I largely agree with you. I used to work at Cochlear (hearing aid implants) - their "headphone" equivalents actually had neatly replaceable batteries 10 years ago, it's doable! Larger than airpods, to be sure, however i'm sure Apple could shrink them nicely. But... would anyone want the ability to replace batteries? I wouldn't know. I suspect most people misplace them before the batteries go bad.

Batteries go bad in like a year or two. They aren't so easy to lose as you'd assume since they go right into the case after you take them out of your ears due to the relatively short battery life.

I have a bee in my bonnet about this software complexity issue. Perhaps it takes large amounts of humility to accept that your job is fairly mundane, and only needs simple code to get the job done? I mean: who wants to turn spanners on a Toyota when you can imagine you're working for NASA, and introduce fascinating new paradigms to your work, that ultimately add complexity. I suspect that's why i've joined so many teams that have tied themselves up in knots of un-grok-able indirection. Another theory I have is that people encounter bad code, and misdiagnose it, identifying the (wrong) solution as needing a big complex architecture.

I think it’s actually easier to make code more complex than it is to identify simple elegant solutions that will continue to work as the code expands.

This is really disappointing. I used to have a fertility tracking app on the iOS App Store, zero data sharing, all local thus private. But, people don’t want to pay $1 for an app, and I can’t afford the marketing drive that an investor-backed company such as this has… and so we end up with situations like this. Pity :(

Stories like this one can be the basis for effective marketing. We need to normalize paying $1 (or more, where warranted) for apps that provide value in the form of not doing the things that allow the $0 ones to be $0.

You say that hamas is no "credible military threat" - may I beg you please reconsider this in light of the 1195 killed when they attacked on October 7? They're no world-class army, to be sure, but it's not like they have no teeth whatsoever...

I think they agree with you. Did you read the second paragraph?

Anecdata: Recently spoke with a friend's son who graduated compsci a year-ish ago, he reckons none of his year got jobs, now working in a kitchen. (in australia for context). Very sad. For comparison, I graduated just after the dot-com crash, and our year mostly found jobs, just not very good ones, so maybe they're doing worse than we did. Good luck convincing anyone to study compsci any more.

As an Aussie computer science student, I do wonder what they are actually looking for. I know full well that uni isn’t teaching anything useful (heck my uni doesn’t even allow compsci students to take C programming) so I try and extend my knowledge by working on projects in my own time. Recently I’ve been getting into reverse engineering, before that I was writing my own shell from scratch in C. Is this good stuff to do job-wise?

Sure. Contributing to open-source, releasing and maintaining independent projects, is also good because it shows you can work with others and finish things on your own. Looking for internships is good if there are any.

You might want to be a bit more trendy, or else boring and corporate, but what's really important is that you can pick anything up quickly the first time you see it. So technically, what you actually know right now doesn't matter.

They’re just looking for Indians

Slightly off topic, did Australia ever fix the laws around stock options that meant you paid taxes on unrealized gains?

I always wonder about things like that stifling the start-up ecosystem and lower numbers of jobs

You don't pay taxes on unrealized gains in Australia unless they're in a self-managed superannuation fund and you have over $2 million. Regular investments outside of super are only taxed when you realize the gains. Superannuation is your retirement funds, doesn't seem that relevant to the start-up ecosystem.

I printed a few for a friend. They seem to work just fine, but if you look close you can see the ‘terraced’ steps in the printing. Probably feels a bit rough. I guess you could smooth that with acetone vapour and ABS filament if so inclined.

The article does talk of it being a relatively simple proposition to embiggen the range with an bigger battery kit if that helps. But yeah, it's not a ton of range.

I'm very positive, however note that when they mention "injection molded polypropylene composite material" - this (i think) is the same material used for Seadoo Spark jetskis. I owned one and had a minor crash, and because this material cannot be repaired, the entire hull needed replacing, it was an insurance write-off. I hope they've thought about how to make this car repairable and not 'disposable' after the first inevitable minor crash. Of course this may not be a fair comparison because jetski hulls are exposed, whereas car chassis' have panels and bumpers.

Speculation: Perhaps Google accelerated the Manifest V3 change to get anti-adblocking 'baked in' and benefitting their interests, before they're forced to sell off Chrome?

Ok this is beautiful, I love it, I was looking for something exactly like this earlier today. Nice one.