I'm seeing a lot of comments here about how its the government's fault for relying on a private service for public communications.
The sentiment, while understandable (and not entirely unfair), assumes that the government has armies of technical folks available to maintain ActivityPub/RSS/$RandomHarryPotterSpell$. A Twitter account (well, before the Musk takeover anyway) offered:
a) The ability to disseminate information to essentially anyone with a mobile device and an internet connection.
b) Low setup costs, maintenance overhead, and technical expertise needed.
As a taxpayer, I would like my government to be cost-effective in resource allocation - Pre-Musk Twitter was one such cost-effective way to maintain a 1-->many communications infrastructure. That said, I fully agree that they should explore alternatives in light of Musk's antics.
It is important to also remember that government can be slow when it comes to embracing tech. ActivityPub is only 5 years old, and that's a short-time by govt standards, RSS is effectively (and quite sadly) dead for the everyday folk. This may or may not surprise the readership here, but Ontario's healthcare system still uses faxes to transmit patient records: https://www.dww.com/articles/ontario-government-to-eliminate....
> assumes that the government has armies of technical folks available to maintain ActivityPub/RSS/$RandomHarryPotterSpell$.
Sadly this will never be the case, but it should (and absolutely can) be.
I worked on a large government project, and learnt that what they generally do is outsource to the worst bidder. There's so much bureaucracy that accountability disappears. This means that as long as all the boxes (on all the millions of TPS reports) are ticked, company X gets the contract.
Bear in mind company X isn't the best, not even the cheapest (far from it), but they're the best at getting government contracts because they know how the game is played.
Now the government's overspent, under-delivered, and still nobody's accountable for the complete disaster of a project. I wish I could give you exact details on what I'm talking about.
An alternative is just hiring good engineers, but that would introduce accountability, and nobody in government wants that.
You’ve got to wonder how governments executed emergency communications from, say, 1800 until 2006-ish. The secret is they did, and there’s ways to do it still.
Cost-effective resource allocation is one part of government but if you think that’s all there is to risk management in the public sector you’ve been mainlining “govt as Corp” Thiel views and forgotten risk management overall, part of which is disaster recovery, failovers, high availability, no single points of failure, all of it. Using pre-Musk twitter had these same drawbacks too.
The moment a bunch of heads of state got account takeovered in 2019-ish should have been the wake-up call.
It is the gov's fault for relying on a service...that lacked a formal legal agreement that favors the gov, and even better that favors the citizens who pay taxes to said gov. But, i am not going to fault the gov folks too much, because hey they're human, and also because i'm pretty sure that the gov's intent (in deciding to use mechanisms like twitter) were not evil, quite the contrary no doubt. I fault such governments not because they're thinking evil, but rather poor decision-making. Also, you make a valid point that gov entities often lack enough tech personnel...However, i feel gov entities should at least have some small numbers of tech personnel who - not only install hardware, software - but advise governments on what technologies could fit the very specific needs of the citizens. Corporations for years/decades have technology advisors on staff; basically IT/tech/digital folks who don't go anywhere near software/hardware, and instead advise corporate entities on leveraging the most appropriate tech solutions for whatever scenarios come up for said corpporations. What any gov should always ask themselves in cases of deciding for platforms for emergency use: what mechanisms do we need in place that will scale to provide the service (emergency comms and/or broadcast) that our citizens need, etc..
To your point about having gov. be cost-effective, i fully agree with you! While i happily (yes, happily!) pay my taxes when gov uses them to good use (because it helps everyone in the long-term even if they dont realize it), i dislike poor decision-making by govs when they waste my tax dollars. So, i think the issue is not so much that govs can not afford to make long-term proper decisions of choosing scalable, appropriate tech platforms...but rather, that many govs simply make poor choices, or don't know how to make a choice, and then rely on ther wrong people to help make bad choices.
As the point about faxes...the U.S. also relies on fax as the approved "private" communcation system within healthcare...Not because gov doesn't move fast enough nor because someone made a bad tech decisioin...but we use faxes in american healthcare because someone made a bad tech decision AND THEN proceeded to explicityl cement that decision into law!
Overall, i blame gov, but not too roughly...but i also blame our gov/political leaders for not thinking properly long-term, and often relying too much on private entities...entities who do not always have the same incentives alignbed with citizens. Ok, ok, i'm off my soap box now. Thanks for your patience! :-)
The goal of govt here is to reach the breadth of it's audience. To that end: it takes some really unproven assumptions to assert that they coulda done better than publishing where people already are. A "scalable appropriate tech platform" is nice but the point here is that there's a significant number of people who will use the funny bird app but not whatever other channels you establish, no matter how wonderful they are.
Ok, if there's the need for government to be present where people already are, then - much like the U.S. emergency broadcast system - there would need to be an accommodation that allows government to "interrupt this message"... without hitting against an API limit, etc. I honestly don't know if regulations govern that on tv airwaves but I imagine so..in which case for profit social platforms need similar regulations.
The provincial and federal gov'ts all sorts of online services fairly effectively. e.g. CRA's isn't awful, even if rudimentary -- it beats what I hear the IRS offers to Americans. They have hosted services all over the place and infrastructure to host. And there are, surprisingly, actually reasonably talented people inside the public sector that could run a Mastodon instance and publicize it.
But direction to manage such services needs to come from the gov't and the public generally. And it's indicative of a loss of a public-sector / public-service ethic generally -- especially in North America -- that that never happens.
The worst problems as I have seen them it is when the government outsources these things, puts out RFPs and the lowest cost bidder, or best connected bidder, wins and produces garbage. I've been privy to that process (homeless shelter management system / case management system for the City of Toronto) and it was depressing as hell.
The EU and various European countries have already made moves into the fediverse. But this concept of offering services like this has seemingly become foreign in North America, where privatization and private public partnerships are the order of the day and people just assume that anything done by the public sector is going to be expensively run garbage.
Just as an example of how simple it could be - a WordPress install would get them an easy way to manage content on a website with different users and publishing permissions (so it can integrate into their human organization in a useful way) and should work not only to display information on the website, but to provide a search on that site, and you get things like RSS feeds for free. Hosting WordPress isn't free, but it is relatively straightforward and affordable.
Not saying that WordPress is the best solution, but I think over 45% of websites online use it, so toss a coin and it's probably a WordPress site. It should be very easy to find people who are familiar with it or can help work on it if that's ever needed.
A solution like that is small and simple enough for even a municipal government, but scalable enough that it could work for a national, or even international level organization too. I think something like this would be a prudent way to publish important information online.
TranBC is a wordpress site. DriveBC is four bare metal hosts that have a baseline nic load of around 1 Mbyte continuous. On 'snow days' it goes up two orders of magnitude - yes, close to saturating single gb nics on each host.
We followed a mantra of "publish to static; static is king".
WordPress can emit statically-hostable websites, though you may lose that site-searching functionality. It would be possible for those who work on the site to log into a running WordPress install, to write and manage their content in the dashboard, but for that to inform and redeploy a static site. It's not a requirement that the place where the Wordpress-powered site is hosted to also be running PHP and the WordPress app on that server.
> Pre-Musk Twitter was one such cost-effective way
But with absolutely no continuity or performance guarantees, and answering to absolutely nobody.
Twitter (pre or post Musk) and any social network are companies that do whatever the hell they want whenever they wants. They answer to nobody, and nobody should rely on them to do anything of importance. Sure you can share cat photos with your family, but don't do anything that actually matters.
Maybe the service is down for a day = tough.
Maybe they charge you to post on their service = nothing you can do.
Maybe they charge people to read posts on the service = nothing you can do.
Maybe they flip the whole script and delete everything and do something totally different = tough.
Government relying on such flaky mechanisms to disseminate critical information to citizens is the problem here.
They have public TV and radio. those were not easy tech when it started. It's just a matter of will (and a consequence of geriatric leadership everywhere)
- Nerdwriter: https://www.youtube.com/user/Nerdwriter1
- Patrick H Willems: https://www.youtube.com/c/patrickhwillems
- Every Frame a Painting: https://www.youtube.com/c/everyframeapainting
- https://www.youtube.com/c/LessonsfromtheScreenplay
The amusing thing about Computerphile is it makes me wonder how inaccurate or inexact Numberphile is, as I'm very knowledgeable about the former and clueless about the latter. Computerphile is unwatchable to me, they'll just say stuff that is flat out wrong, but I eagerly await each new Numberphile vid.
There's a term for this, I can't remember. You read a newspaper article about a subject you know, and can't believe how much in it is incorrect or misconstrued, then you read another article about a different topic and it seems fine.
It's similar. Two issues with Numberphile videos I can remember:
Their video on 1+2+3+... = -1/12 was so bad that another Math channel (Mathologer, which is highly recommendable btw) did a whole 40min video tearing it apart: https://youtube.com/watch?v=YuIIjLr6vUA
In their video on fluid mechanics, they say that the Navier-Stokes equations describe all fluids on earth, while they only show the incompressible version (without clarifying). The examples shown on screen at that moment also include a Ketchup bottle, and they don't discuss non-Newtonian fluids either (Ketchup is non-Newtonian, that's why you can get a lot of it coming out at once if you shake a bottle too hard). It's a bit nitpicking though, because apart from these missing caveats it's a great video (with a guest lecturer from Tom Rocks Maths, another great math channel).
Recent videos? I haven't watched it in a while. But looking now, I immediately found an example, because the problems are always with the history. In the video below [1], the guy absolutely mangles the story of the byte and why it's 8 bits long. He turns what was a fuckup in the launch of the System/360, into some urban legend of IBM's technical superiority and vision.
"IBM said, 'Let's be brave! 8 bit characters!'"
FFS, no. IBM said (in summary), "Crap, we really wanted to use 7 bit ASCII - an evolution of the 6 bit teleprinter code, since we're on the federal standards committee, but ASCII peripherals won't be ready in time for the System/360 launch, so uh, let's use this 8 bit extension to our old 6 bit punch cards instead and wing it." It turned out to be a massive blunder. [2]
The System/360 still succeeded and its success meant a bunch of software was written for it, which all assumed an 8 bit byte, competitors copied IBM, and the rest of the market followed, but it took a decade or so. There's lots of fun stuff in the actual story - including the rich history of today's character standards which goes all the way back to the telegraph - to summarize without making things up.
For Film Theory, I think Big Joel is a good if weird addition. I don't agree with him on everything, but he certainly has interesting and (usually) well-founded opinions. Most of the videos are on really niche topics that maybe apply more broadly to cultural trends.
I wanted to like this article - I couldn't. The author lost my respect right off the bat when they hand-waved recent trends in Ontario education as "Marxism" or derivatives thereof - a failing of intellectual rigour on the author's part [1].
I will not comment on the actual court judgment itself simply because I'm not super privy to conversations surrounding public schooling in Ontario. I will, however tackle one point the author brings up about "rote-like teaching and learning methodologies". I grew up in one such "rote-like" learning system, and I'm witness to how it _kills_ the beauty of math and sucks all joy out of it. I was privileged enough to find Khan Academy around my HS days and Sal's intuition-backed approach to math was a godsend in a place where we were told to redo the same problems till our "hands memorized the problems". Rote-learning is great for multiplication tables, but anything after that is begging your students to fear/despise math. We need creative ways of teaching math so students are actually interested in the subject, and I see far more of that in the west (I have worked part-time as a math tutor in Toronto) than the rote system I was subject to.
This romanticisation of rote-methods and painting all activism as Marxism leads me to believe the author is no better than those he/she seeks to criticize and is victim to the same intellectual trappings they accuse their opponents of. If I had a kid in the Ontario public system, I'd probably be wary of my kid learning anything from this teacher - my political beliefs notwithstanding.
[1] - I'm not denying the author their right to criticize the system (they probably have valid criticisms), but if they're going to do it in a self-important manner, I'd expect more intellectual rigour than calling anything moderately activist as "Marxism".
This is a good and thorough article. The author got down to brass tacks pretty quickly and brings up interesting hypothesis about $MSFT.
That said, I do have one gripe:
> To oversimplify Notion to its demographics, it is Office 365 for people below age 35.
I recognize this is an oversimplification, but even so, it seems like a stretch. Notion is a decent product, and I have used it for a few small-scale team projects in uni (mainly for Kanban-related stuff) - but to call it a replacement for O365 is an exaggeration at best.
Yes, you can have pretty, nested documents in Notion and that's great, but a tabular database in Notion is by no means a replacement for Excel or even Google Sheets. The velocity that is afforded by Excel in terms of formulas is unmatched and there's a reason it has yet to be unseated as the kingpin of modern finance.
Most young people I know use a combination of Discord + Google Suite to collaborate. I am aware this is slightly anecdotal, but I am also having a hard time imagining myself as a founder and then asking my CFO to use Notion to prepare investor pitches.
God, if you have personal and work accounts under the same email bring on the insane pain. There is sometimes confusion on the MSFT backend (or was) in these cases and you'd get jammed into weird corners (ie, reset would do just your personal so you couldn't ever get a work account reset etc).
It's something about their federation tech vs google. Google, if you are in wrong service, nice switch account, one redirect it feels like.
I thought this was bad, then my work changed from on-prem AD to Azure AD. Now my account is "linked" to my computer, and the only way I can log into a different Outlook inbox is by opening an incognito window.
It really does feel like something is broken on the back end of Microsoft's SSO, but I'm sure it's just so complicated with decades of cruft that it's hard to dig out.
Same here but with the added pain of an early "onmicrosoft.com" account that splits our users between their domain and ours, doesn't let me use my work domain address, and yet denies the onmicrosoft.com one access because it's not a "work or school account".
It's seriously bemusing to be logging in to an organisational account with admin access only via a personal Gmail account username but there's literally no migration path for these early adopter accounts.
Exactly. this is such a pain, especially if you happen to be apart of one organization that's AAD Connect and one that's full AAD (Azure Active Directory).
As far as I can tell, the easiest way to switch users is to go to https://www.office.com/login?es=Click directly (?es=Click is important) which will present you with all the accounts you're 'Signed in' with, even if office.com has you locked into one. Then you can use the app switcher to switch domains, which ensures the correct account.
I wonder if this is a generational thing. If there's a decent app for a thing, I use the app¹. In this case Outlook. I have 4 email addresses to manage my personal email, throw-away registrations, website comms, and website SSL/admin.
I never access any email ever from a browser - Outlook is unbelievably good, and with the .PST file size restrictions no longer being restrictions I have my entire email archive of ever in it. Been doing things like this since 2002.
¹ Social media is the exception. Where I have multiple social media accounts (Instagram) I use seperate browsers (Edge for hobby account, Firefox for personal account). This is not ideal but the workflow is easy.
Ye there is something fishy about Office365 login. Sometimes the account switch for no good reason. Even if I just entered the username and password in a prompt.
It is a great mistake login in on different accounts on the same computer ...
> I use shitton of MS products, but I cannot switch from Google's gmail, docs and drive to anything.
Here's my libre stack:
- Thunderbird for e-mail (whichever provider you like, i also self-host a mail server for automation etc.)
- LibreOffice, which i use as a local piece of software, because web office apps rub me the wrong way
- Nextcloud, which i also self-host and which has both desktop software and mobile apps
Of course, that's not something that everyone might want to use for themselves, but personally it has worked out pretty nicely for me, allows me to keep my data private (for the most part) and is a rather cost effective way of doing so!
> ...but I cannot switch from Google's gmail, docs and drive to anything.
Is me offering workable alternatives counterproductive or unhelpful? The fact that the software is free and open source is just a nice boon to have and something to mention in my eyes.
Here are the links for the aforementioned software so that anyone may attempt to switch to it, if they so desire.
(the latter needs a server, much like Google Drive does, have a look here for a non-self hosted option if that seems like a hassle: https://nextcloud.com/providers/)
If anyone has thoughts on the viability of any of these solutions, hearing arguments for or against them would also be nice! I know for a fact that many prefer to just use web browsers nowadays as opposed to installing software on each platform locally, which could be one such argument!
LibreOffice also opens up Wordperfect documents. My wife had a church project and one of the teachers had Wordperfect. Office could not read it. So we coverted it in LibreOffice.
Also LibreOffice can edit PDF files so no need for Acrobat Pro.
I've had Libre Office completely destroy hours of work multiple times.
one example: In Excel, I was going great work dissecting raw data provided in another worksheet tab, and apparently writing formulas that LO couldn't understand, so upon opening this file in LibreOffice, LO stripped those cells out. just completely emptied those cells, and then saved the file, all without a warning or a prompt or anything. and, best part was that I was showing someone how LO can open Excel sheets just fine, without worrying. so not only did I prove myself wrong, destructively, I lost all of that work.
I will no longer use anything with "Libre" in the name out of principle.
> I've had Libre Office completely destroy hours of work multiple times.
And I've used it (well, back before it was forged) to clean up things that others had messed up to bad in MS Office.
> one example: In Excel, I was going great work dissecting raw data provided in another worksheet tab, and apparently writing formulas that LO couldn't understand, so upon opening this file in LibreOffice, LO stripped those cells out. just completely emptied those cells, and then saved the file, all without a warning or a prompt or anything.
I've never had LibreOffice save the file without asking.
In fact I think it also usually tries to convince me to make a copy in the official LibreOffice format instead.
I'm going to be extremely blunt here and ask you to look for a PEBKAC.
no pebkac, I assure you. this happened multiple times, to multiple people, at multiple employers. all felt MS Office was too expensive until free solutions cost them thanks to problems like these.
couldn't be the software, huh? you sure? no bugs? ok...
> Is me offering workable alternatives counterproductive or unhelpful?
If it is done unprompted, then I would argue that it at least is an attempt to take over the conversation, and at worst it is saying that the person who has the problem brought it on themselves because they aren't using what you're using.
The following things are very different:
* stating that there is a problem
* stating that there is a problem and asking for help with it.
Confusing the second for the first is a terrible thing that a lot of people do these days, and intentional or not, it is destructive to constructive debate and discussion.
> If it is done unprompted, then I would argue that it at least is an attempt to take over the conversation, and at worst it is saying that the person who has the problem brought it on themselves because they aren't using what you're using.
I don't think that this is a charitable interpretation. If i said that a Python library X doesn't work for parsing nested YAML structures and someone recommended library Y instead, i wouldn't feel like they're blaming me for using X, rather offering a workable alternative.
If i told them that it's impossible for me to use library Y because of reason Z then that's a different discussion, but in lieu of clear information about these constraints, it's perfectly fair to suggest alternatives. That can prevent us from falling into certain dead ends, like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem
Furthermore, in a threaded medium, i'd argue that taking over discussions is a moot concept, since you can have any number of branches that the discussion goes in. If most people prefer focusing on a branch that's of no interest to you, then i guess the majority has just decided for things to be so.
> The following things are very different:
> * stating that there is a problem
> * stating that there is a problem and asking for help with it.
> Confusing the second for the first is a terrible thing that a lot of people do these days, and intentional or not, it is destructive to constructive debate and discussion.
I've heard this opinion be voiced in regards to social interaction - for example, when someone is upset about the way things are but doesn't want a solution, only empathy and for the other person to acknowledge how upsetting the situation can be, and therefore feels frustrated when potential solutions are offered instead.
And yet, in regards to technical discussions, isn't solutions what we should focus on most of the time? If i have a problem to solve but have no idea how to do so, i don't want someone to say: "Sure, that seems pretty rough.", instead, i want someone to offer me advice on how to tackle the issue and move on. Mere empathy alone here is kind of useless.
Admittedly, it's perfectly fair to introduce others with your particular circumstances and concerns for others to consider them, though that's a different discussion once again. Describing a problem and not addressing any potential solutions isn't as much of a debate or discussion as it is just stating the fact, the net value of which can be pretty close to zero.
In my subjective opinion, the value add here is to actually discuss how to solve problems, or why a particular solution or a group of solutions might not be valid for the set of constraints at hand, or what their shortcomings could be. For example, a sibling comment brought up a point about the integration between the mentioned non-libre pieces of software being much better, which is a fair point that's worthy of consideration: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30146365
I think for the original poster complaining about not being able to switch was because of integration between the different tools which they find too useful to forego. Thus, while free open source solutions will be useful for many people they seem unlikely to be able to fix the issue that is keeping that particular user from switching.
> I think for the original poster complaining about not being able to switch was because of integration between the different tools which they find too useful to forego.
Ohh, that's a good point, something that i didn't consider in detail!
Edit: just to be clear, it's still really cool to see them pulling off something so usable with such limited resources, that speaks positively of how extensible their platform is.
In that regard, perhaps i'm just old fashioned, preferring to use my local file system as the intermediary, though the cloud oriented way of interfacing with software probably shouldn't be discounted either!
> but I cannot switch from Google's gmail, docs and drive to anything.
Until you:
- Use Google Drive and its subpar desktop experience of sync'n files (OneDrive is far worse, but Dropbox+MS Office beats it out)
- Experience Gmail's hostile user stance against non-Google calendaring. (1) Automatically creating Google Meets for every invite (or did they fix this recently?) and (2) the terrible formatting that gets sent to non Google-based accounts that gives me the "fingers on the chalkboard" feeling every time it gets sent to my O365 based email.
> I hate MS login page and endless redirects between their services
100% agree.
> Also I have feeling that MS account is more "formal", idk how to explain it.
Agreed. And I feel like anyone who sends me email/cal invites from GSuite are essentially amateurish. Can't explain it either.
> I hate MS login page and endless redirects between their services
I dread logging into any Microsoft product for this reason, I just know it’s 30 mins of BS trying to find different passwords for different accounts, none of which relate the thing I’m actually trying to do.
Flashbacks to when i started a new job and just got the credentials for microsoft 365 but for some reason even after logging in through my work email the service seemed to be tied to my college email had to open an incognito tab for it to work
It's really not. I have no problem remembering or calling up the passwords or emails for my personal, Xbox, current work, previous work, or previous student (!) accounts. And yet Microsoft somehow gets them confused; I haven't ever signed in with this PC or from this ItoP address to my student account, the email no longer works, and it obviously can't access my work document...but something is tied together there and MS insists that must be the account I want to use. Private windows don't always fix it either, there's something shady going on behind the curtain.
Contact support and let them know you have multiple accounts and these issues. I thought they were going to be clueless but they were able to resolve some of these issues quickly behind the scenes.
It does not. I have some combination of my work, school and personal microsoft accounts signed in across a couple different computers. It seems to randomly pick one based on some really poorly inferred context. For example, going to outlook.office.com will (usually) load my personal Outlook email. while going to outlook.office365.com (which redirects to outlook.office.com!!!) always loads my school email.
All of my accounts are meticulously password-managed. The ONLY Google property with this problem is Forms. With Microsoft, the entire authentication system is a disaster. Did you know you can sign into your microsoft account with a security key if the moon is waxing crescent, your computer is at least 3 OS updates behind, and you recite a secret incantation?
I got locked out as an admin of a Microsoft 365 workspace while using password manager. I still haven't recovered the account. You can only recover your account by contacting their support on mobile but they are clueless.
I have a feeling they truncate or santise password somewhere.
This is getting downvoted quite a lot. I don't understand why. There are lots of legitimate uses for a text-based browser, from quickly looking something up on an SSH session to trying to script something. Servers are often placed behind an SSO wall and Microsoft's authentication regime means that you can't, for example, curl server/data without passing a token coming from a graphical browser and a whole world of pain. This is explicitly a design decision from Microsoft: you need to support javascript to use their SSO login.
Anecdotally, O365 products always felt like disjointed attempt by various engineering and sales teams to put a modern spin on the client side offering. In these contexts, it never had to be good - but just similar enough to the old products that excel, word, and outlook power users would use it and find value.
GSuite, Notion, Confluence, and others appeal to an audience that either never required MSFT office nor felt the need to become power users in it.
I don't know why people like gmail so much but I found gmail's design, or Google's Material language in general, really bloated. Outlook.com has a flat and simple layout. Of course it's inferior to gmail in search and I don't understand why they makes me type out the "@outlook.com" part at login.
Another reason I use outlook is that I already gave everything else to Google so just diversify a bit.
Yes, the article is good but that's where it goes off the rails. There's lots of talk about how MS has 96,000 "talented engineers". Yeah? Where are they then?
My experience of Microsoft products in the past decade, both Azure and Windows, as a developer, has been extremely poor. The decay inside the Windows org has been very sad to see in particular. Windows was never exactly bug free but it had a certain robustness about it simply due to the sheer weight of apps using it. The Win32 docs were extremely verbose but mostly did tell you what you needed to know. But, those apps have been evaporating for 20 years and it shows.
From the perspective of a developer trying to do stuff on Windows in 2022 is an exercise in frustration. Nothing modern works right and their developers don't seem to know or care. Trying to do absolutely basic tasks using their recommended approaches will yield an un-ending stream of stupid, impossibly basic bugs. To name just a few bugs I've hit in recent times: they've managed to screw up things as simple as taskbar icons, downloading files from web servers correctly and restart apps after an upgrade. I never thought I'd find myself actually liking Win32 but it does at least tick all the boxes and the standard code paths are bug free.
Nothing about this experience radiates experience or talent. It leaves you with the constant impression that everyone working on the Windows team is a new grad who learned C++ 3 years ago and is shielded from the reality of what their customers experience by a wall of even less talented program managers whose primary job is to post vague reassurances and empty promises to (badly implemented) web forums.
That's Windows. Azure was little better. Again my experience was one of incredibly simple bugs in basic functionality, like holding TCP connections open for more than a few minutes. The fact that people keep finding "root@azure" bugs is also indicative, because usually these reveal that there's no defense in depth of any kind.
What you’re experiencing isn’t the result of bad engineers, it’s the result of business decisions that prioritize new features of testing. There are many talented engineers in Microsoft (as well as some terrible ones) but they don’t have full control over the goals of the business.
To be fair, the authentication for Microsoft is far more complex than any other comparable system. They have to deal with their own Microsoft accounts (Outlook, Live, Hotmail...), federated domains (via ADFS or third parties) and domains hosted in 365 too - Some of those being synced passwords from AD, some of those using pass through authentication from local servers...
Google just has to deal with accounts with Gmail domains and third party domains that they host.
I totally get that. This is why it would make sense to implement login a way that it is obvious to the user what is happening. I am not sure how much time I wasted on trying to figure out which system I am logging in to and with.
For my professional stuff I’ve actually dumped O365 and Google.
I’m using Apple stuff only (pages, numbers, keynote, mail, calendar, reminders, icloud). It’s completely different to anything else and there are a few small compatibility issues but it works really really well and doesn’t stab you in the face with complex problems. Add zoom and slack and you have enough interoperability.
I set three simple standards that I will not budge on which ensures this solution will remain working. Documents via PDF only. Copy via cut and paste on slack. Data via CSV and JSON only.
I also only use spreadsheets internally to my “partition”. They are shitty for everything else.
I’m not going into the long time rants with my extensive experience with O365 and GSuite and LibreOffice here but this feels like I’m being shafted the least hard at the moment.
I think Excel is the main moat on people/company keep using Office. Even the spreadsheet product on macOS is unmatched. I think it's the defacto tools in the salaryman-world for any backoffice work requiring some spreadsheet app.
I know an avid iOS fanboy that uses Excel on Windows for their main job, it's on a different level than its macOS counterpart.
Yes that’s true. There are better ways to solve all the problems that spreadsheets solve but no one way of solving them all in one place as badly that’s quite as good :)
Zoom and Slack are defacto standards which have similar issues as O365 and Google.
That said, I love Numbers. It has some features like easy to use formulas right out of the box. I'm not able to do it that quick/easy with any other spreadsheet product.
However, given I don't use Mac on work as now, I'm bound to Microsoft Office and Microsoft Excel.
I'm usually in Teams all day. It's our VoIP, file share, and chat. We have scheduling, notifications, interactive web cards, and multi-user document editing all in there as a single interface.
I get that that it's a duck-on-water front end to OneDrive, SharePoint, Skype-for-Biz, etc... but it works well enough to get things done.
I use gsuite for my own needs, but unfortunately whenever I deal with anyone on the non-technical side (marketing, support, etc) I always need to switch to word/excel/powerpoint.
I have been waiting for this to change, but I can't yet free up the gigabytes of space on my work laptop that is currently occupied by MS software.
I'm stuck on Notion since my much older CTO thinks Notion is 'hip'. I think it's more fair to say Notion is just the counter culture solution to the same problem O365 and G-Suite try to solve. I suppose Notion kind of made sense back when were tiny, but these days Notion is just clunky and has one of the worst search functions I have ever had the displeasure of using.
At least it apparently isn't doing well in our security audit and the security team is telling us G-Suite is in our future.
I haven't used Notion much but if the search is worse than G-Suite, that is bad indeed. G-Suite search is so bad I sometimes wonder if I'm being trolled.
Google is supposed to be king of search, yet I can type in one of the words in the title of a document that I was editing a few days ago, and it won't find it, but it will find some obscure and completely unrelated string in a csv file from 2014 that I haven't opened since I uploaded it. To work around the horrible search, I literally keep a google doc that starts with AAAAA so it will always be at the top that has a bunch of links and keywords in it. When I need to find a document or spreadsheet or whatever in google drive, I Ctrl+F in there and it's a life saver. Also seems ridiculous that I have to keep my own index file in order to find anything.
Don't even get me started about problems in Notion. It is so depressingly bad that it makes me hate one thing I really like about my work: writing. The search is just broken, but even more broken is the user interface for writing. All kinds of weird things happen if you click your text or start a code block and move your cursor to the wrong way.
What I do nowadays is I iterate my texts in Org Mode, get the comments on GitHub and when we're all happy about the text, I import it to Notion and lose the writing to the black hole of Notion search forever. Now when they have a public API, I'm thinking could there be an Emacs plugin that could sync the text between Notion and Org Mode, that would let me keep my texts in version control? I guess that's just a matter of time...
I’m there with you on the search function. I have no idea what its result ranking algorithm is, but I’d love it if the top results were ones with the exact search string. Instead, we get “You searched for AWS. OK! Here are pages with awl, Australia, House, lasagna, [8 pages], Google Wave, and AWS.”
I feel like Notion and GSuite (Docs mainly) solve two very different problems.
The thing that Notion brings (which I found hard to work with in Gsuite) was that shared documents aren't owned by any one individual, and copies are far less likely to proliferate. So its good for shared documentation that an Organization needs, as opposed to two people collaborating on a document, which google docs handles fine.
The basic tables and cards and stuff are nice for many things but are not a substitute for sheets by any stretch of the imagination. And Notion has no analog for Slides.
Lotta people make this mistake. They think Notion, or Google Sheets, or Slides is the only tool they need. In truth they need all three, depending on the task at hand.
Lots of product managers seem only capable of thinking in slides when Notion would be better for documentation. I've received 500 pages of content for review written into CSV file for some insane reason. And yes, I've seen people struggle to run mathematical models in Notion when Excel is right there.
I try and remind people not to use a hammer when you need a screwdriver, but sometimes that's all they know.
The reasons why the modern productivity suite is winning (Notion, Coda, Airtable, etc) is because they've embraced the web and collaboration.
- ability to share the original source to people
- tag people right inside the document.
- set tasks to people and track them from within the doc.
- new age collaboration features - likes/comments/hashtags built-in
- ability to tag a document within another document
All these are small steps towards embracing the web's nature deeply inside product instead of just shipping the native features to run over the web.
But there's a catch, these modern solutions tend to lag a bit over the powerfulness of what native offers, like
- powerful charting capabilities
- the calculation engine of excel
- pagination of documents
- powerful set of formatting features
Interestingly it's much easier to build the new age features into the already powerful editor than vice versa - which is why google docs pivoted towards smart canvas features instead of launching an all new app.
IMHO the most important period for microsoft is the 90s. There is nothing about it in this article. 1990 is windows 3.0. In 2000, it was the start of Ballmer's era with the erratic management.
A lot of people (me included) aren’t using Excel beyond opening the files to look at the graphs or entering data in predefined fields. It’s the usual 20/80 split between the people actively creating and managing the data and the ones on the receiving end.
For a long time Microsoft pushed Office adoption by forcing the “viewer” to have licenses to access the data. That’s why a company would buy Office for every single employee. But now, you can have Office for the “20” part, and have them push their result to Notion for everyone else to view, do simple things with it.
Notion can effectively be a O365 replacement for the proverbial “80” part.
(Basically O365 is becoming a “power tool” and Notion can skoop the “casual users” slice. I see G\Suite inbetween)
You are right in that Microsoft is the giant pillar sustaining a ton of big and small companies, I'd randomly guess more than 90% of them.
Macs and GSuite are more of a long tail that anything, but these would precisely be the companies that would go to Notion I think. They will have way less incentive/lock in to push Office365 on the bulk of their employees.
This is the biggest reason MS remains a huge player though. Whether you're using Microsoft's cloud e-mail or an onprem exchange, they'll be more than happy to figure out a CAL bundle that is compelling.
No, it's not, but they are used for exchange last I checked. Perhaps my verbiage was a little inaccurate, but thank you very much for the downvote and condescension.
I'd wagger these were just excuse programs aimed at releasing regulatory pressure. Employees working on them might have put their best efforts, but they were inherently flawed and limited beyond just the "viewing" aspect.
A long time ago of my employer tried to skimp on a license and we tried those instead, just to give up after a day and buy the whole package.
They couldn't enable viewing of truly crazy files without shipping the rest of the elephant with it.
And Word users never listened when told to only share RTF files instead of DOC files, except maybe early on when dealing with how Mac and Windows version files were mutually incomprehensible (RTF was kept at feature parity and documented all the way to Word 2003, precisely as interchange format)
A lot of people didn't understand there could issues at the base level. They were exchanging files with their colleges on IT provisionned machines and didn't have to mind what they were using, on a day to day level they had no issues, it was the people "outside" that were a PITA always boyhering them.
Also biting the bullet and being on the latest version of Office with everything from Access to Outlook installed sadly covered all the bases. We worked on an intranet for a smallish company and they had web components that only worked with the specific Office DLLs installed. Took us an afternoon to figure out why it didn't work on our machines.
I don't think the author's American-ness disqualifies them from writing about China. On the contrary, it is their very experience as a Chinese American that helps me (an outsider) see things from a new and interesting perspective.
> some seriously confused Chinese American
I don't recall where I read this (I think it may have been Rachel Cusk), but it is a writer's job to ask questions. And what better source of questions than confusion?
That said, I'd genuinely be interested to seek your recommendations on China from Chinese sources.
> I don't think the author's American-ness disqualifies them from writing about China.
It does. Americans, and Chinese Americans themselves sometimes don't realise that Chinatown America is absolutely not characteristic of China, nor modern, nor at any point in history. Instead, it's a strange universe on its own, with its own history, and customs.
To me, when I talk to Chinese Americans, Chinese Americans feel as Chinese, as American football is football.
When the pandemic first hit, I realized how important routines and (associated) metrics would be in keeping me afloat in a tumultuous time. To that end, I built my own little CLI-based habit/checklist tracker and started analyzing trends and habits on a weekly and monthly basis.
It worked great at first, I had a privileged insight into my week and could therefore fine-tune parameters to optimize for certain metrics. However, as the pandemic dragged on, the drudgery of waking up from my bed and working from my desk (which is a foot away [0]) eventually caught up to me and I started burning out. Looking back, a relentless pursuit to optimize for certain KPIs was part of the reason. Having successfully mechanized a large of my life with little room for error (for fear of rebuke from those pretty charts in Tableau), I started dreading those weekly-check ins with myself, eventually dropping the habit altogether. My tracker went poof soon after that. After all, there will be no rebuke from a chart if there is no chart to begin with :))
A couple months later, I cleared the backend database, and started anew. I had also come to realize over this "break" that I should not tie my self-worth to some graphs [1], and if I was getting the important stuff done, I had little to worry about. My "system" since then has been working fairly well, I use Trello to keep track of stuff, and if something super alarming pops up, I investigate. If not, I let things flow.
I believe it would help your user retention massively if you could remind users you are not a drill sergeant, but are there to help. And part of helping them is to sometimes remind them that (bad) metrics are not a judgement of their character and its okay to let things slide. You can always start anew.
Good luck to y'all, I wish you well! :)
[0] - I am an undergrad living in off-campus housing. Real-estate is unfortunately an expensive luxury at my time in life.
[1] - I recommend Jenny Odell's book "How to do Nothing" to anyone feeling like they are on a never-ending treadmill. There are parts of it that I didn't like, but all in all, it was a good read.
You articulated a real concern of mine. At the end of the day, literally everything I set out to do seems to turn into a programming problem. Trying to get healthy? Better find the exact right diet and workout routine. Learning guitar? Better find the exact combination of scales and chords to practice.
And like every programming problem, it's only fun until I find the answer. Then it becomes maintenance work, slotted alongside all of the five million other tasks I have to keep up with: Doomed to be ignored, dismissed, or otherwise forgotten about.
I realize there is a serious flaw in my approach to building good habits. The way to circumvent it is by decoupling process from results, and finding joy in the mere act of doing.
Still, it's so hard to do when trying to improve at something. The urge to optimize is pervasive.
Definitely that's how I think about it too. I use my weekly check ins to revise or remove goals all the time. We're going for kindergarten teacher vibes over drill sergeant.
Also we live in NYC and are acutely familiar with [0] LOL
Really helpful tip that we should remind users we're not a drill sergeant and that your productivity scores don't equal your identity.
We don't yet have a profile page in the app, but when we build it, we want it to represent the user's identity with a lot of fidelity, which will include creative, professional, or personal milestones alongside productivity data that the user wants to showcase.
I.e. sometimes you will be proud of yourself for a cessation streak, but sometimes you will want to proudly display a new artwork that is difficult to map to your productivity data.
I see comments talking about Stripe's "PR", not just in this thread, but also the one from a couple days ago [1]. I agree that Stripe's hiring practices, based on the information available, certainly warrant criticism.
But I also think it is important to distinguish between Stripe the product and Stripe the company (and subsequently its hiring practices). Based on what I've heard, developers love Stripe, and they are popular in YC too for obvious reasons. PG's essays have often mentioned the Collisons [2], and Patrick Collison is admired (presumably) universally for his smarts [3]. All the above mentioned praise stems primarily from two things:
a) Stripe having a well-functioning product
b) The Collisons being incredibly smart and driven individuals
Both of these factors in conjunction imply that Stripe will be heavily admired. The love for Stripe is therefore a manifestation of that implication, and I dont think there is some PR machine working tirelessly to polish the Stripe brand.
It is a fallacy to extrapolate the sentiment surrounding product and founders to assume that Stripe will automatically be a "good" company.
Needless to say, my heart goes out to those who had offers rescinded. As others have mentioned, an offer can set in motion events that are seemingly irreversible. I hope Stripe uses this as an opportunity to reflect on their hiring systems and fix them to be more waterproof.
> The humans preparing and serving the food are the only weak link in the chain, and they’re treated as such.
I worked nights at a McDonalds about 4 years back (first year of university) in Canada. You are spot-on about them treating humans as the weakest link.
For instance, I noticed that every carton in the freezer contains an illustration of the item inside (in addition to names in English and French). My understanding is that they simply do not trust their workforce to be able to read the contents of the carton and will gladly slap an image on top to remove any unpredictability from the process.
They’re just not assuming that all their workers are fluent in English nor French, which 1.8% of Canadian residents are not (according to the 2016 census).
And there's a not always inaccurate stereotype about the back-of-house at 'real' restaurants being entirely immigrants who only speak enough English to communicate with the servers.
I used to do package design for frozen and refrigerated foods, stuff they sell at Costco. We were always doing little illustrations showing how to, like, open a bag of croutons and pour it onto a salad. As if we were drawing the manual for how to put on an oxygen mask in case of depressurization. I always get a kick out of looking for those things on food packaging these days.
Labeling something in every way imaginable is basically a free way to reduce the long tail of errors.
I think there's a wide gulf between that and "treat literally everyone like they have the intellect of a toddler" kind of policy making which you see advocated for a lot on Reddit (less so here, but sometimes). McDonalds definitely does that, but my impression is that it's more of an acknowledgement of things getting missed in that kind of work environment than people being stupid. When two school buses pull up and you've got every machine beeping and buzzing things need to be stupid proof.
