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TriangleEdge

784 karma · joined November 19, 2022

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TriangleEdge··on Ask HN: GitHub Copilot down?
https://downdetector.com/status/github/
TriangleEdge··on Leaving Gmail for Mailbox.org
I use both mailbox and gmail. For people that are considering switching, some websites don't accept the mailbox domain, so be ready for that. Otherwise the service works great.
TriangleEdge··on White House in Talks with Intel for 10% U.S. Government Stake
I don't understand how the finances work here. Is the proposal that the US govt buys 10% of available stocks at some price from Intel to give them cash to operate? Why doesn't Intel just get some investors to do that? If Intel is no longer competitive from an investor standpoint, then what's the point?

A quick ChatGPT search tells me Intel owns none of it's own stock, so I'm confused. It tells me a company can sell newly created stocks and dilute the value of the old stocks. I didn't know this was possible. Is this the proposed case?

TriangleEdge··on Palantir is extending its reach even further into government
Ex FDE here. Part of Palantir's pitch for Foundry back in the day is connecting disparate databases from agencies that don't collaborate well. They're also really good at getting demos up and running in a few days. The tech was good back when I was employed.

They get hate because support war efforts / police / intelligence.

They do 5 year contracts with the govt then bump the prices once they're sticky, like a J curve, hence the valuation.

TriangleEdge··on Figma will IPO on July 31
Can AI replace Figma workflows?
TriangleEdge··on LibreOffice slams Microsoft for locking in Office users w/ complex file formats
After having worked for many companies, I think the complex file formats is likely due to employee turnover, pressure from management to just get shit done, and careless coding. Not ill intended anti-competitive practices. The locking in is likely an unintended bonus for Microsoft.
TriangleEdge··on Retro gaming YouTuber Once Were Nerd sued and raided by the Italian government
My guess is that someone tipped the authorities about the crime. So, someone must of been offended about something this streamer did (maybe not the alleged crime).
TriangleEdge··on Nvidia Becomes First Company to Reach $4T Market Cap
The next question is: will I be alive to see the first quadrillion dollar company? Or maybe a 100$ banana?
TriangleEdge··on US Supreme Court Upholds Texas Porn ID Law
I think your assumption that Texas cares about its porn industries is incorrect. Pornhub is a Canadian company. Afaik it's the #1 porn site, I could be wrong. I assume if they don't comply, their DNS host will be blocked in Texas. Registries of porn sites are readily available. (I use them in my hosts file blocking). So, my guess is that the likely step will be block all of them until they prove they have ID enforcement.
TriangleEdge··on Second study finds Uber used opaque algorithm to dramatically boost profits
My first thought was it could scan the WiFi names. I think there's many ways to determine location without GPS.
TriangleEdge··on "The models were right": astronomers find 'missing' matter
"Over one-third of the ‘normal’ matter in the local Universe – the visible stuff making up stars, planets, galaxies, life – is missing"

How was this determined?

TriangleEdge··on New US visa rules will force foreign students to unlock social media profiles
I recently migrated to the USA from Canada. I make 2x the income I made in Canada. My work is about the same as it was. I was also able to get competent medical care in the USA but in Canada I was on a waitlist for 2 years. I had to jump through a lot of hoops and the GC process was shitty, but my life is good here and I am glad I came.

I think economic freedom is a powerful motivator. Unlocking a social media account is hardly a deterrent.

TriangleEdge··on Apple introduces a universal design across platforms
I hope they tweak the opacity before they go live with this because I find the shared image quite unpleasant. I have no issues with the current design. Kind of like the camera button and the touch bar, I hope this goes away fast.
TriangleEdge··on Mario Kart designers had to rethink everything to make it open world
Nintendo is going to be getting 80$ from me, that's for sure. Mario games are most of the funnest games I've played. I've been playing Mario Kart since the n64, and I've liked every version since. I have high hopes.

As Peter Thiel said: if you double your price and don't lose half your customers, you're making profit.

TriangleEdge··on Ask HN: Is Slack Down?
https://downdetector.com/status/slack/
TriangleEdge··on Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
Practical Engineering YouTube channel black start video: https://youtu.be/uOSnQM1Zu4w
TriangleEdge··on Sapphire: Rust based package manager for macOS
In my experience, rewriting software doesn't work. You should replace the components iteratively in Homebrew itself if you want your ideas to succeed. I doubt your software will see any major adoption just because you wrote it in some other language. The word Homebrew is culturally significant in hacker groups as well and sapphire is not.
TriangleEdge··on The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state
I remember having a conversation with my friend some 15 years ago when FB only allow .edu accounts. I argued that the incentives for the company cannot be to connect people because that in itself isn't profitable. I signed up maybe 10 years ago for 6 months or so and never tried again. I think this has isolated me in some ways, but I'm quite comfortable with the friends I currently have.

Hypothesis: people who regularly use social media score higher then the average population in narcissic personality trait.

TriangleEdge··on Google is illegally monopolizing online advertising tech, judge rules
I think this decision would have been impactful 10 years ago. Why did the government wait until Google started becoming irrelevant?
TriangleEdge··on Harvard's response to federal government letter demanding changes
Wasn't Harvard's president a woman who wrote her PhD thesis on DEI? I vaguely remember the news about this (fraud or something). If this is what Harvard considers that the person for the job, I think the sense making apparatus of Harvard personnel is specifically tuned to not bend the knee in this case. The instrument would likely fail at the input validation step and not proceed to the sense making portion.
TriangleEdge··on Half the men in Seattle are never-married singles, census data shows
I live in Seattle now, am married, and have an infant. I find Seattle not friendly towards families at all. The going rate for a daycare here is 3.5k per month for an infant. My wife and I are both ~7%ers? individually and we can barely afford our home (a tall skinny townhouse with no yard) and the cost of 1 baby. Having a family is hard here... Also, I don't find Seattle safe for infants and toddlers, or anybody really..

What big tech wants are people who are willing to give up everything for the dream of making money, and that's what they got.

Edit: Our life is pretty good in any case. I would never let my kid go outside and play unsupervised in Seattle even tho I myself did this as a kid in my home town (the safety I was mentioning).

TriangleEdge··on The Insanity of Being a Software Engineer
Other then all the frameworks you need learn, if you are not an expert in a specific field, in my experience, you are completely disposable as well.
TriangleEdge··on Palantir suggests 'common operating system' for UK govt data
Palantir's goal is to make a data monopoly. This is laid out quite plainly in Peter Thiel's book 0 to 1. As he said: "Competition is for suckers.". This is also pushed internally (I worked for Palantir as an FDE or "delta").

The financial purpose is to create a J curve with income. Lose a bit or money first, then charge monopoly prices.

I don't like Palantir at all. Anecdote: I got drugged without consent _twice_ while employed there. The first time was minor but the second time hurt me and I'm still hurt from it. I can only guess but I think I got dosed with a large amount of Adderal or meth. I quit after that. I wanted to get authorities involved, but Palantir contracted for them, so I didn't out of fear.

This being said, if you're a UK employee and think this is a good idea: you're about to get screwed out of a lot of money long term. And you won't be able to leave because Palantir's tactic is to be as sticky as possible.

TriangleEdge··on I'm the Canadian who was detained by ICE for two weeks
The officers were "dirty". They brought me in a room to do an interrogation where one officer asked questions and the other took notes on an old computer. I literally told them: "I am not going to stay past my return date" and the officer asking questions told the officer taking notes to not write that down. They asked who my parents were, how much money I had, my employment history, what I did in the US while working on my previous TN, if I was in danger, etc.. They asked if I was applying for jobs and I said yes because I was unemployed. They then asked if the jobs were in the US and I said I would accept another TN job if I could. They call the process a "sworn statement".

For those of you who go through that, don't agree to the statement if they modified it, like mine. There's no cameras or recording devices so they can be dirty, and they abuse that fact. You have no rights at all at the border, and your assumptions on decency and honesty are not correct.

My assumption to this day is that they thought I was trying to work illegally, but this is not the case.

TriangleEdge··on I'm the Canadian who was detained by ICE for two weeks
About three years ago. My lawyer told me it used to take one year, but got bumped to two recently.
TriangleEdge··on Google to pay $28M to settle claims it favoured white and Asian employees
lol, wait until the govt hears about Amazon engineering orgs. Or any other big tech company nowadays..
TriangleEdge··on I'm the Canadian who was detained by ICE for two weeks
I've been issued a five year bar for visiting someone in the US while unemployed. My immigration lawyer told me it's the weakest case he had ever seen. It took two years for the appeal to be approved. I had worked in the US on TN visas twice before, and never overstayed. It felt like they were just trying to meet a quota.

Edit: I had applied for a GC years before this happened, so I think the officer thought I didn't want to leave. This was not the case however. The case had been approved but not processed.

TriangleEdge··on Google to buy Wiz for $32B
Why? I have a hard time believing the engineer at Google see Wiz as innovative. The front page of Wiz.io reads like a bunch of sales bullshit. I built a security posture dashboard for a competitor and I would not say it's worth anywhere near 1b. Is Google such shit now that runtime scanning in a k8 cluster is worth billions?
TriangleEdge··on The Alexa feature "do not send voice recordings" you enabled no longer available
Alexa listens to more then the wake word. I've had this recommend products on Amazon while my wife and I were having a conversation at the dinner table. It also recommended calling 911 while I was talking about fire.

It's a spying device people willingly put in their homes for the convenience of a timer you can active with your voice.

Edit: It could be that it activated mishearing "Alexa". I don't have hard evidence of mass spying. I think this wouldn't be hard to prove intercepting the data using something like Wireshark. Even if it's encrypted, you could tell by the data size. The recommending products while chatting with my wife anecdote happened multiple times tho, which convinced me to relocate the Alexa device in the garbage. It seems unlikely to me to not mine the voice data to generate ads, or to do law enforcement.

TriangleEdge··on Did the Particle Go Through the Two Slits, or Did the Wave Function?
Not a physicist - how is it possible to only send 1 photon at a time? How is this ensured?
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