Yes - that mental picture of a divorced dad watching old family photos come to life, while sitting alone on his couch - is just gutting. Like a literal punch in the gut.

But having said that, is "loneliness" the correct (or only) takeaway on that? I mean, there are people toying with the idea of uploading emails and documents of the deceased to an LLM so relatives can still "talk" to them.

I don't have a word for what that kind of world looks like.

While I think the "divorced dad" thing is one use case, I don't see it as the primary one. Granted we're a ways from this reality, but, especially if Apple releases standalone cameras or builds recording for these moments into iphones/ipads, it seems to me that the use case for this feature is not to replace human connection, but to have a facsimile of it when circumstances prevent you from being able to do something in the real world.

I can very much see a future where that technology is a useful tool in helping people through grief and loss, or for experiencing parts of the world that you otherwise can't (prohibitively expensive; you have disabilities that prevent accessing it).

Examples:

- Replaying interactions with a beloved pet who has died. Reliving taking your dog to the dog park or playing with your cat.

- Replaying interactions with parents/grandparents/friends who have died, or have been altered by a debilitating illness such as ALS or Alzheimer's

- Reliving memories of taking a trip somewhere that you couldn't easily go to again (different country, national park, etc)

- Spatial experiences of beautiful parts of the earth that you've never been to

In the current world, we rely on our own imperfect memories and the inadequate still photos and 2D videos. This type of thing could end up a gamechanger in 5-10 years.

Given how good Apple is at crafting images, I can't believe no one caught how sad and pitiful the scene can look. Surely they could have made the dad a grandfather and made it look much less bleak?

I joined a company last year that has a handful of legacy products, and we successfully moved one of them to a CD model a few months ago.

It's hilarious to sit back and watch every other team have the same monthly loop of big change -> lengthy test cycle -> "go-live" meeting -> fixes/big change -> more testing... etc. Loads of stress and finger-pointing.

Hardly ever hear a peep from the CD team. Sure, it's not all rainbows and lollipops. They do have urgent production issues time-to-time, but most are resolved by a rollback (or feature toggle flipped).

Congratulations. But it might be time to "make a peep" internally to other teams about "how we successfully moved to a CD model and what it gave us, and how you can do it too".

Mainly for your colleague's stress levels, and secondarily for the business's success.

I used to travel ...a lot... Minimum twice a week, usually 4+. As an engineer (and process consultant), I spent countless hours sitting at airport gates looking for any optimization I could find, mostly focusing on wasteful and (seemingly expensive) boarding processes.

My favorite half-baked + stupid + fun one: Install the plane seating area at the gate itself, as a separate detached entity on a conveyor belt. Passengers can take their time, it's open, there aren't walls. You can just walk right into Row 20, seat A. No squeezing down aisles. Once everyone arrives and takes their seat, the belt moves and shuttles the seats+passengers into the fuselage. Kinda like a mini-roller coaster. Shut doors. Take off. Repeat in reverse after landing.

(There are obviously serious problems with this. You'd have to redesign planes and gates, at a minimum.)

The "once they start trying to change things" aspect is where I'm most keen to watch.

Surely we have all been involved with large-to-small systems where we were curious how well/long they would stand up on their own without intervention. It's kind of fascinating to watch a real-world example, even though we likely won't get a lot of detail. But still, :popcorn_emoji:.

But what's getting somewhat-ignored in this discourse is they aren't changing anything. All deploys are frozen. And the new CEO has made a ton of promises about new features and policies. Eventually they need to roll those out, and once they do, damn... Even if they have strong automated tests, those generally only tell you that new code is functionally ok. Anything that crosses interfaces, deals with end-to-end integration, or adds new tables/dbs/jobs/etc that would eventually hit their scaling solutions - all could have catastrophic effects.

(And that ignores the consent decree stuff on changes too.)

This is interesting - I have been passively monitoring LinkedIn and a few others for senior engineering management roles for the last year or so (VPE, DoE). I am not really looking, I have only pursued a couple of them, but my feed/inbox is noteworthy. Many of the "openings" have been out there for multiple months, some a year+. A good handful are tweaked slightly every few weeks to appear new.

I can understand fishing for individually contributing junior-to-senior developers, but for senior management roles? Would a company really troll waters to find a senior leader that they don't really need? "Hey, look what I found, let's find a spot for him/her!"

My theory has been either (1) those companies are super picky, which is understandable given the impact of those roles, or (2) they don't really know what they want, and they are using the interviewing process to figure it out. But regardless of 1v2, those companies likely have people fulfilling those management responsibilities today that they have otherwise deemed unqualified, or are very-senior C-level folks that are too busy to do it well.

If I were a C-level executive planning to extend business to a new area, and none of my reports are quite up to the job, I'd probably be looking to hire a senior manager to fill that spot.

But if I can't find the right person in a couple months time, I have a choice -- do I put some unqualified person there to do the job, or do I wait? I think there are strong arguments to wait, especially if the project is not time sensitive or a huge priority.

Or maybe to replace a person who has left. There's a gap and perhaps a not-quite-qualified (or a qualified-but-too-busy) person is temporarily taking care of things while the company tries to hire. There's a choice here too -- do you hire the least-bad person after say 3 months, or do you wait? Given the impact of bad hires at this level, I think I'd definitely wait.

Is there a term for the phenomenon where a supremely powerful person can comment on some event that may happen, perhaps innocently, and the fact they said it makes it more likely to happen?

In many ways, the health of an economy is a state of mind and emotional. Bezos has millions of people following his every word; many worship him and believe he has the keys to success (could also say the same about Musk & Gates). A pessimistic statement like this, regardless of merit, can/will cause others to be pessimistic.

In a vacuum I would be very interested in Bezos's thoughts on this topic - he's clearly super-intelligent. But I don't think I could get past his powerful position and the many reasons why he may want to sway opinion.

Comment on your edit: I don't disagree on the potential for a worse technique or tech on either side, but isn't there also potential for the opposite? As in, exposure to a technology/architecture/process at Company B that might help Company A.

As a consultant, I find many clients are genuinely interested in how other companies solve similar challenges.

While I generally agree about the annoyance with UI changes, and how that grinds on people, I hope we don't just handwave over the "CD for bug fixes is fine" bits.

It varies product-to-product obviously, but I'd guess there is also a significant chunk of folks that are pleased that their functional annoyances/blockers (bugs) can be fixed quickly, without waiting for a monthly or quarterly release.

These folks might not mind the fluctuating UIs, if it means they get the functional value they need asap.

I am genuinely interested in this, please excuse my naivety.

My expectation would be that new Product work would, at some high-ish level, be sanctioned by company leadership. Or you wouldn't be spending weeks/months/years on it. Ideally Marketing would be involved in that leadership decision, and this is where they could raise that kind of concern. But even if they are not, Marketing's "boss" (CEO) could/should tell them they need to market it or go pound sand.

On a whim I picked up The Metaverse, Matthew Ball's book released last week (7/19). I am only about 1/3 of the way through it, so I can't recommend it yet, but I have two main takeaways so far...

1. If you can get through the marketing slog thrown out by FB, Epic, and others, many ideas behind a/the metaverse aren't terrible. Perhaps even good. As an old fogie myself, I cannot see spending hours/days in it, but I have to acknowledge there will be a market for it. (Granted, the author is a VC, so he might be a little biased here.)

2. We are a LOT further away from a functioning metaverse than people think/expect/hope. Many challenges exist across the tech (networking, storage, hardware, processing power, etc.). Not to mention identity, governance, and interoperability. Surely many more. Predictions in tech are always foolish, but I would be surprised if we approached anything like a 'Snow Crash' metaverse in the next decade.