I find it a bit ridiculous that we still have to put up with the Visa and Mastercard duopoly.
You may have missed it, but Australia's banned card surcharges and tightened the interchange fee caps, but it's not really solved the problem. Someone's still paying.
Australia already has fantastic banking infrastructure. PayID lets you instantly transfer money between banks using a phone number or email, generally for free. We've also had eftpos for decades, a domestic debit card network that competes with Visa and Mastercard.
Surely we can make paying a merchant directly from your bank account as easy as tapping a card with proper fraud protection baked in?
I appreciate Visa and Mastercard provide genuine value, but like why should moving my own money attract a commission on the transaction? If I sell something for $10k, why should the payment network earn more than if I'd sold it for $10?
This is essential infrastructure. Governments and banks could fund it without taking a commission on every transaction. It doesn't have to be free to operate, just free at the point of use.
It's 2026, for fuck's sake. Surely there's a better way.
Why is it that you cannot (practically) send money between two people in the US using just bank account number and routing number for free? Can't even do it if the accounts are in the same banking institution.
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Companies are rapidly adopting Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Copilot and internal agents, but most still have very little idea what that AI is actually doing, what it costs, what work it contributes to or whether it is making the organisation better.
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Amplification of commentary and opinion is much easier now. It’s also a lot easier to play into people’s fears.
There’s a wide range of political motivations for this sort of thing too. Not just AI taking jobs, but convincing people to vote against their best interests, or even supporting radical religious groups whose values would persecute you. This sort of rhetoric feels noisier than it ever did decades ago.
Sometimes I wonder if filmmakers have the right of it. They need to show what's going on in the computer to a distracted audience in a heartbeat. When they pull that off on screen, I wonder if us software devs should be taking notes.
Isn't that what dashboards are for? They may not look like simplistic LEDs, but being able to "see" what the automation is doing is something everyone that's ever made automation wants to do. It starts with making logs before migrating to live dashboards.
Its basically that staring at the log patterns in graph form or system stats you get a pretty good idea of what 'normal' looks like and anomalies stick out pretty quickly.
Though having a person interpretingthe degradation progress and relaying it to the rest of the team could be a usable scene.
A guy I went to high school with used to do that for a living. I have no idea what they call it, but it's basically theatrical UI, where the screen has to act and usually deliver a bunch of exposition.
I can't recall where I saw it, there's at least one company working on this issue specifically for nursing staff. Everything beeps in hospitals, but there's no rhyme or reason to it, so room call responses are delayed, serious alarms can be missed, etc.
IIRC, the company's idea is to create a harmonious sound bed when everything's fine, and make different kinds of "out of the norm" alerts use a variety of sounds so that nursing staff get more info about what's wrong before finding the thing thats sounding an alert and looking at its screen.
This company's goal is to ... change an aspect of hundreds of different million-dollar highly regulated machines made by dozens of different multi-billion-dollar worldwide companies? And somehow make money doing this? Good luck, I guess.
Could this be resolved with a capacitor? LED can stay on for at least a second or two once the camera is off? Not sure on exact components but this feels solvable and only problem may be slim design of their laptops.
Indeed. TBH if I was running a Google- or even OpenAI-scale company (3000+ devices) I'd probably invest into creating a useful Linux distribution and hardware configuration myself (at that scale, it could maybe start to make sense).
Red Hat had most employees running a custom corporate RHEL build or Fedora on Thinkpads prior to 2018 or so, and even then most employees moved to Mac as soon as they were allowed to do so.
I was a true Linux believer, and I still switched to a Mac because I needed things to just work. Poor battery life, awful HiDPI support, strange driver issues all contributed. Yes, I could fix them. I opened bugs and could talk to the engineers responsible to get things fixed ASAP. Even so, it was a second full time job keeping up with it.
Most big tech companies let you pick Mac, Linux, or Windows. Whatever you’ll be the most productive with. Whatever you prefer. Most devs (75%?) seem to pick Macs. To each their own though.
Google just announced Googlebooks, which deeply integrate with Android, even running Android apps from your phone, on your laptop. Both amd64 and arm64 architectures available.
You may have missed it, but Australia's banned card surcharges and tightened the interchange fee caps, but it's not really solved the problem. Someone's still paying.
Australia already has fantastic banking infrastructure. PayID lets you instantly transfer money between banks using a phone number or email, generally for free. We've also had eftpos for decades, a domestic debit card network that competes with Visa and Mastercard.
Surely we can make paying a merchant directly from your bank account as easy as tapping a card with proper fraud protection baked in?
I appreciate Visa and Mastercard provide genuine value, but like why should moving my own money attract a commission on the transaction? If I sell something for $10k, why should the payment network earn more than if I'd sold it for $10?
This is essential infrastructure. Governments and banks could fund it without taking a commission on every transaction. It doesn't have to be free to operate, just free at the point of use.
It's 2026, for fuck's sake. Surely there's a better way.
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