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Yeah, the trick on taking out low interest loans is they have to be long term, like a mortgage. Over 30 years, I'm definitely paying it back in post-inflation dollars. In one year? Not really. I'd have to get a raise on, like, the day I took out the loan.

On what laptops does sleep/hibernate work correctly when you close the lid, with Mint?

Seriously, swear to fucking god, every time someone says “oh Linux just works”, the next comment is “oh? I tried that distro on the recommended hardware and had trouble with…”

Next response is ALWAYS: “Oh yeah that’s broken but I don’t use that feature.” Usually about hibernate. As in, apparently everyone using a laptop plugged into a wall and never closes the lid. Or uses a desktop. I don’t even know, it doesn’t make any goddamn sense.

I just don’t believe you guys any more. Everyone who says Linux just works has adapted their workflows to be hyper specific to the things they do, and have just decided that basic-ass features present and working on mainstream OSes are just gimmicks that the rest of us should forgo out of moral purity.

Also with this “try again” noise. Good lord, happy y’all are blessed with the patience to try again until you find the right Goldilocks set of hardware and tweaks that doesn’t give you a migraine but there exists a large contingency of the population that doesn’t spend every waking moment staring at glowing rectangles. Spare us a fucking thought, and spare a thought for our relatives who took years to learn how to double click.

You are you are absolutely right that this will be a more beneficial attitude to carry into their futures because it is exactly what has allowed me to succeed, but only after unlearning some terrible internalized anxiety about failure caused by being told I was smart.

Please keep it up. I hope I run into your kids in the workplace and they are running circles around me with their productivity and goal setting.

A long time ago, on what.cd, I spent some time to upload rare and odd CDs I found at the library in Austin, TX. For a while, I had only one downloader, consistently. A user name Librarian. I looked up their IP address as it was connected to my seedbox and it was The Internet Archive’s. I suspect they have more content than they let on — that they are sitting on a trove of content that they are waiting for copyright expirations or reform.

If I were Kahle, on my death bed I would just upload the entire archive to some IPFS or torrent site and just let it all be free.

Side note: libgen is still around and it’s also another pure instance of what the internet should be.

But they do it with like minded people

This is the main problem I see with your compromise. The self-sorting will create or enforce existing silos. The compromise is not only between you and your employer, but also between you and your coworkers. You might derive no value from face to face interaction, but your coworkers certainly do — and that includes you.

I suspect that this self-sorting will result in a very loud cohort of in-office workers demanding everyone come back, which spoils the whole deal.

What is a sufficient compromise, in your view, that satisfies the need of some workers to have regular face to face interactions with coworkers and prevents corporations unprepared to manage a remote team from whipping back to full in-office?

I do not want to put words in your mouth, but since you offered so few of them, I am tempted to believe you are one of the few lucky workers who has sufficient leverage to wholesale refuse to work in an office. If that is you, or if you the reader are such a person: consider the path we must take to bring flexible work to more people.

With that goal and those prerequisites in mind, what is a sufficient compromise?

Working remote is just what I need, and I am way more productive.

I acknowledge that you and many others derive personal satisfaction from productivity. I do too. However, I strongly believe we should move away from productivity as the measure of whether we should work from home. Primarily because it individualizes productivity and turns any deficits into a moral failing. It is incumbent on our employers to create the conditions which align productivity with our well-being as people, and balance those. Else, we are being exploited.

Put another way, and framing it opposite from what you said:

"Working remote is not what I need because I am less productive" should not be an argument against working from home. You may not need working remotely for other reasons -- social being one of them -- but it's important not to prioritize productivity to the occlusion of all other factors.

I'd spin this around and cast it as a challenge -- regular, forced interactions with coworkers is minimally sufficient and retards some people from pursuing social activities outside the home.

Absolutely. Additionally, even getting to that set of regular, forced interactions necessarily consumes the limited time those people would have to pursue those social activities outside the home. That is, it's hard to have a strong social life when you commute, at best, 5 hours a week. And that's if you're lucky.

All of this benefits corporations. Especially, insidiously, the notion that your job can and should double as your social life.

What concerns me, today, is that that we're in this middle stage where things could tip either way. For this reason, I think it's important for us to bang the drum loudly that we won't spend 40-50 hours in the office. Hybrid is a sufficient compromise.

This quote from the education commissioner cracked me up:

In the letter to teachers, Education Commissioner Margie Vandeven said “an individual took the records of at least three educators, unencrypted the source code from the webpage, and viewed the social security number (SSN) of those specific educators.”

The number of consumers trying to buy a coffee who will “linearly interpolate between the two extremes” will be limited to a vanishingly small group of consumers who enjoy that kind of thing.

The two responses to my very simple question prove to me that crypto is a fad that will fade into the background. Maybe a few big players will use it as their protocol, but the average consumer is never going to think about it.

So the average consumer is back to trusting a central authority (PayPal)? Then what’s the point, for the end user, of the blockchain in the first place?

Note that the article is from 2013, and this is very much in line with Facebook’s stance overall: that they are just a forum for expression, and not in the business of policing speech. That stance has only softened, really, in the past few years.

The people dying of COVID and the people working from home are different cohorts. We have a vaccine, anti-virals, and natural immunity. Will the WFH cohort see an increase in deaths due to RTO? Certainly. We’ll also see more car accidents. The world has never been free of risk, and we are now emerging from the pandemic with a newly integrated risk model for this disease. It’s going to be touch and go for a while — years — but it’s important to remember that flattening the curve was always the goal. COVID Zero was never in play.

My first “tech” job out of college was tech support for a VPN company. Brilliant little operation reselling bandwidth to folks visiting China and those who wanted to hide their traffic. One reason I really respected the CEO and CTO is that they told us specifically to never, ever promise that we made people “anonymous on the Internet.” Even when they went to no-logs — a big step for them — they still maintained that we always stick to this line: “You are never anonymous on the Internet. Our service is to help you create a more private connection, one that makes it more difficult for you to be tracked by corporations and hackers. It does not protect you against state-level actors.” When I discussed this with them, they had an even more candid take: “Look, if you have the US government after you, you’re already fucked. No level of encryption is going to help.”

This has always stuck with me.

Open Web Advocacy 4 years ago

Want service workers to perform background sync? Want push notifications?

No. Not even a little. I don't want these for my native apps. I turn them off for everything.