Linked List: April 30, 2022

Saturday, 30 April 2022

Tara AI 

My thanks to Tara AI for sponsoring this week at DF. Tara believes in bringing joy back into building and shipping software. Tara’s project management tools are designed for developers, founders, and teams that move quickly and build beautiful products. Tara wanted to build project management software they themselves would use, where they didn’t have to spend hours finding a ticket or syncing to source control, while maintaining 99.9 percent uptime.

Since Tara launched to the DF community for the first time, they’ve added a slew of features. Here’s what they’ve released just in the last few weeks:

  • Blazing fast search, across all your tasks, requirements, and synced Github issues.
  • Quick addition of tasks, without losing view of your sprints.
  • Assignment of requirements to multiple teams.

Special deal just for DF readers: 35 percent off all plans, with the coupon code DFTARA.

David Letterman Tried to Buy Twitter 

“But something else will come along.”

What’s the Mood Inside Twitter? 

Kate Conger, reporting for The New York Times:

Many Twitter employees feel personally invested in the company’s effort to encourage healthy conversation — even if they do not directly work on content moderation — and have pressed executives to crack down further on hate speech and misinformation, six employees said. They see Mr. Musk’s proposal to revert to Twitter’s early, lax approach as a rebuke of their work.

But other employees have argued in internal messages seen by The Times that their co-workers have shifted too far to the left side of the political spectrum, making employees who support Mr. Musk’s plans too uncomfortable to speak up. In a worker-run survey of nearly 200 Twitter employees on Blind, an anonymous workplace review app, 44 percent said they were neutral on Mr. Musk. Twenty-seven percent said they loved Mr. Musk, while 27 percent said they hated him.

Blind offers colleagues a way to — according to Blind — anonymously chat about and review their workplace, where only their fellow colleagues can see those internal-to-the-company discussion boards. They verify that participants actually work where they claim to work by requiring a work email address to sign up. Me, I wouldn’t trust this as far as I can throw it, and you can’t throw a website. I might sign up just to lurk, but I wouldn’t post a word that I wouldn’t say under my name. But that’s just me.

A poll of 200 Twitter employees — all of whom are on Blind — doesn’t prove anything, but that an evenly-split response is not what you’d expect based on the public comments from Twitter employees.

Apple Launches Self Service Repair Store 

Stephen Hackett, writing at 512 Pixels:

In a paper published today, Apple addresses some FAQs about the program. It’s worth skimming.

The manuals needed for repairs are published on Apple’s support website but the Self Service Repair store can be found at selfservicerepair.com. I was expecting these parts to be sold on Apple’s website, but the company has decided to spin this secondary website up for purchasing parts and tools.

The site is decidedly different from Apple’s own. The design is basic and feels pretty cheap.

Not surprised at all that Apple farmed this part of the Self Service Repair Program out to a partner, but the website should look more legit. Or at least the website should feature a prominent link at the top to Apple’s own website to verify that it is legit.

I saw folks on Twitter bitching that the tools are rented but they put a hold on your credit card for their full value until they’re returned. That’s how renting expensive tools and equipment works.