What are they even managing at that point? I would struggle to assign a team lead to a team that small. Presumably these were senior IC that needed a pay bump to keep them from going to another company? Maybe they assign a manager to every single internal product?

Have you tried finding a specific app you've used before, perhaps 2 years prior, the good one that's freeware and not ad supported? The play store is atrocious and pushes inferior apps every time over other, better apps. There's 1001 free timer apps but the store pushes garbage on you if you try and search for this. I only use Spotify on my phone, specifically in the car.

Google play store has always been horrific, app search is so intentionally broken as to be useless. I might have bought a couple apps in the first opening years but it's not worth it anymore I don't have any "paid" apps beyond uber and spotify, and I'm working real hard to get rid of spotify.

Probably on the computer side, immutable infrastructure will continue to reign supreme. Since 2015 there's been a big shift towards immutable infra/code. You can let AI fart around in lower environments but until everything passes all the tests, it won't get promoted to production (or end-users computers). You can see this in immutable package managers like nix already. Or in the Android case, it's completely locked down on the user side and only changes on major updates. Managing mutable infra is going to phase out over time, especially if AI gets involved.

If there's a paid tier that is ad-free of a reasonable cost, I don't see the problem with blasting people with ad volume. You're subsidizing the users with ads, and clients want . If your business model is 100% ad supported then sure, normalize ad volume I guess.

The trick I've had to use was to get to the MVP, maybe 800-1600 LOC, and then draw some lines where you see the seams, have it refactor it into 3-6 main files, and split it across there. Then close the conversation and start a new one, and keep iterating. Once a file gets over ~1200 LOC I ask it to split that file and refactor, and summarize any particularly tricky chunks of code. I haven't tried adding new complex large features on an existing codebase, but it seems to be really good at spinning up and iterating on MVP/POC up to ~5000-7000 LOC. I've been burning through my "programming ideas" backlog/list in my spare time with good success, particularly in rust.

Millennials have finally started buying houses and plan on living somewhere long enough to buy a wire-in-the-ground annual cable subscription.
 
Not me though, I'm ad-free streaming till I die at this point.

Yep I also have a kagi subscription too. It's great; I'll never go back to Google search as my primary. Between it and the various ChatGPT flavors of the week I pretty much never use Google products anymore outside of Gmail, and very rarely Google maps.

ChatGPT is a better search product than google, traffic decline to SEO-optimized clickbait websites proves this; they're absolutely 100% going to monetize free tier chatgpt with ads, why would they not? Advertising is 70-90% of Google's stable revenue, they would be insane to leave that money on the table. The question is, given they already have paid-tier products, will they offer ad-free products still? Google always offered their products for free in favor of getting more eyeballs to drive ad revenue, because nobody was willing to pay for a search engine. In this instance, the paid product was offered up front, so hopefully paid products continue to offer an ad-free tier (which I'm happy to pay for, fuck ads).
 
Interestingly, Facebook just started offering a paid tier in... I think the UK? Hopefully that takes off and we see that across other advertising-funded , previously "free only" tier services. We got Youtube Premium during the pandemic and that's been a tremendous value for money.

The whole planet has been wired up with fiber since the late 1990s, even the island of St Helena (google it) has fiber now.

Does mother russia pay by the post or pay by the hour, commarade?

Your overuse of apostrophes is not how I wanted to start my Monday.

Somebody clearly hasn't been paying attention since about April 2025. Things have changed dramatically.

I am seeing the same languages focused on over and over for LLMs: rust, golang, python, c++, bash, typescript, java
 
if these are the languages LLMs are universally best at, that's probably what people will continue to write things in, as LLMs work best at those. Claude and GPT5 are phenomenal at writing rust, python, golang, even terraform

Not using Android means you don't have to put everything in a java wrapper first, and you're not limited to whatever "it seemed like the right decision" decisions Google made to support phones fifteen years ago when they couldn't/wouldn't fund the team better. You can join an android phone to a network using bluetooth (PAN-U), but that feature is missing from android because it was too much work and not enough people used it. Android was useful 15 years ago because it had a convenient touch UI/UIX/API but if you're not planning on letting users run games on your system, it doesn't really matter. Unity runs just as fine on Linux as Android these days with both being platinum level platforms for support.