Pretty much anyone can volunteer and became an UAV drone operator in Ukraine. Get an experience you'll use in the WW3!

Most developers are not good at testing. That's why the role of test engineer exists.

I've seen in multiple projects things like assertTrue(true).

I'm sure the agent is better in testing than average enterprise developer.

big tech is moving / has moved away from the role.

Unfortunately for the users, testing has been pushed to them. You can deploy whatever slop you want - nobody cares. More lines of code!

It was perfect when the only way to connect to the internet was a computer.

Smartphones ruined it.

notifications specifically played, and still play, a most prominent role.

>> post the 100 bugs I hit that week.

But nobody cares. Posting bugs is mostly pointless, it's wasted time. Nowadays even for paid products quality is not a priority.

People are hating it untill goes abroad to the countries where no such regulations exists.

Like in Switzerland it's okay to charge double for the car insurance simply because you carry "unlucky" citizenship.

Or EU law about mandatory 14-day return policy for internet order. Ordered recently something in Switzerland and turns out it was a special sale where standard rules does not apply and items could not be returned.

Or mandatory USB-C charge socket. God bless EU regulations!

You're right that the EU has much stricter baseline consumer protections than Switzerland, but none of the examples you gave are actually part of the GDPR. Insurance pricing rules come from EU equal treatment directives, the 14-day online return window is the EU Consumer Rights Directive, and the USB-C mandate is the Common Charger Directive (which Switzerland actually adopted into law in 2024 anyway).

The GDPR is strictly about data privacy, and it deserves defense on its real merits: it made data collection illegal by default without an explicit legal basis, banned deceptive tracking patterns, and introduced turnover-based fines large enough that tech companies actually had to re-engineer their systems around privacy by design. EU consumer protection directives are great, but it's worth crediting the right ones.

If you are traveling and need to rent a car in the airport - sometimes it is not possible to do without credit card. Otherwise you don't need a credit card.

Using a credit card makes it way, way easier to rent a car or book a hotel room, or do other transactions that require a significant preauth.

If you present a debit card to one of those desks, they may encourage you to swap for a credit card. Because a debit preauth ties up actual funds in your account. A credit preauth costs nothing but part of your credit limit. It really is a difference if you expect to spend money on vacation.

You can buy a new Toyota car or SUV in USA for $25k. You can buy a used Toyota for $17k.

I don't think sales be different. Not many people are ready to drop 100k+ and wait months/years for the delivery.

God bless America! Land of the free! Free to tip everyone you exchange money with.

You can get an additional phone with a screen, 5g radio, ram and everything for $150. An additional radio should not raise the price for another 300.

I assume for something like a phone these things are non-linear. going from 2 PCIe lanes (nand, radios) to 3 (another radio) may cause an SOC to jump from entry-level to mid-level, larger PCB and increased layer count, more antenna for simultaneous use, etc. so its not just the cost of the chip but all the secondary effects.

In many phones, some of the radio hardware is integrated into the SoC. Adding a second, independent radio is a larger engineering task.

A non-linear cost for a small fraction of the phone. A slightly larger PCB with two more layers is about twice the price for the PCB, more antennas is a couple dollars, a one lane PCIe switch is a few dollars if that's cheaper than upgrading your SOC. And if it shrinks your battery 10% you save money on that part.

I blame niche-ness far more than the actual design and production costs.

Edit: fixed the pcb wording

> PCIe switch is a few dollars if that's cheaper than upgrading your SOC

perhaps you're more familiar with these options than I am, but I see 4 lane PCIe switches are 10x10 mm and maybe they are a few dollars but take more board space, new/larger power supplies, etc so it seems that the costs are more than just a few dollar PCIe switch chip. not sure how many phone PCBs can handle additional 100 mm2 but definitely looking forward to learning more.

[1] https://www.diodes.com/products/connectivity/pcie-packet-swi...

add to the antennas are likely based on best/cheapest efficiency for the available area, then additional antenna would reduce the area for each and require more effort/cost.