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’

Explain what you want. It’s that easy.

I did many years of “I want something simple that I can maintain easily, and will still look ok when I drag my ass out of bed at 10am, an hour late for work. Anything but a buzz cut”

Eventually I found something that I can touch up at home myself, and can explain to even the shittiest of barbers.

It’s hair. Nobody really gives a shit. You’ll get some shit ones, some good ones, a buzz cut you explicitly didn’t want. Nobody got hurt, and it grows back.

If 2000 out of 5,000,000,000 images can be found, why couldn’t they be found before the dataset was published.

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 “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.

If you’ve ever flown into New Zealand, you will know there are numerous signs and warnings that bringing any organic produce into the country is illegal and will be met with fines.

If you declare it, they’ll just take it off you and let you go. Don’t declare it, you get a fine.

It’s not hard. Unsure? Declare it.

[edit] But also, Quantas are in the wrong here. They’re an Australian airline, and Australia has similar biosecurity laws. The fact they served their customers fruit, and didn’t inform them is poor form.

Take what HR says with a grain of salt.

If they’re gaming H1B, They’re not gonna say “yeah we’re faking it to get cheap indentured immigrants to work for us”.

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.

Go do a trade. Computers are dumb.

Generally, you avoid frying your offspring.

But WRT the OPs concerns of flying; People move, get jobs in other cities and countries, have kids, want to visit families, grandparents get sick, etc.

There’s a whole range of reasons why. Going “whelp, you had kids, sorry we’re going to ostracise you from society until your crotchspawn can keep quiet” isn’t exactly an inclusive attitude.

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.

What kind of bizarre trinket cabinet did your teacher have.

“And today kids I brought in Howard. His job is to measure tolerances on every B22 lightbulb to come out of the local GE lightbulb factory”

I doubt it’s /just/ smoke ventilation. Sure, it’s primarily there for fire safety.

But it probably provides ambient ventilation for the tunnel too. Tunnels with trains get hot. Most things, living or inanimate don’t like heat.

And if it’s always ventilating, it’s also might be expelling brake and metal dust from passing trains.

But all speculation. I’m not a train engineer, so I’m probably wrong.

Super Thunder Blade did this, same era too.

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.