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morgan814

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Native software is incredibly difficult to build well.

Sure. But if Zetetic, the SQLCipher[0] guys, can maintain native independent releases of Codebook [1] on all platforms there’s no excuse.

Big tech serves the shareholders. Building native applications across platforms is hard, but not “put man on the moon” hard.

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[0] https://www.zetetic.net/sqlcipher/

[1] https://www.zetetic.net/codebook/

leaders

Don’t play their game and call them leaders. They are management, bosses, executives.

They are making decisions about things that they just don't understand. And are completely unworried about it.

Clowns, even.

Just blindly following whatever the news cycle is about AI.

But followers might be most apt.

——

This is such a huge pet peeve of mine. Describing management goofs using their language that makes them sound all-so-brilliant. We constantly watch these people do the dumbest shit and then they go around describing themselves as “thought leaders” and “servant leaders”. When, really, most are just clowns with fragile egos.

And, while I’m rambling, they’ve tried to take away the fact we are workers by calling us individual contributors. Using language to attempt and hide the hierarchy and power dynamic at play. It just…bothers me so much.

Bizarrely, voter turnout among younger people remains low

I understand why my age group has low turnout. It's a disgusting chore that I force myself to do.

In part, it might be a chicken and egg situation. My age cohort doesn't vote because candidates suck. Candidates suck because they pander to those who do vote.

Now to show my political biases:

In 2016 Sanders had a huge amount of support from young people but the DNC did everything it could to tilt favor away from him. He ran a hugely successful grassroots campaign taking small donations from individuals. Where did it get him? On stage with Biden - the anointed candidates with SuperPAC money. That is no small feat. His campaign ended only after the DNC guilted him into quitting as to "not steal votes". That's my perception at least. I temporarily changed my registration from unaffiliated to Democrat to vote for him in the primaries. Young people put in effort and showed up. It bought them exactly one legally rigged primary.

So every election I put on my clown makeup [0] and pretend like any of this is actually real democracy.

[0] https://rimgo.privacyredirect.com/ZUiVLyz

On Getting Hacked 6 months ago

I still have my sense of smugness

Crappy SMS 2FA or not. Losing your number is a huge pain. Because phone numbers are treated as identity, it also allows the person who took your number to impersonate you by calling into $X service. At least in America.

On Getting Hacked 6 months ago

Not all too long ago I had someone port out my VOIP number. They had it for a few hours. This was after I had spent extensive effort attempting to secure my digital life. VOIP was SIM-swap resistant sure, but I totally missed that port out requests default to failing open.

Thankfully the VOIP operator alerted me and pulled the number back. Then I set a port out code.

Who knows how many other holes I have. I lost my sense of smugness that day.

For a differing opinion, I was homeschooled for six years during and it was damaging. There is plenty I missed out on and I wish my childhood was just a bit more normal.

I'm sure a lot has to do with home life though.

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There are legitimate reasons to homeschool, but the article itself is garbage.

You're not qualified to teach your own children You know what does predict outcomes? Whether someone cares.

Fundamentally not true. Caring doesn't make you qualified. I care that my car runs well but that doesn't mean I can replace the transmission. My mom with a basic high school education had no business being a teacher. It's bad enough that standards for _real_ teachers have been lowered over the last few decades.

outperform an indifferent professional

Some teachers (and professors) are mids. Others will change your life. Some care an incredible amount. It can also expose you to a variety worldviews. This could be due to malice (my kid won't learn about sex!) or simply because people are different. Getting a variety of inputs is so vital to receiving a solid education.

What about socialization?

My last two years of high school were public after a long debate with my parents. The level of change in socialization was immense. Sure, only during lunch did we get to socialize without guidance. Inside the classroom it still happens though. Pretending like a classroom of 20 kids has no socialization going on is silly.

Second assumption: homeschooled children can't socialize elsewhere. But of course they can. ...church groups...

In my experience, church is the absolute worst place to socialize. If the author thinks the classroom doesn't encourage socialization (I need another word) I'm not sure how they could possibly argue that church does, which behaves much more as a dictatorship than the classroom.

The author does list other activities that are solid imo. But those didn't happen for me. If I went to public school there would've at least been some baseline socialization going on.

Now ask the opposite question: where are the studies on the system we already have? Those exist.

Fails to cite studies.

You have no credentials.

And back to point 1.

True, American public schools are absolutely failing while spending more money per student than most other countries. The solution isn't to chuck out the whole thing, have your mom teach your kid with AI, and entertain them with church.

These days, I don't really have friends. And I never really had them growing up either. My entire life was in my parent's home. A good bit of that can be attributed to home-schooling.

I somewhat begrudgingly switched to ControlD after years with NextDNS.

The NextDNS web UI is flippin fast and very simple. Feels more akin to HN. ControlD’s is slow and feels so heavy. Maybe more like new Reddit.

ControlD offers Hagezi’s TIF list and allows custom lists to be set. NextDNS’s built-in TIF is very opaque. This was really the deciding factor for me. Unfortunately.

war oriented society

Christianity loves going to war to “spread the word”. See the Crusades. See what’s going on in Israel. See Manifest Destiny. Or, I presume, those “don’t count” because they weren’t “real Christians”.

and likely die or be enslaved in the next clan war

The Old Testament is full of slavery references and doesn’t indicate a problem with it. Yes, I know slaves must be set free after seven years. That doesn’t suddenly make it okay and it’s painful to watch people use that as a justification.

technological achievements of the last centuries

Christians love to claim these advancements for themselves as long as it fits their story. Much of our mathematical advancements come from the Muslim world. And plenty of scientists that changed the world were under prosecution of Christianity.

But it is convenient that a doctor (who has spent years learning about the human body) can remove your bad gallbladder then attributing it to your god. Unless you’re a type of Christian that doesn’t believe in surgery, then it’s “of the devil”.

without risk of being scalped alive?

Well, as long as you’re not a Palestinian trying to survive a genocide that is in part supported by fundamentalist Christians on the other side of the planet.

Frankly, your comment reeks of “white Jesus saved the world” or what many might refer to as racism. Your example of scalping really, really gives you away.

We all fall into this trap, thinking we can do better than others.

It took me a while to learn this lesson about complex systems.

First week at a new job? It’s easy to identify all the ways things are done wrong. Six months later you begin to understand why they were done “wrong”.

While I certainly drink coffee for the caffeine, black coffee is 100% my preference. Sugar in coffee tastes absolutely horrid to me. Milk is fine but it doesn’t do much for me.

People taste things differently and it’s at least partly genetic. See TAS2R38 for example [0]. It’s fascinating how we all perceive the world a little differently.

Years ago, long before I was of age, a science museum had a little demo on this (not sure if it was related to the aforementioned gene or not) using strips of paper with some chemical on it. Some people were pretty grossed out by the flavor. It didn’t bother other people at all, including myself.

On the flip side of things I’m highly sensitive to sweetness and find anything other than the smallest amounts to be off putting.

[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6949464/

The point of drinking is to get a buzz

Once a week I hit the local pub for exactly one pint. Usually preferring lower ABV. Why do I stop there? Anymore than that gives a buzz that I usually am not in the mood for. I’m sure one drink has some effect on me, but not enough to consciously realize it.

Most alcoholic drinks taste bad anyway

Speak for yourself. Beer is hands down one of the tastiest damn drinks. I seriously love German and British styles for their flavor and low ABV. They make great casual drinks.

You don’t like alcohol. That’s fine. And, honestly, you’re likely healthier for it. But claiming that people drink just to get drunk - I stopped doing that in college.

never pay for something with DRM you cannot remove

I take this to mean to sail the seas but I have apprehension over running modified binaries from random people. Is there anything that can be done to alleviate this worry?

Bad Dye Job 8 months ago

Here is an unpopular opinion, how about Craig Federighi replaced with Scott Forstall.

I'm with you there.

Forstall's skeuomorphism gets a lot of hate. It certainly got pretty weird visually. Especially on OS X where a leather-bound Calendar had to interact with other normal windows. But unlike what Ive and Dye have given us, Forstall's UX remained functional overall. I'm glad skeuomorphism is gone, but much of it was done to help the user. Just maybe a bit misguided.

This is why neither party will truly save us. Candidates from both parties seem to mostly focus on social issues (Democrats are 110% preferable here imo). There are very few politicians who speak to the level of corruption and economic inequality we all see.

The way America was designed may have been pretty novel / innovative at the time but we've learned so much since then about how to build better democracies. Switzerland has a council of seven members as their executive branch, not a single person. It's brilliant stuff. I worry that the only way to do better is through an incredibly painful collapse of things. Unless politicians start deciding to write laws that force them to give up power. Which seems almost humorous to suggest.

no one

I recently took a union software job after I was laid off due to the CEO having a tummy ache one morning. Many of my new co-workers were explicitly interested in the company _because_ there was a union.

It's very imperfect but such is life. It's all new to me but here's what I've seen so far:

a) Employees have a voice. That doesn't mean that management is forced to do anything, but at least it's possible to be vocally opposed to eating a shit sandwich.

b) We are protected by a contract. If you are called into a police station, you ask for a lawyer for protection according to the law. If an employee finds themselves in an adverse meeting/situation with management, they can call in a steward to protect them according to the contract.

c) The union is us, the workers. We self-organize. It simply gives us a structural framework to work within. An entity for my employer to recognize. It's not ran by an authoritarian who waves a magic wand to make things happen.

That's it. There seems to be this weird idea that I can screw around for 40 hours a week and have the union protect my job. The union told us that we very much still have to do our jobs (duh).

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To go on a little side tangent. Some countries, such as Finland or Norway, have no minimum wage because unions are (a) everywhere and (b) (allowed to be) powerful enough to protect workers. Honestly it's the best of both worlds. Less government intervention but at the same time workers hugely benefit from collectivization. They don't need to beg their politicians to raise wages - they do it themselves because they are given the power to do so. In the US, we instead rely on the lizards in DC to protect our wages because unions have been so stripped of power.

Dark Mode Sucks 8 months ago

My eyes are extremely sensitive to light so dark mode with a yellow filter is my preference. Too much of the wrong light triggers a weird dissociative-type response in my head and feels terrible. I’d be interested if anyone else uses dark mode specifically for this reason.

At the same time I have pretty extreme myopia and astigmatism which, from what I’ve seen, makes me an ideal candidate for light mode.

On e-ink I 100% prefer light mode (dark text) to be preferable though.

Weird how argumentative people get about this though. Feels like vim/emacs level stuff.

Several months ago my job required RTO for “local” employees (not all that local). I live a flight away from the office so I got to stay remote.

Recently, quite a few remote employees were given advanced notice of lay-offs. Myself impacted.

Fast forward a bit. Now I’m training a contractor in another country to do my job.

We are expected to monitor systems 24/7.

RTO is so clearly a scam.

I grew up in the Rust belt (thankfully got out) and this article feels like it’s starting to get at the root of the problem. So much conversation is around “those dumb hicks”. Well, they might not be college educated but they aren’t drooling-on-theirselves stupid. In my experience it’s near impossible to have a real conversation about this with someone deep in DNC politics.

In short, neoliberalism had a huge hand in hollowing out the Rust Belt. The Democratic Party pivoted to identity politics. I understand that Trump is horrifying, but who exactly are these people supposed to vote for?

Of course, any messaging from politicians that touches on classical liberalism gets shut down pretty hard by the DNC. As another commenter said, see Bernie. He spoke to the 99% that work. Joe Rogan was a supporter. The DNC is so entrenched in Us v. Them that they can’t see that there’s a bigger message to be putting out.