justizin

“Anyone who can be fooled by an internet scam should be sent to war” is faulty in two ways, given that it hinges on a young person making poorly informed decisions:

  - being sent to war should probably not be the result of being young and gullible
  - if we need to send anyone to war, should we send the dumbest people we can find?

Oculus already lets you watch Netflix and stuff, visually it’s a pretty decent experience, but like … 42” TVs are $300 or something. you’re not gonna fall asleep on the couch with your headset on, or at least you certainly don’t want to.

I think it’s a beautiful and fascinating piece of tech, I doubt I’ll be an early purchaser, but I’d sure like one. It does feel like they are grasping at straws for mainstream use cases.

We cram our secrets into git

Excuse me?!

When I studied art history in school, a major theme was that most of the artists from long ago that we have heard of did some kind of work for whoever was in power, to make money, to create their masterpieces.

Let’s not pretend the CIA is particularly good at anything other than overthrowing Latin American democracies.

Really depends on if the cost increase is due to Apple taking a cut.

Apple only takes a cut of virtual goods. This is why you cannot buy Kindle books on iOS without going to the website, but you can buy a television.

I could see they justify this as value-based pricing. As in, it would have costed more for you to travel farther to get the food from that particular restaurant if you were to order pickup.

If this isn’t going to the driver, it’s absolutely unacceptable. DoorDash does not have to do more work because you would have had to drive further, but the actual driver does have to drive further, and is working for a flat fee.

To hear people on HN say things like this explains exactly why these companies do this. This is absolutely not a reasonable way to think.

i am of two minds on this.

FIRST, obviously, there are probably fewer dark patterns in anything than the intuit / us tax situation. there are so many problems with our tax system and the way it eats away at working people while barely touching the wealthiest folks.

i’ve had some unfortunate interactions with the CA Franchise Tax Board in recent years that have made me question whether the IRS will choose to be transparent and treat us fairly if this passes.

I’m certainly no tax expert, so the notion that I may have made a small mistake in past tax years that needed to be corrected is not unreasonable. that i was not provided with any detailed information, or really any communication at all, and the money was siezed from my paycheck without notice. The first time this happened was the second paycheck in the month of december. This sucked, but I was probably wrong, maybe I failed to update my contact address somewhere, and I always want to pay what I owe.

Fast forward to 2021/2022, somewhere in there, IIRC, the CA FTB, during a budget crisis, found that I was short a couple thousand over multiple years from several years back. I had never heard anything about this before, and they came at me for 2-3 years all at the same time. No information on what was incorrect.

CA has an, “Office of the Taxpayer Advocate”, because of course at some point we legislated that there should be someone paid by the state whose job is to help taxpayers who feel they have been wronged. Obviously there’s a weird conflict of interest here, but it’s better than nothing.

My interaction with the taxpayer advocate many years ago involved them trying to tax me for work I performed in an office in San Antonio, Texas, over a year before moving to California.

certainly part of this is about the fact that CA is a bit grabby at the entire lifetime income of anyone who relocates here, which is absolutely the fucking truth, but I also found these situations to give me pause on whether I want to trust the government to tell me whether or not I have correctly paid my taxes.

Even though I am single, live alone, no dependents, and claim 0, somehow I am always off.

If we want to simplify this, get out from under Intuit’s thumb, and have like 95% of the country or whatever not even have to worry about taxes, we have to fundamentally rethink how they are calculated.

Why isn’t my employer liable for not calculating the appropriate deduction? Why is this something I have to worry about? On balance, at this point in my career, a thousand bucks a year isn’t a big deal, the problem is asking me for it all at once, when there’s no great way for me to know to expect it.

I have, for the first time in my life, a small amount of savings, but I still don’t consider it a nest egg. That is my insurance for when I somehow manage to owe taxes even though I have done every single thing that I should do, correctly.

another knock on TurboTax is that they often end up calculating that you owe more tax than you do, and I think it backs up my concern that in those cases, the IRS does not say, “Hello, kind person, you gave us an extra $3,000, we would like to return it to you.”

It’s basically just fucking all bad.

Wow, not even Debian has done this. What a world in which RHEL is more adventurous than Debian.

Adventurous is adding things. Why remove things that work if some people are using them? Debian is less prescriptive than RHEL, and is widely used as the basis for a vast array of different targets. If there are still reasons for people to use Xorg, there are still reasons to have it in Debian, IMO. That doesn’t mean it will be installed and/or used by default.

RHEL is a specific type of target, particularly for things that need some sort of vendor certification, or for fleets who want to depend on RH for LTS and/or use their professional services, use it as part of a larger IBM contract, etc..

yeahp when there is load bearing python 2.7 code written by someone who has left, puts folks in a tough spot. :/

Stop visiting sites who treat their users this badly!

The problem is the individual sites aren’t making these highly technical decisions, people are using what seems to them an innocuous security product.

Not visiting a random website places no pressure on CloudFlare to change, since there’s no way to correlate your choice with the decision to use CloudFlare.

okay then who else?

when i last interviewed at apple, the office i interviewed in was so far from the spaceship, it was almost in another city. apple seems to be occupying just about every office park built since the 1970s in cupertino.

also - those non-spaceship offices are awful, unreachable by transit, no access to food without driving, basically an Office Space type environment. gross.

How long have you lived here? What were the conditions when you arrived, versus what you see now? What areas do you frequent?

Have you ever made friends with a homeless person? Do you know anyone who has been homeless in the past?

In my ~20y in SF, I have seen the exact same issues and political divides repeat over and over. There are certainly issues which need to be addressed, but the constant insistence that there is some short-term degeneration constantly leads to the reimplementation of solutions that do not work, particularly homeless sweeps and policing of nonviolent property crime.

Real solutions take time, commitment, dedication, and engagement from and with the community, not just shouting at a handful of politicians. That isn’t gratifying enough for most people, who want to see some overnight transformation, which is what leads to homeless people being shifted around from block to block based on who most loudly demands that seeing the poor on a daily basis makes them unsafe.

Further, this strategy prolongs and ingrains people being stuck on the street. Having access to the resources that help people get off the street, heal from addiction, and not be so desperate as to engage in petty property crime for survival makes everyone safer, including the folks currently living on the street. Being able to establish semi-stable communities (“encampments”) where they can rely on each other to watch their property, often including medications, identifying paperwork, treasured possessions like family photo albums which keep them tethered to reality, is key to seeing them improve.

This is the strategy upon which navigation centers are built, and while not perfect, it works for a lot of people.

The, “tough on crime, I don’t want to see the homeless”, strategy which has continually failed for decades actually, counterintuitively to many people - esp newcomers’ - perception, makes us all less safe. If there has been a decline in SF since you’ve moved here, it is almost certainly because of these wasteful, costly, and dangerous approaches to public safety and health.

It doesn’t matter how many condo towers are built, SF is never going to be a gated community. If you want to live in a gated community, I suggest you move to one.

I saw a reply to a thread on twitter where a woman said to one of his friends, something like, “sorry to burst your bubble but bob was a champion of ‘diversity’” and if that isn’t saying that quiet part out loud, hoof.

Yes and they rushed to cast this tragedy as part of an imagined crime epidemic.

There are some good contributors to the Chronicle, but they skew fairly conservative for SF and have for a long time.

He wasn't doing a great job

The previous DA was doing a fantastic job, he had finally started focusing on violent crime instead of, “quality of life” crime like shoplifting and vandalism. Doing this is difficult because people will (as they did!) post videos online of petty theft or “unruly” people in the streets and people who do not understand how safety is actually created are never going to listen to people who are actually informed.

he had picked a fight with the police chief.

This is not true. He prosecuted a police officer for murder and put pressure on the police, which have a long history of corruption and rampant racism, human trafficking, etc.. But police unions have a lot of power and influence, the average person thinks that police create safety (they do not! if they respond at all to anything, they respond after the fact with a pencil and paper, and their behavior is often very dangerous - e.g. speeding around the city running red lights when they clearly are not headed anywhere).

The police in SF do not have a tough job, and police everywhere, always slack off. The SFPD famously went on strike some decades ago and were basically shooting out streetlights and holding the entire city hostage, eventually culminating in a bombing on the mayor’s front lawn.

SFPD do not live in SF, almost any of them, they aren’t members of the community, they do not have the community’s best interest at heart. They are bullies who come from the suburbs and basically view all residents of SF as dirty miscreants. If you ask them for help in a violent situation, they will likely threaten you with violence or arrest yourself.

The Walgreens CEO was forced to admit on a public investor call that they had completely fabricated all of their concerns, that these closures were simply planned because San Francisco has far too many drugstores (in some areas there might be 3 walgreens within 2 blocks in each direction), and that they continued to suffer after closing the stores.

I’ve lived in SF almost 20 years, and Walgreens basically exists as a large corner store for people who want gatorade or doritos, and every single in-person pharmacy experience I have had in SF has been awful, sometimes an hour plus wait with 2-3 people in line. Often there are pharmacists behind the counter who simply refuse to talk to anyone.

These days I use Alto, and most people I know who don’t use some sort of online delivery service. In-person pharmacies suck unless you need a prescription with absolutely zero notice, and then they still suck at doing that.

As for the whole foods, anyone could have told folks that was a really stupid location for any sort of retail. That area has been struggling for a long time and the attempted solution was basically, “Bring a bunch of rich people to the area and hope all of the ‘problem’ people get locked up as a result.”

Shocking that did not work.

IQ has racist and eugenicist origins, not understanding that in 2023 can only be described as willful ignorance.

i love this, i often try to wrap things up 100% while in flow and sometimes end up screwing things up. this makes perfect sense.

the lyrics definitely read like ChatGPT output for, “write a 90s alternative rock song that explains why people should use zendesk”

you think it’s reasonable to put someone in jail for 20 years for logging into a social media website?

also: how are they going to determine that you did? what if you have malware on one of your devices and it accesses something banned?

sometimes estimates are useful for deciding what not to do..

“oh, that’s gonna take 6 months? we won’t need it by then, let’s do something else.”

none of those things listed are minor things, those things are the entire job.

no, a CEO isn't going to know what a clopen is like, but if they're responsible for people who are designing a process / choosing a set of tools / setting expectations for employees, being willing to step into the workers' shoes is a worthwile move.

if you ever find yourself needing to modify files at the shell on any sort of remotely modern unix/linux system, you're probably going to have vi or vim available.

it's worth knowing an editor that doesn't require 6GB of RAM and a graphical environment, but it's probably not going to be most folks' primary editor. ;d

Yes.

Use a large provider's DNS. I can't suggest supporting CloudFlare because of their dubious selective enforcement of ToS regarding sites that actively organize and encourage harm to people, but there are much lighter weight alternatives.

AWS Route53 is basically free and doesn't require you to use any other AWS services, the same is probably true for any other cloud provider. Smaller providers like DigitalOcean / Linode / whatever should also be fine - I use DO for personal stuff, but would happily use it for larger capacity projects. Many cloud provider DNS APIs are supported in terraform, so you don't have to worry about what the UI is like.

Your DNS registrar also probably offers this service.

I will say this: if your provider is unable to protect their own DNS service, you should find a better provider. While CloudFlare and other similar services have incredibly resilient DNS, most folks don't need that. Anyone who is in the business of hosting online services should be capable of running a resilient DNS service. If not, you have to ask yourself how resilient anything else they offer you is.

While there are lots of ways to screw it up, DNS is incredibly simple compared to basically any other service, reliability-wise. BIND on any reasonable hardware can handle katrillions of queries.

This is called, "The Tyranny of Competence", and is hostile to other workers.

Companies also don't have a way to quantify this, and sometimes will hesitate to term someone, until they are fed up and will just decide it is worthwhile at all costs.

I have worked with or been the successor to folks who did this and it made me absolutely furious, and reflected poorly on my performance.

It can't be that difficult to contribute to the achievement of absolutely tanking the company's value by investing in a dead-end VR-for-work platform that was always just a distraction to avoid responding in any way to Congress pressing him about election interference.

i found my therapist via a therapy app, which we both left long ago. Apps like BetterHelp and TalkSpace can be very hit and miss, but they're a place to start, and can serve as good matchmaking services.

Be prepared to pay out of pocket, my insurance pays about half of what my sessions cost. You get what you pay for. You don't want a therapist who is stretched too thin, overworked, or financially struggling themselves.

Also, ask friends and family, you may know more people in therapy than you realize, and talking about MH with people you know is incredibly helpful.

If you have a good PCP, ask them for a referral both to a therapist, and consider an IOP - an Intensive Outpatient Program. When you're trying to get out of crisis, it can be helpful to have more than just a weekly or biweekly session. I am in such a program now, it includes group therapy every day (I can choose which groups) and more intensive individual therapy and case management.

The particular program I am in also does ketamine therapy, which can help to rewire your neuropathways so that behavioral changes are more permanent. There are some online programs - Better U and Mindbloom come up in a quick search - which will offer this and other IOP-like services remotely, though I'm not sure how they compare to traditional IOP.

Above all, seeking help in any way that you can will make you feel better and I am personally proud of you for coming and asking a bunch of strangers for help. It shows a readiness to take on your challenges.

Good luck on your journey! <3

It's not the best time to be looking for work.

if the belief is that employees using sit/stand workstations will improve productivity and output, it's a business' own choice not to do so for employees who have collective bargaining.

there is also a cost associated with maintaining different workspaces and equipment for employees of different status, and it's a company's choice to take that on.

typically when discussing working conditions, you're talking about minimum standards. it's not very smart to refuse to improve working conditions across the board.

you said in a reply further down that you were an executive level manager, you should have told HR to shove it because your individual performance would be impacted by the collective output of your employees, and the costs of improving working conditions would be returned in several multiples, some of which you might receive as a bonus.

it was, however, your choice and right not to do this. :)