Nest started out great for me as an early adopter.
The recent iterations are just frustrating. The apps are laggy. It’s always prompting me to join an energy savings program no matter how many times I say no. We had to disable the home/away detection because it went from working well to thinking we were away 5 times per day.
Nest stands as my example of a product that went from great to terrible through complete mismanagement and customer neglect.
Yep. I have an Ecobee currently and have had a Nest previously. Am totally perplexed why people like these things. Just opened the Ecobee app and literally at the top is an ad saying "The Holiday sale is here. Shop now." Irritates me to no end.
the worst is that it doesn’t show up immediately, but after a second and it’s location is where I just went to tap to enter my thermostat, forcing me to exit back. I now try and just use the app via Apple Home for a better experience.
My Nest works great other than the app trying me to get to change my account to Google, which I just close out of every-time. Basic functional UI and works as billed. The unit itself has a nice sturdy feel to it with a very intuitive wheel-and-click interface. It's the only smarthome thing I have besides Hue lightbulbs
> I've known I was gay since high school, probably even earlier, but I kept choosing whatever seemed like the easiest path.
Just so you know, you're not alone here. Mine was a bit different (gender related) but the causes are essentially the same: I just kept choosing whatever path was easiest instead of facing what I was actually feeling. It made me fabulously "successful" at life and I had everything that you would expect to come along: wife, kid, big house, fancy job. It's a hard feeling to reconcile - being so successful in what most of society would say you should be ... and yet still so miserable.
I'll add my voice to others here that this is a huge problem especially for small hobbyist websites.
I help administer a somewhat popular railroading forum. We've had some of these AI crawlers hammering the site to the point that it became unusable to actual human beings. You design your architecture around certain assumptions, and one of those was definitely not "traffic quintuples."
We've ended up blocking lots of them, but it's a neverending game of whack-a-mole.
> one of those was definitely not "traffic quintuples."
O, it was... People warned about the mass usage of WordPress because of its performance issues.
The internet usage kept growing, even without LLM scraping in mass. Everybody wants more and more up to date info, recent price checks, and so many other features. This trend has been going on for over 10+ years.
Its just now, that bot scraping for LLMs has pushed some sites over the edge.
> We've ended up blocking lots of them, but it's a neverending game of whack-a-mole.
And unless you block every IP, you can not stop them. Its really easy to hide scrapers, especially if you use a slow scrap rate.
The issue comes when you have like one of the posters here, a setup where a DB call takes up to 1s for some product pages that are not in cache. Those sites already lived on borrowed time.
Ironically, better software on their site (like not using WP), will allow them to handle easily 1000x the volume for the same resources. And do not get me started in how badly configured a lot of sites are in the backend.
People are kind of blaming the wrong issue. Our needs for up to date, data, has been growing for over the last 10 years. Its just that people considered website that took 400ms to generate a webpage as ok. (when in reality they are wasting tons of resource or are limited in the backend)
Three jobs ago I worked for a company that did e-learning systems for industrial clients. This was roughly 2004. One of the company owner's many ideas was a technical documentation system based on XML and XSLT. The "idea" being that technical writers or SMEs would rather write XML than, you know, use a word processor.
Unsurprisingly the idea did not take off, but I did find the XML/XSLT combination to be very interesting.
Between 2000 and 2003 I worked for a company that produced corporate training materials (initially on CDROM, later as learning-management-system units). We had a system which allowed the content authors to write in structured Word files. VBA would create XML of the Word files, and XSLT would create the HTML. I mostly worked in the XSLT and JS/CSS layers, not on the XML generation layer. It was my first job out of uni and I found XSLT fascinating and slightly psychedelic.
Is this DITA? I always wondered who actually used that.
XSLT is also big in the TEI community in digital humanities. TEI gives a structured markup for reproducing printed volumes, which is important when you are dealing with variants of the same text, like revised editions of a text. XSLT lets you turn your TEI file into a web page for humans to read.
My day-to-day work now is mostly Python and Vue, but PHP was my bread and butter for almost 20 years and to this day probably still probably one of my favorite languages just because I am still so familiar with it. There's something to be said for knowing all the traps and rough spots, and knowing how to avoid them.
The things that held PHP up in the early days, especially it being just dead simple to deploy, are not as big a deal in 2025 as they were in 2005. Shared hosting, while it still definitely exists, is kind of a dying model. Most modern dev I see these days even in PHP is nginx/PHP-FPM and containers, which is really not that terribly different from any other web framework. Even Wordpress, these days I recommend anyone who truly wants to go down that path to find a hosted Wordpress provider rather than trying to do it themselves.
Personally? I would never start a greenfield project now using just PHP. I don't know many people who would.
But PHP + Composer + Laravel? Laravel did for PHP what Rails did for Ruby, and what React/Vue/etc did for JS. Composer gave PHP real package management. It cannot be understated how important it was to have a framework and package manager to take care of all of the thoroughly unpleasant parts. That way you can focus on building the app, not reimplementing things you've done so many time before.
Just wanted to say thank you for this service. I have a little homebrew clock I build from a Raspberry Pi and a small display in my bathroom. Below the time, it displays the weather forecast for the day so I know how to dress. That little clock has become an essential piece of my morning routine.
I switched to Open Meteo a few months ago when the previous API I was using quit working. It's been rock solid and such a nice user experience compared to everything else I tried.
At my last job, when I first started there (this was circa around 2006), we actually used a Firefox browser plugin with a custom XUL interface to enable our writers to write content faster. It has a very complex UI, as complex as anything that could be found in the browser itself. Thousands of lines of XML and JS.
XUL was deeply unpleasant to use and maintain, and I do not miss it at all. We eventually ended up rewriting it as a standard webapp. It made the writers a bit slower, but they adapted eventually.
> Another problem is that programmers specialize at being good at programming, but things like documentation and UI testing are their own disciplines that are separate and distinct in a lot of meaningful ways.
Even having decent UIs is a problem for many Linux apps and many are often deeply unpleasant to use day-to-day. This is one thing that has started to slowly get better in the last decade or so, but I can always tell what applications were designed by programmers and which ones have had at least some UI work done on them.
Also, accepting feedback from users on UI improvements often gets either ignored or de-prioritized in favor of adding new features. It's very frustrating to see an otherwise really fantastic application with a lot of neat functionality hamstrung by a bad UI.
The only desktop to have real meaningful large-ish/professional usability testing is Gnome. And that is only a couple times.
The first time was financed by Sun Microsystems in 2001 for Gnome 1.x and the result was Gnome 2.
The second time was financed by Novell around 2005 or so for their attempt to compete with Microsoft with Novell Linux Desktop. Unfortunately for them the real beneficiary of the improvements that results from their work was Canonical's Ubuntu.
Since then there have been numerous smaller/informal/ad-hoc attempts for both KDE and Gnome.
The results of all of this, of course, is that many "Linux users" believe that Gnome is the result of a conspiracy between IBM, Redhat, and maybe even Microsoft to "destroy the Linux desktop".
So that is fun.
The real success story, from what I can tell, is Blender.
They successfully revamped their user interface without a huge budget. Although it was still financed somewhat by some EU initiative, IIRC. They accomplished this by getting developers sat down next in a big room to actual 3D artists working together to produce a animated feature.
By physically placing users next to devs and having them work together, likely with a great deal of humility and openness, they managed to transform their UI into something that was actually decent.
This is probably a model that can be duplicated by other open source developers, although finding the right type of technical users not experienced in using said software willing to participate is going to always be a major challenge.
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