We frame hybrid as RTO because hybrid is usually mandatory rather than flexible, and implies having to live in some wretched metro area close to an office. I want to live someplace where offices do not exist, which means hybrid is a non-starter for me.
Mandatory hybrid == RTO, but optional hybrid - a combination of hybrid for those who live near an office and remote for those who don’t - can please both camps without drawing battle lines between them.
IMO hybrid only works when there is a set day to be in the office for everyone. Otherwise you are just going into the office to have zoom/teams meetings with the remote people, and you end up with one of two things:
1. Everyone taking calls from their cubicles
2. Remote people calling in individually, onsite people calling in with 5-10+ people on one screen in a conference room.
Both are horrible and fully remote is better than this for basically everything except team-specific stuff (e.g. sales onsite, execs onsite, software remote, that sort of thing). But if you're going off of numbers alone, hybrid makes the most sense and I don't think hybrid makes sense just being an optional free-for-all.
Everyone's circumstances are different so you can't come up with a policy that everyone will like.
The trick is to ensure you are never near all the people who know the secret when there is the possibility of trouble. That makes kidnapping everyone harder.
Of course if you really worry about such things you shouldn't be trusting the other people you are working with either...
Recycling is the wrong, least efficient, laziest solution to the problem of packaging. Why does every little thing need to come packaged in its own cocoon of plastic or paper? Beats me. Consumers have become lazy: they expect purchasing and consuming to be the extent of their participation in the long supply chain through which our goods travel. This tends to externalize the environmental costs of consumption to all of us. Recycling would be unnecessary if consumers were held accountable for properly obtaining and reusing materials.
> Why does every little thing need to come packaged in its own cocoon of plastic or paper?
It started as security. Packaging used to be way simpler. First, packaging got stronger on medicines and food to prevent tampering, mostly after the incident when someone put cyanide in Tylenol. It grew from there - anti-tempering, anti-theft, protection for rough handling during shipping, as shipping speeds increased. The reasons kept growing, and the packaging keeps growing.
I fully agree that we can cut back. But like most aspects of society, you need to first understand the drivers that got us where we are, and then attack the problem by discussing whether our current solutions are truly the right answer to those problems.
That is part of it for sure (recently a prankster was licking ice cream tubs at a grocery store, so it’s still a concern) and there was some copying of Japanese packaging aesthetic to mimic or to convey the idea of premium product, high class product.
An example of the packaging absurdity, order from Amazon something like a 48 count pack of AA batteries. It arrived in a standard Amazon brown cardboard box. Inside was the the battery company's branded box. Inside of that was 12 additional boxes with 4 batteries each. Ridiculous...
Amazon pretty much sets the standard for this. They're the biggest ecommerce home delivery company, and yet have absolutely nothing in the way of reducing waste, and give the customer no option or control to do so. The _only_ thing they do is allow you to group deliveries (in case you want everything at once) which has the side-effect of reducing carbon emissions by the delivery van.
They do offer the frustration-minimizing packaging program, which is less wasteful, but manufacturers have to opt in.
Here in the UK, Ocado (a home shopping delivery firm) will take back the plastic bags your shopping came in. Now that Amazon is handling an increasing proportion of its own deliveries, it would be great if they adopted something similar and started using reusable shipping cartons like these when the client opts in:
>Here in the UK, Ocado (a home shopping delivery firm) will take back the plastic bags your shopping came in.
They charge 5p per bag (as required by law), which you cannot opt-out of. You might as well use it as a bin-liner, as the cheapest version costs around similar price. These bags are unlikely to get reused, when you return them, due to any cross-contamination issues e.g. bag for poultry (campylobacter) reused for loose produce.
An excerpt from their faq's:
Can I choose to not have my shopping delivered in bags?
We can't eliminate bags from our deliveries just yet. Packing them in separate bags for your fridge, cupboard and freezer is a really important part of making sure your groceries arrive in tip-top condition.
How much will I get charged for bags in my order?
The legislation states that big retailers must charge at least 5p for single-use plastic carrier bags.
So, as of 5th October 2015, we will be charging 5p for carrier bags used to pack your shopping. How much you are charged will vary depending on the size of your order, but we will only charge you for the exact number of bags used – there is no fixed charge. If it takes five bags to safely pack your order you'll be charged 25p. If it takes 6 bags, it'll be 30p. It's that simple.
The total amount charged for bags will be shown on your receipt.
hygiene. I wonder if you could quantify the reduction in disease (and so perhaps a dollar value associated with lower healthcare costs, less sickbays, less death) that can attributed to packaging which essentially preserves factory sterilization into the market.
Maybe if you own your own container and control it 100%, but for many shippers, that it not the case. They are one item amongst many, thrown together with everything else.
So it is worse. Your packaging has to defend itself from everything else in the container. It may get tossed around by multiple middle-men, buried under heavier objects and boxes, and has to protect itself in case an object above yours breaks and spills who knows what all over your box. And what if the container is somewhat empty and ends up on rough seas? It could get rolled like dice for days.
I'm afraid not - my personal knowledge of it just comes from having lived through the last few decades, with a year working at UPS, and some time spent helping small business owners figure out logistics for shipping their inventions.
There are likely actual experts around who could write a book, but I'm not sure where to find one.
You're right: there are at least some good reasons for packaging to exist. So, I'm going to rephrase my original question:
Why does every little thing come in packaging that is not directly reusable without further investment of time/energy?
For example, I ordered a USB hard drive a couple of weeks ago. It arrived packaged in:
* An unmarked cardboard box. Why wasn't I required to return this box for reuse? It should be a Pelican-style container that is used to deliver a shipment, and immediately returned for reuse.
* An thinner marked cardboard box advertising the device's features and specs. Why was this necessary? I already know what I ordered: I don't need to be further convinced that this is in fact the right thing.
* A set of plastic bumpers inside the marked box. I get it: these hold the relatively gentle device in place while it's shipped. The bumpers are clearly intended for only a single use: they're shaped to fit only the particular device I bought. Why haven't we developed reusable dampeners that can fit a variety of products and used repeatedly?
* A plastic bag inside the box, with the device inside it. Why?!
There are ways to build reusable substitutes for all of the single-use packaging implements we're accustomed to. Of course, these are more expensive. Insert generic rant on capitalism externalizing its costs to everyone.
> A set of plastic bumpers inside the marked box. I get it: these hold the relatively gentle device in place while it's shipped. The bumpers are clearly intended for only a single use: they're shaped to fit only the particular device I bought. Why haven't we developed reusable dampeners that can fit a variety of products and used repeatedly?
Because those would be harder to make and more expensive and likely work worse, and the benefit would go to some third party, not the company selling it. You could legislate it, but otherwise I don't see companies spending the extra money and time willingly.
People like to think that the market is some state of nature; it isn't. It is shaped by the legal and cultural environment like any other human practice.
If you want reusable hard drive bumpers, modify the environment to make doing so in the best interests of the companies using them.
There are moldable bumpers/foam for this application. The foams can also be made from bio materials such as mycelium (which can actually be grown/entrained to shape) or that puffy corn starch that can replace “packing peanuts.”
Combine with cardboard and paper tape and you’ve got a pretty well compostable shipping container. Landfill neutral.
That's answering a different question, which is how to get away from foam to better materials. The question asked was why aren't they shipping reusable bumpers, which is because there's a market disincentive to, since it costs more, works worse, and doesn't help the company that makes/ships with it.
It would take to long to answer all of those, so let's just look at the first point.
> An unmarked cardboard box. Why wasn't I required to return this box for reuse? It should be a Pelican-style container that is used to deliver a shipment, and immediately returned for reuse.
How much does a Pelican case weigh compared to a cardboard box? It probably weighs more than the cardboard box and the purchased item inside. So, you're literally doubling the weight of everything being shipped. Then, you want to return that case to the sender, so now you're not only doubling the weight, but you're doubling the number of items being shipped, and therefore doubling the shipping cost for the consumer.
What's the environmental impact of a cardboard box compared to a Pelican case? I don't know these numbers, but even if we somehow forget about the extra weight, shipping, and fuel, you literally might need to reuse that Pelican case tens of thousands of times before it has a positive impact over a cardboard box. Would it get lost or need to be repaired from damages in tens of thousands of shipments? I almost guarantee it.
That being said, I agree we should be asking more questions and looking for ways to improve recycling.
Almost all of those can be answered by imagining the worst case scenario when your one device is put into a container with everything else. I just made a comment elsewhere in this thread about the same concerns, but in short, your one device could be put under something big and heavy that is leaking fluids. So your thin cardboard with the specs was the packaging put together to inform the consumer what the object is, because making separate packaging for retails shelves vs. online ordering is not realistic. But everything else is preventing damage along the way.
So yes, you are correct - standardized boxes that protect their contents, and all fit nicely together while shipping, and also are returnable would be great. Or... Amazon, UPS, FedEx, etc could just handle those outer layers of protection themselves. Hopefully the added cost of doing so is offset by the re-use you get from them. Either way, if somebody set up such a system, there would be no reason all those layers need to get to the final recipient of a package.
> making separate packaging for retails shelves vs. online ordering is not realistic
They do do this on a small scale for some items, that's essentially what frustration free packaging is. According to their blurb page about it they work with manufacturers to get different packaging which sounds like they're not doing the worst case scenario I thought which would be just shucking the retail packaging and adding their own.
> * An unmarked cardboard box. Why wasn't I required to return this box for reuse? It should be a Pelican-style container that is used to deliver a shipment, and immediately returned for reuse.
Is the extra fuel required to transport these reusable boxes and to recollect them equal to the amount expended just creating a new cardboard box? Cardboard isn't particularly resource intensive (it can be made from fast growth planted trees). Can your reusable box collapse? If it can't collapse it would take double the amount of truck stops to deliver a single good because it would take exactly as much space to return as it did to deliver.
> * An thinner marked cardboard box advertising the device's features and specs. Why was this necessary? I already know what I ordered: I don't need to be further convinced that this is in fact the right thing.
Amazon does have their 'frustration free packaging' which does essentially what you want. They work with the manufacturer to box things differently for sale through Amazon where there's no need to box and entice customers.
> * A set of plastic bumpers inside the marked box. I get it: these hold the relatively gentle device in place while it's shipped. The bumpers are clearly intended for only a single use: they're shaped to fit only the particular device I bought. Why haven't we developed reusable dampeners that can fit a variety of products and used repeatedly?
Only really works with similarly shaped objects that go into the same sized box. And again there's the energy expended in collecting them to factor in.
> * A plastic bag inside the box, with the device inside it. Why?!
Protection against damage and moisture during transit. Keeps everything clean and fresh. Though I do think the number of different little baggies in many products is excessive.
> Why wasn't I required to return this box for reuse?
Because I wouldn't order anything from a service that required me to return the box. Going to a postal office is highly inconvenient for someone working full time. Of course, I could be convinced to just drop off the box at some kind of drop off/pick up station (provided it was not too far out of my normal commute), but that would require a whole new layer of infrastructure.
* Would you trust a cardboard box that looked like it had been opened?
* The thinner box would be for display in a shop.
* The other packaging points are for longevity; there's a lot of products that will bounce around shops, warehouses, cross country lines for years until they're sold and used. I don't know who sets the guidelines for packaging but they sure plan for the worst.
Some products do have excessive packaging, but most packaging is there for good reasons. You need to consider the embedded energy and resources used to make the product, and how the packaging reduces the risk of wasting them if the product is damaged or destroyed.
There are cases where the total environmental impact of plastic packaging is very likely better than the alternatives, e.g. shrink-wrapping a cucumber more than doubles the shelf-life at ambient conditions:
It comes from desequestered carbon, but importantly, it's very difficult to re-desequester it. Plastic in landfill is mixed with other waste and uneconomic to recover. It's enforcing "keep it in the ground" (not completely, because the manufacturing and transport release CO2, but better than nothing).
"Industry X does things I don't understand. The millions of professionals working in that industry must be clueless fools, and should follow my hunch instead!"
> Consumers have become lazy: they expect purchasing and consuming to be the extent of their participation in the long supply chain through which our goods travel
This is a little unfair on "consumers". I don't have a choice in how my local supermarket packages its products. I bring my own containers to the butcher, I bring my own bags for fruit and veg, and we still end up with at least one bin worth of waste every week. That's not counting the packaging that the products are shipped to my local stores in either.
Consumers aren't lazy, companies are cheap. it's cheaper to wrap something in LDPE + friends, and transport it across <insert landmass here>, then force the consumer to pay to dispose of it (and their local authority to bear the brunt of managing it), than it is for the manufacturer to make it closer and get it to me without shrink wrapping.
Until suppliers, manufacturers, retailers are held responsible, consumers are _not_ the lazy ones, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't still try.
I've had a few wacky ideas for fixing the problem of overpackaging. Theory: the greenest packaging is none at all, the second greenest is the one you eat. In medieval times they would bake and transport food in a "pie", a hard shell of bread. Inedible for humans, but the pig your family had could dispose of it easily.
I agree. Packaging needs to be much more expensive. Online ordering makes things much worse. Now goods are packed in 3 or 4 layers which then get thrown away quickly.
I find it funny how amazon will ship in a box or padded envelope, while random Chinese sellers on AliExpress will use something slightly thicker than cellophane.
I worked in retail about 10 years ago, in a "Mom and pop" Computer store. We would receive hard drives in their retail boxes, with a plastic bag, a cardboard sleeve, and then another box around 10 or so, all wrapped in plastic. I would assume that before they got to me, those boxes were sent on pallets which were also shrink wrapped.
We would throw all that away before a customer ever saw it.
I'm routinely amazed by the things that I buy which are wrapped in plastic that could just as easily be wrapped in paper or cardboard or something else that biodegrades.
I suspect it's simply because the food companies have already bought the plastic-wrapping machines and don't want to invest the money in new processes. But when I'm in the store, I will routinely choose an item wrapped in paper or paperboard over something in plastic.
The primary goal with food packaging is that the food doesn't biodegrade before someone eats it. From an environmental standpoint, if wrapping a food item in plastic causes a 5% reduction in food waste vs. other packaging, it's a clear unambiguous benefit to use plastic.
I can understand that for things that come into contact with the food, but not all of the packaging does.
For example, the Tillamook cheese snacks are individually-wrapped planks of cheese. For that, I understand. But why do the ten plastic-wrapped cheese planks then need to be wrapped in another plastic bag?
Very true. At some points some friends were having a contest about most packaging needed for their meal. I don't remember who the "winner" was, but there was at least "bag-bag-box-bag" combos and up! (this was in the UK, but I bet US can "score" pretty high too)
> You should at least test drive it under controlled conditions [...]
Who cares what the car does under controlled conditions? I'm sure the manufacturer did exactly that in their testing. Even when they test on public roads, there's a hands-off safety driver behind the wheel, who is paid to be on the lookout and sufficiently alert to take over in case of an unexpected excursion. (Unless the self-driving car under test is from Uber, in which case the safety driver simply watches video on their phone. Too soon?)
This is nowhere near how these cars are used in the real world. The real world is not a set of "controlled conditions", so any comfort one builds up in such a situation is merely a false sense of security.
> [...] where you feel comfortable before closing yourself off completely.
So, here's the thing: I'm comfortable driving myself. I don't get distracted, I use good judgment, I consistently prioritize the safety of my vehicle's occupants over everything else. I know exactly how flawed self-driving cars are, and how far behind the curve of my driving skill they will remain within my lifespan. That's the sum total of everything I need to know, and no amount of "controlled conditions" demos will change my mind.
P.S.: If you're from the future and you're reading this because I got mowed down by a self-driving car: ha ha! Joke's on me.
My comment about controlled conditions was about making you feel comfortable and give yourself a safe to try it out to get an understanding of when it. It wasn’t to say to believe in self driving, I agree it’s a long way out. Understanding the technology is more important than dismissing it altogether is what I was simply trying to point out. I think you can at the least try it, understand it, then have an opinion about it.. (which I respect). There seems to be a lot of negative comments from people who have never sat in a Tesla or have gone through a test drive.
I'm not OP, but even if a test drive went perfectly, I would remain worried about the chance of the car randomly killing me for some stupid edge case reason.
Maybe not today, not tommorrow, but maybe six months in the future when the weather and road conditions happen to be just precisely right to confuse the system at just the most dangerous time.
In the meantime I will just read/watch the stories of people more trusting than me about how well the technology works, and currently those stories don't fill me with confidence.
IMO, this is currently dangerous technology that should not be allowed on the road at all.
Common-sense tells me that these half-self-driving systems are dangerous.
I would like to see a study that tested the reaction times of a person who sits doing nothing for a hour and then is suddenly expected to take evasive maneuvers, versus a sober - or even a drunk - driver who is actually driving the car continuously.
This article does a great job of articulating the principles of identity which I’ve been teaching to my daughter ever since she’s been old enough to understand what a Twitter account is. Even though social media is banned in our household, I’ve laid out a few ground rules that must remain sacrosanct for the sake of basic safety.
1. Your “real” identity - the one to which your “real” phone number and Social Security number are linked - is for banking, buying a house, trading stocks, paying utility bills, e-commerce, car registration, life insurance, and so on.
2. Never do or say anything online that would reveal your “real” identity in any way. There’s a surprisingly broad spectrum of activities which might reveal your identity. Don’t take selfies next to your (or my) car. Don’t take selfies next to home. Better yet, don’t take selfies at all. Don’t geotag anything. Don’t “check into” places. Don’t mention your first name. Don’t be telling anyone about your real birthday. Build an impenetrable firewall between “the internet” and your “real identity”, and keep it in good repair.
3. All identities other than the “real” one are throwaway. Use a different e-mail address, phone number, and name for each website. Never use the same pseudonym more than once.
4. Don’t tell your real-life friends anything about your “other” identities. Don’t use social media under your “real” identity. This way, the two can never be linked.
5. Don’t be afraid to periodically “pull a _why” on your pseudonymous identities. The forest of “yous” will grow thick and lush, and will need a preventive burn every now and again in order to avoid an uncontrollable conflagration later. Delete what you can; abandon what you can’t. Move on and move up.
6. If you ever feel compelled to make an exception to the rule, come talk to me before you make the decision. Chances are that I’ll be able to hear you out and make a convincing case against breaking rules 1-5.
Ever since I’ve come up with these ground rules, I’ve slowly wound down my own social media presence. I have set up an alter ego under which I’m conducting my open source and other online activities. When asked why I don’t use my “real name” GitHub for anything but work, I say that this is my way of keeping things separate for the sake of sanity and safety. People nod their understanding, but they don’t really get it, and that’s okay. They can’t possibly get to know every side of me.
I have the opposite approach : everything is under my real name and easily traceable to me.
Thus, I have never the illusion of being hidden online and I need to be conscious that everything I say is said on a public place and that I have to be accountable for my actions.
(ironicaly my hackernews username is the furthest from my real name but it should still take you under 5 minutes to find my full name without effort)
Your “outcast” assertion is unsupported by facts. It turns out that not everything happens on social media. Within a group of friends even a single person who isn’t on Twitter/Snapchat/TikTok/etc tends to pull the entire group’s narrative away from those platforms and into the domain of a more private tool, such as iMessage or WhatsApp. Within the Gen Z cohort the understanding is crystallizing that social media is toxic, addictive, and leads to nothing but bleak and depressing thoughts. This commonly understood truth enables people like my kid to act as an anchor that keeps numerous others on solid ground and away from the jaws of “big social tech”.
And thank you for the “serial killer” comment: I’ll take it as a compliment.
> 4. Don’t tell your real-life friends anything about your “other” identities. Don’t use social media under your “real” identity. This way, the two can never be linked.
How can you add your real life friends on social media if they cannot recognise your pseudonymous profile? Or if somehow they're added, they then reduce the anonymity of your handle... on the other hand having only an anonymous handle on social media means you can only interact with other anonymous handles and not your real life friends, which considerably reduces its value.
While I’m pro-privacy preservation, the idea that these are necessary for “basic safety” seems a bit extreme. Can you add some thoughts about what exactly these are keeping your daughter safe from?
Doxxing and stalkers and other abuse. Postings dredged up from years (and, eventually, decades) ago which can destroy careers. Phishing attacks that rely on knowing things about a person from their social media profiles.
I can go on all day, but the most persuasive voice is your own. Imagine yourself posting your address, full legal name, social security number and bank account numbers right here, right now. What are some considerations that would prevent you from doing this? Would you attach the same information to political activism? What if the tables were to turn in the future, leaving you on the wrong side of history and consequently out of a job?
most people don't have this conversation with their kids. they let them sign up and hope for the best. (which 12 yro doesn't have a phoen today??) -> that's what I'd consider extreme (not somebody teaching their kids about how to be safe).
Yeah this is a legitimate concern (frankly sickening) but didn’t seem to be what the parent post was pointing to. This should be resolved by an outright social media ban (as parent has), strong privacy settings, and maybe occasional checks on the kid’s private messages (though, as an advocate of privacy I’m also an advocate of children’s privacy).
Parent’s response seems more oriented around the, “saying something you regret on a permanent record” area which, again is a legitimate concern, but not what I would classify as “basic safety.”
I should’ve known that it’s turtles all the way down. Considering how many years I’ve sunk into programming for other platforms, this shouldn’t have come as a surprise, but I got suckered into believing that mobile computing platforms represented a significant enough paradigm shift to allow for starting with a cleaner slate.
Not true! Having gotten into iOS development over the past couple of years, I’ve come to realize that seemingly no attempt has been made to actually clear the cobwebs on this shiny, relatively new platform.
For example, SwiftUI is just an abstraction layer for UIKit, which itself is (keep me honest, HN) an abstraction for some mishmash of Cocoa, Display PostScript and Metal. Bits of NeXTSTEP are everywhere still, even when using Apple’s latest and greatest programming paradigms.
Don’t get me wrong, iOS is great, and I love it to death. However, the baggage signals to me that a massive opportunity to start anew has been missed.
> Don’t get me wrong, iOS is great, and I love it to death. However, the baggage signals to me that a massive opportunity to start anew has been missed.
Starting anew is over rated. It’s sometimes the right answer, sure, but it’s just one possible answer. iOS benefited enormously from being immediately familiar and approachable to existing OSX devs, and would have taken another 5+ years to develop from scratch without leveraging its OSX heritage.
Meanwhile Android was in a crash emergency race to relevance for the first 5 years of its existence. If they’d taken the time to do everything right the first time, they could have ceded Microsoft enough time to get their Windows Mobile act in gear.
So legacy is a thing for a reason, taking one opportunity very often means giving up another.
I think certain paradigms were completely shifted compared to the PC space.
-Revamped permissions
-App packaging/name spacing/consistent installation
-IPC was redesigned as asynchronous Intent blobs on Android
-Urls becoming first class citizens at the OS level
-More consistent background app apis (and eventually better ways to track them)
I could come up with more but I think there's actually a very big difference. But yes, its all built on top of older Java and obj-c libs.
SwiftUI isn’t UIKit-specific. Display Postscript hasn’t existed since the OS was called NeXT, 20+ years ago, and was never on any iDevice. Cocoa is an alias for AppKit + CoreData, and iOS uses CocoaTouch instead.
You’re right, yet this doesn’t directly address what parent said, in fact it’s somewhat agreeing with the point, that there’s a ton of influence left behind by these things, even though they are not there anymore.
> Don’t get me wrong, iOS is great, and I love it to death. However, the baggage signals to me that a massive opportunity to start anew has been missed.
I guess that's what Flutter is doing (for both iOS and Android).
It is another layer, but it has as small as possible dependence on the below layers (UIKit, OpenGLES, posix) and instead tries to reimplement everything. For instance, if you want a slider control, that’s not going to use UISlider underneath, it’s going to reimplement it from scratch.
The problem with this is that it is an enormous task and they have barely scratched the surface of it.
Flutter is hardly the first reimplement the world GUI programming environment that tries to match the existing first party environment in terms of look and feel. Java swing was pretty much the same idea 20 years ago, and probably had more investment and momentum behind it than Flutter does today. While I can think of a number of swing success stories, I don’t think java swing as a whole was successful in what it set out to do.
> The problem with this is that it is an enormous task
It's an enormous task that never ends, too. Flutter has to continually keep up with UI/UX changes that Apple makes. Without enough momentum there, the devs using their platform are going to have apps that appear/feel old, which tends to be a marketing negative for Apple users.
Flutter took the approach of treating the screen as a blank canvas. Everything is drawn using Skia primitives, exposed as Dart libraries.
It has some downsides – they had to expose a lot of accessibility features on top of that using platform APIs – but it's quite nice when you are a developer, as you can Cmd-click on anything to learn how it is drawn, and use the same tools to build your own widgets if you need.
Afaik Flutter is basically a Game Engine. Its not using the build in UI Toolkit instead rendering everything itself and just mimics the look of the native UI.
I'm not completely sure about it, i just now it from listening to some talks.
Yes. It's not using any native UI widgets or UI code, but drawing everything itself using the lowest level API it can get, which I guess on iOS is Metal (and something for input). This means that the look and feel and the behavior and accessibility features will not match those of other apps (which do use the native toolkits), or the Flutter team will have to do a lot of reverse engineering and re-implementation to match that on each platform.
"We were discussing this in today's Triage meeting. Our current plan is to turn Metal on soon. This will increase the size of our engine by ~200KB. We can eventually reduce this by removing the OpenGL code but (a) that would drop support for <iOS10, which we don't want to do anytime soon (Skia only does Metal from iOS10), and (b) would require some work from the Skia team (OpenGL can't currently be removed from the codebase)."
I am really curious why you are concerned at all about supporting iOS 9 (and lower?) at this point. That's a tiny, tiny fraction of worldwide iOS users. Probably not more than 1%. How many people are creating apps in Flutter that need to target that far back, and that user base?
I’m not buying your reasoning. Try putting a WKWebView into a SwiftUI view. This kind of thing is all sorts of messed up when multiple rendering systems - two of them declarative (SwiftUI and HTML) - collide in a single view. I’m sure someone’s going to call this a corner case, but useful and interesting apps that push the boundaries of the feasible are all composed of such “corner cases”. And hey, I’m not even doing anything outlandish: just trying to show some HTML.
I sympathize with your position and have had similar problems in the past. There’s no magic option. But typically the combination of a completely new API and implementation is very difficult for both implementors and users.
> Half of engineers prefer to work at a company that does pair programming
Well, I’m glad that it’s only half. Isn’t that neat?
I wish this meme of “company that does pair programming” would die a slow and agonizing death. Not everyone’s brain is wired for pair programming. I do plenty of presenting at work, where I share my screen and write code, Twitch-style, for an audience of coworkers. I do this in order to convey material to a captive audience, not as a baseline method of doing work. “Teaching” and “programming” are two non-overlapping activities for me, as the communications aspect tends to overtake most of my mental capacity, leaving only a precious few cycles for problem solving and creativity.
Any company that considers itself special enough to change how people work is not only delusional, but will also burn through good people who are neurologically different from the type that enjoys pair programming.
I like working with someone for short stints on a problem - like... perhaps an hour or two per week. But... that's not 'pair programming' so much as 'talk through a problem, work out some ideas... or just "collaboration". I don't think I've ever seen some place where 'pair programming' was a 30-40 hr/week norm, and I'm not really sure it could be for almost anyone, as it's going to require a lot of synced schedules for 2 people, and, as you said, similar working styles.
I think "pair programming" is now some nebulous term people use to mean "can you talk through your code issues with someone else?".
I don't think anyone's brain is wired for pair programming. Maybe it's tolerable for people who are in early years of their programming career and are also writing in very inexpressive languages to spend too much time dealing with the code, still learning languages and approaches to writing, structuring code, rather than deeply thinking, exploring. Maybe some people just see this as an opportunity to spend more time on learning about writing code, maybe socializing, maybe even an opportunity to avoid doing hard work. But it's just not compatible with programming in general and for many it's more like plain and simple abuse, an attempt to pressure them to work harder.
> I do plenty of presenting at work, where I share my screen and write code, Twitch-style, for an audience of coworkers. I do this in order to convey material to a captive audience, not as a baseline method of doing work. “Teaching” and “programming” are two non-overlapping activities for me, as the communications aspect tends to overtake most of my mental capacity, leaving only a precious few cycles for problem solving and creativity.
Maybe the problem is that you're approaching it as "teaching" instead of working in close collaboration with other engineers to achieve a better solution to a problem than what you could've come up with on your own? You might be a senior, but there's always something to learn in how someone else approaches or thinks about a problem, and you're depriving yourself of the chance of becoming a better programmer if you reject this outright.
Pair programming is not for everyone, nor everyplace or time. Like most programming techniques it has its pros and cons and should be considered before adoption in a team, or worse, being forced into adoption. But it certainly has tangible benefits in sharing knowledge within a team quickly and achieving optimal solutions in a more immediate way than, say, a code review would.
There’s “pair tennis” (I know nothing about tennis, so apologies if that’s not what it’s called) which seems to flow alright, but tennis is a much more tightly constrained activity than programming. There are only a few actions each player appears to perform, with all other actions explicitly falling out of bounds set by rules of the game.
Chess is a much wider problem domain. I can’t imagine anyone playing pair chess.
They know an IP address. But, without a ridiculous amount of work, not my IP address.
But anyway, the thing is that I do know that I'm under surveillance at least some of the time. So I might as well assume that it's all of the time. Because it's hard to know.
And sadly enough, I won't even speak freely with my wife, unless she's turned off her cellphone, or put it in the utility closet or bathroom, with the water running.
For example, two decades ago I was ~comfortable driving a couple hundred km to a mall, and buying a gift card for cash. Or mailing cash in the mail. I drove back roads, avoided toll bridges, and didn't carry a cellphone.
The moral is that being ~anonymous in meatspace has become very difficult.
So yes, I'm no longer comfortable assuming that such steps would guarantee any privacy. And yes, I'd also worry that at least parts of the process would be recorded. And the harder I tried to obfuscate, the more likely it'd raise suspicions.
I do worry about using a VPN. But that's not too uncommon where I live, so hopefully it's not a huge flag.
I neglected to say that I was doing that with the expectation of ~anonymity. Using those gift cards to lease VPN services and VPS. Mailing cash to people selling Liberty Reserve and Pecunix. And later, Bitcoin.
Mandatory hybrid == RTO, but optional hybrid - a combination of hybrid for those who live near an office and remote for those who don’t - can please both camps without drawing battle lines between them.