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Google’s official announcement of incoming layoffs:
I have some difficult news to share. Weāve decided to reduce our workforce by approximately 12,000 roles. Weāve already sent a separate email to employees in the US who are affected. In other countries, this process will take longer due to local laws and practices. Source: A difficult decision to set us up for the future
And comment from Gruber:
There are numerous reasons the tech industry wound up at this layoffpalooza, but I think the main reason is that the biggest companies got caught up in a game where they tried to hire everyone, whether they needed them or not, to keep talent away from competitors and keep talent away from small upstarts (or from founding their own small upstarts). These big companies were just hiring to hire, and now the jig is up. Source: Daring Fireball
Here’s my view on this. Google is not alone. Microsoft and Meta announced major layoffs too. I’ve been working in IT for over thirty years, and I have never been in such a situation where we have so much difficulty finding or hiring new people. Big companies are competing for great talent not only with each other but also draining talent from smaller companies. It’s very difficult to compete in this context.
I think what is happening is not as catastrophic as it sounds. We will see a redistribution of the workforce in the industry. A lot of talent is being freed in the process from the big ones and is now available for the smaller companies where management is more sound, and financial posture is in good shape.
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When Matter Made a Major Strategic Error
Today I spent some time in Matter to read a few articles. I went to the Staff Picks section, noticed those tweets between articles and remembered Matter's decision to leave the social portion in their early days. They preferred to go the Twitter route instead. That was before the Elon Musk fiasco. As you might expect, it was a deception for me, and I preferred Matter to build its own thing instead. I actually like to comment on articles and share my thoughts on them within the Matter sphere. Oh wellā¦Ā
How ironic things can sometimes be. I think the Matter team made a significant strategic error by dropping the social portion of their initial offerings, and they should reconsider their decision.
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Interesting (and sadly valid point) from Om Malik:
Regardless of age, the big elephant in the room is that we are certified addicts to attention.
It doesnāt matter whether it is Twitter, Instagram, or Mastodon. Everyone is playing to an audience. The social Internet is a performance theater praying at the altar of attention. Journalists need attention to be relevant, and experts need to signal their expertise. And others want to be influencers. For now, Twitter, Instagram, and their ilk give the biggest bang for the blast. It is why those vocal and active about Mastodon are still posting away on Muskās Twitter.
If we didnāt care for attention, we wouldnāt be doing anything at all. We wouldnāt broadcast.
We care. I certainly care that you care about my content, my words, and my thoughts.
Instead, we would socialize privately in communication with friends and peers.
Even in this social scenario, we are broadcasting and expecting that people are listening. This is how we are programmed. This is why social networks, and the web in general, are so addictive.
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What's Really Behind a Subscription Fee?
This video from birchtree@mastodon.social resonated greatly with me today. Here’s why.
First, someone is finally calling out something about software subscriptions that I always wanted to call out myself. Every developer seems entitled to charge a subscription for whatever reason. Matt brilliantly illustrates that some subscriptions are ok, some are borderline ok, but others are not.
For applications like Notion or Craft, developers must pay costs for hosting the backend. For example, Craft’s backend seems to be on the AWS cloud. In that specific case, it’s clear that a subscription makes sense. So we must help the developers pay their bills, right?
Things get more controversial when the developers charge for a subscription, even though no backend services are required. Why would the developers go with a subscription model, then, you might ask? Well, this is where I want to chime in. The developers may not have to pay hosting costs, but what about their development time? It is as if we value infrastructure costs more than craftmanship time. It should not be this way.
I’m willing to pay for software or service using a subscription if the product comes with updates regularly. Matt has shown Tweetbot as an example. Well, this isn’t the best example because Tweetbot rarely gets any updates; it doesn’t fit my criteria for using a subscription. CleanShot X, absolutely yes. I recognize, through my subscription, not only the value of the service but the time it took to put it together and keep it running fine. I’m willing to support the developer for that through a subscription.
We pay 5$ for a drink that takes less than a minute to prepare at Starbucks. Why is it so hard to pay for developers’ time, spending weeks or months writing great software? Also, we must try to consider not only backend bills when deciding that a subscription is ok; craftmanship is something to pay for too.
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Physical buttons are increasingly rare in modern cars. Most manufacturers are switching to touchscreens ā which perform far worse in a test carried out by Vi BilƤgare. The driver in the worst-performing car needs four times longer to perform simple tasks than in the best-performing car.Source: Physical buttons outperform touchscreens in new cars, test finds | Vi BilƤgare
I’m not surprised by these results. My wife always told me she wouldn’t buy a car with a touchscreen-only dashboard. Not only that is the fact that it is far less secure to use a touch screen simply because we need to look at the screen for a long period of time, diverting our attention to what is happening in front of us.
My gut feeling is that, eventually, we will return to a hybrid model when screens have to cohabit with physical dials and buttons. I’m paying close attention to what Apple will do in that space. The next generation of CarPlay that we got to see last June at the WWDC conference points in the wrong direction. But who am I to judge, you might ask!
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If you donāt have a website, a blog or a newsletter and only exist on Twitter, then I give up. Youāre not worth it. Thought of the night.
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I get way better interactions here on Micro.blog (more often, better quality) than on any other platforms I ever spent time on. Just a not-so-random thought.
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Twitter Is the Uneeded Intermediary and How I'm Planning to Get Rid of It
Whenever I want to go to Twitter, I should remember that Twitter is mostly a big dump of content originating from other places. So, why not consume content at the source instead? In my journey to a Twitter-free world, Iāll need to rebuild my habits of visiting the following places:
* Techmeme: for consuming news;
* RSS Reader: for consuming news and articles;
* Telegram: for consuming news;
* Mailbrew: for consuming content;
* Hackernews: for discovering content;
* Reddit: for consuming content, exploring and discovering new content;
A special mention about Mailbrew is required here: a portion of the content generated in my private newsletters comes from Twitter. Iāll need to revisit this sooner than later. Thankfully, Mailbrew supports RSS feeds as a content source. But then, maybe using my RSS reader will render Mailbrew mostly useless?Ā
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On Rumours of Apple Working on Its App Stores Overhaul
Bloomberg:
Apple to Allow Outside App Stores in Overhaul Spurred by EU Laws.
Boom. If true, itās massive. I can imagine Apple's engineering efforts to make it happen for WWDC 2023. I wrote earlier this year that I Ā changed my mind about sideloading apps on the iPhone. I still stand with my change of heart. I expect the iPhone experience to suffer with increased complexity for ordinary users. Not by much, but somehow, things will have to change to accommodate new workflows. Itās not an easy task to keep things simple. I trust Apple to find a good compromise.Ā
I donāt expect to use apps installed from other sources, except if there is a significant pricing difference or if itās a unique app not available otherwise.Ā
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When Ukraine Is Home of Great Software Makers
I recently wrote my satisfaction about Readdleās Documents.app on-boarding experience on the iPad. Now Iām reading about Sparkās cleverness take on emails. Without being as opinionated as Hey.com, Spark is a serious professional email client. Readdleās home is Ukraine šŗš¦ too. Iām considering integrating both software in my toolset. All good reasons to show some support to them.
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Welcome to the TwitterDump
I’m not a Qwitter. I don’t think I’ll ever close my Twitter account. But, there will be a day where I no longer post original content on Twitter, only cross-posting stuff from other sources. That day, I’ll refer to Twitter as the TwitterDumpā¢.
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I donāt know what will happen with Musk at the helm of Twitter. Itās probably going to turn really bad before turning potentially better (no guarantee here) but I have a backup plan: Micro.blog.
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On This AI-Generated Podcast Interview Between Joe Rogan and Steve Jobs
What. The. Fuck.
This podcast example about a fake interview between Joe Rogan and Steve Jobs is a blatant example of where some more thoughts should take place before putting high tech to work. What is the purpose of this? Is this a tech demo or some bad-taste proof-of-concept? It’s not hard to imagine how it could derail in the future when used in politically-heated contexts. Oh, and no, I didnāt waste my time listening to this garbage, and I wonāt share the link to this podcast, either.
Image credits: generated using Dall-E with the following phrase: āan hand drawn Mac computer that never existed digital artā
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On Software Subscriptions
Tweetbot hasnāt been updated for over 6 months, I thought a subscription was going to mean more frequent updates? Source: Letting my Glass and Tweetbot subscriptions expire ā LJPUK:
This blog post triggered the following thoughts.
The movement to subscriptions in the software landscape is MASSIVE but is far from being a guarantee of more frequent updates from the developers. I’m utterly infuriated when I see a yearly subscription for a small utility with a limited scope when no “lifetime” options are offered with reasonable pricing. Many devs are lazy, and greedy and send you a big middle finger.
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How Apple Is Encouraging Developers to Have Their Own Identity
Telegram’s CEO, M. Pavel Durov, complains that Apple is making his life harder than necessary by having to wait for the review process to complete its job. When Apple finally accepts the update but requires him to remove the Telemoji package, he goes on to say:
… this will motivate Telegram to make Telemoji even more āunique and recognizable.ā
He sounds like a whining baby. Thanks to Apple, Mr. Durov now gets the idea and his team will have to return to their drawing board and be more creative.
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About This Reading Enabling Device
For many reasons that Iām aware of, I forgot that the iPad is the best device for reading and collecting information tidbits that are fueling my content creation workflow. The iPad enables me to effortlessly annotate and store content into Craft using a Shortcut. In fact, unsurprisingly, the iPad actually is a devide that invites reading sessions into my morning routine. I should use my iPad more often; Iāll probably read more consequently.
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The Disconnected Country
We’re currently experiencing a major and nationwide cellular network outage here in Canada šØš¦, thanks to Rogers telecommunication company. It’s been going on since early this morning. Everything seems affected in one way or another: phone calls, internet access, emergency calls via 911, travellers, banking services via Interac, and lots of public non-urgent services, just to name a few. We will need a few days to comprehend the ramifications of what happened. It’s a major event illustrating that big telco companies concentration like we endure here in Canada isn’t a good thing. Also a good (and sad) example of how badly we’re dependent on technologies for everything.
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On Keeping a Seperate Computer for Creative Work
In a recent article from Josh Ginter for The Newsprint, If found the idea of having a separate computer for work and one for creative activities interesting and Iām close to feeling the same about my personal and work life. I do most of my work on an M1 Mac mini, while my creative work is done on an M1 MacBook Air. My iPad is used as a second screen on my Mac mini or for some photo processing stuff with Adobe Lightroom. The distinction between two worlds gets blurry when you consider how the cloud brings those two worlds closer to each other. If you are like me and use a single Apple ID for all your Apple services, as soon as you set up iCloud on both computers, youāll get access to the same āvirtual space and digital contentā on both machines. This is where the idea of two separate computers becomes blurry and probably more of a theory.
Photo by freestocks on Unsplash
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Doing Some Cleanup in My Home Office
After spending some time cleanup my office this today, I found these in my drawers and other places. I no longer use these. Do you? I know some people here on Micro.blog do. I donāt which I find fascinating because I did a lot in my younger times. Before the computers.
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Two Years Agoā¦
On March 13th, in 2020, the world flipped, my world flipped. So many things are different now. This short blog post is about reflecting on the last two years and how they became the foundation for what is to come in my life.
Time flies and making judicious decisions is more important than ever. Working from home is important. Iāll never return full time at the office. Even if I move to another job, working from home is now a requirement. Visiting customers for the sake of shaking hands no longer make sense to me. There has to be more than this. The price is too high to pay: wasted time.
Traveling is more important than ever too; thatās the only way for me to do more photography. Something that I didnāt do much in the last two years. This visual work posted in April of 2020 was the trigger to write this blog post. Iām sad about this because photography is my most important source of inspiration and my biggest creativity playground after writing. Still on the travel subject, I can envision traveling abroad for more than two weeks now and splitting my time between leisure and remote work. Leaving for a month or more is now possible.
Speaking of writing, Iāll probably continue to write but probably not as much as in the last two years. A more balanced life is taking place and will take away some of my writing time. Itās ok. Itās also part of making better choices.
The last two years of COVID-19, the more and more frequent climate disturbances and the recent events in Europe are telling me this: the world is more than ever in a constant state of emergency. I better learn how to cope with this otherwise Iām not finished at being in constant consternation mood while reading the news.
Thanks for reading this. I know your time is precious too and you made the decision to read this short piece.
