S201

The overall Forest Service budget has indeed been increasing, but it's nearly all going to wildfire fighting. I recently wrote about the state of forest road funding and went in depth on this here: https://ephemeral.cx/2024/09/losing-access-to-the-cascades

Overall, in 1995 16% of the Forest Service budget was dedicated to wildfires. By 2015 it was 52% and by 2025 it’s projected to be upwards of 67%. Without large amounts of additional funding it is virtually guaranteed that the Forest Service’s budget will continue to be siphoned away by firefighting needs.

I actually quite like it when this happens from the candidate side of the table. I don't want to work anywhere that is so short term focused on "you need to have X years of experience with this exact language/framework or we won't even consider you." It saves us both a lot of time by realizing our values are clearly not aligned early on in the process.

This is how software freedom dies. If bs like this and that "web environment integrity" crap Google tried to push into Chrome last year isn't an obvious sign that Google is a monopoly and needs to be broken up then I don't know what is. It's a disgrace what Google has done to Android as a formerly open and developer friendly platform.

Plus Garmin devices use the Iridium network which has truly global coverage (as opposed to Globalstar which is only in select areas of the world) as well as other features useful for non-emergency backcountry travel. I won't be dropping my Garmin InReach any time soon.

Bank apps not running on phones where security has been compromised seems entirely reasonable.

I have root access on my laptop and I log in to my bank's website just fine. Making apps not run on rooted phones is just perpetuating the cycle of forcing users to comply with the restrictions placed upon them by Apple and Google. Root access != less secure. It means control over the device you paid for and own.

I've never been locked out of my LibreOffice documents stored locally on my Linux box.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

This was also a major concern around the construction of the Golden Gate bridge; that during a time of war an enemy could have destroyed it to trap a large portion of the Navy's Pacific Fleet in the bay.

https://pirep.io - a collaborative database of all airports in the US & Canada and their local amenities for general aviation pilots. There's a bunch of local knowledge scattered about for recreational pilots, most of it unpublished. Pirep aims to make that more accessible so it in turn gets more people out flying.

right in front of ultra short timeouts everywhere

If only I could meet the people who make these decisions in person...

For what it's worth, I was once forced to implement a half hour auto-logout on a website that could hardly be considered as containing sensitive data because an external pentest firm flagged the lack of a short timeout as an issue. The only way we could show clients a passing pentest was to comply with all of the findings. We all knew it was stupid but management gave us no choice but to implement it.

Heh, that's the same company that sends physical mail to me every time I make a trade because they believe that email sent to my personal domain is "undeliverable" and automatically opt me out of e-statements no matter how many times I opt-back in. They have to be losing money on me by paying for so much postage at this point.

(And no, nothing is wrong with my email, it's hosted by a professional email host with the proper MX records and literally only Schwab claims to have this problem with me).

I still have a stack of these lying around. I used them in high school for carrying a live Linux distro in my wallet to use on the school computers since the BIOSs were too old to support booting from USB. Needless to say, the school district IT department was not happy with me.

Lion Air 610 crashed October 29, 2018. BA closed at $357 that day. It continued to go down to $304 on December 17th 2018. By February 25 2019 it hit a high of $440. A month later Ethiopian Airlines 302 crashed sending BA down again. The larger issue beyond this was covid sending the stock plummeting so it didn't really have a chance to rebound after the affected 737 models were recertified and not grounded anymore.

But you're coming at this from a long term investing point of view. If you're day trading or swing trading (which is likely given it's an individual stock and buying individual stocks for a long term investment is rarely a good idea) then it presents an opportunity. Of course, nothing is a sure bet in the market but seeing something like Boeing down 18% can present a short term opportunity for speculators. Would I put BA in my retirement funds? Absolutely not. Would I try to swing trade BA in a case like this? There's a good chance.

Boeings stock price is down 18% this month.

Sounds like a good time to buy it then. There's a 0% chance the government would let Boeing go down so it will rebound just like it did with the last 737 issue a few years ago.

It was a joke.

The problem is that after paying the strike price to exercise and the subsequent taxes I'd be underwater based on their current FMV so it doesn't make sense to exercise them. Plus I have very little confidence left in the business.

I have options on Carta from a prior employer that are going to expire in a few months because there's no buyer for them. If Carta is looking for some shares to trade without the owner's consent I wholeheartedly volunteer.

Same here. Between this and the numerous price hikes I cancelled Prime this past year having been a subscriber for over a decade. The only reason I paid for Prime was the shipping speed and Amazon consistently failed to deliver on that so why keep paying $150/yr for it? It was $50 when I first signed up and felt like it had only gotten worse over the years despite tripling in price. I don't miss it at all.

I now try to buy direct or from mom & pop stores whenever possible and I find that the shipping speeds with UPS and USPS are more consistent and regularly faster than Amazon to boot. For the odd item that I need to buy from Amazon and need it quickly it's much cheaper to pay for one-off fast shipping instead of the yearly Prime fee.

And? It's called collecting evidence.

You are completely missing the point that this is not just about an individual's ability to buy hardware that they can do what they want with, but rather two corporations (Apple and Google) locking out all competition on their respective platforms they have a duopoly on.

Your view seems to be that the free market will solve all ills then and that if this was really something so important then the average consumer would care about it and change the situation. However, 100+ years of anti-trust laws would disagree with this position. It should be fairly obvious that building a new mobile ecosystem would require an insane amount of investment to the point that it's essentially impossible now. As such, the conclusion that "everyone who cares can just buy a Linux phone" is not a viable solution as it's not feasible for a competitor trying to do that to survive long enough in the industry before being run into the ground due to the anti-competitive behavior of Apple and Google locking everyone else out of access to their operating system's users outside of their formal, approved channels.

If we relied on the average person to act in the interest of ensuring viable competition can enter a market we'd be living in the world of the early 1900s with completely vertically and horizontally integrated Standard Oil type corporations controlling every industry. Not that we're too far off from that currently unfortunately, but your view of letting the free market control who has adequate access to potential marketshare in a given industry is incredibly naive and illustrates the exact reason why we need anti-trust laws in the first place and enforcement of those laws. That's all I have to say on the matter.

Please point me to the smartphone that I can freely do whatever I want with. For all Apple devices, it's non-existent. For Android there's only a few limited options left that ship with a bootloader that can be unlocked.

The point is that this isn't 1986 anymore and when everyone's devices are locked down it prevents competition because there's no distribution method for homebrew software. If there was no ability to install custom OSs on IBM and IBM-compatible machines we wouldn't have Linux. And if Microsoft was the gatekeeper of what websites could be displayed on IE in the 90s we wouldn't have the web in the form we know it today. So sure, you personally may be able to buy development boards specifically but when you can't get your software to the average person's device, what does that mean for adding competition to the market?

I'd much rather live in a world where being more open means there might be some malware lurking as opposed to one where everything is so locked down that I am at the mercy of what these large corporations deem acceptable for me to do on hardware that I "own" in the name of safety and security.

I assume by being on HN you work in the tech industry. Assuming so, you owe your career and livelihood to the openness of the systems that came before you and the people that built them. Locking everything down in the name of safety and convenience is also a great way to prevent innovation and competition.

Yes. If I bought and paid for something I own it and should be able to run whatever software I want on it. Anything less makes it not my device anymore.

And malware has never existed in the Google Play store, right?

The point is that if you are the owner of the device you get to choose what to do with it, not Google. If the trade off for that freedom is an increased risk of malware then so be it. The people that want to only use the Google Play store as their source of software are free to do so, that's the beauty of your device being /your/ device.

Is it the stock battery or after-market? Even if you bought it one year ago, when was it filled with acid? Many auto parts stores sell sealed lead-acid batteries as "new" when they've been sitting on the shelf for a year and the clock starts ticking when the acid goes in. You can get higher quality AGM batteries that will last far longer, but know they are quite expensive. Alternatively, you have a parasitic battery drain going on with your car.

A hardwood table does not cost remotely the same in terms of materials or labor as a cheap table that you can buy at the likes of IKEA and crowd. Hardwood, especially nice hardwood, costs FAR more than MDF. For example, a slab of black walnut sized for a coffee table can be hundreds or thousands of dollars and must be custom sourced from specialty locations or local individuals whereas a 4x8' sheet of MDF can bought at any lumber yard for under $100. And that's not even getting into the difficulty of working with rough cut wood as opposed to S4S wood that you buy at a lumber yard.

It's not that there's not a demand for unleaded avgas, I'd say most GA pilots are ambivalent to leaded vs. unleaded fuel; they just want whatever makes the prop spin.

The issues with the unleaded avgas rollout are purely bureaucratic. The FAA has been dragging its feet for literally decades to get it done. Even when we have fuels like G100UL approved which is a drop-in replacement for ~80% of the GA fleet, it still takes forever to get across the finish line.

Unlike software, there is no machine that can do the type of woodworking you describe.

A CNC?

Conversely, my own experience shows that even with context window limitations, ChatGPT is already better than 90% of working software engineers for generating small practical programs.

Well if we're doing anecdotal experiences, I find ChatGPT (both with 3.5 and 4) useful for replacing quick search queries to look up documentation but for anything more complex than that and it quickly starts making up blatantly incorrect examples even for small programs making it more than useless most of the time for me at least. But you're welcome to disagree; I don't have the energy anymore to get into my 1000th internet discussion full of anecdotal evidence trying to validate the future merits of generative AI for software engineering purposes.

Folks still enjoy doing woodworking and make boxes, tables, benches, etc. -- even though they could easily buy them new, used, or for pretty cheap (say, at IKEA).

For what it's worth, many woodworkers prefer making their own stuff because it is of far higher quality than what you can buy at IKEA (and similar stores). With the exception of extremely high end and expensive stuff, most furniture is complete junk. Making a coffee table out of a solid slab of walnut, for example, will last a lifetime compared to the cheap MDF table at IKEA.

Obviously I nor anyone else can predict the future, but I wouldn't be surprised for a similar divide to appear with AI generated software vs. completely hand written software where the hand written software is of higher quality for those that desire such things.

Tangential: A few years ago a coworker of mine suddenly died in a tragic accident at way too young of an age. Every once and a while when I see his name pop up in a git blame from code written many years ago I'll click into his GitHub profile as it is frozen in time now. For the first year the worst part of this was watching the green contributions squares slowly retreat to the left until the wall was solid grey.

It makes me wonder how long all of our online presences will remain after we're gone. Personal blogs/websites will go down and large companies like GitHub & social media will yield to newer competitors. Archive.org is probably the longest living publicly available archive of these profiles but who knows how long that will exist for either. Like countless other human lives, at some point there will be no evidence left that we were even here at all. "All those [profiles] will be lost in time, like tears in rain."