If you’re on-call 24/7/365 without a break, and it’s not because you have equity in the company, then find a new job.

If you don’t, then your health (physical and mental) will eventually force you to leave anyway. I did it at a startup where I was employee #1 (no equity for me), just me and the founders, and I nearly had a nervous breakdown from it, and ended up quitting from stress. Afterwards I decided I would do no more than 1 week in 3, and life got better after that.

What? Tech companies the world over have people on 24/7 on-call rotas, and it’s usually voluntary.

Depending on the company, you might typically do 1 week in 4 on-call, get a nice little retainer bonus for having to have not much of a social life for 1 week in 4, and then get an additional payment for each call you take, plus time worked at x1.5 or x2 the usual rate, plus time off in lieu during the normal workday if the call out takes a long time. If you do on-call for tech and the conditions are worse than this, then your company’s on-call policies suck.

I used to do it regularly. Over the years, it paid for the deposit on my first house, plus some nice trips abroad. I enjoyed it - I get a buzz out of being in the middle of a crisis and fixing it. But eventually my family got bored of it, and I got more senior jobs where it wasn’t considered a good use of my energies.

Your internet connection, the websites and apps you use, your utilities - they don’t fix themselves when they break at 0300.

If TSMC’s approach to on-call is bad, then yeah, screw that. I don’t see anything in the article that says that one way or the other. But doing an on-call rota at all is a perfectly normal thing to do in tech.

I can only imagine they’re shutting it down to replace it with something with different branding, based on an LLM. Microsoft has gone all-in on LLMs and I’m sure they’d love some of that virtual assistant action if they were able to differentiate themselves.

Converted-to-Bluetooth Stadia controller.

It’s actually a really nice controller. The ergonomics are great for my big meaty hands, it’s got some weight to it and feels really solidly built. The heft means the vibration really has some kick to it. The battery life is really good too - it was specced for having Wi-Fi on all the time, so now it’s running only a little Bluetooth LE radio, the battery is massive. Even when it runs down, the charge rate is quick - full in about half an hour, and then good to go for weeks. Again, probably because it was specced for Wi-Fi, the radio circuitry is way above average and the range is stupid - I can control a Steam Deck from two rooms away, through two solid brick walls, something none of my other controllers can do.

The sticks are accurate and don’t drift, the buttons are pretty good, and the D-Pad is a bit stiff but perfectly serviceable. My one significant complaint is that the springback on the triggers is way too light, which makes it difficult to be subtle with the triggers, a little annoying for driving games.

Still, if you see one at a sensible price, they’re a steal.

Bit of a nitpick, but the comparison with the reversing of the MS Office formats is a bit tenuous, and somewhat revisionist.

Competitors and open-source applications were reverse-engineering the Office file formats long before Apple iWork was a thing, and arguably no-one really gets it right because in order to get it perfect you’d have to reproduce the Office application layouting engine exactly, bug-for-bug. Even Microsoft doesn’t get it 100% from release to release.