Network effect. Gradually over time my whole extended family wound up with iphones for one reason or another, and Android phones would consistently break our group threads. The last few holdouts (not ideologically, they just didn’t need new phones) wound up switching to Apple afterwards to make everything smoother for the rest of us.

Yup, the PyPush python-based proof-of-concept can run pretty much anywhere there’s python.

I don’t know about the app itself, but the blog article links to the PyPush python-based proof-of-concept, which you can run pretty much anywhere.

Their “how it works” blog article is worth a read - they’re using a blackbox reverse engineering of the protocol and re-implementing it natively in the app, so there are no man-in-the-middle servers. Impressive software engineering for sure.

If the thing has developed its own approach to generalized symbolic reasoning that could actually be a pretty big deal.

Irony meters everywhere explode

Wow. AI really is coming for white-collar jobs!

I wonder if anyone has ever attempted to model the min/max/ideal number of users (and …ugh… “engagement”) for a healthy online community? It’d be especially tricky for a federated service, but I’d bet there’s some overall population size that puts the average user in contact with the right number of other people (lower than the Dunbar limit, I’d expect) to make it seem worthwhile to keep interacting.

The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald

Don’t go boating in a storm, folks.

As an anecdote, I work at a midsized software company as a product manager. I have an international team of about 20 that I manage from home (full-time remote). Overall there is some loss of speed and agility versus having a full-time in-office staff. I’m not a fan of trying to quantify productivity per se, but for things like estimations and deviations there’s no question that in my environment at least, things move a little slower and take a little longer. Now personally, the fact that we can hire engineers anywhere across the globe (including in LCOL areas), don’t have to pay rent and related fees, and that some of the best engineers specifically want full-time remote more than outweighs the reduced agility (putting aside all of the other potential QOL benefits) – and if needed, some of the savings from reduced rent and salaries could be used to expand the team anyway. Thankfully my management team agrees and has continued to pursue a remote/hybrid environment. But for those places that value speed and agility most it could be a bit of a problem.

I worked in a field that managed a lot of technology in retail stores. The big ones know everything about you, it’s just astonishing. At the time (around 15 years ago) there was very little oversight, but also most CIOs were inept and couldn’t really make the data sing and dance. Today that is very much no longer true, and it’s almost too easy to build a comprehensive profile of an “anonymous” guest and then attach it to their personally identifiable information, all without their consent or knowledge.