Souk's Notes - Unofficial Summaries
Scott HanselmanDecoding Tech Influencers with Emily Freeman
synopsis
Freeman, author of DevOps for Dummies and 97 Things Every Cloud Engineer Should Know, previously worked in developer relations at Microsoft and AWS. She ends up defending paid influencer marketing in enterprise tech, the business of her new firm Freeman & Forrest, on one condition: the payment buys attention, never opinion. Her advice to young creators is that a durable career rests on technical substance, not the quick rise of engagement and spite.
What an influencer is now. Hanselman asks how this differs from word of mouth. Freeman says the difference is a changed world: her daughter thinks the most famous people are YouTubers. These parasocial ties, she says, rest on influencers being regular people. Hanselman recounts reviewing a monitor he was sent and feeling pressure to soften his criticism. Freeman answers with the line "clarity is kindness."
The business case. She argues creators already do the work and should be paid, as open-source maintainers now are, provided they keep their own opinions (she credits Corey Quinn's line). She describes developer relations as running out of reach quickly. Her firm measures impressions, engagement and conversion, weighted by each client's goal. It distrusts Twitter impression counts and favours high-trust outlets such as Cassidy Williams' newsletter.
Ethics and credibility. Both say a developer advocate's value lies in telling employers the truth. Hanselman notes that juniors can't yet afford to criticize their employers the way established figures can.
Shine versus substance. Hanselman criticizes engagement-bait influencers. Freeman narrows his complaint: the real problem is gratuitous meanness, which she says lasts five years at most. Visible tech people need both shine and substance.
Staying in. She credits years of frustration for her resilience, but warns that the golden ages of code schools and developer relations cannot be replicated. Hanselman's advice is to learn one level below your current abstraction, and she endorses it.
- Tech creators already do the work and deserve pay. Freeman, co-founder of the influencer-marketing firm Freeman & Forrest, says influencer marketing is huge in fashion and beauty but has not landed in tech. She argues that creators already raving about products should be paid, just as the industry accepted paying open-source maintainers. The condition is authenticity, summed up in a line she credits to Corey Quinn: "you can buy my attention, you can't buy my opinion."
- Measure impressions, engagement and conversion according to the goal. Her firm measures all three, then hands converted users to the client's own funnel. A cash-limited startup needing signups gets a conversion focus, while trust-building campaigns weight engagement. She avoids leading with Twitter's "empty calorie impressions" and favours smaller, high-trust channels such as Cassidy Williams' newsletter.
- Paid creators extend developer relations' reach. From her developer relations work at Microsoft and AWS, she says in-house advocates exhaust their reach quickly and see returns collapse when they repeat themselves. She adds that she always resisted companies' requests to list influencers to target, and that payment lets "tinkerers" afford to keep experimenting.
- Lasting careers need substance, not just shine. Hanselman complains about engagement-bait influencers who ask generic JavaScript questions. Freeman says questions are fine and the bigger problem is gratuitous meanness, which she calls a five-year run at most. She describes visible tech people on a spectrum from shine (communication, authenticity) to substance (real coding experience) and says going too far toward either end causes problems.
- Today's newcomers can't replay the golden-age paths. Freeman says she entered code school and developer relations in their golden ages, and that people now trying to replicate that era misread a changed world. She credits years of "spinning in mud" for her grit. Hanselman, who admits his own career has been lucky, advises going one level below the abstraction you know, for example JavaScript beneath React. She endorses this as advice that at worst does no harm.
Crosstalk SolutionsHow Fast Can I Ethernet? #cat6 #ethernet #networking #techchallenge #crosstalk
- The host took nearly five minutes to terminate a Cat6 cable. Timing himself through cutting, stripping, removing the centre spline, untwisting and ordering the pairs to T568B, he finished in 4 minutes 54 seconds with a passing test, and says as a hobbyist rather than a professional installer he expects many viewers are faster.
Polis Pandit$Why So Many Silicon Valley Business Leaders Have Turned To Trump
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Scott HanselmanIs AI the new UI? Talking to computers with Noelle Russell
synopsis
Russell, chief AI officer at the AI Leadership Institute and a former Alexa, IBM and Accenture hand, holds that voice is the interface that removes friction, and that the technology to deliver it is ready. What lags, she says, is organizational will and ethics. She argues that companies which disclose their AI and build responsibly will keep customers' trust while others erode it.
Picking voice early. She says she backed the idea of talking to technology, not a product, after seeing her son with Down syndrome and her father with a brain injury use voice devices. She came to believe keyboards and menus could disappear.
Alexa's stall and reboot. Hanselman calls Alexa a dumb terminal whose devices haven't improved in years. Russell agrees the device market did the hard part by putting a terminal in homes. She says her skills, about 2 million unique users on unchanged code, are ripe for generative AI, and predicted a new Alexa "weeks away" at recording. She attributes the delay to teams guarding their own models. Earlier systems were brittle; she says users over 75 and under 20 tolerate errors most, and generative AI lets failures land gracefully.
Cost and motive. On running costs against a $59 device, she cites Alexa layoffs, the loss of Bezos as its champion and a roughly 10-year road to profit. She argues Alexa pays off through owners buying more on Amazon.
Names and listening. Hanselman objects to gendered wake words. Russell says the human name aided adoption and was chosen to minimize false wakes, though it hurt girls named Alexa. On an always-listening pendant, she says bystanders' data and voice-cloning raise the problem that no legislation yet protects a person's likeness. Trust. Citing a Stanford study, she says hidden AI costs far more trust than disclosed AI. She criticizes an undisclosed AI calling product sold to realtors and urges diverse AI red teams before launch.
- Voice is the friction-free interface, and the obstacle is human, not technical. Russell, chief AI officer at the AI Leadership Institute, says she saw this when her son with Down syndrome and her father with a traumatic brain injury began talking to devices. She argues that letting users talk to your tech means they never return to your website. She says companies are slow to exploit voice because teams protect what they built, not because the technology is unready.
- Alexa is primed for a generative-AI reboot. Hanselman calls the device a dumb terminal. Russell says her 100-plus Alexa skills reach about 2 million unique users with unchanged code, such as an 800-line daily-affirmation skill that walks through 365 entries. She predicted the new generative Alexa was "weeks away" and said it would let skills run in 40 languages without extra developer work. She also says older (75-plus) and younger (under-20) users tolerate voice errors far more than people in between, and that generative AI lets devices fail gracefully.
- Voice AI's business case runs through loyalty, not direct revenue. Hanselman asks how a $59 device can sustainably call an expensive model. Russell points to Alexa team layoffs and to Bezos moving on from his Star Trek computer project, and says Alexa took about 10 years to get barely into the black. She says Alexa owners buy more on Amazon in general, not through the device, and argues builders need values that sustain them through costly retraining.
- Anthropomorphized wake words helped adoption but carried costs. Hanselman dislikes "yelling at invisible women" and welcomes unnamed products such as ChatGPT and Copilot. Russell argues the human name probably helped adoption, says "Alexa" was picked to minimize false wakes, and notes girls named Alexa were hurt, with mothers attempting a class action. She sees a return to push-to-talk in ChatGPT voice and the Humane AI pin.
- Disclose AI and recording up front, or lose more trust. Russell cites a Stanford study finding that using AI always lowers trust, but far more when people discover it afterwards. She says no legislation currently protects a person's ownership of their likeness, and criticizes a realtor-targeted voice product (captioned as "air") that never discloses it isn't human. Her prescription is to build responsibly even if it is slower, and to use AI red teaming with diverse people who judge experiences, not only adversarial attacks.
Crosstalk SolutionsThe Wi-Fi Multi-Tool You Need
- The WLAN Pi R4 kit turns a spare Pi 4 into a Wi-Fi toolkit. The host bought the bring-your-own-Pi kit himself, about $180 USD with shipping, and says the video is unsponsored with no contact with the project. It adds a heatsink case with display and a USB Wi-Fi 6 adapter, since the Pi 4's onboard radio is Wi-Fi 5. It needs a Pi 4 with 2 GB or more and did not yet support the Pi 5.
- Left at a client site, it becomes a remote Wi-Fi probe. Reachable over VPN, Tailscale, ZeroTier or Cloudflare tunnels, it can serve as a remote endpoint for WiFi Scanner on Windows or WiFi Explorer Pro on Mac. The host would pair this with its bundled Grafana dashboards, which log periodic speed tests, latency and DNS resolution time.
- The profiler shows what a misbehaving client can actually do. It broadcasts a test SSID; any device attempting to join, with any password, gets profiled for supported bands, beamforming and maximum transmit power. The host uses this to diagnose a client with a weak antenna or one that cannot use the available band.
- Kismet and Cockpit come bundled, but Kismet runs hot. Kismet, which the host likens to Wireshark for Wi-Fi, scans selectable channels and details every device and access point, but loads the Pi enough that the metal case matters. Cockpit gives a browser console with updates and a terminal; spectrum-analyzer dashboards exist for tools he does not own.
- Most functions work from the device's own screen and buttons. Without the web GUI, it offers reachability checks, speed tests, tests to vendor clouds (Aruba Central, Extreme, Mist, Ruckus), a port blinker for finding its switch port, a hotspot bridged to Ethernet, and a DHCP/TFTP server mode. The host had not tried its Bluetooth features.
Technology and FriendsAlex Riviere on CSS Container Queries [EPISODE 823]
- Container queries style components by their container, not the viewport. Riviere calls them the next step in responsive design, now termed "intrinsic design", and suited to component-based front ends built with React or Vue. He believes they now work in all browsers, with Firefox the last to catch up.
- One container query can replace several media-query breakpoints. In his live demo a pagination div is declared
container: pagination / inline-size, and@container pagination (max-width: 200px)hides the list of page links and shows a select dropdown instead. Placed in a fixed 200-pixel sidebar, the same component always shows the dropdown. On a Shopify cart sidebar he says an icon grid that moved between one and two columns would have taken four media queries but needed one container query. - CSS nesting now works natively in the browser. Riviere says the nesting of styles and media queries that once needed a preprocessor such as Sass or Less is now plain CSS. He nests the container query inside the
.paginationrule. - CSS is strongly typed, and
@propertylets you declare types. His example is that CSS ignores a pixel value assigned to a colour. With@propertyhe defines--background-colorwith a colour syntax,inherits, and an initial value of white, then applies it tohtmlandmain. - Style queries act as an if statement on a custom property's value. His demo turns a component hot pink when
--background-coloris black. He was unsure of support at the start, and a reference page said Firefox lacked it. Live documentation then said every element can be a style query container, and he concluded it should work in every browser today. He says it is limited to custom properties for now, with the goal, "I believe", of supporting any property. Giard suggests a use: when users set their own theme colours, the components can keep contrast automatically.
Polis Pandit$How Kamala Harris Can Win in November
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Technology and FriendsMichelle Frost on Sociotechnical approaches to AI [EPISODE 822]
- Responsible AI is a social problem, not only a technical one. Frost, a senior developer at CREMA in Kansas City who sits on the Center for Practical Bioethics' Ethical AI Council, says privacy, bias and value alignment can only be handled by a socio-technical approach that puts "a lot of different people in the room". Giard argues technology is just a tool for good or bad people; Frost agrees, but says AI moves fast enough that its consequences can reach further than earlier tools.
- AI's history shows we may be measuring success wrongly. Frost traces the idea of an artificial person back to the myth of Talos (around 750 BC), 1500s clockwork automata and Vaucanson's 1700s digesting duck, before the term was coined in 1956. She asks whether replicating humans, as the Turing test, chess, Go and sonnet-writing do, is the right goal, and argues AI should augment what people do rather than replace things that are inherently human, like creativity.
- Fear of job loss and AGI crowds out today's problems. She says some job displacement always happens and that forecasts of what will be replaced have historically been wrong. Giard adds his own career advice: watch which skills will be in demand five years out, though he grants AI's pace makes retraining harder.
- Governance should be proactive: consult domain experts before coding. Frost says a developer building a healthcare app needs doctors, health-tech people and legal input as stakeholders, thinking about impact at one, five and ten years. Governance to her means guardrails, measuring fairness and bias, knowing data provenance and building explainability in up front. She expects the rest of 2024 and the next few years to be "a wild ride" for regulation, with state rules from Colorado and California putting borders on technology that has none.
- LLM bias is an error worth understanding, not reality to accept. She cites "mid twenties" of fairness metrics, a number she hedges, and says no single fix exists. Her examples: a story about an engineer comes out male, and one about an engineer named Michelle turns into a story about a woman in a male-dominated field. When Giard says such stereotypes are grounded in the data, she answers that prejudice is a human error and that understanding the errors we feed a model is how it could "do better than us".
Polis Pandit$Trump Wants To Attack Mexico?
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Scott HanselmanCreating Tools for Thought with Andy Matuschak
synopsis
Matuschak, an independent researcher who previously worked at Apple and led R&D at Khan Academy, argues that the dynamic media computers allow should be used to help people understand and remember, not just to add polish. His own example is a "mnemonic medium" that builds spaced repetition into a book. He ends up holding that durable knowledge depends on fluency and rich connection, and that people learn best when they have a real reason to know something.
From Apple to learning. At Apple, he says, the most interesting design was the part you could not print, like inertial scrolling and rubber-banding, and it felt wasted on polish. That led him to education.
How experts read. Citing ethnographic research, he says highly cited scholars read nonlinearly, and that skill at reading strategy lets people comprehend hard texts outside their field. Hypertext works for entries written to stand alone, such as dictionaries and encyclopedias. He argues it undercuts the long narrative context that page 200 of a 400-page argument depends on, and that this is a structural reason for its limited uptake.
What lectures carry. Lectures and podcasts are weak at conveying specifics, he says, but they transmit tacit ways of seeing. A sentence that changes a belief works as the first domino in the listener's own reflection.
The mnemonic medium. Quantum Country, built with Michael Nielsen, puts review questions in the text and emails readers days later. He explains that reviewing when you can just barely recall something extends retention, and that the world sometimes supplies this rhythm by accident.
Why base knowledge matters. Responding to Hanselman's question about AGI, he says you cannot look up what you do not know you need, and that missing fluency eats working memory, like a computer paging to disk.
Learning styles and meaning. He rejects fixed learning styles in favour of multiple linked representations. Pokémon stick because they are tied to games, friends, songs and culture. The periodic table lacks a visceral reason to be known.
- Expert readers do not read books linearly. Matuschak cites ethnographic studies of highly cited professors, who skip from contents to index, preface, chapter openings and figures before choosing what to read; people with reading-strategy skill but no domain expertise can still comprehend hard texts by drawing inferences across distant passages.
- Lectures and podcasts transmit attitudes better than facts. He argues a lecture is a poor way to acquire specifics such as how to calculate torque, but a podcast gives a "portal" into how someone thinks, building tacit scenario templates; a single sentence can change a belief only by tipping a cascade of the listener's own reflection.
- Quantum Country embeds spaced-repetition review in the text itself. The quantum-computing book he built with collaborator Michael Nielsen poses quick questions as you read, then emails you days later to review for a few minutes; he says recalling material when you can only just do so repeatedly extends how long it is retained (the Flappy Bird image is Hanselman's).
- Base knowledge still matters even if AGI arrives. Asked by Hanselman why his son needs logarithms, Matuschak gives two reasons: you often cannot know what to look up without already holding the pieces, and fluency frees working memory ("seven plus or minus two"); a physics student he tutored was struggling because algebra was not yet automatic.
- Many linked representations beat matching a "learning style." He says the evidence does not support learners being fixed visual or symbolic types, but understanding grows with each representation learned and linked; teenagers remember Pokémon better than the periodic table because of richer connections, not choice, and he argues the real gap is having no visceral reason to know.
Crosstalk SolutionsStarlink Mini In-Depth Setup and Review
- Starlink Mini is the dish for mobile use, not fixed sites. The host, who says the video is not sponsored and that he bought the dish and service himself, rates it superior to every earlier Starlink by almost every measure for RVs, camping and off-grid work, but still recommends the full-size residential dish at a home or business for its extra bandwidth.
- The Mini costs more up front than the full-size dish now does. The dish is $599 plus the $20 shipping he paid, while SpaceX cut the standard dish to $499, with promotions as low as $199 in places. Mobile Regional is $150 a month unlimited, in-motion up to 10 mph; Mini Roam is $50 a month with a 50 GB cap and opt-in $1/GB overage; both can be paused and are prorated.
- The in-motion speed limit may not be strictly enforced. The host ran a Gen 3 dish on the Mobile Regional plan through a 12-hour road trip at around 80 mph without trouble. The captions state Mini Roam's in-motion terms ambiguously.
- The router is built in, and unplugging Ethernet breaks the IP67 rating. The dish (12 in by about 10.25 in, just over 3 lb) carries a 3x3 MU-MIMO Wi-Fi 5 access point, which the host argues is enough because internet speeds never reach Wi-Fi 6 rates. Its RJ45 port lets it act as a WAN-only device, but Starlink says IP67 holds only with its own Ethernet cable, unreleased at recording. The data sheet gives 12–48 V input, with a 12 V cable and a USB-C-to-barrel cable "coming soon".
- His backyard tests showed strong speed at half Gen 3's power. Off an EcoFlow Delta, setup took about 2 minutes plus roughly 15 minutes of two firmware updates. The Starlink app measured 138 Mbps down, 16.4 Mbps up and 54 ms; Ookla measured 82 down and about 12 up, against the 150–300 Mbps he typically gets on the full-size dish. Idle draw was 20–30 W (Gen 3: 40–60 W), rising about 10 W, to roughly 40 W, during a speed test.
GeoHussarThe Paris railway system was attacked via vandalism, leaving their Railway system damaged
- Coordinated arson hit the French high-speed rail network before the Olympics. The attacks targeted signal boxes on three TGV lines linking Paris to other major cities, and a fourth attempt was foiled. The SNCF said 800,000 people were affected; the speaker notes these are the first French Summer Olympics in 100 years.
- Far-left activists look responsible, but suspicion also falls on Russia. The speaker cites Macron's earlier statement that Moscow planned to target the Games and a reported Paris arrest of a Russian man suspected of organising destabilisation. The speaker speculates, without offering evidence, that Moscow may be paying French far-left activists; the captions cut off mid-sentence.
Technology and FriendsJavier Salmeron on Bitnami and Tanzu Application Catalog [EPISODE 821]
- Bitnami gives developers ready-made open-source building blocks. Salmeron, a staff engineer on the Bitnami content team (VMware, now Broadcom), describes a free catalog of more than 200 applications and components, including PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Redis, MongoDB and WordPress. It ships as OVAs, cloud images, containers and Helm charts, so a developer can run something like
helm installfor Postgres instead of configuring it by hand. He says that historically cloud providers paid Bitnami for marketplace listings while users were not charged. - The paid Tanzu Application Catalog serves platform operators. Salmeron says enterprises need control of licences, software bills of materials, known vulnerabilities and compliance checklists such as STIG, which he calls "a very, very painful process" to do by hand. The open-source catalog uses only Debian, while Tanzu lets a company build the same catalog on Red Hat 9, Ubuntu 22 or its own hardened base image. He points to Log4Shell, when many companies could not tell whether they were affected, as the case for per-component SBOMs.
- Operators curate the catalog and developers pull from a private repository. An operator picks the applications and operating system and sets a target repository. The system pushes container images and Helm charts there in OCI format, and developers use it as they would Docker Hub. He says the charts follow community security checklists, so tools like kubescape and kube-bench report the essential security features as configured, and OVAs are available for teams not on Kubernetes.
- Vulnerability-exchange documents separate scanner noise from real exposure. Salmeron says scanners such as Trivy and Grype often return "terrifying" lists that users cannot interpret. Bitnami bundles analyses saying which reported CVEs actually affect each application, so five critical findings can drop to zero once the document is applied.
- An in-house operating system can get closer to zero CVEs. He says the team cannot do much about Debian, Ubuntu or Red Hat because it does not own them, but has full control over Photon OS, a lean in-house image. He recommends it to vulnerability-sensitive users as part of the commercial Tanzu offering, his employer's product.
Polis Pandit$But Kamala Harris Didn’t Win a Single Primary!
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Technology and FriendsJason Bock on C# Source Generators [EPISODE 820]
- Source generators make code generation part of compilation itself. Bock, a staff software engineer at Rocket Mortgage after almost 25 years as a consultant, says that unlike older tools such as CodeSmith or T4 templates, a generator plugs into the Roslyn compiler pipeline. It runs whenever code changes in Visual Studio or Rider and also under
dotnet buildat the command line. It can work from the project's existing C# or from "additional files" such as a JSON data file. The feature is C#-only and purely additive: it can add code to a project but never edit existing code. - The output is ordinary C# you can read and debug. Bock counts this as an advantage over IL weavers such as Fody, which rewrite the binary and need knowledge of intermediate language. Generated code is compiled into your assembly and you can F12 or step into it. By default it is not written into the project folder, which he thinks keeps it out of the Git repo; a project-file setting saves it to a chosen directory. Anyone who clones the repo and builds gets it generated afresh.
- Consuming a generator is easy; authoring and packaging one is not. Using one, such as his own compile-time mocking library Rocks (an alternative to frameworks like Moq), means referencing a NuGet package and adding attributes. Writing one means implementing a single interface, IIncrementalGenerator, with a single method, but it requires understanding syntax trees and semantic models and building C# inside strings. He relies on raw string literals for this, which he thinks arrived in C# 10, and on Microsoft's helper libraries for input/output tests. Packaging has "weird little idiosyncrasies": any dependency the generator itself needs at compile time, and that dependency's own dependencies, need special handling. His lesson is to minimize generator dependencies, and he points to Microsoft's two "C# source generator cookbook" documents.
- A badly built generator slows the compiler, so design for caching. Bock says to avoid the original ISourceGenerator interface, still referenced three years on, because it did not plug into the pipeline well. With IIncrementalGenerator, if the generator builds an immutable model with value equality (records give this out of the box), the compiler skips regeneration when a change yields an identical model. Without that, the generator regenerates the same code on every change. He also says never to make REST or other network calls in a generator: relative to the compiler they are a big performance hit, and they can fail.
- .NET itself now ships generators, the regex one being his showcase. Marking a partial method with what he recalls as a "generated regex" attribute makes the generator write the regular expression's implementation. He says this is typically faster than runtime regex, is AOT-friendly because unused generated code can be trimmed, and gives a hover description of what the generator thinks the pattern does. Its source uses tricks such as goto statements for speed. He also cites community dependency-injection generators that surface IoC registration mistakes at compile time rather than runtime. To learn more he recommends the cookbooks, a Discord channel where Microsoft compiler-team members answer questions, and reading the source of the .NET regex generator, Rocks or others.
GCastUsing M365 Copilot with Microsoft Outlook Emails [GCast 180]
- Copilot summarizes a long Outlook email thread in one click. Clicking Summarize on an open thread produced highlight bullet points covering weeks of back-and-forth. In the demo they came out in reverse chronological order, which Giard says is the order the thread itself is in. He pitches it for threads forwarded to you that you would otherwise read end to end for context.
- Draft with Copilot writes a new email from a prompt. On a new message, the Copilot button on the message ribbon has a Draft with Copilot option, available if Copilot is installed and you subscribe to it. You describe the email, including the tone and what not to promise, then click Generate. Giard says the more specific the prompt, the better the draft.
- Drafts can be regenerated, adjusted, then kept or discarded. Regenerate reruns the same prompt and lets you flip between versions. Adjust changes the criteria: longer, shorter, more formal, more direct, more casual, or even a poem. Keep copies the chosen draft into the email without sending it. Discard throws it away.
- The sender, not Copilot, stays responsible for what is sent. Giard's point is that it is "a co-pilot", not an autopilot: you can still edit the draft, you should read it before sending, and you cannot blame Copilot for a bad email.
- Coaching by Copilot critiques a draft under three headings. Also on the ribbon's Copilot button, it gave feedback under tone, reader sentiment and clarity, with suggested rewrites that were mostly more direct or more concise wording. Giard says the thumbs-up and thumbs-down buttons feed back into the engine, which refines its responses if many users rate them down.
Scott HanselmanTech review of the BenQ RD280U programming monitor
- The monitor was supplied free; the review is unpaid. Hanselman says he normally reviews only hardware he bought himself, and made an exception because BenQ pitched the RD280U as a monitor specifically for programmers.
- The 3:2 aspect ratio buys more lines of code. At the same width as his 27-inch 16:9 Dell (3840×2160), the 28-inch BenQ runs 3840×2560, which he calls "4K plus": 400 extra vertical pixels at the same DPI, which he estimates at roughly 20–25% more height.
- Contrast is the most immediate difference he sees. With no calibration, he says blacks are black and dark mode is genuinely dark, while his seven- or eight-year-old Dells look washed out beside it.
- Coding presets tune the panel for dark or light themes. A front-accessible button cycles coding modes for dark and light editor themes; he also shows "Moon Halo" bias lighting on the back, DisplayPort, HDMI and USB-C inputs, a USB hub with KVM, and that it hung on his existing VESA wall arm without changes.
- His verdict is provisional and the price reasonable. He calls $599 a significant upgrade for the money, and says he will use it for a couple of months, judging eye strain, colour temperatures and the bias lighting, before giving an update.
Technology and FriendsEsteban Garcia on Prompt Engineering with GitHub Copilot [EPISODE 819]
- Good Copilot prompts give context and keep the conversation going. Garcia, managing director of Xebia's US Microsoft services line, says "give me a loop" gets a generic loop. Stating your role, the application's tiers and microservices, the target (Azure), the language and the goal gets an answer fitted to the scenario. He says not to accept the first answer but to follow up ("yes, and also this") until it is right, and that the main way to learn is to keep trying rather than give up after one miss, with GitHub's Copilot enablement videos as a supplement.
- His most useful prompts scaffold, explain or debug code. His examples: ask Copilot to scaffold a cloud data-fetching utility for Azure in a named language, and it builds the whole file structure; ask it to explain a coworker's five-year-old code instead of spending a day reading it. In his own recent code it found an infinite loop he could not locate and pointed to a variable that needed initializing. Giard adds his own use: a starter for a language or library he has never used.
- Copilot's context depends on where it runs and which licence you have. In VS Code it learns from the files you have open. Garcia says Copilot Enterprise on GitHub.com sees the whole repository, so slash commands such as /doc, /explain, /tests and /generate follow the codebase's naming conventions and reuse its existing pieces, such as connection strings. He describes individual, business and enterprise tiers, with enterprise adding controls such as blocking suggestions that could raise copyright problems.
- Copilot won't replace developers; developers who use it will pass them. Garcia says the developer stays the pilot, setting intent and architecture, and that Copilot will not turn a junior developer into a senior one. He compares it to the modern IDE of about 25 years ago: optional, but faster. He predicts that in a year or two developers who have embraced it will get the jobs others do not. If it gets you "maybe 75%" of the way, he says, you spend the rest on the business problem, a point Giard backs with his own story of a manager who said good developers should write the code themselves.
- Copilot is heading into security fixes and browser-proposed pull requests. Citing what GitHub and Microsoft showed at Build "like a month ago", Garcia expects Copilot to work with GitHub Advanced Security to fix flagged issues. He also describes GitHub Copilot Workspace, where you describe a change in the browser and Copilot proposes a pull request that you approve.
Scott HanselmanDefining Developer Relations with Angie Jones
synopsis
Jones, VP of developer relations at TBD at Block, recorded with Hanselman in Berlin at the WeAreDevelopers event. She argues that developer relations is a job about trust. Advocates work for the community before the company, refuse to push products they don't believe in, and justify themselves internally by bringing back what developers actually say.
What the job is. Jones concedes DevRel may be a form of marketing, but says it reaches developers who run from marketers. Hanselman raises the tension in a tight job market, where advocates must like the product they are paid to promote. Both say refusing weak products comes partly from privilege. She argues that doing otherwise burns the trust the job depends on.
Feedback and visibility. Both call bringing field conversations back to product teams among the most valuable work. Jones says DevRel teams that are not respected internally must show this output, because the travel otherwise looks like a party.
Experience and entry. Jones says advocates for developer tools, SDKs and APIs should have worked as developers; Hanselman suggests five years or so. Pushed on gatekeeping, she reframes this as an easier path rather than a requirement. Her junior advocates are paired with senior mentors.
Team shape and travel. They agree that specialising beats expecting one person to do everything. Jones says COVID showed audiences can be reached online, and she now also does virtual meetups. She spends 90–95% of her time on the road and says she is not burning out, but she is passing opportunities on to others.
Words matter. Both dislike "evangelist" for its preaching overtones. Jones negotiated "developer advocate" as her first title.
- DevRel works only as a trusted source, not as marketing. Jones, VP of developer relations at TBD at Block, says developers are allergic to traditional marketing, and she has recommended competing tools when they were the best fit; Hanselman frames this with his radio-ad line "you've got a friend in the diamond business."
- She won't promote products she doesn't believe in. Both acknowledge this comes from a position of privilege; she argues internally against weak products, and tells employers that pushing one would cost trust and make her less effective afterwards.
- Bringing community feedback back inside is core work. She says the job is working with the community, not talking at it, and reporting pain points back to engineering and marketing; she argues that sharing this is what earns respect for teams whose travel can look like a party.
- Developer-tools advocates should have been developers first. For SDK and API work she says you need to know developers' real constraints (her example is teams stuck on Java 8 or 11 because upgrading a bank system needs buy-in); she frames it as "the easier path," not a gate, and has juniors on her team but would never hire one as a sole advocate without senior mentors.
- Advocates should specialise rather than do everything. She and Hanselman agree that building on each person's strengths beats demanding a Swiss-army-knife of video, samples, docs and social; she negotiated her first title from "developer evangelist" to "developer advocate" because evangelism implies forcing a belief.
GeoHussarDonald Trump doesn’t like his running mate JD Vance. Here’s why. #trump #jdvance #donaldtrump
- Trump dislikes Vance because of Vance's past attacks on him. The speaker presents this as "very clear" and lists Vance's 2016 statements: calling himself "a never Trump guy", a deleted tweet ("my God what an idiot"), a private Facebook message, an op-ed calling Trump "unfit for our nation's highest office", and saying in an NPR interview he might vote for Hillary Clinton.
- Trump backed Vance anyway, and Russia has praised the pick. Trump endorsed Vance in his 2022 election, which Vance won, and now has him as running mate. The speaker says Russia has been praising the choice, but the captions cut off before giving Russia's reasoning.
Crosstalk SolutionsCloudFlare's speed test is amazing! #SpeedTest #InternetSpeed #Cloudflare #TechReview #Crosstalk
- Cloudflare's speed test gives a fuller picture than a headline number. The host says speed.cloudflare.com starts automatically and measures bandwidth in segments of 100 KB, 1 MB, 10 MB, 25 MB, 100 MB and 250 MB files, aggregated into the total. It also measures latency unloaded and during upload and download, graphs packet loss, and maps your location against the test server.
Technology and FriendsDean Schuster on UX Design [EPISODE 818]
synopsis
Schuster, of True Matter, a UX-only consultancy in South Carolina, argues that most software frustrates people because its builders assume users think like them. In his view, the cure is to watch real users struggle, which convinces developers faster than any argument can.
Where software fails. Login is his example: most user errors happen just getting in, and novices often cannot tell whether they are logged in. Good design plainly answers where am I, what can I do, and what went wrong. Each pause is friction, and five to ten of them make a product maddening. Giard admits his own early database-shaped UIs.
Testing with developers watching. True Matter does both diagnosis and new design, working alongside dev teams whose ideas of their users are often wrong. Developers watch the tests from behind one-way glass and go from denial ("this person's dumb") to acceptance by about the third user who fails the same way. After that, the fixes need no argument.
No access to users. Being cut off from users means guessing, and a customer wish list is not what users need. He advises observing users anyway, without asking permission, or finding an employer that allows it.
Common ground. Schuster came to UX through the web around 1993, and he calls it a young discipline that he speaks to dev groups to spread. Slowness has been users' top complaint throughout his career, which gives UX people and developers a shared problem. He recommends Don Norman's The Design of Everyday Things, and urges each side to learn enough of the other's craft to work together.
- Developers build for power users, but most users are novices. Schuster, of the South Carolina UX consultancy True Matter, says most user errors are about getting into apps at all. Novices struggle to tell whether they are logged in, two-factor authentication makes them angry, and even corporate power users on single sign-on report more than typical frustration. He says developers tend to think "login, I've got a module for this, done".
- Good UX answers basic questions so users never stop to think. Users need to know where they are, what they can do, what the rules are for an input, and what went wrong and what to do about it, in plain language. A field label like "ID" is not clear to most people. One pause is small, Schuster says, but five to ten of them become friction that frustrates.
- Watching real users fail is what changes a team's mind. Schuster runs task-based tests with developers watching behind one-way glass. He says they move through the Kübler-Ross stages, starting with "this person's dumb". By about the third user with the same problem the team accepts it is a design problem, and after that the fixes need no argument and are often small. He also says teams that claim to know their users are often off base, building what they or their stakeholders want.
- If you can't get access to users, find them anyway. He calls an organization that insulates its team from users "basically guessing", and says a customer wish list almost never equals what users want or need. His advice is to observe users without asking permission, perhaps on a learning-and-growth budget, as his own firm did in its early days. Otherwise, find an organization that lets you.
- Speed is the shared ground between UX and developers. Schuster says slowness has been users' number one complaint for his whole career, so his researchers look for the number two complaint. He recommends Don Norman's The Design of Everyday Things as the first book on UX. He urges developers to learn a little UX, and people on the humanities side to learn a little development, so both can "talk at the same table".
Polis Pandit$Trump Impressed Me When He Was Shot
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GeoHussarinflation numbers came in at 3% meaning that the soft landing theory still holds
- Inflation falling to 3% means the soft landing has arrived. The speaker notes most economists did not expect this level at this stage, and reads it as evidence that the Fed is doing its job, the US economy is being navigated competently, and the official numbers can be trusted.
- If inflation holds or falls, a September rate cut becomes likely. The speaker predicts a cut would bring a large stock market rally and rallies in other industries. The benefit lands first on big money and on banks holding hundreds of billions of dollars in held-to-maturity assets at a loss, not on ordinary people; the captions cut off there.