App Tracking Transparency on iOS devices is an interesting test case for this argument. When an app wants to track you, you’re asked in plain language whether you want to be tracked. You can say no. You don’t have to be a savvy user to say no, and the consent is explicit rather than being buried in a EULA that you don’t read. If you say no, the app will likely still work fine. Specific numbers vary, but somewhere between a majority and a vast majority of iOS users opt out when given that choice. How much that costs advertisers is harder to reason about (a lot of the data comes from advertisers themselves, who are hardly unbiased), but the data are at least consistent in arguing that ATT opt outs produce a quantifiable drop in ad engagement (clicks, etc) and ad spend.

I’m personally a big fan of ATT. You shouldn’t have to be a savvy user to opt out of surveillance capitalism. I also don’t personally care that much about how effective online advertising networks are. But I think LG and similar companies are probably not off base to worry about making it possible to cleanly opt out of everything. From their perspective, that wouldn’t be a great outcome.

driven by our mission to create meaningful connections between brands and their audiences

Oh fuck off with this.

There’s a residential stroad near me that does this without advertising it. It’s a neat trick if you know about it, but a solid majority of the folks I see on that street just haul ass from red light to red light (and I catch up to them right when it turns green again).

I’m not too optimistic about traffic calming coming up in this road’s future. Maybe it’ll get speed cameras.

There’s a parallel universe where the US continued supporting its own domestic EV industry with more tax credits, more charging infrastructure, more grid investments and stricter corporate fuel economy standards. Maybe in that universe the automakers would attempt to compete with Chinese EVs instead of whining. Instead we elected orange man. Oh well.

A couple observations on reading this (as someone who heavily uses agentic coding at work and is mostly OK with it):

• Maybe I’m weird, but I don’t find “we always plan the implementation and make decisions first, and only then do we write the code” to describe my work style that well. If I don’t know how I want something to look, I will frequently just start writing whatever code comes to mind about that something. Most of the code will suck, and I’ll probably throw much of it away, but I find that it’s often a much more efficient way to get to a design that I like than sitting and debating tradeoffs in the abstract. Me writing the code might be slower than an agent writing the code, but that misses the point of the exercise: me writing the code is a way for me to build my own understanding of the problem.
• The text translation analogy at the beginning is illustrative, I think. A piece of writing has information, but also elements of the author’s wit, humor, tone, their assumptions about us as readers, and the cultural frame they write within. Good writing combines all of those things in an appealing way. At some basic level translation is about translating words correctly, but “correctly” there does a lot of work. It can be very hard to translate a work from one language to another without losing those less obvious characteristics (wit, tone, etc) that make it appealing, especially if you’re translating (e.g.) idioms or slang that don’t have a clear counterpart in your destination language. This is probably familiar to folks who read authors who’ve been translated outside of their native language: the right (or wrong) translator can have a huge impact on what you experience while reading. That’s not a bar we hold for all text (we’ve all seen very poorly translated manuals for cheap consumer electronics that are nonetheless fine because we can figure out what they’re trying to say), and similarly isn’t a bar that holds for all code, but there is some code where the nuances that automatic translation misses are actually important, and where a human touch is useful.

I guess it isn’t that surprising. I bet the developers who write the software included in this distribution would love some of those millions, but being a guy with a brand and opinions is apparently more valuable to the investor class. Consistent with how they think about the workforce at their own companies, anyway.

(I normally read things like this as people paying tribute to the guy running the company getting the money, or wanting to be perceived as in favor of that company’s viewpoints. I don’t understand why anyone would want to pay tribute to DHH. Ignoring the ick, he’s not that important or powerful. There are a lot of SWEs who don’t know who he is, let alone the general public)

I was getting unregistered jalopy vibes from the condition of the truck (dirty, preexisting body damage). Often also means uninsured, and an owner who doesn’t have anything to pay for the damage they cause. The good news is that this driver may not ever get his truck out of impound (in addition to towing + storage fees they’ll need to pay to get registration current, they probably wouldn’t have let it lapse in the first place if they could afford to do that), so he may be off the road for a while. The bad news is that he’ll probably never make the city whole for the damage caused here, though maybe they’ll recoup something by auctioning the truck.

There are also enough engineers looking for jobs that companies can be picky and only hire the ones who seem agreeable and inoffensive, which reinforces the dynamic. “Idealistic” folks accumulate employment gaps that they have to explain or which cause AI ATS systems to auto reject their application before a human ever sees it, meanwhile management and hiring panels become increasingly corporate and less tolerant of difference because that’s who gets hired.

I don’t disagree with a lot of the advice here as a practical thing (e.g., having a scrubbed public image online, assuming that someone evaluating your job application will research you), but I also remember a time when you didn’t have to do that to work in the industry. A lot of the smartest, most creative folks in my CS program were also outspoken on (e.g.) privacy or civil rights in ways that could be tied to their real name, and it makes me kind of sad to think that they’d probably have to hide that today if they wanted to get hired as a new grad.