bowlich

Worked in the Park Service for four years. Worst days for most visitor conflicts was always, always, the free entrance days. Everyone dreaded having to work on one because everyone was super expecting.

Man 5 months? I'm on two right now. Still getting idiotic automated responses from their customer support. I ping the ticket every couple of days, and nothing. Been thinking of going the Twitter route.

No way to get in and retrieve the % of a coin that I bought a couple years ago. Quite a bit of a scam to accept money for storage, lock a user out, and then provide no support for getting back in while still taking on new customers.

Sure, my understanding is that's how Oxford works.

The fact that almost all the traffic to my personal blog are just one-hit wonders from google actually made me feel a lot less pressure to "grow" the blog or to even keep to any kind of coherent theme.

These days, I post about whatever I feel like. With greatly varied degrees of quality. All knowing that a small handful of posts on some oddball niche will continue to garner tons of Google traffic while the vast majority of pages lay fallow.

The article seems to engage in a bifurcation fallacy in suggesting that if you have company data on a personal device, then you must or ought to have MDM.

Trusting me to be able to access my work e-mail from my own equipment without the need to monitor me is perhaps the lowest baseline of trust that I expect an employer to put in me. Afterall, if they can't trust me to be responsible with such data why bother giving me access to their systems at all?*

* The exception of course is in cases where they are required to monitor data use by law, e.g. medical. But prefer working in open environments anyways...

I think you hit it the big difference between public/private sector work -- the rules. My spouse has spent seven years in a land agency specializing into a position that really entails knowing, and keeping abreast of a very narrow, specific body of legislation and regulation that is applicable only to that land agency and only in very specific agency/business relationships.

There is no comparable position in the private sector (there isn't even a comparable position in different land agencies), and there is no way you could pick someone off the street and expect them to be versed in that legislation without a similar timeframe (and no agency will ever foot the bill to train you on it either. They'll just leave the position empty and the work to pile up for years or decades until a similarly skilled person becomes available).

Unfortunately, the biggest issue that this particular agency is facing has been a multiple-decade campaign to hire externally to the agency rather than promoting internally. The result has been a body of upper management from the public sector that neither understands said legislation or how it applies.

Close. #7 is actually not true (although a lot of hiring managers seem to think that it is). You are not required to hire the veteran per OPM regulations. They only get the point based boost.

In practice, the veterans benefit becomes meaningless once you advance in specialist grades (GS-09+). But it will get you the glorious position of elevator operator in Carlesbad.

This last year I made the connection that Facebook only provided the illusion that I was socializing with past friends.

Sure, I know what is going on in the lives of my buddies from high school and college. I know when they have a kid, bought a house, that they switched jobs, that they moved out to Denver, etc. But I realized that I had learned all of this through passive consumption.

With the exception of three close friends, the vast majority of my "friends" list are people who I haven't directly messaged, spoken to, or even written on their "wall" in ten years. At this junction, I'm more of a voyeur into their lives then an actual participant.

I haven't deleted my FB account, but I have stopped browsing it. I've started to pick out people who I would really like to re-connect with and then using the platform to start real conversation with people and perhaps drop in for lunch when I pass through their cities. And then perhaps, un-friend everyone not important enough to my life to value maintaining that kind of a connection.

My folks (living in the upper peninsula of MI) went from being able to pick up all the stations from Greenbay from across the lake to being able to pick up one random analog station out of Canada.

Everyone ended up on satellite to compensate. But it was really viewed as yet another Urban vs. Rural fight with Rural getting the short end of the stick again.

The For-Profit thing has continued to irk me about Patreon and Kickstarter. Why haven't we seen a 503(c) come out with these services so I can make my contributions to the arts as a tax-deduction?

If I donate to the local theatre, art-in-the-park, PBS, etc. then there is a non-profit organization accepting and then distributing the funds.

I'm starting to think that the hyper-engagement of fighting over every $CANDIDATE, $CAUSE, and $OUTRAGE is going to drive people away from Social Media.

I started doing blackouts on Twitter and Facebook every time some major news event occurs because I just don't want to hear about it. And the one thing that I have noticed is a slow consolidation of my Facebook feed to just a narrow slice of hyper-engaged people who post multiple times a day about whatever the latest outrage is -- the broader spectrum of users haven't deleted their accounts, but most on my "Friends" list haven't posted in years. I suspect a lot of my friends are disengaged from the platform precisely because they have zero interest in fighting their loud, opinionated relatives of opposing political sides.

I miss the days where everyone was just avatars, nick-names, personalities. It still seems odd to me to be expected to mix my virtual and real identities, since the "internet culture" when I got online insisted that you do not share your real-life identity* and Facebook came along and turned that entirely upside down.

*It was common practice on some of the bulletin boards that I frequented in the late nineties for users to maintain multiple accounts under different nicknames and personas, and even have conversations with themselves.

Switched back when Rust went alpha. It encouraged me to really look into some of the side projects that Mozilla had going on and it made me really want to support them and see those projects succeed.

Latest one seems like it has a memory leak on linux. Starts off fast, but I've found that I need to close out all of Firefox about once a day. Not sure if that's the vanilla build, or the multi-account containers extension that's causing the issue.

I've gotten into the habit of organizing my feeds into two groups. People who post infrequently with high quality articles get put into one group. Sites that generate loads of articles (NPR, Guardian, HN) go into the other.

I generally read everything in group one. In group two, I start the day by just marking the entire group read. If something neat comes into group two during the day I might read it when I have a spare moment. Otherwise, it gets flushed.

I switched to Startpage last quarter as my default search engine. I did this mostly to make myself consciously aware of every time that I actually use Google.

My experience thus far. Google beats out Startpage when it comes to queries related to programing issues. If I have an error, or some issue Google seems to do a decent job of sending me to the right documentation or relevant Stackoverflow question.

Google also seems to do a decent job if I'm searching for particular commercial services if those services have physical location that it can point me to (Restaurants, brick-and-mortor stores, etc). All search engines seem to fail horribly if I'm looking for contractors/service providers in my area. Try searching for who actually provides internet coverage for your street address and you'll end up with every provider under the sun listed in the results. Try searching for a plumber, electrician, chimney sweep, roofer, etc. and you'll get SEO crap for people not even in your state. I've found going directly to government registries (broadband.gov, Arizona Registrar of Contractors [https://roc.az.gov/]) to be the only way to get around this.

What I've really found disappointing is how search results for humanities related topics have really gone down hill in the last decade. For example, I just searched for "The Rebel Camus." The results are always Wikipedia, Amazon, and then after that an assortment of either encyclopedias, links to Youtube, Goodreads (or similar sites). Used to be, that I would get taken to the personal website of a scholar, hosted at a University, whose life studies revolve around that topic -- links to scholarly papers, coursework, suggested readings on the topic.

This story makes me think of the colloquialism in the northern plains states where if two drivers come to an all-way stop on some dusty dirt road right-of-way is determined by a nod of the head or wave of the hand.

Legally, I don't think there's a rule on the books for offering right-of-way via body language. If you misinterpret them and they drive out and hit you, then you would be at fault. Yet, growing up it seemed like an an unwritten rule that, at an otherwise empty rural intersection, if you have right of way, you should offer it up as a kind of generosity to the other driver.

It's a cultural norm that I would dearly miss and would definitely vary from state-to-state and even from urban-to-rural driving inside the same state.

The weakness in the teaching of ethics, and in particular the lack of discourse in ethics amongst business in this nation is utterly frustrating. That you can do something (within the law) or that no moral outrage would occur is itself not a measure of ethical action.

Not dealing harm is itself a rather weak ethical stance. Ethics doesn't test whether you do no harm, it tests whether you maximized the good -- and not the good for you or your investors, but rather the good across all of society.

If anyone holds you to an obligation that entails that you take an unethical action then such a license itself become immediately void. We can see this historically expressed by St. Augustine in the 3rd century and more recently by Martin Luther King Jr. (an unjust law is no law).

Hence, the law itself is not a measure of ethical act. That you _can_ do something is not itself a justification of ethical action. Only that you _should_ do something is itself a measure of ethics. In which case you must provide proof that you _should_ misrepresent yourself and your content. Returning to Kant. If you cannot universalize the action -- that is to say, if you cannot show that to create fake content is always a good act (and with all the rufus about "Fake news," I think we certainly cannot show that fake content has been universally good).

Jumping into the question of net good we skip from deontology to utilitarianism. Yet, utilitarianism recognizes that net good is not a measure of money, or pleasure but can be an abstract measurement. Success of the business is only a local consideration, you must expand the ethical question to all of society. That which is good for you or your investors is not itself a net good for society (nor from a deontological perspective a good unto itself).

Was the success of Reddit a net positive for society? Had there been no Reddit would our net quality of life have been improved as a whole society. In this, I would say Reddit was not a net positive for society. It consolidated a distributed system of smaller social forums across the internet into a single hegemonic gated community and consolidating social power into a smaller sum of hands. And I would argue that consolidation of power into smaller groups (whether hard or soft power and in this case we are discussing the soft power of cultural norms) is itself unethical.

But that doesn't answer the ethical question. Success and imminent failure are not a justifications for unethical actions. If success cannot be achieved without unethical action, then perhaps it is best to fail.

Misrepresenting the nature of the content would certainly fail Kant's deontological tests.

For a "corporate death penalty" why would the state need to concern itself with the notion of shareholders to begin with? Loss of stake would merely be a part of the penalty. There's certainly precedent outside of the US for nationalization of corporate resources.

That assumption doesn't work for a big chunk of rural and small town America. I make the once-a-week trek to the post office to pick up my mail.

I tried to sign up for the informed delivery service, since it would be nice to know if it's worth my while to make the weekly trip into town, but those stupid KBA questions would never let me through. Verifying you by random, incorrect, data that they somehow scrapped out of the ether seems much less reliable then just letting me show up at the post office with ID in hand to sign up for it.

Been working remote now for four or so years. The big items that I found useful:

If part of the team is remote, then the entire team is remote. Keep this in mind for meetings. If anyone in the meeting is phoning in, then it's best to just keep everyone at their desk and have everyone phone in as if they are remote. Otherwise, the in-house folks just end up tuning out the remote employees and you end up with two meetings. A meeting of the in-house and a meeting of the remotes.

Team bonding is always an issue. Fly people in once or twice a year and really schedule most of their time in-house to be situated around social activities. We do daily stand ups and block out thirty minutes. Wrap up stand up in five minutes, spend the other twenty-five bullshitting about what's going on in your life. When you're not in the office, it can be difficult to really know what's going on in people's lives. If someone has a sick kid, or a grandparent in hospice this isn't going to be readily communicated unless you schedule and encourage some non-work-related conversations.

I remember seeing it a lot used around the context of media piracy and attempts by companies to control the narration and dissemination of content via legal grounds. Stuff like region-locked DVDs, control over distribution of a game or film into countries that might have banned that media, attempts to censor and control dissemination of a particular article or essay. When duplication becomes essentially free then content, good content, will want to be free and ultimately any attempt to lock down and control this information will eventually be thwarted.

At the time, I it was a positive sentiment. Government secrets would leak out (which they have). Rare or impossible to find books, films, and music would become freely available. If governments or corporations tried to restrict access to those books they would fail, etc.

These days, I often find myself using the phrase more as an ethical warning. Any information you gather or create will eventually become freed. So if you're gay and live in the middle east, don't post it on Facebook because eventually that information will be freed. Don't collect personal information of dissidents in countries were they may be persecuted. Don't collect information about your customers that you don't want eventually going public (e.g. do stupid things like store credit card numbers and social security numbers when you don't have to)

Been slowly weaning myself off Google's products.

Switched my default search engine to Startpage. I still end up on Google for half of my searches -- particularly if I need to get a map to a business -- but it helps that I now have to consciously type in the name of a Google product before I make use of it. It's like treating an addiction.

Fork it, fix it. Pull in upstream changes until the maintainer fixes it. I suppose file a ticket with a snippet of what I did to fix it so a regular contributor can create a request faster.

If this is a random one-off drive by bug, then why go through the hassle of figuring out what particular standards any individual maintainer wants to follow just to have it turned down, or discover that some regular contributor already patched it while I reading the documentation.

(I mean, I'd love to contribute, but the few times that I've stumbled upon a bug, fixed it, figured everything the maintainer wanted in a pull request... it was aleady fixed by the maintainer and I'd just wasted a lot of time)

My employer is not SF based, but they do pay the same to all employees regardless of location based on the market rate for their base city. Lots of folks taking advantage of that to live in cheaper environments. Although there are a couple oddballs who use it to live in SF and not get the local rate for there.

"Double Dipping" as in working two jobs simultaneously and billing two employers for the same hours? No.

My current employer about 60% of the employees are remote and my entire team is remote. Almost everyone has their own on-the-side consultancy and is very public about it. Team members swap stories about their after-hours clients. The after-hours work allows us to diversify into new stacks, experiment with tooling that might not be available to us during the day hours, and then bring a lot of this experience back. Since we're all on very flexible schedules, meetings during normal the normal 8-5 rarely conflict. As long as we don't compete in our employer's industry (which is a very niche industry), we're generally trusted to keep our client/employer work separate, prioritize our employers meetings over client meetings in scheduling, then really it's quite kosher.

I'm a little surprised more medium-to-large businesses aren't more encouraging of it. Free training, keeps the engineering team sharp, and definitely keeps a lot of the more ambitious engineers from getting bored with the pace of building boring business software.

In most of the west the inverse is true. If you hit livestock, under any condition (if it got loose and was wandering the highway), you are liable. Livestock always has right of way.

Back when I was doing a lot of brochure sites I often thought that there was a correlation between the quality of content and the amount of filler -- big text sizes, lots of graphics.

If I have a lot of meaningful content, say essays of 5,000 - 10,000 words or novella-length fiction, a 20px+ is going to make the page-length ridiculous. But sure, if you can only be bothered to churn out 100 words of copy and you want your page to not look like a content-desert then 20px+ font and giant margins are your friend.

I held a similar attitude through college. An exam exists to test my knowledge and abilities, give me a solid idea of what I learned and where my deficits lay. It is not a test of short-term memory. If I didn't learn the material good enough the first time, then it was a waste of my efforts to cram for today.

Likewise with the interview. Sure, I look into the company, the requirements. If they use libraries that I am unfamiliar with, I will review the documentation so I have a general idea of what it does and how I can map my existing skills against those libraries. But I can't become an expert in that short of a time, and I wouldn't purport to be one in the interview either.

I have yet to do an interview that asked me to white board. I've been asked to solve some fairly basic problems (of the fubar variety). But then again, I've never applied to a business that was large enough that my resume and interview wasn't handled by my future direct supervisor. I've no interest in jumping through the hoops of a large bureaucratic corporation.

Providing your own materials isn't really a unique thing. There's a lot of blue-collar jobs that require you to bring your own tools to the job. When I applied for a construction job back as a teenager it was a requirement that you bring your own tool belt, hammer, hard-hat etc. My girl-friend's ex bought $100,000 worth of CNC equipment for his first job. My grandfather owned his own bulldozer and while he was an employee of the company he rented the dozer to his employer. I know mechanics that own and bring their own tools into the shop.

Even today, I provide my own laptop, desktop, and work environment (I work remote). If you are particular and a specialist in the tools that you use then it makes sense to bring them with onto the job.