I would imagine that it is there in order to protect themselves if someone uses their tool for malicious purposes as they can point to that statement and say they were not complicit.
Most of the talk seems to be around Apple, which makes sense since they were opponents of the bill but I am more interested to see how this affects game console manufacturers. I had a longer post I had typed out about how console manufacturers have prevented non-authorized peripherals in the past with parts pairing and I was curious how that would affect the consoles going forward. I re-read the parts pairing section to make sure I read it correctly and then stumbled upon the section that refers to what the parts pairing restriction does not apply to and it is clearly written out that it does not apply to video game consoles. I find it very interesting that this applies to smart phones but not to video game consoles at all.
The video game console question is very interesting. I think a lot of right-to-repair advocates, right now, are fine with carving out an exception, for a few reasons.
One, video game consoles have no pretense to being generalized computing devices. They are more similar to appliances, and while that appliance status is arguable, they are definitely closer to that right now than smartphones.
Two, people have nostalgia for video game consoles. They like the packaged nature of it and generally have more good will towards console manufacturers than computer manufacturers (although that part is arguable and may be changing).
Three is politics. It's already hard enough to go up against companies like Apple to get these bills passed. You do not want Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo lining up to oppose you as well.
With all that said though, there is no reason I can see that the arguments used for right to repair -- that users should have full control over the devices they own -- should not also apply to video game consoles. But doing so would mean that consoles are no different than PCs, and would have huge implications for the industry.
Those lines are being blurred already with things like the Steam Deck and I think we're just a few years away from that upheaval, but it hasn't quite happened yet -- hence you see these carve-outs.
edit: Upon rereading what I wrote I realize that I may be conflating right-to-repair with regulations around app stores and walled gardens. They're not exactly the same thing, but I do think they touch on the same issues of the meaning of ownership, which is what set me off.
My car has wireless CarPlay and I use it daily. There is one quirk I have noticed and I’m not sure if it is a general issue with wireless CarPlay or just Volkswagen’s implementation and that is there are times that the phone gets disconnected and the infotainment screen goes black. My assumption is that it has to do with a signal that is stronger disrupting the connection causing the issue as it only happens in certain areas and not always. The latest area I know it will happen is on a bridge that is having construction done on it. When we get over the construction equipment the CarPlay disconnects and will reconnect a few minutes down the road. I’ve actually wanted to get a HackRF One to capture the signal and see if I could tell what it was but I can’t justify spending $300 for just that.
There's a complex intersection near my house where my aftermarket Atoto CarPlay head unit will also reliably disconnect. Fortunately, after a firmware update to the head unit, it will now at least reconnect automatically; previously, I'd have to disconnect and reconnect the phone.
(Without any data to support,) I believe it to be a complexity of map issue (maybe causing a buffer overflow) rather than an RF/WiFi interference issue. It seems far too repeatable for it to be an RF issue.
I would be curious if that intersection ever stop causing disconnects. There was an intersection that would cause disconnects only from one area of the intersection (the east side of the intersection) and one day the disconnects stopped. There was another area near a water tower that would also disconnect the CarPlay and that no longer causes an issue. There was a water pump station near the first intersection so I was thinking it could somehow be related to the operations of the equipment. I am betting that once the construction is done in the area I’m having issues currently the issues will go away.
I subscribe to Night Flight+ (https://www.nightflightplus.com/). It is very niche and I basically subscribed just for the music documentaries. It is on the cheaper end (~ $40/year) but it doesn’t seem like there is much content added and the app is lacking (at least on the Amazon Fire TV )
The paid vs free options for gaming are much different than the paid vs free options for other types of software. I don’t know of any free options for games like Assassin’s Creed. On the other hand, there are viable options that may not be as polished as the paid versions but are good enough for things such as image processing, 3d modeling, etc.
I started to get into music synthesizers and actually got all the parts to create the Atari Punk Console [0]. An analog synth is super fascinating to me and being able to get all the parts needed to make a basic analog synth for under $20 was too enticing to pass up.
>Of course, no one would use corporate resources for job-hunting, right? I know that folks here, get all huffy, when I suggest that happens rather frequently.
Where I work we have a take home exercise we have candidates do and then when we have the interview with that person we review their code with them and ask them to make incremental changes to see how they handle the asks with their communication skills and their technical ability. I interviewed one individual who couldn’t even get the REPL started for their project and as they were struggling trying to get it to work I heard them mumble to themself “I should have just use my work computer”. The fact they couldn’t get the most basic aspect of the project to work on their personal meant that they did their coding assignment on their work computer
Interesting. What makes work provided computers better suited for coding?
Me, I don't recall using company hardware for anything even remotely personal in many years. It's stupid because they are loaded with all kinds of spyware.
When you spend eight hours coding on your work computer, you make lots of little tweaks to improve workflow. If you then do nearly no coding on your home computer, it's unlikely that you will perform the same tweaks. I try to keep my systems set up almost identically, but that's a lot of work. (I now try to use ansible for that but after playing around for a bit I'm having doubts if it was the right choice. Keeping everything in sync is not exactly ergonomic.)
Some particular quirk of autocompletion could become almost pure muscle memory, and if it's suddenly missing, you notice.
Work computer is windows with wsl, home computer is Ubuntu. Work computer I need to develop in IntelliJ and vscode. At home I can use copilot or local LLMs, at work I cannot (nor several other useful extensions) At work I use maven and I have to spend 15minutes dinking with project settings anytime I need to compile a new project. At home I have admin privs, at work it’s a set of hoops to get temporary admin access so I forgo things like system environment variables.
I am skeptical that nix or home manager would solve these problems. So I just have a specific setup at work, that is typically more advanced and automated than my home system. My leet code interviews suffer because of this. Just makes me realize that coding interviews using an environment that does not mimic the workplace is just excluding senior developers (read: old people) who don’t have the time or patience to jump through these hoops for 15minutes of placating a recently hired college grad
Nix evangelists should seriously consider putting the breaks on advertising Nix until its horrible UX is fixed. I’m struggling to even discuss Nix as an option at work because every engineer I bring it up to has had bad first impressions.
when you get a work computer you have to get it set up to do your work immediately. The work you are doing is probably the work you will be interviewing for thus you have everything you need to set up for the coding challenge already set up on your work computer.
When you get a personal computer you do not need to set up all the things you need to do your work immediately, so you will do the setup of things as you need them.
thus if you get a new personal computer it might not be fully setup yet.
If you are of the age that you have kids you may not have time to do any sorts of personal projects, if so and you have an old personal computer it may not be up to date with what is needed for the coding project because you have not been doing a lot of stuff.
If you have kids or other problems your personal computer may end up broken or unusable and you might not have the money at the moment or the reason to buy a new one.
I mean the first one is probably not right either, since often you need to do some particular thing or use some library you are unfamiliar with but it is at least more right than on your personal computer for the other reasons listed.
> Interesting. What makes work provided computers better suited for coding?
They already have working software development environments. It's a process that can be time-consuming and is done once in a blue moon (basically when you need to reimage the machine). In the meantime, all changes to your software dev environment are gradual, and your work-provided computer ends up being configured like a software development pet instead of cattle.
Moreso if your company adopted/enforces internal development tools.
Ask yourself this: how many times have you went through a complete OS reinstall and subsequently had to setup a working software dev environment? Is this something you have automated? Most people do not.
I've been in almost exactly this situation, although the issue was rather that I have a Linux tower without camera/microphone and a Windows laptop for playing some games or doing Microsoft / office stuff. Setting it up to anything resembling my real dev experience is probably a day or two of work, and the first time I used it for a job interview I probably seemed less than competent...
I also have a work MacBook, but so far haven't used it for applying to other jobs, that would be kinda weird.
I have met people who can’t really code outside an IDE. If someone has a full JetBrains setup at work, and never worked any other way, it might be really hard for them to change code on demand without it.
I expect there is a similar, but worse, problem growing with CoPilot and friends.
Just that it's set up in a particular way, I suspect. A long running project/organization will accrete plenty of tools, scripts, configurations, etc that make their environment different than another using a similar stack.
For a few roles I’ve been allowed to buy a top of the range MacBook and expense it without any contact with IT - no spyware, no anything. To that end, I never felt the need to buy a personal laptop and do basically everything on my work laptop
If your company ever has to go through litigation, all of your personal data will be at risk during discovery. Always keep work and personal separate. This includes mobile phone
I don’t even use the same OS at work. I use macOS at home, but work at a Windows shop on a Dell.
I guess this is because in college and my first few dev jobs used Macs. A nice side effect is my wife hasn’t had any tech support complaints since we switched, it has been great.
I’d still never use company hardware for personal stuff. I don’t even login to Spotify on the company laptop.
She doesn’t seem to have issues with macOS at all though, aside from the one time I had her using a VPN and it expired which is totally on me and disabling it was nonobvious.
> Interesting. What makes work provided computers better suited for coding?
Some people only know how to code within the environment managed by their corporation. This is increasingly the case with folks that have only worked at Kubernetes shops.
> I interviewed one individual who couldn’t even get the REPL started for their project and as they were struggling trying to get it to work I heard them mumble to themself “I should have just use my work computer”. The fact they couldn’t get the most basic aspect of the project to work on their personal meant that they did their coding assignment on their work computer
I've been a candidate who "couldn't even get the most basic aspect of the project to work".
I had been working for years at a company that most developers in the world would sacrifice their firstborn to have a shot at being hired, and I've been using their work laptop for years on end. I considered switching gigs, I answered a recruiter's call, and I found myself in a technical interview using one of my own laptops. Only during the interview did it dawned upon me that my personal laptop had no development tools installed. Why? Because I never used it for work. Worse, I was used to my employer's automated process to setup software development environments, so I had no assurance that I could setup a fully working dev environments in 5 or 10 minutes, let alone the meeting's full hour. If you want to run Python as a REPL on Windows, good luck.
Thankfully my meeting ended up using a webapp to do the pair programming/coding challenge, but if I had to run code on my personal computer I would have to spend far more time setting it up than testing stuff, reschedule the meeting, or simply bail out.
Some companies allocate more than a day to get new candidates to set up a working dev environment and building a project, while assigning an experienced dev to guide them. I know that because I've onboarded half a dozen people and that's what it usually takes.
I'm reading your comment and I'm surprised you didn't noticed how your account does more to document how oblivious you and your team were to critical failures in your hiring process than in assessing the competence of a candidate. How many times per day do you need to setup a software dev environment? Is this how your company gets paid? Is that where you needed additional people to work on? No? Then why on earth are you evaluating them in a completely irrelevant domain? Don't you have people in your team who can spare some minutes documenting and automating that process?
By the way, following that interciew I was extended an offer for a senior position. If the recruiter was like you and I would have been evaluated on my ability to setup a working software dev environment in the allotted time, I'm sure I would have spent over half the meeting googling for where to download the interpreter and how to set it up.
I can select "run Python as a REPL on Windows" in your post, right click, search and find an answer within a minute.
From my experience, onboarding at companies is a painful process due to internal software, specific setups for complex build processes and (frequently) permissions / annoying processes required for downloading and installing things. Those points are not applicable if you are using publicly available and well documented tools on your own machine.
> I can select "run Python as a REPL on Windows" in your post, right click, search and find an answer within a minute.
That takes place only after you search for the python installer, download it, install it, check the environment flags, and restart your terminal of choice.
The web is jam-packed with examples of how problematic it is to setup and deploy Python on Windows, and we're not even touching the problem of how some fundamental packages, such as anything involving the file system, is either riddled with platform-specific gotchas or does not work at all.
Setting up a REPL is a far more involved process than it's being casually described in this thread.
It can be that simple, but there are plenty of times where the easy route doesn’t work. Sure it’s solvable with 5 minutes of googling and applying the top stack overflow solution, but of course the interview is not the time for that. And there are many other aspects that can throw you off and give the unjust appearance of incompetence.
My anecdote was to show that there are in fact people who use their work computer in order to do projects related to their job search. You have made many assumptions based on my small paragraph.
First, this is a coding challenge that the candidate is given before the technical interview that is well defined in the expectations and is small in scope. They are not expected to spend more than an hour or two on it and they send the recruiter (who is an internal recruiter) a link to their github repo with their completed project before the technical interview is even scheduled. Candidates would have several days and potentially even a week between when they finished the project and when we have the technical interview. The candidates are also told that their project will be gone over in the technical part of the interview. I understand that there are circumstances that would prevent the individual from getting an environment set up on a personal computer but if that is case then just stick with using the work computer.
Second, I never even indicated if the individual was hired or not but you made the assumption that we passed on the candidate. The fact that the candidate couldn't get the repl started was just a tidbit that stuck out to me and I made the comment to my coworker as it is odd to me that a candidate would use their work computer for a job search. We just went with the fact we couldn't use a repl and had the candidate just talk out loud with what he would change when we added different scenarios/requirements.
For what it's worth, the candidate was using a Mac for their personal laptop and so all they would have had to do is run the following in their terminal and it would have gotten them pretty close to being able to run the repl
What is amazing about it, too, is that if you want to get better at using Shaq you could “increase your Shaq-fu”. For those who aren’t aware, there was a 2D fighting game released in the 1990s called Shaq Fu and featured Shaq [0]
I did a trial of Apple TV+ and MLS Season Pass in May, which was about 2 months into the MLS season, and I cancelled within 20 minutes. The UX of the app is terrible. I didn't want to watch live matches but wanted to watch previous matches in the season but in order to do so I would have to find the match on the screen and then click on it and then scroll down and click a button to actually watch the match. That doesn't seem too bad except that on the thumbnail of the match they show the final score and then when you click into the match before you are able to actually watch the replay they show the final score. It took the whole purpose of being able to watch previous matches away. I am sticking to watching NWSL on Paramount+.
As an MLS fan that bought the season pass as soon as it was announced, I can't agree more. Honestly Apple should be embarrassed, because the biggest problem with MLS Season Pass is the app and user experience.
1) On my TV, I'm consistently logged out of the app between uses. Logging in is annoying. I've sat down to watch games, hit this issue, and decided to just watch something else. I suspect that the issue here is my 2016-era LG TV, but everyone else's apps work fine.
2) When the app is working, it stutters a lot. This happens both on my TV and iPad, so I don't think this is just an app issue.
3) I have an Andriod phone, so there's no native app. More annoying log in experiences and poor video watching UX.
4) .. but on my Mac, where a website would be fine, I'm forced to use the Apple TV app to watch a game, which creates a slow and weird experience for no reason.
I'm genuinely to the point that I might not bother to renew next year if they don't start to fix these issues. I sort of doubt they will, though, as several of these (say, not having an Android app) seem like deliberate decisions and have been issues with AppleTV+ for years.
