My hobby: doing things the easy way and then watching in despair as 5x as many people do it over again the hard way.

NO WAIT THAT'S MY JOB

I think I just understood why Americans are so afraid of a "nanny state." The nannies here are psychotically overprotective.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/02/13/nyregion/central-park-ice-fest-canceled-cold.html

Come on, it was -40 with windchill in Ottawa last year, and we went to the ice fest, and we liked it! (Okay, we didn't like it all that much, but we went.)

The older I get, the more familiar this story sounds.

http://alumnimagazine.insead.edu/who-killed-nokia-nokia-did/

Apologies for linking to the Ycombinator post, but it was actually useful.  I had no idea the Apple's new iOS security model (iPhone 5S and later) was so amazing.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11114756

The court order here is for an iPhone 5C so I guess it's probably technically possible to comply.

"The problem is not that we have a lot of fsync() calls. Quite the reverse. fsync() is really really rare. So is being careful in general. The number of applications that do even the minimal safety-net of 'create new file, rename it atomically over an old one' is basically zero." -- Linus Torvalds

The technological singularity: 

The dystopian but likely future point when increasing frequency of software updates intersects with the increasing amount of time it takes to "optimize your applications" after a software update.  When this happens, progress will, paradoxically, be prevented by progress itself.

Fiber to the Press Release, we still call it.  They're awfully good at it though.

http://www.courier-journal.com/story/opinion/2016/02/26/comment-fiber-optics-leader-may-surprise-you/81003548/

"At Apple, 99 percent of everything that was started would ship. Now, with the iPhone it took two and a half versions to finally ship it, but you knew it was going to ship. That's a very different thing in your culture. If people know it's going to ship, they invest in it. If you have a culture where you kill stuff all the time, you won't get the best out of your people, and the best people are going to walk."
-- Tony Fadell

That's not what I expected. I assumed they intentionally didn't release tons of stuff over there.

http://venturebeat.com/2016/02/28/how-the-father-of-the-ipod-iphone-and-nest-became-a-tech-visionary/