't you have to maintain your password in keychain as well as 1Password?
There are still many retail investors who think the saga is far from over, and are now betting on direct registration (DRS) of their GME shares with the goal of triggering another, much bigger short squeeze than last year.
Its easily dismissed as conspiracy but having read many of their supporting arguments and seeing the SI (Short Interest) being over 220% myself along with the SEC report suggesting that shorts never closed their position... I can't say I would dismiss the possibility of another short squeeze...
"In seeking to answer this question, staff observed that during some discrete periods, GME had sharp price increases concurrently with known major short sellers covering their short positions after incurring significant losses. During these times, short sellers covering their positions likely contributed to increases in GME’s price. For example, staff observed that particularly during the earlier rise from January 22 to 27 the price of GME rose as the short interest decreased. Staff also observed discrete periods of sharp price increases during which accounts held by firms known to the staff to be covering short interest in GME were actively buying large volumes of GME shares, in some cases accounting for very significant portions of the net buying pressure during a period. Figure 6 shows that buy volume in GME, including buy volume from participants identified as having large short positions, increased significantly beginning around January 22 and remained high for several days, corresponding to the beginning of the most dramatic phase of the run-up in GME’s price."
Meaning shorts covering causing a small increase in price and then retail FOMOd in.
See also the graph on the next page that show short interest dropping from over 100% to around 20%.
I'd like to add to this the following scenario for explaining why short interest can be high even if the original shorters have closed their positions.
1. Lots of people are short.
2. Price goes up significantly, shorters get margin calls.
3. Price goes up a lot due to buying pressure from shorters closing their positions. (ie, the squeeze itself)
4. Price is now extremely high and fairly disconnected from fundamentals.
5. People notice the price is very high compared to earnings and open new short positions.
After step 5, there can be a ton of shorters in the stock yet there is not a very big chance of a new squeeze since the price at which the new short positions were opened is so high. Imagine how much the price of GME would need to rise to squeeze out the shorters who opened their position in the 300-400 USD price range.
FINRA and the SEC require brokers to report short interest data twice a month [1]. These are share aggregates. FINRA then provides those data for U.S.-listed companies to the exchanges, who publish it. None of those exchanges have changed their publishing methodologies in years.
> Now; SI = [Number of Share Short] + [Float] / [Float]
So you're saying that SI is always reported as higher than 100% now?
Since that's not the cause, are you saying there's negative number of short shares now?
I made a little money of it last year when the squeeze squoze, and I don't see it happening again.
I was late to get in, but not too late; the next morning, the price had doubled, so I sold half. I held on to the rest just to be along for the ride, but I think that morning was the real squeeze. I think I bought some extra on a dip, sold half of that for double again, and sold the rest on a minor bump a few months later.
Hectic stock like this can be an easy way to make a quick profit as long as you remember to buy the dips and sell at any bump that comes along. I bet that's what the big guys on Wallstreet did to make way bigger profits than I'll ever be able to.
Of course. Always check if something changed about the company itself.
And when trading derivatives, even dips caused by the market (rather than fundamentals), can lose you lots of real money. Because even if it will eventually recover, it might dip deeper and longer than you can afford. I lost a ton of money on Tesla that way. (I would have been rich now if I'd been able to keep that.)
Both Gamestop and Tesla were just the market freaking out. The market often does that. Much of the stock market is more about what other investors will do than what the companies themselves will do. It's a bunch of noise on top of the actual value of the companies themselves.
Of course sometimes it is the companies themselves, and then you need to pay attention. And because you rarely know in advance whether a dip is the company or the market, you always need to pay attention. But the Gamestop thing was a clear case of the market freaking out.
Right. So, you were taking a risk trying to buy in the dips and sell in the bumps, you were not following your own advice to "Always check if something changed about the company itself." Which is fine, it worked out for you.
Of course, the bigger picture challenge is that -- modulo market freakouts -- everyone else is also "checking if something changed about the company itself", and that's already built into the market price, that's kind of the model of how the market works. To make money by buying in dips only after checking if something is changed in the company itself, you have to think you are better at noticing or predicting changes in the company itself than everyone else, I guess?
Here's the thing, though: I think most of the time it is market freakout. Even if something did change about the company, quite often the market will freak out about it in one direction or another. I really think Warren Buffett is one of the few investors who really pays attention to the actual value of companies. Most investors just sail on hype.
That doesn't mean that $4 was what it should be, though. I hope GME used the ridiculously high stock price to issue a bunch of new shares, so they have plenty of money to invest in whatever they want.
> There are still many retail investors who think the saga is far from over
I had the misfortune to encounter one of these on reddit the other week. I asked (what I thought was) a fairly simple question - are people still in it because they think the company has a reasonable chance of turning around and making good money, or is this now an idealogical thing about sticking it to the man, or a bit of both?
And I basically got a full-on hard sell as a response, massive amounts of details about business plans and any reservations I expressed were due to me being stupid and/or biased.
It does seem like a good idea on paper, though when you look at the reports of how many people have actually DRSed their shares it becomes painfully obvious that it's so few that it isn't likely to ever make a difference.
What reports have you seen that show the actual numbers? Genuinely curious.
As far as I know, there is only one report that has been released--that was by Gamestop itself for the 3rd Quarter (Aug 1-Oct 30). That number was 5.2 Million.
Now, the DRS movement, for lack of a better term, did not start to take off until late August/Early September. IOW, DRSing shares has not been going on since last January.
The next quarterly results (Nov-Jan) will be released around the end of March and, assuming that Gamestop continues to release the DRS numbers, will provide 2 data points.
The last point I would like to make is that the total number of shares outstanding for Gamestop is only 76.5 Million. 12 Million of those shares are Insider shares. Even if you Ignore institutional holdings and individual investor shares held in brokerage accounts, 5.2 Million is 8% of 64.5 Million. I would say that is not an insignificant percentage, even if the DRS movement stagnated after October.
From what I've seen there are now ~122,000 accounts for DRSed shares, and even if the average numbers we're seeing on reddit hold for all accounts (which I doubt), that's still only around ~18M shares, or 28% using your numbers. That's a lot, but it only matters when it reaches 100%.
I don't want to spread negativity, I have a bit of money invested as well on the off chance that the theories are true, but I'm placing my bets that if anything happens it'll be because of stricter regulations regarding short selling, not because of DRS.
Just to clarify my original statement, I did not mean to imply that after the 4th quarter results come in, that another squeeze will immediately happen.
I've always thought that this would take some time (i.e. DRSing the float). I don't think it necessarily has to reach 100% (although that would fantastic) I do think the higher the number climbs, the harder it will be for investors and regulators to ignore.
DRSing shares will reveal irrefutable, easy-to-digest proof that there is illegal naked shorting of Gamestop. How that plays out (squeeze, investigation etc) is anybodies guess because this exact situation has never happened previously. (individual retail investors directly registering shares in their name to secure the entire inventory of a company).
>I've always thought that this would take some time (i.e. DRSing the float).
Is there any expectation that the number of DRSed shares will continue to climb, rather than asymptotically approach some arbitrary number? At this point you'd think everyone who wanted to DRS their shares already did it, so for that number to increase you either have to target stragglers (not many of them), or buy more shares (I doubt folks on superstonk have enough free cashflow to pull that off).
>I do think the higher the number climbs, the harder it will be for investors and regulators to ignore.
>DRSing shares will reveal irrefutable, easy-to-digest proof that there is illegal naked shorting of Gamestop.
Like, illegal naked shorting that's happening right now? I saw in other comments that the short interest is 20% or 14%. It's pretty obvious that you don't need to do naked short selling to get that kind of short interest. Not to mention, > 100% short interest isn't indicative of naked short selling either, because the same share can be lent over and over again.
March 22nd is when Gamestop 4th quarter results are released. They should also release the number of DRS'd shares.
But to be completely Honest: I will be able to answer your question with more certainty in about 12 months.
That will give us 5 data points. That should be enough to get an approximate number of shares being DRS'd every 3 months.
Through all of the due diligence and personal research, I do believe Illegal naked shorting is taking place. I'm not here to convince anyone to buy GME, but the DRS number seems simple enough for the general public (short attention span--I include myself in that) to wrap their heads around. DRS is the elevator speech, so to speak, for me.
If someone were inclined to listen to me, I can do a quick 2 minute, back of the napkin calculation that may spark interest, using DRS.
>“Some commentators have asked how short interest can get as high as it did in GameStop. Short interest can exceed 100%—as it did with GME—when the same shares are lent multiple times by successive purchasers. If someone purchases a stock from a short seller and subsequently lends the stock out again, it will appear as if the stock was sold short twice for the purpose of the short interest calculation.”
I’m upgrading from an M1 Air (16GB) to a 14” Pro base model just for the display. Extra M1 pro performance is bonus but the M1 has already been amazing for development work past year.
Is it the resolution you've found limiting on the M1 Air? My eyesight is slowly getting worse so I'm assuming I'll have to run both at 200%. Which makes the Air a 1280x800 screen - something I last had on my 2009 13" MBP!
I’m lucky enough to still have good eyesight so it’s not limiting for me personally.
Most of the time when working I’ve got it hooked up to a big 4K display though. My expectation is I’ll appreciate the new XDR display for the times I’m not on an external monitor.
M1 only allows one external monitor (you can run 2 with some docks if you turn off the laptop screen). This isn't such a problem for me as I have an ultra-wide, but lots of people with dual/triple monitor setups haven't been super thrilled.
