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caskstrength

1,450 karma · joined April 23, 2020

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caskstrength··on How Japanese black companies oppress workers (2014)
> For the other "business falling apart", maybe they consider it’s part of the business owner’s responsibility to make sound business decisions when involving someone else’s livelihood. Just like when leasing a shop or taking on a loan.

What about running a tech startup with high chance of failure? Ever considered why they seem to be few and far between in EU?

caskstrength··on Bluesky adds 700k new users in a week
> These are mechanics that will just create certain kinds of behaviors.

Yes, but if platform API allows using customizable third-party clients it is not really a problem for me (e.g. I can just enable chronological timeline, filter out all the ads and noise).

caskstrength··on QNX is now free for anything non-commercial, plus there's an RPi image
> For everything else, including desktop and mobile operating systems realtime sounds like a good idea.

Why on earth would you need real time on desktop? Every time the topic is discussed on internet bunch of confused people chime in with this sentiment that doesn't make much sense. "RTOS" is not some magic that somehow makes everything on your desktop fast. All it would do in reality is make everything slower for 99% of your interaction but guarantee that "slowness" is uniform and you don't have any weird latency spikes in other 1%. Note that for cases that are not "nuclear reactor control system that requires Very Certified OS with audited and provable reaction times" RTLinux is already available, but distros are not inclined to leverage it on desktop for reason described above.

caskstrength··on Trump wins presidency for second time
> we don't want to help other countries at our short term cost (even if it is a long term gain for us)

It is not even that since what they basically propose is to dial down the war in Eastern Europe but get more involved in the war in Middle East and possibly soon in East Asia. That stance always seemed very confusing to me as a non-US person.

caskstrength··on New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike
> What crawls on four legs and causes women to drop out of the labour force?

"Women earn less due to sexist discrimination" and "women earn less due to bearing the brunt of raising children" are two distinct claims. The first one is contentious and widely disputed (disproved?).

caskstrength··on A change of heart regarding employee metrics
> Being a manager is about more than just getting people to do their job well. You also need to plan things, you need to know what's changing over time, you need to test whether your processes are working. I use metrics to measure the aggregate impact of my influence on managing my teams, not that of any IC on any of my teams. Employee metrics are useful for a big picture view.

The point of the article is exactly that such metrics don't give you any kind of a good signal unless you are really into the fine details. And if you are, then you don't really need them in the first place.

> quantitative details (eg a count of how much output there is)

For example I recently spent a week producing several thousands of lines of tedious trivial code that parses some configuration out of JSON file in pure C. Then I spent a month writing less 1k lines of very dense low-level packet parsing code and the main loop also in C. So the metrics would show you the big picture of me slacking and my performance tanking which obviously wasn't the case. You can't substitute actually knowing and understanding of what your reports are doing with some tools providing you with trivia like number of commits, lines of code changed or tickets closed.

caskstrength··on Touchscreens are out, and tactile controls are back
Yes, and suppliers outsource the actual development and testing to cut costs even further.
caskstrength··on Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction
> Changing course is a CEO taking responsibility for the company.

Changing course and immediately resigning would be that.

caskstrength··on A new book shows how the power of companies is destabilizing governance
> For now, most countries still have some semblance of control, usually backed by the power of international treaties, DNS blocking and control over payment infrastructure, but I wouldn't be surprised if the prevalence of fast and affordable satellite internet on one hand and easier access to crypto on the other will make the situation even worse.

What exact scenario are you envisioning here? Germany bans X (for example), but people smuggle Starlink terminals to continue reading it and advertisers continue advertising to them illegally by paying with crypto? Sounds extremely unrealistic to me TBH.

caskstrength··on A new book shows how the power of companies is destabilizing governance
> Alternatively: it's what users want.

So why are they so opposed to adding some toggle in the options to allow chronological feed then?

caskstrength··on Germany's 49-euro ticket resulted in significant shift from road to rail
> Edit: the 49-euro ticket is great though!

As a Swiss person you want appreciate German tax rates that subsidize that 49-euro tickets. The money has always got to come from somewhere.

caskstrength··on Phind-405B and faster, high quality AI answers for everyone
Yeah, just went over their pricing and they apparently don't have any lower tier subscription besides 20$/month "unlimited Phind + 500/day ChatGPT" version. I don't need that, what I need is something like 100 uses per month for 5$. As a coding-focused search engine they really need to consider why would people pay them same rates as for more feature-rich competitors.
caskstrength··on Phind-405B and faster, high quality AI answers for everyone
This is true in my experience. Before searching for something I often try to guess whether it will take me more time to quickly go over Google results or watch Perplexity Pro slowly spitting the answer line-by-line.
caskstrength··on Outsourcing Cost Boeing Billions (2019)
> Ukraine. We spent a week being confused because the Ukrainiens expected the electricity bill to be calculated based on the size of your house and how many animals you have. The concept of a domestic electricity meter was completely foreign to them.

What are you talking about? Private apartments and houses in Ukraine had domestic electricity meters installed since soviet times.

caskstrength··on X ordered to pay €550k to Irish employee fired after yes-or-resign ultimatum
> I heard that wges are less than 50% but you end up saving more

Curios regarding how you came up with that conclusion. After paying rent, taxes and buying some groceries from EU senior engineer's ~80k you will generally have enough to maybe buy a new smartphone at the end of the year, not any meaningful amount of savings.

caskstrength··on X ordered to pay €550k to Irish employee fired after yes-or-resign ultimatum
> I could still buy a car, a house, raise a family, have some savings, etc.

You are an outlier. Very few SDEs in EU can afford to raise a family in their own SFH on a single salary while living in a location with any notable IT jobs market.

caskstrength··on It is time for more holistic practices in mental health
A very boring kind.
caskstrength··on Multiple Displays on a Mac Sucks
Why would it be "a Mac thing"? I only ever close FireFox when updating the system and I'm on Linux.
caskstrength··on How we communicate
If 1/3 of their employees quit over innocuous "no politics at work chats" policy, then it seems to me that the problem is in the hiring process and not communication.
caskstrength··on Letting go of the idea of keeping up
> Templeton recalls a turning point when being asked about her recent reads felt more like a competition than a shared interest, prompting her to reevaluate her relationship with reading. She argues for a reading culture that values personal experience over productivity, emphasizing that the number of books one reads should not dictate one's worth as a reader.

It feels to me that Templeton needs to re-evaluate her relationships with friends asking this instead of with reading. Sometimes I read a lot, sometimes barely at all but I don't get questions from friends like "Only two books in half a year? Bro, do you even read?!".

caskstrength··on Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison
> Besides (potentially) rehabilitation, prison serves to protect the populace from dangerous people who would harm others and as a deterrent to others who can see what punishment they might get if they do something illegal.

It is not like he will be getting away with a slap on the wrist one way or another. I just don't see more years in prison past some reasonable threshold as a good deterrent.

> I am not claiming prison does a good job of these things, just that its goal is not to "ruin people's lives".

The purpose of a system is what it does.

caskstrength··on Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison
> What could anyone ever do to convince him to not commit fraud again if given the opportunity...

IMO 10 years in prison should be more than enough to discourage SBF from repeating it. And if it is not enough, then 30 years won't be enough either...

caskstrength··on Google suspends romance author's account for writing sexually explicit content
> Google is also a multi-national company and would need to comply with laws in other countries too. If the individuals are represented as being minors (again, changes with jurisdictions) this gets into further complications in many places.

Why is this particular example is being singled out? Calling current conflict in Ukraine "war" or "invasion" is also illegal in one particular jurisdiction. Would Google also ban me for distributing draft of a book about it via Drive? How about a fantasy novel about adventures on Winnie-the-Pooh in China?

> That share links are neither checked for age nor jurisdiction, google would be liable for knowingly distributing sexually explicit material without proper checks in place to limit consumption by minors or in jurisdictions where such content is restricted.

As far as I understood the draft was shared with particular group of people. It is not like author uploaded porn video on youtube and made it public.

caskstrength··on Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison
Prison should be to rehabilitate (i.e. ensure that convict doesn't re-offend after they are released) as opposed to just punish and ruin people lives for their mistakes for the sake of making random commenters on internet feel good. Also, consider that keeping people in prison is very expensive and is not an optimal way for the state to spend you tax money IMO.
caskstrength··on Google suspends romance author's account for writing sexually explicit content
Bad faith? Erotic writing "may be illegal" in the US? o_O
caskstrength··on Google suspends romance author's account for writing sexually explicit content
They usually have them in order to not spook the advertisers who don't want to see their ad near anything remotely objectionable. Don't see why they care about somebody sharing a document from their Drive.
caskstrength··on Google suspends romance author's account for writing sexually explicit content
Care to explain what exactly "may be illegal" in this case?
caskstrength··on Florida's DeSantis signs law restricting social media for people under 16
It is not just 15$ a month. You need to pay someone to develop the website in the first place and then deal with all kinds of issues that eventually arise (updating the underlying framework and/or getting hacked and dealing with the consequences, solving random stuff like expired SSL certificate, etc.).
caskstrength··on Florida's DeSantis signs law restricting social media for people under 16
> Although I don't support it, would the internet be a better place with people being identified?

I don't believe so.

> For this to be a constructive discussion, can we assume companies have a proper and secure way to validate identities and store your data?

What?! No, we absolutely can't assume that. In fact, good default is to assume that data stored will be eventually compromised with high probability. Assuming otherwise is like believing in some magical backdoors in cryptography that only "good" guys can access and other such nonsense.

> I sometimes wonder if the internet as we know it and social medias pervasive influence would be much different if people were less anonymous.

Social media as we know it today mostly stems from FB which has a real name policy. Don't think FB is much better than others (by any measure that interests me at least).

caskstrength··on Flipping Pages: New Linux vulnerability in nf_tables and exploitation techniques
You are being downvoted, but as an outside observer I have also always been interested in ethics of security research.
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