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A decade of hindsight

I wrote a bunch of stuff over the last 10 years. Now that we know what happened, this is my look back. Followup is most recent posts first, and then getting older.

History podcasts did well, and keep getting better.

I liked the Casio Smartwatch, but WearOS and its apps aren't getting much development. (It was particularly frustrating when even Google didn't bother to keep their apps working, and some third party ones just stopped working one day.) It turns out the Apple Watch is also 50m water resistant, will also run for 30 days in power reserve mode, and can also be charged without taking the watch off. Those were the important base features of the Casio to me. Apple watch also has a 1,000 nit display (ie sunlight readable), and you get microphone, speakers, and NFC. Plus the rectangular display is better for those like me who prefer digital watchfaces with lots of information. Even Google's apps work better. I switched.

I keep wishing Emacs well. Language servers have made development environments easier. In the end I did abandon Atom in favour of Visual Studio Code. While vscode doesn't have tramp mode, the remote development is good enough.

I was very wrong about Mario Kart 8. It is a lot of fun, and Nintendo fixed many of the Wii version issues. We try the Wii version again every now and then, and it seems less fun than we remembered.

I had to switch from Nikola to Pelican. The main feature of Pelican is a far slower development pace, and not sucking in lots of dependencies. Nikola went full tilt adding many features quickly, but that made it hard to run infrequently since everything would be a lot harder to update. Additionally every time I ran it, there was a blizzard of messages about deprecations and configuration changes.

Support is still a problem. It is still usually treated as a cost centre, with incentives to do as little as possible. It is easier to support smaller numbers of customers who have paid more for a product, but offering supoort to large numbers of people cheaply doesn't seem to be done by anyone.

SSL was fixed by Lets Encrypt.

RSS is still around, but not as mainstream as the days of Google Reader. I still use it.

Self driving cars are still just around the corner, while there is more evidence of just how bad human drivers are.

I still have trouble with voice recognition. Most of the services do get it mostly right now, but when they get it wrong it is very wrong. Any other humans in the room usually also burst into laughter, due to what the service did. For example I may ask for a temperature conversion, and instead the service will start reading out some obscure fact.

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