I fixed this on my A158 (basically a silver F91) by replacing the backlight spreader. Super simple mod and only costs about $12. Granted that's close to the cost of the watch itself.
If I'm not mistaken, this is written by the author of Lucia, a popular auth library for TypeScript [0]. He recently announced that he will be deprecating the library and be replacing it with a series of written guides [1], as he no longer feels that the Lucia library is an ergonomic way of implementing auth. He posted an early preview of the written guide [2] which I found enjoyable to read and complements The Copenhagen Book nicely.
this is great. he saw the coming complexity explosion, that the library was no longer useful to him personally, and took the humble route to opt out of the Standard Model of library slop development. rare.
I often wonder what universities brings to students who are already performing in professional life. I’m tempted to ask “So what is he going to teach?” to such stories.
Networking, physical and information resources, help with learning things he might have had trouble grokking, and the signal provided by a degree to get into organizations or events that might not have heard of him. If a very smart and already accomplished person doesn't worry about money, academia (at least attendance) can be a very good choice.
Yeah, but Lucia is just going to be immediately replaced with some other popular auth library.
The thing is, 99% of people really do just need 'log in / log out', and this is an incredibly useful thing to have as a library.
If you need Web 8.0 passkeys served via WASM eliptic curve sockets or whatever, sure, roll your own or use Auth0. But it feels really silly for the consensus around auth to be 'oh, you're making a CRUD cooking app to share your love of baking? cool, well here's the OAuth spec and a list of footguns, go roll some auth'. It's not a good use of that person's time - they should be focussed on their actual idea rather than being forced to reinvent plumbing - and tons of people are going to get it wrong and end up with effectively no auth at all.
Haha I've been working on my cooking app[0] (not ready yet, join the waiting list!), and for the last 1 month I've been implementing auth with AuthKit (bad experience IMHO, should have just self host SuperTokens in hindsight), experiencing what you described here 1:1
I'm continuously impressed by Costco. Not only is it one of my favorite places to shop, but I also recently recent to the Acquired episode on Costco[0] and was super impressed by how they run their business. They've continuously been able to align their unique advantages to reenforce each other and make their advantages even stronger. I highly recommend this episode to everyone.
The beauty of competent management from the very top down. They understand that paying people a living wage has become a massive competitive advantage these days.
What are those? I never really found any sort of "unique advantage" of Costco. Certainly nothing to drive the extra distance past Sam's. While I had a membership, it was largely more expensive or didn't have what I wanted.
Product filtering: Low number of SKUs of high confidence. I can basically blindly pick up anything at a Costco and be assured of a certain basic quality. It's the opposite of a place like Amazon.
Customer filtering: The subscription model creates a high trust customer base with way lower chances of shoplifting, fraudulent returns and the like.
As a consumer, the advantage to Costco is they've done the product filtering for you. You can reasonably bet that whatever Costco has is in the upper echelons of good within that product category. Costco also ends up being cheaper if you do enough shopping there, because Costco's low prices are realized by the membership fees comprising the lion's share of their revenue.
As a merchant, Costco is significantly more efficient than other retailers due to a much leaner and simpler inventory because they only ever sell one or two brands of a given thing and only one or two things of a given brand. They don't have to deal with the overhead of unmoving stock, micromanagement of stock, and other such inefficiencies of non-scale.
All of these things are true. But the real advantage of Costco is that they’ve been consistent in their strategy for years. Having built a loyal customer base by offering high-quality products at reasonable prices, they haven’t shifted gears to raise prices or fill their stores with garbage products and coast on their brand recognition. This is shockingly unusual in today’s (US) economy.
Gas is cheaper. Pharmacy is cheaper, whether you have insurance or not. Perhaps more so if you don't have insurance. The regular stuff is good quality and cheaper than competition too. I don't even shop that much, but I still maintain the membership as I come out ahead even with my occasional shopping.
Every product at Costco is vetted or experimental. Either way, you’ll always be happy because if you don’t like it they have their eternal refund policy (refund at any time without a time limit)
The product return rates are also tied to customer data (membership scanning is required to pay). The better return data allows them to make better decisions on which products to boot.
They also treat their employees well. (Not with free food or other so-called "tech" company nonsense). I have been impressed with the people from Costco I have met at conferences.
If you go in the back near the bathrooms, there's usually a wall of photos marked "25 years long service", and I noticed more recently one "40 years long service" (although a few of them had "retired now!" stickers).
That there's enough retention to justify that suggests they haven't burnt their employees too badly.
In case it’s helpful to anyone who has to jump off vercel:
I recently had to transition my company off of vercel for reasons unrelated to this (wanted to use cloud infra primitives that vercel does not provide, and wanted to leverage the large amount of AWS credits my company received) and found sst.dev [0] to be easy to migrate to and a joy to use in general. It leverages open-next to deploy next.js projects on AWS in a serverless way.
I’ve been enjoying using it so much that for my next project I think I’ll skip vercel altogether and use sst from the start.
For me personally, I find a functional programming to be the most productive when working on a project as a solo dev or as part of a very small team that I've hired. But the downside is that it's much harder to onboard devs without experience in functional programming. It takes a while before they can be productive when introduced to a codebase that's mostly written in a functional style — one that's written in Effect for example.
I recently started a company and was tempted to use Effect as I felt I would be able to build faster and higher quality than Standard TypeScript, but decided against it since I felt that I would pay the price when it came to grow the team. So far the decision has paid off.
I did indulge myself a little bit though and do make heavy use of remeda and ts-pattern across my code.
I use a similar pattern in my typescript code by using the Remeda library[0]. Like the patterns described in the article, the util functions can be used in both a one-off data-first way:
Although this article was adapted from the author's newest book, she also has an older book[0] where she writes more about this topic and how it relates to emotions. I thought it was a little longer than it needed to be, but it was still the most interesting no-fiction book I read that year.
