If they know we have savings. They’ll just increase prices again to take them.

Not crazy, just sad.

Middle of the day, sitting at our desks working. This middle aged guy who was usually happy as Larry gets up and leaves the office leaving his stuff behind. Not a word said. I just assumed he was getting a coffee or something.

End of the day rolls around, stuff still there. Same thing the next day. Still there the next week.

People start asking what happened to him, but the agency he was working through kept telling us he’s coming back soon.

Over a month later, someone packs up his stuff and puts it in the bin. The guy was never coming back, turns out he went left and ended his own life the day he walked out. Never made it home.

The agency apparently only found out he was dead a few weeks after the incident, then strung us along so they could find a replacement. We terminated their contract and offered the handful of other employees jobs.

———

Another job, we had a new guy start. Very conventionally attractive and he seemed normal enough.

A few weeks later one of the women complained to HR that someone was stalking her. She was getting ‘flattering’ letters, emails, notes etc and they often contained information and photos in/about/around her work. Flattering, but not something she was comfortable with

Few weeks later, we’re told new guy won’t be coming back due to inappropriate behaviour.

Woman had to get a restraining order against the guy. In a twist of irony, she said that if the guy had just talked to her, she would have gone on a date with him in a heartbeat.

Imo, the term “buy” for all goods should pass some sort of litmus test. Eg:

does the product being sold have the same properties as a brick?

• can the product be resold privately?
• can the product be lent to another user temporarily?
• would the product still perform its function when the manufacturer stops supporting it?
• would the product still perform its function if the manufacturer ceased to exist.

if the product does not pass all these tests, the customer is not buying. Consider using terms such as ‘rent’ or ‘lease’ or ‘subscription’

It’s America, so the answer is probably “No”.

Do you not have consumer protection laws?

We’ve had digital price tags for decades. But you couldn’t do this in NZ. Stores are obligated to sell you a product at the price they advertise it for AND have a reasonable quantity of units at that price… you couldn’t sell 1 TV for $1.

So these systems would need to track what price you saw it at.

(Caveat: Our stores are still cunts and have been found to overcharge people)

They are also IR controlled. A lot of them have a little window on the front of the unit, and an array of transmitters in the ceiling.

Because that’s the way the legal system works.

“Oops, had some harmful/illegal content on there? Nobody was /really/ hurt, or at least, we weren’t directly causing harm. I’ll take it down and eat a small fine.

Vs

“Oh I’m sorry, I’ll take down the 30s clip of your 90s movie. it has caused you 3million in damages? I’m so sorry, here’s some tools that will automate detection and removal of your property. I’m so sorry”

Is there any evidence of it? The Wikipedia page says “which may include unclothed or partially clothed photos” but doesn’t necessarily mean there is any.

Is “The Algorithm” just “we stuffed all our GPT responses into a Lucene index and look for 80% matches”?

Because that’s what I’d do.

Yale’s Assure SL doesn’t have a key, but you can power it externally with a 9v battery. (And, keys are just another failure point). They also make some keyed variants.

It out of the box doesn’t have any network capability. You can plug in a zigbee or Wifi module to give it connectivity.

Zigbee support is pretty primitive. Basic functionality works fine. Lock, unlock etc. afaik, you can do whatever the unit can do through zigbee commands but I’ve not seen (nor really looked) for a usable interface to it.

[edit] realised I mixed up zwave and zigbee.

I used to love ‘the cloud’. Rather, a specific slice of it.

I worked almost exclusively on AppEngine, it was simple. You uploaded a zip of your code to appengine and it ran it at near infinite scale. They gave you a queue, a database, a volatile cache, and some other gizmos. It was so simple you’d struggle to fuck it up really.

It was easy, it was simple, and it worked for my clients who had 10 DAU, and my clients who had 5 million DAU. Costs scaled nearly linearly, and for my hobby projects that had 0 DAU, the costs were comparable.

Then something happened and it slowly became complicated. The rest of the GCP cloud crept in and after spending a term with a client who didn’t use “the cloud” I came back to it and had to relearn nearly everything.

Pretty much all of the companies I’ve worked for could be run on early AppEngine. Nobody has needed anything more than it, and I’m confident the only reason they had more was because tech is like water. You need to put it in a bucket or it goes everywhere.

Give me my AppEngine back. It allowed me to focus on my (or my clients) problems. Not the ones that come with the platform.

You guys are getting push notifications?

Because you’re only ‘exposing’ the port on the peer to peer network.

You “publish” a port to holesail, then clients have to create a local proxy via holesail before they can access it.

I agree, It’s a dumb pointless claim. But I don’t think it’s misleading.

It looks like holesail is just tailscale, but on a much smaller scale. It’s not networks, it’s just ports.

Yep, This is taken straight from Facebooks advertisements circa 2018, maybe still today.

Put each character in a spans with random classes, intersperse other random characters all over the place also with random classes, then make the unwanted characters hidden.

Bonus points if you use css to shuffle the order of letters too.

Accessibility? Pffffft.

Could a hypothetical attacker not just get you to visit a webpage, or an image embedded in another, or even a speculatively loaded URL by your browser. Then from the v6 address of the connection, directly attack that address hoping for a misconfiguration of your router (which is probable, as most of them are in the dumbest ways)

Vs v4, where the attacker just sees either your routers IP address (and then has to hope the router has a vulnerability or a port forward) or increasingly gets the IP address of the CGNAT block which might have another 1000 routers behind it.

Unless you’re aggressively rotating through your v6 address space, you’ve now given advertisers and data brokers a pretty accurate unique identifier of you. A much more prevalent “attack” vector.

I was maybe a little inebriated, and he was very rude.

He had to wait for the next train, and I had a sore jaw for a week. Mild inconveniences al round. I think everyone got what they deserved.

Threw a man’s belongings off a train because he was listening to music without headphones.

Worth it.

Nah we want you to start all your fucking about, get any beverage or condiments you might want, wash your hands, and have everyone at the table ready to eat when the food is ready.

And subsequently, not get any criticism while we’ve finished our meal and you’ve just sat down because you had to go to the garage to get a new bottle of OJ, pee that became a poop, wash your hands, and find the sauce you’ve suddenly decided to dig out from the back of the pantry.

If you still do the sizing (it’s not entirely wasted as it’s a reasonably effective tool to gauge understanding across the team), This can still be done without the artificial time boxing.

“How much work have we done in the last two weeks?” Just look at all the stories closed in the last two weeks. Easy.

“When will X be delivered?” Look at X and all its dependencies, add up all the points, and guesstimate the time equivalence.

Kanban isn’t a free for all, you still need structure and some planning. But you take most of that away from the do-ers and let them do what they do best… do.

They were first to market with a decent GPGPU toolkit (CUDA) which built them a pretty sizeable userbase.

Then when competitors caught up, they made it as hard as possible to transition away from their ecosystem.

Like Apple, but worse.

I guess they learned from their Gaming heyday that not controlling the abstraction layer (eg OpenGL, DirectX, etc) means they can’t do lock in.