mdip

Fascinating -- I think the comments on the HN post are almost as good.

I think everyone mostly agrees that AI is coming for a lot of jobs. There's disagreement about how many, how it will impact society and the like.

The pace of technology is not linear, it accelerates. I've never seen something that has so rapidly crossed into the "magical" territory as "nearly every single big LLM/Generative AI thing" seems to. It redefines what was previously laughably impossible ... a decade ago.

We're riding a curve upward that is making it extremely hard to see what's coming next. All of the pontificating, all of the attempts at finding solutions to imagined problems ... I can't see one that doesn't feel like a blindfolded person aiming at what they were told was a dart board with what they were told was a dart. There's really nothing to do but hang on and hope you land where any new opportunities creep up.

Expect bubbles, black swans, and purple unicorns.

I'm seeing a lot of negative comments about this post. I was a little underwhelmed, but I think that was mostly the fault of the title setting higher expectations than the author intended to deliver. That's on me, though. The title is accurate. I was just hoping for some neat script/tool/repo/gadget that re-created the feel of ancient interfaces on modern hardware in a more general sense. The author went for something different, and I found it to be interesting, none-the-less.

Maybe it was that I just landed on the "Moonshot" article[0], but as I was looking at the screenshot on a 4K 15" ASUS OLED display, I know that the image is also being fscked with a little by the OSes attempts to imbiginate everything for this Hi-DPI display (it didn't enlarge the smaller screenshot and even the middle one is kind of small, but it's also a little uneven which smells like shoddy scaling happening somewhere other than "on the author's end").

In all seriousness, though, Windows 11 does a terrible job of upscaling things for Hi-DPI in really unforgivable ways[1]. I can see a future where some of that upscaling is done via AI and all of that work is undone by accident.

Gotta love all of the weird unintended side-effects as things move forward :)

[0] Samsung using AI to enhance images of the moon when discovered in scenes ... and it's more comical/unfortunate results/moral panic thereof.

[1] I know, "You can't put signal back in" and I'm ranting about AI trying to do that while complaining about how terrible it is, today. The unforgivable part is that the signal (WinForms fonts/layout/etc) was lost to the point that the way it's done for these apps is to use the "content-unware myopia upscaling algorithm" (named because it makes you feel like you need glasses while wearing your glasses).

Excellent write-up. I love these kinds of "I had this problem, these things on hand and an idea for how to solve it" followed by the story of every barrier and how it was overcome. It's becoming more and more rare with people preferring to go the YouTube route. I'm not knocking video-versions of these things, they have a lot of value (among them being "less friction to publish easily" for some folks[0]) but convenience of text is vastly superior for consumption as far as I'm concerned.

It takes a lot of time and energy to put these sorts of things together but they have value beyond the original topic (e.g. perhaps one of those barriers you encountered designing this is a barrier to other problems[1]).

[0] Sometimes that's perception, sometimes it's "I don't type very quickly/use a phone exclusively for my computing needs"

[1] Unexpectedly, your site produced a TLS error in Firefox on one of my laptops, so it's causing me to investigate a problem I didn't know I had :)

While I tend to agree with the author that there are far too many "certified/designed for" logos that are meaningless, I have always purchased devices that are certified/designed for Teams/Skype for Business/Lync/OCS R2/OCS/LCS[0].

Back in the OCS/OCS R2 days (2008ish) the market was still pretty impressed with Bluetooth Headsets[1] (and people walking around like they're talking to nobody). Many "computer headsets" were extremely low-end mono-headphones/mic combos with physical mute switches (that often didn't "fully mute"). The sound quality was on-par with a terrible analog POTS call.

Our company made the choice to ditch all IP (Cisco at the time) phones and legacy PBX equipment and replace "everything that was practical to do so with" with computer attached OCS R2 certified headsets.

Here's what you (often) get with certified vs non-certified:

- Assuming the device has a mute/unmute switch/indicator, it will match the mute/unmute state in the client. This was (probably still is, but my devices are certified) a huge problem. Non-certified devices still muted but other participants wouldn't see the mute icon. What's worse than waiting for someone to "unmute"? When they think they're unmuted but their second mute button is muted! My Jabra Speak 410 shows the mute state on the device, it matches what's in the OS and it matches what the client sees/reports. My old Polycom (similar) did the same and short of having to be oriented in a certain manner for Echo cancellation to work properly, it was a similarly trouble-free experience.

- It will always[2] pick the right device for the call and the ringer. If the certified device is attached when you join a call, it will pick that device. If the OS has something different setup for when you're playing games, it still picks right.

- The sound quality exceeds what the client is capable of delivering. I'm using a USB wired "speakerphone" device that I picked up for $150 in late 2012. Nobody can tell I don't have a headset unless I'm on video; it has always cancelled noise/echo and works brilliantly with "just me" or in a small conference room with several participants[3].

- Other features tie into the client correctly. If it's got a "call answer" or "hangup" button, it can be used to join or hang up a conference. Volume indicators match what the OS/Teams indicates.

Can I find a headset, today, which isn't Teams certified that does all that in Windows 11? Probably. I've heard that the microphone tracking the OS does now makes the mute/unmute situation a bit better. BT Headsets and their support in Windows has improved enough that if I've got my high-end Bluetooth headphones connected, I'll use them. But for the last decade, picking a "certified" device (Teams/Lync/etc only -- I can't speak to the others) meant a completely grief-free experience. Aside from "no drivers/no setup/It Just Works(tm)", the headsets are all "at least mid-to-high-end"

[0] I think that covers the naming back to 2005?

[1] I remember my BlueAnt Z9

[2] Yeah, there's no such thing, but it's always worked for me across several devices.

[3] So well, in fact, that when we merged with a competitor and they opted to implement Lync (at the time), they stuck (and later secured) one of these in every conference room instead of purchasing much more expensive devices (opting, instead, to outfit some of the better rooms with very high-end solutions).

  > What is the advantage of lacing

It's a "pros/cons" thing to me. The big disadvantage is that it's far more time-consuming.

The advantages are mostly aesthetic. For example, I have a 7.2.2 home theater setup with an AVR ... basically 14 cables going to the back of a device that is located in a place in my family room which makes it hard to obscure the cables.

I purchased white speaker cables to match my white wax lace, laced the speaker cables each at ~1.5". The lace is coated in wax, so it will coerce the cables into the right position by wrapping it around an extra 2-3 times when needed. It's more invisible than zip ties -- there's no "nub". If you're lacing the way I was taught, there's no knot. Each cable in the bundle is individually tied, as well as the bundle which means "it stays where you tied it" far better than zip ties do. This also means you have to do almost all lacing "in place" because you can't fix mistakes after the fact.

The result looks like one larger cable, made from 9 others in a horizontal row behind my receiver which makes a sharp turn directly into a port in the wall. I can remove my receiver and the 9 cables remain roughly in the same position because the lace holds.

I used black lace to cover the black power cables (separated from the speaker/signal wires).

You are correct and I should have clarified a few points.

Especially given the time (my memory is hazy but I want to say this would have been just before Y2K) -- almost all of the business and management network was ... token-ring[0]. I don't think these cables were even for that network (we usually ran those and they didn't come with much in the way of "rules"), but were for the SONNET/voice network (memory, again).

[0] When I came on in ~1998 most of the (PS/2) machines were connected via token ring. A lot of the work I was doing at the time involved replacing PCs with newer models and getting them plugged into one of the managed 100MBps switches. :)

If I care about what it looks like and want to precisely arrange my cables, I always lace. It's time-consuming, finger-aching work, though and I'm not as good at it as I was when I was younger[0].

In my late teens, I worked at a telecom in desktop support and ended up on a multi-day project installing hardware at a switch site in Cleveland. They'd taken on a new director who was furious at the condition of the cabling/cable management[1]. I remember a piece of paper with a sliced black zip-tie taped to it and the words "FIRED" scrawled in big letters. Teams of two men were working throughout the site.

They were ripping out/replacing a huge number of runs. During the week, a group was working on a bundle of what looked like thousand Ethernet cables coming from the ceiling, all labeled, starting out as a perfectly laced 3x2 ft rectangle through the channel in the ceiling and then falling into a spaghetti pile extending most of the floor of the large room.

By the time I left, that channel was nearly done, the wires broke off at 40 or so points in different bundles ranging in size, but most were inches thick/wide, wires joined the bundle at various points in the metal channel causing the wire bundle that went to the floor, below, to be only a little smaller than the one coming in. Every curve of every bundle was visibly the same radius.

After seeing what could be done, I decided to learn how to do it. :)

[0] I'm not that old.

[1] Some of the issues were straight-up code violations, but most were issues of good practice.

This reminded me of a Mr Wizard's World episode I watched in the 80s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdz_8AjIgfA

In it he demos the UI of a word processor of that era on a green screen monitor. As I had a CGA screen/PC at the time word processing was pretty novel to me ... in white and black, but most of my friends did not own computers and those that did had Commodore 64s[0].

[0] I sat jealous despite sitting before a $3,000 8088 w/FPU, 10MB HDD and 640k of RAM that took 2 minutes before it started booting from the hard drive (I learned to count in powers of two up to 640 that way).

Thanks for that, it brought me back to my teens.

In the Renegade BBS system, for like one minor version or so, you could authenticate to any account, including SysOp, by hitting Enter instead of providing a password. Of course, in Renegade and many BBSes, you could login with either your account name or ID, which was an auto-incrementing (the manual way) integer starting at "0", the Sysop. And I'm fairly certain that the problem wasn't triggered unless you logged in by ID, which few ever did.

On one Saturday nearly every BBS in my area code running that software was restoring from backup.

I stumbled upon it because I was "1" on another BBS[0] and accidentally popped "Enter" aiming for Shift when typing my password. After picking my jaw up from the table I called my buddy and told him to unplug the phone line. :)

[0] Actually, I had hacked up and substantially re-written from the leaked Telegard 2.5 source (whichever was the origin of Renegade's code) and the password validation code was insanity -- I was young enough to see hacking as mystical and suspected I'd found a cleverly hidden back-door so I rewrote the entire thing to be as "dumb as the rest of the password handling logic was"; I had heard, later, that there was something funny going on but I stopped playing with that code by then and the Internet quickly ended that world. In all likelihood, the original developers were doing something novel that I was totally unfamiliar with and I made it worse, but I like to think I "locked that up". :)

... as it relates to "if I saw something like this on someone's profile, should I automatically disqualify them for hiring" ... absent any other information, "Never ascribe to malice ..."

I didn't dig out the guy's profile but he sure looks quite young. Depending on where he grew up, who is teenage influences were and what he was dealing with at the time he was maturing, it could be a sign of immature teenager rather than a sh!thead adult. I wouldn't want to be held responsible for the foolish decisions I made in my youth. Of course, in this case, that man appears to have had a lot going on.

A bit deeper thinking, though. You're carrying around two pieces of information "Microsoft hired this guy to do an important job that would, hopefully, require a mentally stable individual" and "This person was so mentally unstable that he stabbed a dude who's, basically, a stranger[0]." We can play a little modernized Ayn Rand and say where you see a contradictory result, check your inputs. There's enough we don't know about this guy and the circumstances around it that jumping to any conclusion related to his hiring, requirements of his job, his personal life (i.e. he's odd/moderately unstable but can fake it well enough until he has a mental break ... he's young enough that something similar may have never happened in his life ...).

   > Or just live in a red state?

*eyes roll* ... My parents were extremely conservative, my Dad a business owner with employees. He actively spoke out against discrimination, hired with only regard for the ability to do the job, spoke frequently* with his children about how ignorant, uninformed, and evil racism, sexism and the like were -- in the 80s -- in an area that doesn't run anything but Red candidates on the local ballot because they can't get elected. I don't recall my mom or dad, once, making a joke about homosexuality -- at a time when it would have been extremely* permissible, otherwise. Growing up in my Red territory, I was shocked in fourth grade when a kid "who wasn't black"[1] used the "N-word".

I have attended rallies for both Red and Blue candidates (with massive crowds) -- nobody holds up signs to burn gay people or seize the means of production[2]. Some on the fringes carry opinions that are not much better than that but it's wildly unfair to make an assumption that ones political party indicates whether or not one is bigoted/biased in any way toward race, religion, or sexual orientation.

Personally, I've been part of both parties, part of neither and apolitical, now (Libertarian most often). It's weird attending a rally for a candidate who's positions you detest, but I've done it a few times, now ... both parties (technically, various). Milling about in the crowd revealed a that I had a whole hell of a lot more in common with the people who were voting for this guy than I didn't. Sure, I felt more aligned with my specific values and it didn't change my vote, but it stopped the whole "these people are evil" error. I'm not saying "go do that" but if you do, attend a mainstream rally for a Republican in a "non-fringe" part of America[3].

When it comes down to brass tacks, I've never heard someone articulate why "Voting Republican or Being a Republican Candidate" is racist. I've heard every variation on "David Duke and some evil organizations[4] support/are Republican", therefore, everyone in the party must be racist. I attended a KKK counter rally. My understanding is NAMBLA supports Democratic candidates -- should the fact that an organization advocating pedophilia supports a Blue candidate have any impact on whether or not an average voter in America supports a Blue candidate? I've heard nearly every Republican candidate get asked to denounce "David Duke" since about the early 90s, but I haven't heard anyone insult a Blue politician with any similar "guilt-by-association" questions (unless they are non-controversial policy things).

So many travesties/evils, including the Holocaust, and every form of racism begin by dividing up the "us"'s and the "them"'s. Nowhere does that exist in a bigger way than political affiliation. I've met people "who won't hire liberals" and people who are afraid to admit their conservative leanings for fear of being fired/isolated. Personally, I won't work at a place that would do either. It speaks to a huge organizational blind-spot.

/end-rant

[0] Is this known, for sure?

[1] It was red-and-yellow-black-and-white back then, after all. The girl, incidentally, would have been considered minority being 100% Albanian speaking no English until first grade.

[2] Not entirely true; in one case a guy showed up wearing a Nazi symbol on his shirt at a Trump rally (didn't attend, it happened in a parking lot a half-mile from my home) -- there's always an a$$hole -- only thing I can think was he was a plant -- my neighbor said he watched him take an over-shirt off, he was noticed, Boos started followed by people hoarding him and the police intervened shortly thereafter, arresting him. ... and I attended Blue governor's rally with a hard-line communist who held up a sign. (yeah, there's that).

[3] We're looking for a "fair perspective" not one that reinforces confirmation bias, so Cletus McCoy's re-election for the 34th House District Somewhere in Appalachia is out. Try suburban areas in Ohio, Michigan or Indiana.

[4] I was always taught it's wrong to remain silent/ignore evil. Yeah, when there's 7 KKK people and a megaphone against 20 gajillion college kids, all you end up doing is giving them a national headline. There's a time to "stop showing up for these clowns" to rob them of their audience. Or show up silently, face away from them and let them talk -- nothing makes the case against racism like the listening to the 7 idiots with enough mental health issues to think it would be fun to show up screaming racist things in a city not a stranger to race riots.

   > There's a subset of users who are hungry for high quality applications and games.

You're right on, here, and it points to a few problems and opportunities. I'm that subset of users yet I have an incredibly hard time finding apps meeting my criteria in the app stores. They are there. I often find them right after purchasing something that isn't as good or using one of a hundred free-but-varying-degrees-of-awful apps because I don't trust that spending even $3.00 isn't going to get me a paid-but-varying-degrees-of-awful app[0].

The amount of awful going on in the space of "mobile development" long passed unacceptable to me. The idea that McDonald's is $10.00 or $4.50 if I use their app that crashes, needs my location, sends me random empty notifications and every other minor and major brand's app that wants to slurp up any little bit of data they can and make my notification tray useless. I'm not happy with the "check this box and we'll track everything you do but 'trust us'" cloud-enabling Windows and every app being non-functional without an internet connection and the "functionality provided" often being "license validation" and/or "share this! social network features and data mining"... takes a breath yeah, that got away from me ... but it's just nuts.

[0] The reviews which mix in the mess of one-stars from "a bad release" among the five-star "some of which were clearly paid for" just leave one wanting to take up drinking.

That's so sad.

I had this pain with my kids a few months ago while "looking to kill some time" in the Android world. I don't play a lot of phone games and was dismayed at the crap that was out there.

I like to introduce the kids to more low-fidelity games -- I started with 2048 -- I want to say probably 5-10 different choices; all I was looking for was "lets me buy away the ads", works offline (one choice was a webview to a URL which was not cached, several were very low quality) and has a small number of features that I like (and mostly sacrificed).

I ended up buying mobile version of The Kittens Game[0]. $2.99, minimally updated[1], and worth every penny. The pollution in the market as it were, I would have spent $9.99 for it.

Your comment kind of got me thinking, though. While searching, I used a "mental sorting method" (after I found a game matching my requirements) best summarized as "price, descending" because -- in a hurry -- I equated price with quality and assumed "a more expensive game in this category is not going to have ads/be a scam." In some spaces (slot machine/casino games), I wouldn't touch an app that wasn't "upfront payment only/no ads/no tokens" or "free without ads"[2], yet would happily pay for any that worked anything like the old Xbox Texas Hold'em (without voice/any casino-style game).

[0] https://kittensgame.com/web/ (I'm sorry for those who have yet to be exposed).

[1] So my kids got hooked which meant I went down that rabbit hole, again. I'm not sure when the last update was, but many bugs mentioned in the Wiki aren't present in the mobile game.

Hopeless.

That's a tough word. It feels like a loop: The mere fact that I feel hopeless makes me feel worthless which makes me feel hopeless.

I've never struggled to find work but I've had two tragedies in my life that feel similar -- a very big loss that maybe has a way for you to assign blame to yourself (blame that is likely less deserved than how much is being assigned), a loss that feels like your future is blurry or that makes you feel like the dreams you planned on are not possible any longer. OK, that's probably a good place to stop with that ...

    You are by yourself in a car in a Burger King parking lot, but you are not alone.

Today, an untold number of people are reading your words, some of them are sympathizing with you, some have prayed for you[0], and we're all rooting for you.

    You haven't given up.  I don't believe you will.

What you've written sounds like you feel like you're at "rock bottom" right now. When you hit rock bottom -- whether it was "on purpose" or just a subconscious reflex -- you took action. It's really hard not to let circumstances like this make you feel like you're unqualified/incapable -- consider that getting hired for a job is all on you and you've done it twice. Getting laid off -- frequently -- has nothing to do with you or your abilities.

Let yourself feel hopeless for a little bit -- at least, don't let yourself feel guilty for "being normal". If you haven't already found a thousand people to talk to, reply and I'm sure we can figure out a way to exchange numbers outside of an HN comment thread (I'm pretty easy to track down). If not, I wish you and your spouse the best through all of this -- give them a hug; they're rooting/hurting for you, too.

[0] raises hand looks around puts hand down

It's pretty common throughout the US, but there's a section of Ohio that I recall driving through which has several cities named for European and Asian countries.

I had a girlfriend early in college who's grandmother lived deep in rural Ohio; we visited the area frequently and it involved driving past several.

A bit of obscure trivia I learned while down there, "Russia, Ohio" is pronounced like "Roo-She". I was told this was because of the Cold War but even in my late teens "I wasn't so sure". The dialect of Southern English spoken by Grandma and the local population was a cross between deep Appalachia, slowly spoken and ... I don't know ... English-like words[1].

[0] Nice to see Wikipedia had the goofy pronounciation. It did not explain "why", unfortunately.

[1] She had an English (only) speaking neighbor who had the most "articulated"/"exaggerated" variant -- I remember having "Tonne Cohwa" or "Tonne Cohs" (plural) translated for me after several attempts to figure out WTF that referred to... Yeah. It was the word Taco. We were talking about the cold weather, I thought.

  > Yet there are companies out there rejecting me for job descriptions which are only 50% of my skill set because I couldn’t code this obscure hard algorithms problem in 45 mins.

Ohhhh, screw that.

Maybe I've just been lucky in my career, but outside of the early days I have only had one interview that involved a white-board or some form of timed test. I didn't express this to my interviewers, but I felt like part of a circus -- hey, let's see the candidate do "code tricks." And they were dumb exercises, they asked me to sort an array of numbers using a "bubble sort." Bubble sort. My brain went right to "wait, this isn't an actual example of something I'm going to be expected to do, is it?" It was a simple web back-end in C#/Razor. And you've given me a pen and paper. Granted, I thought back to my High School Pascal I class and "i" and "j"'d my way through OCD sorting.

It's "programming tricks" because we write software using a set of tools day-to-day in order to be productive/effective. If I can write software without those tools, cool, but will I be better with them and will I ever work without them in the real world? No. So it's the old "hit the apple off that person's head using this bow/arrow", except "do it blind-folded" (oooh, aaah).

In my younger days, I hated writing code with someone looking over my shoulder and my abilities to write good code would decrease dramatically if I felt like I was being judged with every keystroke.

What a great read -- I think this individual managed to summarize a mess of things I've been thinking for a while.

The "False Negative" problem was one I made a dent in at a former employer. I was accidentally thrown into interviewing someone for a position on a development team that I wasn't a part of. After a spectacular interview, I was invited to participate in a few others and participate in selection.

The selection meeting was one of the most difficult arguments I've ever won. There were 5 of us; all had dismissed the only candidate I liked, most were in favor of a candidate that was seriously over-stating his skill set. The other candidates I had no opinion on[0].

They'd dismissed the first guy because he had not had a CS degree and were grumbling that HR had not filtered that candidate out[1]. They were sitting in the room with two people who didn't have degrees and reported to a Director who didn't have one!

I remember the "no-CS" guy really well as it had been the first interview I'd ever given. I was given no preparation, no notes, no resume, no "how to give an interview" pep talk -- I'd met the guy in the lobby where he was waiting to be let in the door ... I had taken apart the Kiosk used to do that, so I had to find the person he was looking for, which resulted in discovering that the main technical person he was to interview with was out sick and they needed to reschedule, "unless you want to do it." It sounded like fun. I'd read a lot on the topic and had been on the other side of the table several times, so I know what I liked, what I wished had been focused on and what I thought would be useful.

It turned out he had a Github repo with no less than 30 projects, a few with a handful of stars. In my head, I'm thinking "just for laughs", I asked for his "ugliest" but it turned out to be a perfect way to go. We used it as a source to brainstorm refactoring and he didn't have to claim that the code he was showing me was "his best work" and be judged for every little problem.

He was interviewing for conferencing, so mostly C/C++[2], and this guy -- on opening the first source file -- threw out tens of changes that were all appropriate. He could argue pros/cons for each approach, he even changed his mind a few times as his thinking evolved and then managed to explain how he'd redesign the entire thing if he had ever intended to "do it right." I don't even remember what it did.

At the end of our "selection meeting", I think I said something like "I don't care if you hire any of these other people but if you don't hire this guy, you're making a mistake -- he's a better developer than I am[3] (or any other developer we have on staff)."

They hired him. Within 3 months he was promoted and was the lead developer for most of the important things in conferencing[4].

[0] There was nothing particularly wrong with them or great with them and any would have been a good hire if we had that many positions open. The only problem I had was that they had no examples of anything they had written in the past to show me so I couldn't adequately judge their abilities.

[1] Never mind that the job ad said "4-year degree or equivalent experience" which this gentleman had more than enough of.

[2] I got really lucky. I hadn't touched the language in probably ten years prior to that year where I was put on a project that, unexpectedly, required me to deeply "brush up". It turned out the person who was interviewing him was a Java developer with no C/C++ background and was not looking forward to handling the technical interview for the position.

[3] I specifically called myself out because two of the people in that room had more respect for my abilities than anyone could ever deserve and thought most of the developers on "in the development org" were terrible. I avoid confrontation (more than I should) but it plays in my favor when I do complain/advocate/go to bat for something -- people tend to listen.

[4] There were people considered "owners" of an app, usually at least two, who signed off on anything going in and generally fleshed out the major design elements for those apps -- sometimes they were the only developer, too, but that team was much larger/more disciplined. I think they promoted him to Director over that org but he left shortly thereafter due to a desire to remain on the tech side of things.

I'm curious how the mass layoffs play out when the large tech outfits find themselves needing to fill difficult positions.

My expectation, unfortunately, is that for the biggest players it won't be much more than "we have to pay more for talent to be willing to work for us."

However, for some it may play out as it did for the survivors of the early-00s dot-com bust. I know of one company, in particular, that narrowly avoided bankruptcy by laying off about half of their staff. They did this in the ugliest way possible (at the time) ... having people sent to rooms to receive either "you're safe/new job" letters or have their badges taken from them and walked -- en mass -- out the door after an apology speech delivered via video.

Unfortunately, this company was located in a market that even in the worst economic times never broke 1% unemployment for devs/engineers. When the need to expand/fix what fell apart came, they found it impossible to hire mid-level and above programming and support positions[0]. After discovering an unusually low number of referrals (despite large bonuses offered) for programmers, they polled staff and found that the issue was the reputation of the company among the staff's professional network... and being a (still) large employer in the area, that represented the overall reputation of job-seekers in the area[1].

The company I worked for (or, at least, the company that we merged with) had a similar problem, though had a much larger pool of engineering talent to pull from (and I'm not sure they ever did "door #1/door #2" style lay-offs). It was a big problem for them for a few years, but was managed by increasing offers and accepting less qualified candidates (which are realities for large businesses with a lot of bureaucracy, anyway).

[0] I know of several cases where they paid employees to move across the country in order to fill needed positions. It was always puzzling to me why they didn't just hire remotely, but they had a reasonably centralized operation.

[1] My buddy continued working there after they laid off most of his coworkers; apparently the environment improved, dramatically, about two years later but the hiring problem persisted until he left a decade later. I suspect it's better by now. I don't even know if the company has the same name.

I figured this was coming at some point. Believe it or not[0], I don't share my password with people beyond my immediate family. My immediate family is likely to run smack into one of those edge cases. I share custody with my children and I share a Lake House with family. My Netflix account is used for my kids mobile devices, my son's laptop, my daughter's iPad, one of their TVs at Mom's[1], all of their TVs at home and the two TVs at "The Cabin"[2].

Like a lot of us, I've thought about this problem and come up with several ways to sort it out. I have business internet service at home and a DD-WRT router up north. I have it configured with a virtual access point that is bridged via VPN to my home network and could easily tunnel the TVs that way[3]. The problem is that Netflix isn't providing me a service I can't get from someone else (or via piracy[4]). The funny thing about all of that, though, is that I had a major hardware failure (PSU took out ... nearly everything) in a server over a year ago. I solved it by subscribing to a bunch of services and stopped downloading movies/TV much the same way I stopped downloading MP3 files two decades ago -- the streaming services were far less ideal than what is/was available for music, but they were approaching "good enough" and were a lot less work for me.

I expected this would come and I'm curious to see how it plays out. I don't even know how I am going to actually react if I get flagged. I am becoming more and more unhappy with the various streaming options available, today, and I subscribe to -- like -- 9 different services?

Here's where they're currently failing:

  1) Every service has the same 200-300 videos, produced in Canada, usually True Crime series (sometimes with different titles but the *same episode* -- in one case, a Netflix documentary movie was listed as an Exclusive and it was *identical* to a Discovery+ documentary with a different title).
  2) The UX of every service has various things *very* wrong -- each has its own selection of profanity-inducing circumstances, be it "they don't re-connect when things go wrong" or "I hit the home button by accident and it takes 10 clicks and 2 minutes to return to the thing I was watching", etc.
  3) Every "Season", each of the services gets 80% of the same movies, most of which are trash. The "good" movies are split up among 4-5 services.
  4) The "big" things I want to watch are all on different networks, some of which have *nothing* else that I want to watch (read: Peacock and Paramount+)[5]

I'm paying a "Typical Cable Bill plus some Premium Channels" would cost but do not have cable or a cable-like subscription (Youtube TV, etc). Contrast that with my media server setup: Everything can be searched in one place. If I don't have it, I can go to a locally hosted web site, put in the name of something and it'll (usually) show up in 5-10 minutes. If it's a TV show, it'll start downloading everything. The cost was an (older) server with a dedicated RAID controller -- about $2,000 which lasted about 5 years (and was mostly used for "things other than streaming movies/music"), a VPN subscription at a few bucks a month and some patience setting everything up.

I'd put my money on "if any one of my services flags me, I'll probably cancel all of them and go back to the more convenient days"

[0] Honestly, I don't care.

[1] My son got logged out and couldn't reach Mom, so he called me for the password; that's probably the most likely to get flagged.

[2] Which is used from May-November about 50% of the time. We all have Netflix accounts; it really didn't make any sense to buy a separate one for a home we don't use year round, though we do that for cable television.

[3] I've done this back when I wasn't willing to open a port for Plex

[4] I am financially capable of paying for things I want to watch so I do. I pirate movies when I cannot get them in the format that I want. I would buy BluRay discs if I could rip them and play them from my media server with all of the audio/video features. While I can do this with various tools, it's far more convenient to just download something someone else ripped and I don't feel particularly bad about choosing not to jump through a mess of hoops just to reward the movie studios for their awful technology. That said, due to a server meltdown, I have exactly zero pirated movies, today.

[5] What a missed opportunity ... I wanted to watch Picard -- it's $50 if I want both seasons. That's a few months of service. Had they given me an offer like "Subscribe for 6 months and you get a code to purchase the season on Apple/MS/Amazon/etc for (hopefully) more permanent streaming rights" I would have done it and given the service a chance. This could have been offered to me when I viewed the Picard series on Amazon Prime...

Like others, I am similarly perplexed as to who would believe something like this who isn't extremely inexperienced[0] with regard to how many businesses operate[1].

I have reviewed resumes for decades and a few gaps in employment due to being laid off -- even if they indicate an employee did a terrible job at the company. And maybe the problem is my interpretation of the statement. I'm interpreting it as the inverse "Only bad employees, specifically people who would make bad employees anywhere in the capacity of what they were doing, get laid off."

I have been laid off, once, but I won't speak for myself. The best boss I have ever had -- and within his department and to his direct manager (a VP), he was considered a top performer got excellent reviews, had been with the company for a decade with a track record that was all sunny. To give you an example, during a very serious outage -- with enthusiasm at 1:00 AM on a Friday, this Director volunteered to drive an extremely expensive piece of equipment about 12 hours, alone, to another data center to keep one of his guys/gals from having to make the trip (in a place he, and few others, would be interested in visiting for fun). He was laid off for political reasons involving one individual -- a co-worker who was disliked as much as this guy was liked, was a constant road blocker, bike-shedder and, honestly -- I have no idea how he lasted as long as he did[2].

I've known people who were laid off because of bait-and-switch scenarios. In one case, a company was purchased (by a private equity owned competitor) a month after the new hire started. This new hire had negotiated employment terms that sacrificed some pay for additional time off, included a very flexible IP agreement and explicitly did not include a non-compete. After purchase, time off was standardized which caused him to lose two weeks. All of the agreements were replaced with an employee handbook that was mandatory to sign. There were no options for altering the agreements. This wasn't an "acqui-hire" (almost the opposite, the large business was in a legacy market, the smaller was "shiny/new" and rapidly expanding/making money -- they were hoping to integrate some of the old into all of the new). They laid off my buddy and several of his co-workers due to their decision not to sign the new terms -- especially at the salary offer -- which defeated the purpose of the acquisition, for the most part.

I've known one person laid off because the company (lender) went under. Over a period of 14 months, he watched 1,500 employees get let go. He was "a grunt" at the time, but ended up being one of the final 5 people laid off. There were endless "organize these files/move these things" tasks and he did them 10X faster than anyone else. Besides him, there were 1,500 people and a few thousand before that who were laid off because "the company was rapidly failing."

There are countless stories of companies expanding into a local market and receding, entering a new market and exiting after failure, being purchased by a large competitor who "already has twice as many people as the other company doing that thing" or "does that thing so differently that they don't have anyone in that role." And especially in companies where "software development isn't everything they do", when they merge with another company, some of the projects that Company A does will be cut. Some of those developers -- sometimes (often?) the most technically capable ones[3] -- are let go.

Despite how it is often used -- at least in principal, being laid off is supposed to be a simple matter of: We don't have a need for this person ... "It's not them, It's Us(tm)", we're an "at will" employer, "these things happen" and we'll pay higher unemployment rates for our mistake in hiring someone we did not properly prepare to put to work. Cold, simple, and shouldn't really say anything about the employee unless it's a pattern of their employment (and they're not intentionally taking jobs at startups/other places with high-risk to employment status).

Good employees get laid off all the time.

[0] Not implying "worked too few years", but maybe worked too few jobs or not in varied enough sectors (from an economic standpoint), or company sizes/ages.

[1] ... I can only speak for "the US" and for the company's I've worked for and those that others I know have worked for -- small sample size but near-universal behavior.

[2] It sounds like I have a vendetta against the guy but he and I barely crossed paths. When we merged with a competitor, he lasted about a week. I was present at the new HQ when the incoming CIO walked into our room, "The Guy"'s name came up, he said "oh, yeah, I forgot to handle something." He was 15 minutes late to an all-staff meeting about 30 minutes later. He needed the time to tell "The Guy" that his service would no longer be needed.

[3] Sometimes because "they know the old systems so well they are resistant to moving to the new systems" but sometimes because "they're really popular with people who are resistant" and getting rid of that person will cause others to fall in line (I have one specific case that I know took place this way because I tried to convince the person who made the decision that it would blow up in his face).

Before piling on too much more, here ...

... Cloudflare has a lot of customers[0]. They have to balance the cost of providing (a lot of) human support against the cost they can reasonably charge for their products. It's a balancing act, and one that has worked out well for me, personally. It sounds like this issue is happening related to R2, which is quite new.

You're not likely to see a post hit the front page with the title "I've integrated Cloudflare's products with 30 or so customers and never had an issue" (or even be written). But experience an issue this large and you're going to do everything -- make calls, post things to social media, reach out on HN where you know the CTO is an active participant -- and a lot of those are going to get attention from the small percentage of customers who felt wronged by CF but hadn't spoken up.

It's a crappy situation because it gives the impression that things are a mess when -- I'm willing to bet -- it's something along the lines of a problem in a quota checker and a failure of internal process to escalate the problem appropriately. That happens at every big company in various places all the time.

Really, the only major difference here is that unlike every other big company, their CTO actively watches Hacker News. When a problem pops up, he willingly chooses to be Customer Service and from the sounds of it, that escalation to address "problems like this" is now happening. There's going to be gaps like this at every company. When I worked at "BigCo", if something like this hit the front page of HN, you could expect a mess of people to have their phones ring. Work would be done to respond to the customer (variations on "acknowledge/minimize/suppress" communications -- on official company hosts). Staff would be forbidden from interacting in the ongoing discussion. The CTO might have had to have explained to him how to get to the web site containing the complaint.

[0] I don't work for them; I'm just a happy customer so everything here is my view from the outside.

The fact that you just post your e-mail address and invite your (likely many) customers here to reach out to you would probably surprise me from another company.

I've been doing this long enough that just about every major vendor I've worked with has had (and taken) the opportunity to disappoint me with some unreasonable decision/change and even an occasional (unwarranted) account suspension. I think I've convinced every customer I've worked with to purchase a Cloudflare subscription. I've worked with support once and I've worked with someone handling the beta testing for Warp (a Romanian gentleman -- he called me and shipped me a T-Shirt).

The two people I talked with didn't have to tell me they enjoyed their job. You could hear it in their voice. The guy I talked to about Warp was as far from a salesperson as someone could be, yet he couldn't help explain some of the details about how interesting of a product Warp is.

I can't count how many times I've pointed people at the Cloudflare blog to learn about "how all of the stuff between your code and the user's browser 'works'". I remember reading a post several years ago thinking "they're basically explaining how they achieved a major competitive advantage well enough for a competitor to duplicate." I didn't think that it was a bad idea to do so -- realistically, it didn't represent a loss of IP -- I'm just surprised so much energy/time would be spent writing highly technical posts that sometimes "give away secret recipes" in a sense. It's wonderful from where I sit.

I expect the HN crowd will recognize that people who have a problem/issue/incident with a company/product are a "flobbity-jillion" times more likely to write a post (and have it hit the front page) than a guy like me who's had 30-ish opportunities to integrate your products into things I've written and have been delighted every time.

There are a lot of comments against your advice here so I'm going to speak up in agreement.

(1) Cover letters are very rare. Out of the last ten interviews, I've received two.

(2) It's the one place you can reveal some of your personality. Focus your message to answer this question: "What is it about this role/company/job that you find exciting?"

I have a PDF file with a cover letter on the front and a page or two of resume. Five minutes before the meeting, I'm opening up that PDF, again ... the first thing I see is that cover letter and a candidate that's excited about the job. It puts them on the right footing before the video camera fires up.

I also know that "your resume was produced, once, and probably fired off to several companies in that exact form". While (assuming it was done correctly) "your cover letter was written to me, about this job."

If you've provided it, I'm going to pay more attention to the words on that page than probably any others. So while a cover letter is not required and a resume (often) is, if you include it, it's not controversial to say "it's more important than your resume" as far as its impact on my opinion of you prior to an interview.

Oh, do I remember these days. I spent 17 years at a global multi-national telecom through two mergers and a bankruptcy (and a half). We were a large organization (between 5,500 and 22,000 depending on the year).

During much of that time, "who paid for what" was a big issue. The thread alludes to the issue: IT says "you need to buy new hardware every X years", department already has less than no budget, has no budget for new PCs and perceives no need for new PCs for workers that could get away with much less than they're using, now.

It was a funny little game that was played because IT would get dinged in their compliance metrics if staff was out of date (and staff hated old hardware/blamed IT), but management would get dinged for spending too much and have little incentive to buy new hardware until the last second. Meanwhile, C-Level executives on both sides get to say "your problem". The difference, here, is that someone gave IT a pretty large sledge-hammer and permission to use it in order to force departments to push for more budget. In our case (and I'm sure others), a bit (a lot?) of non-compliance was normal.

Personally, I think the take that "IT should own the budget" isn't as great as it sounds. It solves one problem: distributing the payment among budgets creates a "shared responsibility" that ultimately becomes "pass the buck". It also happens low enough from C-Levels that "they don't have to think about it."

Having IT own the budget solves this because at least one C-Level is going to have to account for a large enough expense that it's likely to be a little better planned for.

It won't always be better planned for ... depending on the company or manager, it won't often be better planned for. Unfortunately, the consequence of this poor planning only extends to the IT budget. Since compliance is non-negotiable, the largest line-item on the budget -- IT's staff -- is the next hit. In the former model, "making the budget deficit up" is naturally spread throughout the company, in this model, it all hits IT.

Which means if one were to require monitoring and status pages to be connected, one of two things happen (for each monitored component):

(1) The monitoring system would be altered to ignore tests that return false positives (at the expense of missing the alert when it represents an outage).

(2) Fixing the monitoring. It wasn't working for the sysadmins/operators, anyway, since it had so many false positives that their "mental model" was essentially based on (1), anyway.

At least, where I've forced the issue of doing just this, that's exactly what happened. At the end of the day, especially since SLAs took a hit and that affected bonus payouts, monitoring got a lot better -- as did overall team function when we truly realized how bad things were -- we stopped doing workarounds and started fixing problems at a more fundamental level which led to SLAs that were both accurate and excellent.

It helped bring attention to a hidden problem which resulted in time being allocated to fix tests that dropped constant false-positives and to evaluate each for whether or not it should exist in the first place.

Strange choice of headline given the content, but I'm guessing they went link-bait-y to drive clicks.

Nonetheless, I don't know that any of this is unexpected. They're doing about as well as I would have thought they would. Honestly, they have a tricky market in the first place: (a) Vegans that I know[0] don't want a product that makes them "think they're eating meat[1]" and (b) they haven't marketed sufficiently enough to "me".

By "me", I mean, the guy who's only going to buy the meat-free burger if and only if I can't tell the difference between real/fake. I'm also unwilling to buy a fake "raw ground beef" product if I have to substantially change the way I cook it in order to use it.

That gets you through the "I'll try it" gate -- and I ate an Impossible Whopper. I didn't side-by-side it, but I went in expecting I'd be able to tell the difference and really wanted to but I had to concede that it was exactly the "kind-of-shitty-but-you-still-crave-it" Whopper. And that says a lot -- it's a weird flavor and texture (which was slightly different, but it was either unimportant or slightly better).

But then there's the second reason -- if it tastes the same, why am I not eating the regular Whopper? I am not in any way invested in "Animal Rights", I do not have a political or other bone to pick with the meat industry, I don't know enough about the effects of the meat industry, specifically, on climate change so as far as I can tell, this product needs to be one or more of the following: (a) a little (or a lot) cheaper than meat, (b) healthier than meat equivalent to the additional cost, (c) shelf-stable or has an otherwise much longer refrigerator/freezer life than meat.

I found out at Burger King that "it's more expensive" and "tastes the same". I bought it because I read about the company and "I wanted to see if it tasted like a Whopper." On one hand, they nailed marketing it early on. There's no way I would have tried this. I was vegetarian and swore off all forms of plant-based ground beef after throwing up my share of Boca Burgers. Had I not read a bit about the science behind it and "the blood", I wouldn't have been curious enough.

Having now satisfied that curiosity and having even had a good experience, I have never purchased another Impossible Whopper, nor have I even thought about purchasing another plant-based product. I suspect that they may be better for my heart, but they haven't told me[2]. I suspect it's quite a "process" to make and wonder how many ingredients "I can't pronounce and don't understand the origin of" that the product may have. These are the "gut-instinct" judgements that I made with no knowledge, not so much as picking the product up off of the shelf the hundreds of times I've passed it because they haven't given me a good enough reason to get past the price.

Not everybody in this space is failing "me". I probably bought Morningstar Farm's "fake chicken patties" for my family every grocery trip for 10 years. The reason was easy: they were far more consistent and tasted better than processed chicken patties. I only stopped because my kids stopped enjoying chicken patties (buns were going bad too quickly).

And despite the bumps in the road, I don't think any of the bigger brands are really failing ... they need to adjust their messaging a bit, maybe, if they want to extend their market. Or maybe this is the totality of the market for "plant-based meat" at this price point.

[0] I don't know why this phrase is starting to sound like "I have (insert minority) friends" but ... I was (lacto/ovo) vegetarian for a year in my 20s (having nothing to do with animal rights); many friends were vegan.

[1] This topic often came up when discussing Boca Burgers and other veggie burgers; universally they preferred mushroom/eggplant-based patties because they don't taste anything like meat.

[2] OK, so this may be my fault. Maybe they're not reaching me or my family. I've found that living 15 years without Cable Television nor watching any broadcast at home (I stream everything and do not watch sports ... not even the Olympics), having Adblock everywhere and the like means my exposure to ads has resulted in major gaps (gasps of "you've never heard of X" ... and I'll say, the spray-dish-soap was something I wish I had in my life a few years ago, but all in all it's a big plus). But nobody talks about those aspects of the product, either.

The "not very expensive" ones are also not very fire-proof, unfortunately.

A family friend learned this the hard way when a sizeable amount of cash went up in flames and his $300 Sentry safe was a melted mess, the contents forever lost.

    > Banks increasingly regard safe deposit boxes as more of a headache than they’re worth. They’re expensive to build, complicated to maintain and not very lucrative.

I think this article answers the question as to "why". I remember about 15 years ago the bank by my house opened up and passed on an offer that people who opened one of their high-deposit checking accounts would get a Safe Deposit Box for free. At the age I was, I really had nothing of particular value to store there and it seemed like a silly thing to get but I was curious.

Reading the leasing agreement, the bank made it very clear that the "Safe Deposit Box" provided far less assurance that my (non-existent) valuables would be protected than they would in a good safe in my home. The paperwork reminded me that purchasing insurance for the Safe Deposit Box[0] was a necessity and the bank would not be liable for losses.

It's basically a product where the entire thing the customer wants to buy, security at the expense of convenience, is precisely what they are not selling you "despite the name". To make up for that problem, apparently, my local bank thought it'd be best to give them away to people, like me, who have no use for one. Of course it's not lucrative! People who would be willing to pay a reasonable sum of money to protect their assets aren't going to rent a Safe Deposit Box with a "your stuff will probably be there, but get insurance" guarantee.

[0] Do they make Safe Deposit Box insurance or do you add those valuables to your homeowners? I never found out.

    > bought the cheapest bare wood door at Home Depot and laid it across two filing cabinets.

I'm surprised how many people don't build their own desks (especially those of us who work at home). I spent about $1,200 on a pretty minimalist (but very large) desk in my early 20s. I could build my ideal desk for half that price.

Even the "cheapest bare wood door at Home Depot", switch that out with "cheap (but straight) wood" or layers of thick MDF or other durable surface, add paint, grout, tile adhesive and window molding (or something wood for an edge) and cheap ceramic tiles. Cut the MDF to ensure no tile cuts are needed, sand/spray paint the edges to match the tile and you have a pretty decent looking/functional/durable desk of any desired size.

I did a dining table that way in my 20s. It was a curb rescue that the top was destroyed (someone used it as a work bench) but it had a really nice set of thick oak legs that would clean up. I re-used the top after a lot of sanding but the tiling/painting job was maybe an hour's worth of work done mostly by brief instructions given to me from an older gentleman at Home Depot (I owned a dull hand saw and plug-in power drill given to me by my grand father). It took a weekend to complete between the various "waiting for things to dry". I sealed mine, as well. It cost less than $75 about 20 years ago.

Honestly, if I were to do it all over again, I'd skip the $1,200 desk. I'd watch Craigslist for a large hardwood dining room table with the right characteristics[0], preferably with leafs. It's a huge work area. If pressed against a wall, you could set a number of deep cabinets wall-side, put the monitor in the center of the table and even access cabinets behind (but above) the monitor pretty easily.

[0] You'd want legs that wouldn't be in the way of your knees while working at it. Ideally, leafs that are attached in some way which could be re-engineered into a printer/computer stand.

Ooooohhh, that's clever.

I've never had a need for such a device, but I worked for a company that wrote Skype for Business plug-ins, many of which revolved around "presence". You were considered active on your computer[0] when your mouse moved. We had a tool that we used for billing our time which included a graph of your Skype for Business presence state for the day you were entering time for[1].

I noticed, one week, that I was active 24-hours a day for three days in a row. I discovered that I left my mouse plugged in, it had fallen onto the carpet, and the minor vibrations that would occur in the house mixed with difficulty tracking would cause the mouse to move on its own "little enough" for me to not notice but frequently enough that it kept the computer from sleeping and kept my Skype for Business state bright green.

[0] Similar to Teams, today, you could be logged in from multiple devices; unlike Teams, a toast message might not reach your phone (or appear and be dismissed immediately) if you were active on a computer.

[1] This was entirely to assist in accurately filling out time sheets; it was never used to make sure "butts were in chairs".

I'm not sure what he made, but it was his first job so I'd imagine it was pretty terrible.

Actually, I think he would have moved on from that job a lot earlier except that the owners paid for him to get his pilots license and then paid him to fly -- something I know he really loved.

He eventually created his own startup outfitting (mostly automotive) manufacturing plants with ... just about anything. His company (being that it was actually his) also paid him to fly to various far flung (often rural) automotive plants -- it was often a business advantage that my Dad could drive 30m to the airport where his plane was stored and fly to a plant in any of the bordering states in as little as 30 minutes.

I recall a story where one of the plants was 2-3 hours from any airport you could get a commercial flight into, and you always had to connect at Chicago O'Hare[0]. The only way to get there for day shift was to take the earliest flight out, but that flight was always cancelled and everyone was tossed on the next flight that left 2 hours later. Some days took 10 hours flying commercial ... it's like a 12 hour drive from here. When the plane was available[1], there was a small landing strip 10 minutes from the plant. I'm guessing it was 3-4 hours in the air (and a lot of time over Lake Michigan) in the Piper Cherokee but I have no idea ... it no more than 40 minutes of driving, though!

[0] Which, apparently, was folly at every turn.

[1] He shared it with a few other men but his company was the one using it the vast majority of the time.