I do not care about Liquid Glass or the half-baked Apple Intelligence cruft. I don’t like them, but they are easy enough to look past. My issue is specifically the bugs. My M2 iPad Pro never gave me any trouble until this update.

Isn’t this the major takeaway from the entire social media era of the last 20 years? Content that triggers strong emotions, especially anger, fear, and moral outrage, reliably increases engagement.

See also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outrage_industrial_complex

There is another issue. The 2-stroke gas engines in backpack leaf blowers emit very toxic exhaust. Much worse than a 4-stroke. The landscapers are breathing that in all day.

Worth also mentioning leaf blowers are terrible for air quality because they blow a lot of dust in the air.

I agree. This outlook also implies a greater degree of meritocracy than usually exists in a competitive corporate environment. Doing a good job and taking initiative sometimes leads to promotions, but it sometimes just leads to more work. Meanwhile, many ladder climbers are busy optimizing for their own success, not the corp's.

You want to leave any company where doing a good job doesn’t lead to raises and promotions, as soon as possible.

thanks - i can't even get to the paywall because of the ai-driven enshittification of the web - i was blocked before I even got there.

Words are cheap. When someone tells me they’ve changed, I need to see at least a year of consistent behavior before I take that claim seriously. Far more often, what looks like change is just a honeymoon period that fades, with old habits resurfacing and regression to the mean taking over.

In NYC, they found red honey which was coming from bees drinking at a maraschino cherry factory:

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/30/nyregion/30bigcity.html

Unrelated, but that led to the police finding a marijuana grow operation in the basement:

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/27/nyregion/secret-marijuana...

The New Yorker article about it also has some additional details: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/23/the-maraschino...

Perhaps this was not unrelated after all, as the bee detectives might have sensed the smell of the flowers.

The admiration some readers have for Jay Gatsby (even though he’s meant to be a tragic figure) reminds me of how some currently view the character of Patrick Bateman from American Psycho as aspirational (minus the murder). I think America values success and beauty so dearly that it can override better judgement in cases.

They’re completely different characters and their qualities are completely different. You can easily admire tragic figures, as well.

As whole essay could be written about how this comparison misunderstands The Great Gatsby.

These are all great. We have good taste.

It’s uncommon to love your customer. Customers are demanding. Have you ever spoken with the locals in a resort town? Their economy depends on the tourists… who they generally loathe.

I also think love is the wrong word here.

But I will agree with the overall sentiment - in most places I’ve worked in software when I thought to myself “fuck that customer”, I was wrong. It was actually our fault because we weren’t meeting their needs or didn’t set a clear boundary on service expectation we were willing to provide to them.

So I see it as more “respect the needs of your customer and be prepared to part ways amicably”.

If you want to call that love, sure. But I think some customers can be abusive as well so I don’t agree with that word choice.

I work in a vertical right now where prospective customers are desperate to switch from the incumbent because of abusive lock-in contracts and poor service levels for obscene pricing based on ancient processes. So, overall, I have to agree with Brian’s sentiment even if I think it comes off as too idealistic.

This is the reverse situation.

Here the provider is being abused by the customer. Because of the nature of global travel, there is a race to the bottom phenomenon of what kind of tourist behaviour is tolerated. An old housemate of mine from university days, who runs a bicycle tour [1], makes his guests sign a document where they are made to explicitly acknowledge their role as travellers. The reward is a deep cultural intimacy.

This is why I use the term symbiosis in my comment further below. There is a relationship that needs to be understood by both parties and each has to have the resolve to not be exploitative nor to tolerate exploitation.

Speaking of that trip. I should go again. The food, oh man the food!

[1] https://www.southindiabicycleadventure.com/testamonials