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beardedetimon Ask HN: Share your personal site

Trying to be open and honest about my life and thoughts.

It's all static behind NGINX with some markdown to HTML scripts at build time.

beardedetimon Amazon workers on Staten Island vote to unionize

> Why should developers unionize? I love not being in a union. If my company starts dicking me around I'll quit and find another job.

Why does the former preclude the latter?

> Besides, if I do something so bad my boss wants to fire me, fine then I'll go work somewhere where people want me.

What if you didn't do _anything_ and your boss wants to fire you so badly? What if your boss fired you over Zoom randomly without any recourse?

> The only time unions make sense is when you're doing labor that could be done by anyone and your bus factor is basically infinite.

I disagree with this point. A union makes sense for anyone that is working for a wage. It makes sense to me to work together for all of our benefit rather than me to try to go up against those that pay my wage alone.

Put it another way, I do not think that I can argue well enough to get the actual value that I produce back in my pocket and would love if we all banded together and said "We deserve this much of the value we produce" instead.

beardedetimon Ask HN: Software with biggest potential for positive impact in 5 years?

I know one of the programmers that built Origami for ORNL and the DoH

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/913790

seems to go down this path. It is doable and they were able to beat IBM Watson to find some thing or another (_can't find the article off hand_) and won an R&D 100. But as you can tell, no one actually wants to use it.

beardedetimon MDN Plus

There used to be a tool I used that just downloaded all the files of a site locally that the browser requested. Would that be enough here or are you imagining something like it also points all the links to be local and goes and saves future pages as well?

beardedetimon Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

I think we're seeing _many_ people's health be raised in the past ~30yrs. Maybe not Americans/Western Europeans but I would venture to guess that _most_ people are now living _healthier_ lives than they were 30 years ago _globally_.

For damn sure "smarter" by any definition of education and intelligent that I could come up with. Sure, maybe not Americans/Western Europeans. Sure. But _globally_ has our education system gotten better and people gotten "smarter"? I think so!

Happier? Oh hell no, I don't think we're _happier_ now.

beardedetimon What Google search isn’t showing you

I would imagine, if I had info on _every aspect of a human's life_, such as their email, their documents and photos, their messages, their browsing history, etc, that I could tell what _they_ meant by "best" _at that moment_. If not, what _are_ we trading all of that information for? Ads?

beardedetimon Wartime Is a Bad Time to Mess with the Internet

I thought Iran had some democratic elected leaders until US backed insurgents ousted them? Is that not true?

beardedetimon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (March 2022)

Location: Tennessee, US

Remote: yes. Only open to Remote at this time.

Willing to relocate: no but I will work remotely in any UTC-0 through UTC-9 timezone.

Technolgies:

Used Daily: Web (JS/TS, HTML/CSS), Node.JS, Database/Caches (SQL, Mongo, Redis/Memcache), Message Systems/Queues/PubSub (RMQ, Kafka, Rediis via Bull), Cloud (AWS, GCP), K8s/Nomad, Observability (Datadog, Honeycomb, Opentel, Prometheus, Grafana)

Shipped Production Code: PHP, Clojure, Haskell, Python, Golang, ELK, Rust

Resume: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1G2bL4Q6j4z8kbFXJYzquhvLg...

Email: timroberts@fastmail.org

Linkedin: https://linkedin.com/in/beardedtim

Full stack lead engineer that has a desire to focus on backend distributed systems. I have spent 15+ years building web sites and applications and am excited to solve hard problems that directly affect business metrics. I currently am the tech lead for the Video Processing team at Hopin, designing, validating, building, and supporting distributed systems and Edge compute in order to facilitate LL-HLS and other file types and transformations.

beardedetimon Ask HN: Is anyone else genuinely scared that this is the start of WW3?

What are the odds that you wake up tomorrow and the world's gone to ash? Probably really unlikely. Compared to 5 days ago they're a million times more likely, sure. But a million times a really really really really and I mean really small number isn't that much.

I'm afraid. I'm searching the news for any new information I can and feel overwhelmed. I'm not doing too well through all this and I'm safe and sound in North America!

But. I'm not. At all. Even a tiny bit. Worried that randomly tomorrow I'll wake up and the world has literally ended. There may be war. And there may be bombs. And I may need to find shelter and reevaluate my odds. But. I think there's a much larger chance I'll eat too much due to stress than there will be nukes used. And I can do something about the over eating.

beardedetimon In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

Where else should we go to but the official information? I agree it's not great and as faulty as humans so where can I find information about these things that is great and not faulty?

beardedetimon I wrote a program that sends cats to my phone when I'm sad at the computer

It sure feels like I'm eating steak...

beardedetimon I wrote a program that sends cats to my phone when I'm sad at the computer

I really want a machine that monitors me and tells me "yo dude, you're Hella depressed. Don't take any of your thoughts too seriously" or "you're super happy. Don't make any big choices without asking your Wife about them".

beardedetimon Convoy Crackdown – power to freeze bank accounts without trial or legal recourse

Why not? I agree we currently don't but why shouldn't we?

beardedetimon Convoy Crackdown – power to freeze bank accounts without trial or legal recourse

I agree with you on paper but have a really hard time viewing my current relationship with any State as that of which I have power. Nor do I see myself with any _limited State_ having any power. Nor do I see myself as having _any_ ability to legally inflict harm to others as the State has power to do.

I totally agree that democracy on paper says the People have control but I am not seeing that play out at any real scale.

beardedetimon Convoy Crackdown – power to freeze bank accounts without trial or legal recourse

I agree and am wondering for my own edification:

What _would_ make a pattern? Is it possible to make any negative predictions without falling into the Slippery Slope?

beardedetimon Show HN: Full text search on 630M US court cases

I don't think it's the plaintiff. It's John Doe, here by referenced as Plaintiff.

beardedetimon What Is Rust's Hole Purpose?

I don't want to get paid to write code. I want to get paid to solve problems. My least favorite type of problem to solve is "how do I explain ABC solution in Language 123". I hate it even more when ABC solution is working per any metric the business cares about.

beardedetimon The Fun Scale (2014)

My body being in pain and my brain enjoying working the body are not at odds with each other.

In my experience trying to become an ultra runner, its not that I enjoy the pain. I enjoy the workout. I enjoy the run while my body is in pain, not that I enjoy the pain itself.

beardedetimon Facebook's African Sweatshop

For sure agree these are totally different and the space between them vast! I was asking directly about a specific use-case so that I can better understand your perspective on who is responsible for the bits stored on a hard drive.

beardedetimon Facebook's African Sweatshop

Are you saying that if _any one of those_ things isn't true that it's _not my responsibility_ for the bits on that machine? I am losing the thread here a bit and am not clear on what you are trying to say or how you're answering my question. Apologies.

beardedetimon Facebook's African Sweatshop

If I wanted to start a media hosting service for me and my community (_local, only within an N-block radius of my hosting device_), who would you expect to be held liable if the hard drives associated with that device held something illegal in those N-blocks?

beardedetimon Names of Canada truck convoy donors leaked after reported hack

> Where do you think that hypocrisy comes from?

Me and my brother watched the Super Bowl last night, me rooting for he Rams and him for the Bengals. We saw the same play happen live, resulting in the Bengals getting a penalty for holding and the Rams being awarded free yards.

He saw it as "fucked up" and I saw it as "just".

When the Rams were called for a penalty, the roles were reversed and I felt like the refs were in the pocket of the Bengals for calling such a stupid penalty.

---

All that to say: when _my_ team does stuff, it's okay. When _their_ team does stuff, it's bad. This is the same line of reasoning that is being played out with the above hypocrisy.

beardedetimon Ask HN: What are your contrarian views?

HTTP status codes are important.

beardedetimon An Introduction to Deno: Is It Better Than Node.js?

I have a strong feeling that deno will be the io of our age: important for pushing node forward and ultimately be brought into node proper but not worth investing any apps/projects onto.

beardedetimon TikTok shares your data more than any other app and it’s unclear where it goes

> doesn't mean there aren't smart people in government.

agreed and I was flippant to make a point. I did not mean to say there aren't smart people in government. But I would venture to say that people who understand ML/AI are _not_ working in the government. Or put more correctly, the _odds_ of a person working in government being up to date on how LSTM works today is such a low number, that I would be fair to say it is extremely unlikely that anyone on any board would be smarter than Sen Hatch _in this domain_.

> then that's a rabbit hole that needs to have funding put towards digging up as well.

Agreed and is the larger point I was trying to make: we currently, no matter how smart you are, have _any_ way of knowing what your "algorithm" is doing. Or if you do, it's a rule-based system and isn't AI/ML. We should though! And I think pursuing that will give us much higher rate of return than our black-box strategy everyone seems to be using.

beardedetimon TikTok shares your data more than any other app and it’s unclear where it goes

> Show me how this works, now.

Let's say we had this. We had some ML/AI team go up to Congress/DoJ and show them some tensors, some "back propagating LSTM" horseshit. How does that help the people that don't understand how the ad model works?

Hell, I bet there is _no one_ using AI or tensors or any of that shit that can tell you _why_ their model output Foo instead of Bar.

beardedetimon You cannot police misinformation in a fair, reproducible, and representative way

I don't have any data to back this up but my overall feeling/ideology is that we can't have groups larger than some number. I like Dunbar's number [1] as a rough guess but am more than happy to raise it to something like 100k if one were able to be convincing. But I do not see any path forward where we can get buy-in from 300 million people let alone 7 billion.

If we were to have a Tribe of 7 billion people, we would need to come up with "facts" that can be agreed upon by 7 billion people. We cannot get 7 billion people to agree that the earth is not flat. I don't have any hopes that we can get 7 billion people to agree on human rights or other things that can be described as "us vs them".

This may be my anarchist/extreme leftist ideologies that I personally hold bleeding into what I think is possible/should be done. I have a very hard time separating those feelings from "facts" and I think that makes this point even more clear!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

beardedetimon You cannot police misinformation in a fair, reproducible, and representative way

100% agree. There is conflict between tribes and that something that I am not clear on how to fix as nothing other than violence seems to help ensure _my_ tribe doesn't get killed off.

In my perfect world, it is Mutually Assured Destruction between tribes that keeps us not putting mercury in any drinking water outside our own, etc. I know that isn't going to work but that is the most _fair_ to me.

beardedetimon You cannot police misinformation in a fair, reproducible, and representative way

yes yes yes!

It sucks that our Tribe can't be 7 billion people. It really does. But we should see it as a positive and a war of _benefit_ instead of a war of _ideas_. What _benefit_ does believing in QAnon offer? What _benefit_ does being apart of Group A have over Group B?

Each community is responsible for its own truths and policing them how they see fit. We should be arguing over how to make our _benefits_ better than theirs, not trying to force our ideologies onto them.

beardedetimon What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

I think they're two sides of the same coin.

_How_ do we have any experience will be more easily answered the more we know about _what_ we actually experience. And _what_ we experience is predicated upon _how_ we experience it. I agree both need investigating.

The _bigger_ question I see the coin representing is _who or what_ is experiencing in the first place? The way I see it, it's not really _a thing_ experiencing _something_ but instead _things_ experiencing _things_ at _times_.