Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
My time as a pinch hitter on my current project comes to an end next Wednesday but I’ve enjoyed the ride.
My next project is undecided at the moment but I know there are two possibilities. I’d be happy to work on either.
Paul Reubens, who found fame as the quirky man-child character Pee-wee Herman, has died, according to an announcement on his verified social media.
I liked Mr. Reubens as the flatulent “superhero” Spleen in Mystery Men. Pure sophomoric comedy.
RIP 🪦
Naomi Nix and Will Oremus • Washington Post
Initially, the team carried just two product managers and one or two designers alongside dozens of engineers — a flatter and more coder-dominated group than most Meta product teams, Mosseri said. (At launch, it had grown to three product managers, three designers and 50 coders.) Instead of 30-minute presentations on a single design decision, typical at Facebook and Instagram, “It would be like, ‘Here are six things we need to go through this week.’”
Lean teams can often pull off amazing things if they’re extremely talented. I’d imagine this team is extremely talented. The other thing that helped them succeed was the freedom to cut to the bare minimum allowed to make a great 1.0.
Also, 50 engineers isn’t a small team. 😃
Raymond Chen • The Old New Thing
Depending on what version of Windows you have, you might see a body of water where Poland should be.
Mr. Chen has been involved with the Windows team for 30 years and has been sharing his stories on The Old New Thing for 20. He’s a real gift to us old guys who wrote Windows apps.
His title should be Microsoft Historian. 📜
Unispace found that nearly half (42%) of companies with return-to-office mandates witnessed a higher level of employee attrition than they had anticipated. And almost a third (29%) of companies enforcing office returns are struggling with recruitment. In other words, employers knew the mandates would cause some attrition, but they weren’t ready for the serious problems that would result.
This doesn’t shock me. Once you settle into a routine at home it’s really difficult to muster the desire to go back to the office. Some folks need to be in an office with other folks but other, like me, don’t need it.
I like the control I have over my environment. My desk, my chair, heck I even bought my own monitor so I could make my setup just the way I want it. Couple that with no commute and the convenience of walking up stairs to our kitchen for lunch or coffee and it’s hard to beat. 🏡
The backdoor, known for years by vendors that sold the technology but not necessarily by customers, exists in an encryption algorithm baked into radios sold for commercial use in critical infrastructure. It’s used to transmit encrypted data and commands in pipelines, railways, the electric grid, mass transit, and freight trains. It would allow someone to snoop on communications to learn how a system works, then potentially send commands to the radios that could trigger blackouts, halt gas pipeline flows, or reroute trains.
Wow. This is a nightmare. We work really hard to make sure our code isn’t exploitable and here you have a company who intentionally made their software just that, exploitable. If you have a back door it’s an invite to every bad actor to walk right on in. 🫣
Before I could get this post completed, this 1947 Lincoln Continental cabriolet disappeared from Facebook Marketplace.
I love this car! Design in the 40’s and 50’s was beautiful. Lots of curves and fins and just plain style. Restoring a car like this would be a real honor.
Beyond the beauty of the design it sported a whopping 125 horse power from its 292 V12. 😆
But in June, Bluesky found itself embroiled in its own controversy after a user signed up for the service with a racist handle incorporating the N-word, and had apparently been permitted to use the platform for weeks without anyone at the company seeming to object.
Bluesky seems to be attracting a lot of the folks who make Twitter so attractive to many and with that it’s also attracting the terrible people.
I miss some actors and writers from Twitter and some seem to have taken to Bluesky. But if Bluesky is going to allow racism and hate to exist on the platform then I really don’t care to use it.
Yes, I have an account but I rarely use it. I’ve found a home in Mastodon.
One dusky June evening, two days before the 2022 Pennsylvania Firefly Festival, the biologist Sarah Lower sat on a back porch, watching the sky for a specific gradation of twilight. A group of Lower’s students from Bucknell University hung around her, armed with butterfly nets and stopwatches for counting the time between firefly flashes—a way to differentiate between the multiple lightning-bug species that live here at the edge of Pennsylvania’s Allegheny National Forest.
I love fireflies! It’s one of the things I’ve come to love and look forward to here in Virginia. Little critters with butts that light up! What could be better?
I feel fortunate to be able to walk outside and watch these beautiful creatures at work. Alas, it seems they’re almost finished for the season but watching them was a real joy while it lasted.🧡
Justine Bateman • The Daily Beast
Hollywood CEOs Would Sooner Wreck an Industry Than Suffer Bruised Egos
It feels like this could get really ugly and I hope for the sake of the writers this whole mess will work itself out in their favor, but I’m not holding my breath. 😮💨
Warner Bros. Discovery reported its second-quarter earnings results Thursday, revealing that it dropped in 1.8 million streaming subscribers across HBO, Discovery+ and its new combined streaming service Max.
This is a real bummer. Max is my most watched service, but only from the HBO perspective. To see them combine the catalogs of Discovery and HBO feels like a bad idea. Why not have two apps with one set of credentials? 🤷🏻♂️
