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thesmokingman

@thesmokingman@programming.dev

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thesmokingman ,

This headline was incredibly confusing to me because, as an American, I’d never heard of “mobes” as slang for mobile phones. The article does open with “phone motherboards” so I thought it was either a typo’d “mobos” or someone had changed the slang for motherboard when I wasn’t looking.

thesmokingman ,

They already did that. They companies the tools to remove negative reviews. Glassdoor has not been much different from BBB for some time (if not all time).

thesmokingman ,

I’m really confused. The article points out why Brave is a bad choice right after saying it’s a good choice, says that logical fallacies are a problem, moves immediately into why false equivalence is something to look out for in general, and ends. Why is does this mean Brave isn’t going to steal our info? Because Mozilla might too? How does that address any of the valid privacy concerns with Brave (eg forced affiliate links, a privacy violation) rather than social ones (eg Brandon Eich being a piece of shit)? Empathy is a tool to have a conversation with others who might have different values, not a lens to evaluate privacy or user experience.

thesmokingman ,

Wait what

virtualization is a legacy technology

AWS, GCP, and Azure run on virtualization. Do you think all these cloud providers are providing everyone bare metal? This doesn’t include containerization which is a subset of virtualization. Your average shop might not run virtualization directly unless of course your team touches VirtualBox or Vagrant or qemu or (probably shouldn’t) HyperV.

Either your understanding of virtualization is very lacking or you didn’t explain your point very well. I am really curious what you meant.

thesmokingman ,

WSL is also shit for any kind of containerization and HyperV fucks up everything else. If you’re not doing any DevOps/SRE stuff WSL 2.0 is fine provided you don’t mix the filesystems. I have been so frustrated with their claims on release for 1.0 and 2.0 that I haven’t evaluated the recent systemd release for WSL. I provision WSL for people that don’t know why they should care and Linux VMs for people that need to work with CI tooling.

In general if you use a Microsoft tool you have to use the Microsoft ecosystem. Sometimes that’s not a huge deal, eg VS Code just adds a ton of telemetry and GitHub reads all your public code. Sometimes it’s a huge deal, eg you want to do literally anything beyond Docker Desktop defaults in the container world.

thesmokingman ,

I think that’s a fair point. Trying to build a new virtualization company today would have huge initial investment and a steep path to the companies that run their data centers.

thesmokingman ,

This I can wave my hands at and say “Lawyers.” Their recent Rust move, not so much.

It’s No Surprise That “Skills-Based” Hiring Has Not Worked (www-forbes-com.cdn.ampproject.org)

This article outlines an opinion that organizations either tried skills based hiring and reverted to degree required hiring because it was warranted, or they didn't adapt their process in spite of executive vision....

thesmokingman ,

Code has been skills-based for as long as I’ve been working. The few places I’ve seen that really have a hard degree requirement are not places I’d work. Most CS degrees are also mostly worthless for most app jobs because the theory is not the practice. There are degree programs that focus on shipping applications. In my own hiring, I’m looking for experience over degree and potential over buzzword bingo.

thesmokingman ,

For junior IT roles, you’re screening for passion more than anything else. The best candidates are usually people that play with computers and are looking for growth. There’s a mix of “I have been taking computers apart since I was a kid” and “I’m getting an associates in IT.” Totally hit or miss. Sometimes the person with nothing pans out and the degree seeker won’t. Sometimes it’s the other way around. The deciding factor here is how the candidate meshes with the team.

For junior dev roles, someone with a college degree is usually looking for more than a junior salary but has nothing I would hire at higher levels. Someone without a degree might have been coding in their spare time or done a boot camp. A good portfolio might give you a leg up. I consider a portfolio to be evidence of growth, not a bunch of perfect code. I love seeing GitHub profiles that show really shitty code that matures into really solid code (or at least the signs someone is trying). That being said, what matters is the tech screen and a quick code test. If you can do what I validate in an interview and the team likes you, rad.

For someone with no experience, I tell them to figure out something they want to learn and put it on GitHub. Then repeat a fuck ton. Always expand the things you challenge yourself with and move on when your learning or passion has ceased. Sometimes that means you build yet another todo list. Other times that means you try to figure out how to build that cool Discord bot and fail utterly but learn a bunch of shit along the way.

Honestly at the end of the day it’s all fucking luck. If you get a hiring manager like me that’s slightly biased toward self-trained over degree, you have an easier chance on skills stuff. But that’s a crapshoot. I was lucky when I started and people took chances on me. In return I take chances on people I think could have great potential. That’s just dumb luck both from me and for the people I’m able to help grow.

thesmokingman ,

This is the primary reason I do it, although more for my battery life than the cell towers.

thesmokingman ,

The United States is woefully behind in almost every area of cybersecurity both defensive and offensive. While the FBI is quoted here, the international cybersecurity community would most likely agree. China has more bodies than Russia and is able to field a larger presence. The NSA is a shell of what it once was and the ability of the US to pull of something like Stuxnet again would only be possible through allies like Israel.

thesmokingman ,

The DoD’s initiatives are coming way too late. Private industry is much more lucrative and without a pipeline like, say, Unit 8200, there’s no hook to pull people in. Thirty years ago when the NSA controlled the entire stack, math to hardware to code, it was a different story. In undergrad I regularly attended lectures by mathematicians who were finally able to talk about combinatorics problems that had been classified for 20+ yr. The genie is out of the bottle.

I’m in cybersecurity and voraciously consume everything related to it. I’d be really curious to know what you’re reading that says the US is capable of anything beyond social engineering.

Edit: really good example is the rampant infiltration of malware into critical infrastructure in the US, something that would have been unheard of until the late 90s/early 00s. Hell, the Silk Road was only taken down via social engineering and gross misconduct was completely missed.

thesmokingman ,

That’s okay! The literature and the international cybersecurity community explicitly disagree with your naive assessment that “billions means we have capabilities” and the total lack of defense for critical infrastructure highlights how all of that is spent poorly. I don’t need to go out of my way to try and convince someone on a government contract doing nothing because neat attacks like the Colonial Pipeline and Pegasus prove my point!

thesmokingman ,

My stance has been that, just as long as I’m interviewing with someone, I’m happy to do it, up to an undetermined time threshold. A screening interview, a tech screen, and then a bunch of panels is what I expect from a solid firm. Just as long as I’m interviewing with someone, I have a lot of opportunities to learn myself. I will also occasionally do a take home if and only if there’s a novel problem I want to solve related to that take home (eg I want to learn a library related to the task) but this is very rare.

As a hiring manager, I try to keep things to a hiring screen, a tech screen, a team interview, and a culture interview. My team is small. I don’t want to spend more than three hours of someone’s time (partially because I can’t really afford to spend more than that myself per candidate or lose more team hours than that). My tech screens are related to the things I actually need people to do, not random problems you’ll never see.

My assumption is that a good dev has lots of opportunity and I am in competition with everywhere else. I need to present the best possible candidate experience. Big companies with shitty employee experience telegraph that by presenting a shitty candidate experience, which is where the employee experience begins. You can’t have a good customer focus without starting from a good employee focus.

thesmokingman ,

It was founded without Aaron Swartz. He was brought in later as part of a YC merger. Next you’re going to say that Elon Musk was a Tesla founder.

thesmokingman ,

Your second paragraph tells you who you’re trying to find in your third paragraph: FAANG. Hiring 500 engineers and bragging about it something you can do when you’re just interested in shareholder value not customer experience.

I wouldn’t hire the guy in the article because I haven’t seen strong candidates come from FAANG and I’ve been very happy to lose the people I did to FAANG because they weren’t good engineers, they just knew how to leetcode and tunnel vision trivia.

thesmokingman ,

That’s how little they got‽ Holy shit. That’s the steal of the fucking century for all that content. Reddit clearly puts the same stock in its negotiators as it does its 3rd party ecosystem. Anyone who values them more than maybe 2x this price for their IPO is a fucking idiot. Forget Trump’s Art of the Deal. spez needs to write a book.

thesmokingman ,

I have a replacement action set up to change a ? and a ! to ‽. I use it at least once a week!

thesmokingman ,

Currency transaction reports and suspicious transaction reports, do they not sound like something the Stasi would demand in communist East Germany?

No. Not in the slightest. They’re a response to crimes of capitalism committed by capitalists governed by capitalists. If making sure everyone gets equity means people moving about 20% of the median American yearly salary have to be transparent, I’m okay with that.

thesmokingman ,

The Fed printed at most 200bil in 2023, down from 330bil in 2022. There’s about 2.25 trillion in circulation and about 15% of the notes are destroyed every year, which is loosely equivalent to the cash order the Fed created, give or take a couple of percent. Inflation for 2023 using the Consumer Price Index was about 3%. That means net cash supply didn’t really change much and prices went up.

If you think that ~200bil in cash has any effect on inflation I’ve got an amazing investment opportunity for you: it’s called crypto and it’s totally legit.

thesmokingman ,

Wow, it’s so amazing that the price of gold remains forever consistent. If we had a resource-backed currency inflation could never happen because we never adjust the cost of silver. Scarcity and psychology have no power here!

thesmokingman ,

I’m flabbergasted. I would have thought that your graphs that claimed to show no inflation yet clearly increased would have prepared you for irony.

thesmokingman ,

You raise a really interesting question there. I always ignore Tether as a joke because it’s just a crock of shit. But what happens if someone makes a run on Tether? They publish accountability reporting which, crucially, tells consumers to inform themselves of the general risks and potential legal issues. It would appear that Tether does have ~80bil in USD assets of various maturity. Only ~400mil of that is cash. There’s another ~20bil in other assets. If there is a run on Tether, it collapses at under 1% of its balance, ie of the ~100bil in Tether only ~400mil/0.4bil of it could be converted to USD today (well, 2023-12-31 per the last report). Since it’s not insured, there’s nothing to prevent a run on it. Its value is supposed to be its ability to be converted to USD, so if a run occurs and people are not able to make the conversion, its value plummets and can only be rescued by the fire sale of assets well below market value. Tether, more so than fiat currency, has completely made up value.

I’m not a finance person so I bet someone that knows more than me has already done a better job of explaining how Tether is a scam.

thesmokingman ,

I feel like there has to be a half-life for scalping. If I buy a new-in-box item that has limited supply and immediately flip it, that’s definitely scalping. If I sit on it for 30yr and then flip it, is that really scalping? I dunno. I buy a lot of old mint board games to actually play them. I have to pay a huge markup. I don’t know that it’s necessarily right from a commerce perspective to expect someone who’s held onto something for 30yr and kept it in good shape to not get something extra for that time and work.

thesmokingman ,

There’s a huge difference between throwing something on a shelf and taking care of it. You’re assuming I have a house to let something sit on for 30yr. That’s an incorrect assumption. You’re assuming I have unlimited space in my apartments and moving trucks. That’s an incorrect assumption. You’re assuming all storage is created equal. My climate controlled apartment and external garage with a crack in the foundation prove that to be an incorrect assumption.

Apparently you have all of those things and that’s fucking awesome. I’m happy for you. Not everyone is as privileged as you and some of us have to make decisions about what we keep and where we keep it.

thesmokingman ,

You used the phrase “paying” while saying it’s not much work? Where do you think money comes from if not time and work? It sounds like you don’t have to worry about money but most of us do. That’s another incorrect assumption.

thesmokingman ,

I really don’t understand your perspective on commerce. You seem to think that everyone has unlimited space in a house that they own or the money to fund movers to keep shifting things around all the time and that no one ever has to get rid of anything ever and everyone can always afford everything ever or companies are always making everything they’ve ever made. I think you’re just trolling so I’m done with this conversation.

thesmokingman ,

I think everyone should have access to books and audio. It’s very important for people like yourself to consume a lot of material so you know there are people that don’t have infinite money to buy and store all the things. I know that comes as a shock. Would you like some resources that might expose you to other new ideas that will help develop yours?

thesmokingman ,

I’ve shared it with my very young nieces and nephews for a few years. We do Simpsons and Star Wars, they do everything else. Now that Disney is pulling a Netflix, I don’t see a reason to double my cost for probably less viewing. For the price of a year’s sub, I can get a lot of movies or box sets. Over the years, I can get even more and never worry about losing access. Assuming Disney continues to raise prices, I can probably buy more and more for the sub price (although buying power will also drop). I can never share my access with my family any more. I can share box sets. Guess which one makes my nieces and nephews happy when they come visit.

thesmokingman ,

Whether or not you think he should be jailed for leaking CIA secrets, the dude had child porn. He deserved a serious sentence because he expressed zero remorse for that. Along those lines he couldn’t even fucking pretend to have leaked the state secrets for any other reason than the CIA was a shitty place to work. You gotta play the fucking game if you’re gonna fuck with the government. You can’t just be a crusty old coder.

thesmokingman ,

That was never part of his defense. Do you think the CIA colluded with him and his lawyer to accept responsibility for the material the CIA planted to sandbag his sentence? I feel like an innocent person would be screaming that. Hell, even possibly innocent/possibly guilty folks do.

Edit: here’s a quote about the material you’re defending:

Schulte called the child pornography he was accused of possessing a "victimless crime"

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/06/13/the-surreal-case-of-a-cia-hackers-revenge

thesmokingman ,

Apologies. I copied the quote from his Wikipedia article. The other sentences I left out included him potentially assaulting a drunk roommate and the decade+ of evidence covering his interest in CSAM. That really changes your context quite a bit, no?

Still waiting for you to produce evidence of his defense about it all being the CIA. You’re really focused on the poor wording of a single news report covering his case and you’re missing the preponderance of evidence.

Edit: you really defended someone who claimed that CSAM was a victimless crime. What the fuck.

thesmokingman ,

I’m not sure how you get this from the article, though. Evans has no doubt it’s possible; like anyone with any knowledge of the state of AI he also knows that’s really fucking far away and just science fiction today. On the other hand, if you’re going to reduce things to the absurd level comment chain OP did, I suppose the future is now because judicial AI is just as racist as cops.

thesmokingman ,

So are you suggesting that humans “[lack] agency [and] the ability to make dynamic decisions?” Your point is that humans are just AI and, if we’re going from this quote, we can’t have agency if we are the same.

thesmokingman ,

That’s fair. With that line of logic, the author had to say what he said so there’s no value behind criticizing him. Granted you had to criticize him because you have no free will either. The conversation is completely meaningless because all of this is just preprogrammed action.

thesmokingman ,

Right! Without free will the only meaning you have is whatever you were preordained to have. Even your sense of meaning is just a predefined firing of neurons set into motion when it all began. This conversation, my response to you, your response to me, it’s all just something we have no control over unless our brains were wired back when to believe that infinitely small sub(infinite)atomic particles colliding is any form of meaning.

thesmokingman ,

Speaking as a security professional, this is pretty standard practice for a solid user experience. I’m rather surprised someone in a privacy community would take umbrage at this because security and privacy are closely linked. When someone attempts to steal your account, do you not want an alert?

The easiest way to get rid of this email is to delete your Twitter account.

thesmokingman ,

From a conspiracy standpoint, so what?

  • Numbers for the console that tracks these things go up, making the security features trend higher internally. Net win for user security.
  • Total logins goes up. This is a meaningless metric that doesn’t affect value to anyone but the most ignorant shareholder. Nothing changes for Twitter.
  • Links clicked through Twitter’s tracker goes up. Since the target and originator is a single user, this increases nothing. From a shareholder perspective, again, a worthless metric.
  • Twitter gains session data. Unless the user deletes Twitter while logging in, this is an intentional choice by the user to use the platform and give that data. Possible win for Twitter but it’s a win the user agreed to because their data is the product.

“Numbers go up” doesn’t really work here. Fidelity isn’t going to upgrade Twitter’s value from any of this. Even if we assume it’s a drummed up attempt, it gains Twitter nothing we don’t agree to give Twitter by using the platform.

thesmokingman ,

You should always have an understanding of recording consent laws in your state/country and if you live somewhere with one party consent, you should always secretly record HR conversations. Just as long as it’s not obvious you can do a lot of things with your phone. Company policy might ding you for exercising your rights; that’s their right. If you’re building a case against the company that should be the least of your worries. Know your rights and more importantly pretend you don’t know them.

thesmokingman ,

The reason this is a meme is not Star Citizen but rather the article. That’s it. That’s the whole article. It just links to a couple of tweets.

Edit: I forgot the second paragraph:

Star Citizen, which remains in alpha, has crowdfunded over $650 million from fans since 2012.

Tweets have more characters than this has words.

thesmokingman ,

They are in all categories now

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