Once upon a time in Germany, I was put on several special duty assignments to guard documents overnight (with a machine gun!) prior to their destruction by companies like this.
Yeah, and even "good engineers" can take jobs that they don't do well at. It's weird how this works and seems in many cases not related only to the job or type of work, but many factors both on and off the job. I think this is the reason hiring is so hard, because there are factors not taken into account that have a real effect on how well a person does at some particular job.
Hello! Data hoarders [0] like myself use tons of automation for this task. For online videos specifically, I watch them locally so as to avoid as much telemetry as possible, and when I see a video I want to watch, I save it to a playlist. Then I have youtube-dl set up so that it will sync with the playlist and download any new videos that it doesn't already have. Your question about finding the time is on the money: The "choice" we are given is a complete farce, and time is the main way the monopolies turn the screws on getting you to behave the way they want. They make it exceptionally time-consuming to NOT give them everything they want. I spend an infurating amount of time not trusting my phone or my computer, and refusing to allow telemetry of any kind. I'm not married and have no children, and those things certainly make the problem that much more difficult. People seem to not give a shit about this nightmare dystopia we've built, they just want to connect their iPhone to your wifi network to they can shovel more data into tiktok or whatever. The more people you have in your life, the harder it becomes to "choose" not to give up (an inevitably insane amount of) your telemetry. It fucking sucks!! I am slowly feeling more and more helpless and now I even feel like I might have some understanding about that guy who flew a Cessna into that IRS building "lol".
Yeah bitrot is way worse than people imagine. About ten years ago (wow time flies) I ran an experiment to validate hyperlinks and measure bitrot and even then, links older than a few years did not work. This is why we will be leaning ever harder on stuff like the Internet Archive (thank you Jason!) as big ass media companies keep turning the screws to confine our attentions to their content while spending considerable effort to attack outside content.
This is exactly what I do, but I use a randomly-generated-per-call two-digit number to advance the caller from my (Asterisk-based) IVR. It works like a charm.
It's been clear to me we're at the tail end of the golden age of online videos and I and many others have been furiously downloading in preparation for the inevitable.
Microsoft repos were silently added to Raspberry Pi OS earlier this year, ostensibly "in case anyone wants to use VSCode" and definitely not just as a super shitty way of adding telemetry to every Raspberry Pi OS install without asking the user if they were cool with this.
If I buy hardware, it's mine, and I'll figure out a way to take ownership of the hardware I've been sold. One way or another, every artificial limitation shimmed into in every piece of hardware goes down in flames.
I interviewed at Doordash when they were just starting. I think I would have been like employee number twelve or something. To this day, I have not interviewed with a founder that repelled me more.
This is the crux of the issue. I have spent a lot of my adult life in places that would horrify the average westerner. The root of the problem in recognizing what could go wrong with this stuff, is never having been exposed to a jurisdiction of political power which is run by murderous psychopaths outside a rule of law that benefits anyone but the psychopaths. Of course "authorities" will always continue to push boundaries and seek to embiggen the largesse of their power, but we in the developed world are so lucky! Most of us here on HN have won some sort of cosmic lottery with odds more infinitesimal than any other lottery that could ever exist. But an unfortunate side effect of never having been exposed to the various hazards of human civilization that almost every other human before us has endured, is not having built up any "ideological antibodies" against these sorts of things.
I've seen comments on Youtube that seemed shocked that Youtube could trace comments to an IP address! We are deep in it now, approaching a point where the barrier to entry to understand how the technology functions is too much even for capable specialists to fully comprehend the rampant abuse happening at this very moment. How often do we as technical people find out about some new god damned thing some god damned tech company is doing to steal our data or otherwise exploit us as "customers"? And even people who are technically capable of grasping the depth of the power of this technology are still busy hammering away on their keyboards to make it more powerful, having never had to worry about violent psychopaths with political power. We are creating a truly terrifying nightmare of brutal suffering for our grandchildren or their children.
Decentraleyes is also very helpful on the privacy front. It will cache commonly included libraries like jQuery from various CDNs like Cloudflare, preventing them from tracking you across the internet. ClearURLs is another one that I install on a freshly-opted-out Firefox, to avoid those ubiquitous tracking parameters in various URLs.
I am genuinely curious: Was this at least partially in response to the bots over the weekend spamming "JOIN #LIBERIA ON LIBERIA.CHAT"? Because that probably didn't come from libera staff or even from the libera network, for that matter.
I've been trying hard to keep people from making rash decisions about moving, since I have read enough to know that there is some amount of duplicity on both sides of this split, and we were playing a waiting game for the truth to come out and help us make a more informed decision. I do not support morality police, and all we had to do was wait out the momentum. There was some censorship on libera, but what you have done here has made all of my efforts to aid Freenode totally indefensible. You have made a grevious strategic error.
While I agree with your assertion in the general case, I think the response from other factions is that they, too, must lie in order to compete, leading to much more systemic, intentional, strategic lies.
We live in the age of the lie. It's impossible to take anything at face value, because it seems like every organization we interact with is just lying to us all at every opportunity.
As with anything, we need to ask ourselves how something can be used to attack political enemies and punish outsiders. The woke politics thing is dangerous, and I think organizations (like the CIA) will ultimately be the ones to wield this power against the people, even if they haven't fully mechanized it yet. That is because this isn't just "politics" as the article asserts. This is a form of ambiguous morality (one is expected to just know when something is wrong, and everyone is expected to agree) which requires the use of an oracle (CoC, D&I council, etc) that exists outside of the traditionally enumerable, rules-based systems based on the rule of law, except that it additionally can't be questioned or opted out of. This is the most ideal thing imagineable for people who want to weaponize the workplace to achieve their own ends. Proponents of this system, beware.
Maybe it will surprise you to learn that monarchies (and their supporting monarchists) are a weird bunch, and will fight for generations over a throne that hasn't existed for generations. They will even have generations of supporters with no claim to power. It really seems hardwired into our nature.
I think this right here reflects the reality of many or most of the channels on Freenode. I am one of the few operators of one of the larger channels on Freenode and it cost me otherwise productive work time (with no warning whatsoever) just to have to prevent the inevitable trolls from squatting on related channels and nicknames (for anyone wondering, we were helped with the channels, but not with nicknames, despite having logs to demonstrate these were registered by squatters). Now we are being "encouraged" to put more work into this matter which is, as far as I can work out, just some interpersonal drama and power politics. We have taken a "wait and see what happens" stance, which seems to be what most are doing, not only because it is unclear what is actually going on here, but because I otherwise have a lot of work to do (despite the time I spend on HN, I promise!).
Is it possible you have conditioned yourself through the years of needing to reflexively post these kinds of replies? I took a break from HN when I took a break from all the things associated with the industry over the last couple of years, and this place has changed (as have I, but of course that's a tautology, because the only constant is change).
For one interesting example, take a look at how the Luftwaffe responded to the placement of machine guns on the B-17 and adapted to the number of crew members available to man the guns.
However this is a statement of fact, not partisanship on my part. How do you suggest someone say this in a more neutral fashion? You can see some of the comments in #libera on the new network, and here is one of the staffers saying it in their resignation letter: https://web.archive.org/web/20210520142350/https://blog.bofh...
I think "the RH crowd" does care, but they don't have the time or resources to learn. A bit surprised I'm saying this but, people generally care about their money. If they knew for example how easy it is to transfer out of RH and also that RH could liquidate your holdings to save their asses (which they can do), I don't think they would use Robinhood. Just because people don't have access to some information that informs your value judgments doesn't mean they don't care (or for that matter that all of our value judgments have to line up with one another).
I think we are exposed to the loudest and most annoying of these groups by media that has every incentive to showcase the nutjobs for clicks, and so this is what we remember, even though most people aren't this way.