shelled

This usually means all of us are on the hook.

And since we are talking about USD (specifically "of" USA), it also means globally a hell lot more of "all of us" are on the hook than we would have been involved (even remotely) had (or would) this endeavour ever ended up in some sort of general success.

I don't know whether it'd be "tails I win, heads you lose" or "I reap the profits alone, you reap the losses alone". Maybe the latter and it becomes magnitudes more interesting when it expands (or rather engulfs) beyond the boundaries of the great nation.

For me, reading books depends a lot on the space - the place, the setting. I can't read anywhere and everywhere.

I can regularly work in noisy places. I can even routinely sleep in such places. At least after adjusting for a while, or when I am too tired, or travelling. But I cannot routinely read if the place isn't calm and doesn't feel cosy. I say "routinely" because when I am travelling, I can read just fine even at the bus and train stations (both are mad noisy where I live) - the brain somehow knows or adjusts. But I just can't in a house that is near a traffic hell, or above a noisy market. I just can't read there. That's one of the reasons I my house hunts become so daunting and stressful in this godforsaken city where "older bachelors" are double-whammied.

Train journeys are very productive for my reading and sleeping.

And as the author notes, abandoning books helped my reading. Though most often I don't truly dump them - I skip-read them, I speed-read them, if I am sure I may never pick them again. Then there are books that I may find they are not worth "my" time (might be great books to others), I don't even bother to speed/skip read them. I just let go of them.

HN is quite nice inside a desktop browser, but mobile browsers are a different story altogether. But even there, it fares slightly better than old.reddit.com. So looks like I should dust off that xcode.

I was doing something with Claude today and it just told me "By the way Cowork is a separate desktop app" and it proceeded to explain to me how it is not part of the standard Claude desktop app and how the plugin I am exploring might not be a great fit for me. I actually ended up having to search around and see whether things had changed that much in last 24 hours. It hadn't.

It beats me how can their tool hallucinate at this level, that close to home? Do they really weaken their tools, do they perform a lot of painting job on their tools to hide the cracks? I am speaking generally of today's frontier AI scenery, not just Fable or Mythos or Cowork.

I hope this brought us one step closer to being able to run our distros of choice very freely and easily on a Mac.

A few years ago I was using OpenCV is a commercial Android SDK (it might still be being used; also because iOS provided almost all of those "needs" ready-made and Android just didn't, neither did Firebase, or Jetpack suites/tools). I was the one who had added it in the SDK. There was a lot I/we could do but as an Android developer (barely any exposure to CV or even C/C++) what I felt we lacked was documentation, a community. We struggled with even shaving off parts that we did not want to ship with our SDK. Speed was such an issue. The problem was someone who just wanted to use the lib (on mobile) a lot of things felt esoteric and out of reach i.e difficult. It didn't have to be.Sadly LLM wasn't at full speed back then, barely useable, not even talked about. Something like this would have been a perfect use case of AI/LLM. A coder, not from the exact/specific field the tool was made in/from, but being able to take full advantage of its capabilities in a nuanced/selective manner.

I wish there'd be readily available keyboards/pads where one could just use the surface (key surfaces) as the touchpad when fingers brush across on them softly.

I am assuming the idea is to talk about "react" pattern/idea as well, not just that JS framework, and no, I didn't read the article - after two quotes, I scrolled and realised there was no article to read.

For me, coding is feeling intuitive as a human being even when I am writing code for the computers (but also for other human beings who'll read and work on my code; not sure how much would that be post-LLM world but still...). React never felt intuitive or, say, natural to me. It "feels" upside down to me, a bit anachronistic (in some way). But as I have seen with many frameworks, or rather "paradigms", which become fashion in the end, "the tools in vogue" because that's what the largest population of coders use, this is what one usually has to use now. I was quite sad when I saw Jetpack Compose as an Android dev. Technically it had improvements over the XMLs no doubt but then seeing it was React was quite not great (at least not for me). But this is what it and one just deals with.

I wish the coding world wasn't obsessed with patterns, architectures, and the need to fit everything into something concretely established (or in vogue). I often see Frankensteins as results.

As someone with native command over Hindi and, unless it's spoken by folks from certain UK countries, English, who also spoke and read Sanskrit quite well during school, I had a period of a few months when I went down the rabbit-hole of wonderful general linguistic history and the interrelation among them. I was shocked beyond imagination to see how we might actually have been more the same than different, if we go back far enough (not even prehistoric 'far enough') in each case (even the languages which are geographically distant currently). But then, of course, civilisation happened.

I am somewhat also concerned that this software was still being distributed on SourceForge.

Realistically speaking - anything could be a reason. A shakedown or blocking based on some "nudge" (this might come across as tin-foiled though). Some flag/trip-wires going wrong, more worryingly due to a bug/false alarm - and this is more worrying because in this case semi-incompetent large orgs like MSFT find it really hard to accept it, fix, and move on. Some change in OP's account that either they don't see or haven't realised - some edge case, you never know.

And of course, it doesn't affect their earnings and there are no consequence, or significant, so they won't care and won't respond or tell what went wrong.

Can one move legally? Sure. But then it effectively is a combo of who blinks first and who can hold their breath longer.

I wish they had retained one awesome Thunderbird desktop feature on mobile as well - being able to set the "from" address on the go while composing the email, without having to add an identity/sender-mail in advance. Alas, it seems that hasn't been the case.

https://onethingwell.org comes to mind

https://web.archive.org/web/20170608203825/http://onethingwe... - used to be slightly simpler and less colourful.

There might have been few more such blogs over the years but this one has stayed in memory long after I stopped going to it and eventually it stopped (sort of). It was not just the design but also the simplicty of the conent and being very accessible.

I have had very varying experiences with suggestions (or talking to someone) about these kinds of changes in life and how to deal with them. Most of the times what I have to say has been met with resistance (sometimes even some sort of resentment or confrontation, or a mix of the two). Why is that? No, not because I consider that they thought I was being a jerk or flippant. But because they had considered certain things undoable, or they didn't do them before, and didn't want to change that and hence when I suggested exactly those things to do in life (or in some cases 'not do') it was considered of no use, being repetitive, clichéd. Of course, by saying this as the leading text in my comment it might look like I am saying OP might be that, but I am not saying that. What I am going to say is - in such a case of OP exactly those things help, what many have actually listed below, and that's why they are cliched and repitive (again, because they work), and can be summed up as:

1. Physical activities as a routine

2. Going out (regularly but maybe not as a routine)

3. A physically engaging hobby that involves someone else and something tangible (besides the two mentioned above)

4. Pickup an intellectually engaging hobby (may or may not involve others)

I shall expand a bit on these (but this will mostly be a huge text wall).

By [1], I mean giving your body the physical exercise it literally "requires" (yup, for us humans it's not a choice, but many of the capable us don't do/get that). Gym is the easiest and helps a lot. Better still, pick up a sport - actually, what works best is doing the two, as one helps and accentuates the other.

If someone is looking for a short, readymade "first to try" list, here's one: gym, running, or/and a racket sport.

Very important: if you have the means and money, consider joining a coaching program to begin with. It's a game changer (no pun intended), and that includes a non-"typical gym-bro/gal" gym trainer.

The [2] is not "let's go out" kind of going out - but just physically stepping out (regularly!!) of your house or usual comfort zone spots - for walks, backpacking trips, travels, treks, camping, hiking, window shopping, attending plays, films in cinemas, puppet shows, bookstores, museums, music shows, comedy shows, get those perfect walking leather shoes for yourself and go around the stores trying to find that and be disappointed that the perfect hasn't been made yet (if you find it, then great).. and so on. You get the gist.

The [3] and [4] are somewhat similar, and I wouldn't regurgitate a lot about that. But just a few examples (you pick your own): for [3], learn to play guitar/cello/violin/drum/some shit/explore - do this under a tutor; and for [4]: pickup reading (may or may not be a reading group), world cinema (a cine club maybe), writing literature (for your diary, you don't have to plan to publish; though you can join a group for sharing if you want). Etc.

None of these is going to happen in a day. But you might not want to make these a months-long research and execution project either. Give it a few days to a few weeks. It's perfectly fine to switch, get bored, move from one to another, get frustrated, try something else, something entirely diagonal, and get disillusioned, but keep trying, keep exploring.

Saying it again, try to get trainers/guides/tutors/groups wherever needed or can. If nothing else, it helps with getting good at something in somewhat shorter time and helps you avoid unlearning a lot of basic things later, and since you are older (as in not a kid or teen), this could be a tad bit more productive, especially in sticking with it.

For me, the point of "how to be alone" is very different from "how to be lonely" (which I doubt anyone wants or hopes so, at least I don't). These engagements give you the bare minimum to sufficient human exposure without having to "socialise" and set you up to be perfectly fine being alone, at least in the short term, and slowly opening up paths for you, giving you some road to decide what turns you want to take in life over time and get back hold of things.

(From your story, it's clear I am not from your geography/culture/etc., so if something seems very weird/odd for you, please note where/why it might be coming from.)

Good luck.

History and the world are strewn with people (and hence entities) that fled the land and kept the fight on (and alive) from outside, and it mattered. In fact, it helps. Other options could be acquiesce or extinguish.

But, is there a safe haven that'd stand up against the blatant bullying and daily (or more frequent) national threats/trolling (which often stem from social media and sometimes become reality)?

I, on the other hand, am getting gradually, but strongly, disillusioned, and importantly also feeling disenfrenchised, from coding and the world around it.

And Gradle? Does skip the Gradle and that nightmare of a dependency management and handling?

While as a mobile dev most of my usage were limited to api client kinda usage I did use it for debugging traffic and hence its intercepting features. Haven’t checked their landing page or the tool itself in a long time (or any coding for that matter) so not sure.

At a previous workplace, Charles Proxy was not in the list of approved software. I don't recall the reason - it might have been cost, but we used lots of paid tools, and since it was in the restricted category, we couldn't pick and use (we handled a copious amount of Western PII, from reading, working on it, to storing it). Two were approved: Requestly and another was a link to an internal wiki with a really "interesting" process involving Wireshark and whatnot. Needless to say, that doc was one of the most clicked and least read. I tried Charles at a later place that offered a license, and I went back to Requestly, which I really found to be more straightforward or simpler to use.

SoundCloud once messed up a huge song import - hundreds (as in more than 9 hundreds). There was no way to batch clean/edit, or even clear/nuke (i.e delete everything). Support refused to help. They clearly said they "won't" do it and they helpfully asked me to do it one by one because that was the way users were supposed to do it. I kept requesting that they could just delete everything and I would set up everything again because at that point my profile looked all garbage and noise. They refused and stopped responding. I found a CxO email and mailed seeking help. I never received a reply. A few days later, I just deleted that really old account. I used to use the site very regularly since the beginning. But after that, they never even came to my mind until I saw this here on HN.

This is really sad that some people are in ways blaming it on the author. While I do advocate zero to almost zero usage of services by these OEMs or big corps, in today's world everything, or almost everything, is linked to your email and/or phone number and in turn with a computing device, which, for me, makes these OEMs essentially public service providers for a cost. Locking a user out literally casts that person out of today's society — communication, dating, groceries, transport, hell, in some cases maybe even health care and emergency services — you name it. So it's very ingenuous and unkind of us not to raise hell and shout for extreme accountability on these corps' part instead of reminding a victim of T&C and not having diversified the online services usage enough across providers.

Any company or entity ought not to be allowed to wield power over our lives, like locking someone out arbitrarily, let alone via some asinine, half-baked algorithm.

I am in a situation right now where Amazon delivered a fake product. Support suggested they can also try redelivery, and when I asked what if it happens again, they said it should not happen.

It happened - fake again. Now the customer support flow is: you upload images of the product (max. three), and the system approves the verification or rejects it, and then you have a way to contact customer care. System rejected. The trick is - they do not know why the rejection happened, they are not able to tell me, they are confirming the images are very clear and crisp, but they can't do anything to help me because the system leaves them with zero options to move forward - in fact, there is no further escalation matrix either. Nada!

The bank (credit card issuer) refused to raise the chargeback because "but the merchant 'delivered' the item". But it was fake, so? No, no, it "delivered" - that is what counts, so you have to sort it out with the merchant. But they are refusing any further help. You have to sort it out with them. And so on... in a loop.

Can I take them to court? Sure. It may take weeks, months, and maybe years, and even then, in the end (if I win), the court may just instruct them to refund and possibly (possibly!) compensate a trivial amount for legal expenses, which is never even remotely close to the actual legal expenses in this country's courts.

Just stonewalled. It almost feels Kafkaesque.

As someone from India — who has written this kind of comment against India and Pakistan in forums, with poor reception, and later realised it was rightly so — some more detail and nuance, possibly with some easily readable sources, would help a great deal - mostly for the people who want a picture of that because slavery is a very evocative term.

Not exactly on the backend, but I worked on the frontend (SDKs) at a previous employer whose product offering was fraud detection literally. Over the period of those years, I realised the team wanted "get whatever you can" and then just kept it and used it as needed. A few things I recall - heuristics, some matches with data sources they had of fraudulent actors, et cetera. I am talking about the time when "AI" as we know it was just picking up, and that company was actually calling these systems ML-backed. They pivoted to "AI" as soon as the term became more commonplace, and in the beginning it was just the name change, but I am sure they'd have changed the systems as well, or I hope so.

I can tell you that any kind of "abnormal" combination of system metadata (basically sysinfo) was technically frowned upon by that team, and of course, the system was designed by that team. So, say you had a rooted Android (we had solutions for all devices out there; pretty much) - naughty boy, the system suspected you of spoofing GPS - instant reject, disabling GPS - it was not a mandatory permission in the app (and we asked for it only for some clients) – but it didn't like it, you had changed the default resolution of the system - suspicious, we also captured typing/tapping speed (not only for text entry but also for interacting with the interface) - too fast was considered weird because you were not supposed to have known our interface (because it was interact once or twice in a lifetime or years, kind of thing).

I am speaking more from memory of new joinee intros and rare discussions with the team. The team was kinda "different," so other teams just wanted to avoid them and also wanted them to stay away from other teams. So a lot of things might not sound exciting, might not be accurate either and these are not technical observations anyway.

Another aspect I just remembered. Say you had an app list (oh, we read that too) that matched with known fraudulent actors datasets, you had app(s) that showed you were not well off (we served a lot of instant loan givers around the world), you had an old phone, your OS was very old – all these things were taken into account, along with your PII (which were of course mandatory), when their backend received the data and we gave the final reco/score to the client's system in the API response.

I worked in BT almost a decade ago for 4-5 years. My first job. I had never worked close to the hardware. It was nice. Even though the work was not assembly-level close to hardware. Then the rot hit. I saw BT had been there more or less for decades and in one way or another it was going to remain there. The big bad world of backward compatibility and having to support older devices out in the wild was so crucial (as per the companies' POV and I am not judging it either way) that I realised I do not want to keep copying and pasting one line for a driver fix from one code base to 373 for different devices. Given it could have been improved with CI/CD and better source control (maybe!) but it was just not worth it.

Then the rest of the software world hit hard, and I saw, yet again, that the grass is green and that at least the world of BT had epic job safety, slow but stable growth, and best of all - no rush to fix something in the next 37 mins or millions of ad revenue will be lost.

But I see, as I had guessed, not much has changed "more or less" :)

I blame Apple as well, or both Apple and SIG for not making adoptions faster. But then Apple had nothing to worry about when it came to backward compatibility. So "Apple-rest" never really happened in a meaningful way, and whatever happened happened quite late.

(By the way there are more details on SIG portal if one is interested. Here are some https://www.bluetooth.com/bluetooth-core-6-2-feature-overvie... and https://www.bluetooth.com/blog/just-released-bluetooth-core-... and maybe follow from there)

I had received a video call request from a German asst prof after I had applied for CS MS and a full scholarship to his department. I had written back saying I'd be okay with that and had asked whether he could tell me what it was about. He was upfront: "English proficiency satisfaction call" (yup, verbatim). 2-3 minutes into the call, he chuckled and said, "okay okay I am satisfied with your English". He was from Eastern Europe, and English wasn't his strongest suit, and he had to ask for meanings a few times. I am from an ex-GB colony. Anyway he mentioned that his department (and no other department there) faced a lot of situations from this part of the world where applicants had perfect GRE and TOEFL/IELTS scores but in reality they struggled with communication, and with laughter he added, "and your score had a big red flag". Mine were not perfect; just that my TOEFL and GRE verbal scores were at odds.

It was Diwali vacation in India. It looks like the managers were not able to force everyone to walk around with their laptops and pagers hanging from their necks and waists, respectively, which they normally do.

If there's one thing I have learned from my Amazon mates, then that is they never have a true time off. Hills, beaches, a marriage in the family— no exceptions. It's so pervasive that I can't really imagine it to be voluntary, and my friends' answers on this topic have never been clear.

This might not be sufficient for a lot of folks and I do notice sometimes a bit of struggle here and there, but for someone like me who mostly uses one widnow at a time on the Mac, or two screens when I have a external monitor setup along wiht my laptop, this thing kinda does it for me (but then I have never been a heavy "tiling" user at all) – https://support.apple.com/en-in/guide/mac-help/mchl9674d0b0/...

Did you really do one-bag?

There are things I can't think of my days/weeks without. So for

In 2015 I got rid of everything I owned that didn’t fit in a laptop backpack

There go my badminton rackets, cricket bat, and cycle. I couldn't care less about everything else :)

(To be fair, the rackets may possibly fit into my Osprey 45L. Never tried.)

On a more serious note: How much does health-care certainty factor into such travels? I am someone who doesn't have a family. So if a sudden death comes, I couldn't care less (I mean as of now - in advance), but I am perennially scared of falling sick and possibly needing care and hospitalisations, and when travelling (or without a base i.e one-bag kind of setup) and then there's at least the allergies, it becomes such a nightmare if you live in a country that doesn't have universal health care and is decidedly third world irrespective of the GDP.

I am asking because when people blog about such plans and minimalism, the gory details of behind-the-curtain things are often left out, maybe not deliberately.

Hey - "Shame" is somewhat stronger than what I would have said but I also had similar feelings considering it was from DHH's company. And not just for outdated Electron, but for shipping Electron in the first place. For some reason I always felt DHH will write native apps for his company :)

I have absolutely lost hope from Dropbox and I am actively looking for a replacement.

BitWarden using Electron is just unfortunate and it is sluggish.

What happened to 1Password (don't use it, never did) and their Apple only-great-native-software trope I used to hear? Cost cutting?

Electron is the reason I am still using Overcast and not Pocket Casts even though it's FOSS.

Proton Mail - this app is such a mess!

Simplenote - moved away long back! When did Electron come into it? It was native, wasn't it?