rcurry

And lots of podunk towns also have officers who live in the community, hang out with you and your family at the Saturday Fish Fry, and know that when some new neighbors from the city call 911 because they see me crossing the road at 0200 in full camouflage it’s probably just Rusty out huntin’ yotes. There are always one-offs, for sure, but most country cops are good folks who usually give the town drunk a ride home and will probably just give you a warning the first you decide to act like an idiot.

Oh man, who can forget the interview questions back in the nineties. I go to an interview after spending all week writing trading systems in C++ and it’s always “let’s say you are building a car, how would you structure the classes?”

LMAO, I always failed. Good times.

54 here, hang in there buddy.

Maybe this guy did some social engineering at one time or another but the idea that he could get any employee at a Wall Street firm to spend an hour reciting the cell phone numbers of all their executives is a load of bullshit.

I just miss the balance - between some kids having fun and some angry Karen calling the cops. And the cops were sort of like “Yeah, kids do stupid shit and it might go south, but let’s let them have the adventure.” And we all lived and had that adventure, thanks to a couple of MPD officers who let us go play and have fun. and yeah, we cleared out of there right quick after abseiling off the Minnesota river bridge. But the officers were the real heroes, they just let us be kids.

Cops were different when I was a kid, lol. I remember me and some buddies getting set up to rappel off a bridge over the Minnesota river and some cops rolled up. After questioning us (14 year olds who were clearly at risk of accidentally killing themselves) the one officer says “Well, I don’t really know if this is legal or not, but it sounds like you guys are being pretty safe and you know your gear so, uh, my partner and I are going to go investigate some things and when we get back, cough, cough, in about half an hour I’m guessing you kids won’t be here, right?” I miss those days.

Hi All, I’m working on a small project called textmyapi.com (no website right now) the original idea was to allow people to invoke API calls over text messaging but with the advent of ChatGPT and related AI technologies I’d like to look at this as more of a text based AI concierge type service, and I’d love to bounce some ideas around - I think there are still a lot of opportunities around texting and so it’s more about the backend service than needing to have a flashy mobile app. Imagine just being able to text an API that gets things done for you. Basically just a phone number you can text that helps you get anything done. I’d be happy just to kick it around with anyone who has an interest and my email is:

russ@fastmail.com

Thanks!

This reminds me of my first experience with how executives think vs engineers. I was working for a day trading firm and was a hardcore C++ nerd at the time. We were having scalability issues and the CTO asked me if there was as anything I could do. So I tell him “Well, if you give us four or five weeks I think we can optimize the code and get about 30% better performance.” He just looks at me for a moment and then says “Or I could just buy another 25 servers, would that work? I can have them here in a few days.”

Thank you!!!!

And, fortunately, the hero’s MacBook Pro will use the same graphics card as the alien mothership, so we’ll display a jolly Roger on their screens right before we set off the nuke.

I forget the name of the TV series but there was a great show where aliens had occupied earth and the drones were just completely lethal and unstoppable. It was very realistic, the machines would just show up and instantly frag everyone in sight. The story was about a cop who ended up working for the alien occupiers, I wish I could remember the name of the show.

I ran into some folks in a similar situation a few years back in the Lucerne valley. We were driving out to check a campsite for a party we were going to have the next weekend and came across some folks in a Pontiac Grand Am - same story, they’d started getting bogged down in the sand and so kept accelerating deeper into the nowhere, eventually getting high centered on some rocks. When we found them it was a Sunday and they’d been there for nine hours, they told us they hadn’t seen anyone. We were in a big F250 4x4 so we pulled them out and got them pointed back down the road. I wonder what would have happened if we hadn’t shown up that day.

To their credit they had two cases of bottled water in their car so they weren’t entirely stupid.

I’d have to agree here - with no comms and no water their best bet would have been to torch the van and hope someone sees the smoke.

You folks are probably going to skewer me for this, but here goes:

I’ve been a hiring manager for many years and hired a lot of people.

It starts with reviewing resumes just to see if someone has a few years of experience in similar technologies as what we are working with.

If it looks good, I just pick up the phone and spend half an hour or so shooting the shit - an intelligent person will realize this is an opportunity to talk about their experience and they’ll do that.

If that goes well, they come in for a face to face chat with me and maybe one or two of our developers, totally free form and absolutely no coding challenges or nothing.

If they seem like they have their shit together, we hire them.

I’d say I have about a 90% success rate with this model. Yea, sometimes you get a good bullshitter and it doesn’t work out, but that’s easily remedied…

I have a lot of faith in casual conversational interviews and don’t worry about grilling people on whiteboards. I just go with my gut and that’s it.

The wheels turn slowly, but grind exceedingly fine. This is a major case and it will take time for various agencies to put all the pieces together.

If you really want to get away from it all, I can recommend areas around the Chiricahua wilderness in AZ. My brother picked up 40 acres for $20k and it’s really beautiful country out there. You can get a few hundred acres for $100k or so if you time it right. On the down side it’s about an hour to the nearest real town.

This. I’ve been wilderness backpacking for a long time and still carry a 2m radio just for fun, but the usefulness is limited in a lot of places. If you’re climbing up a mountain in NH you can pretty much hit a repeater from anywhere, but if you’re trekking around in Big Bend State Park in Texas you can forget it. Satellite communication is much better and if you can’t afford a few hundred bucks for some kind of satcom then you probably shouldn’t be going out too deep into some of these places.

This idea has legs.

We should at least drill down.

Drop the last sentence and post this on LinkedIn. You’ll be a Sales Leadership Influencer in no time.

True story: A few days back my wife and I were doing Wordle. I could tell the answer was “RUSTY”, her pet name for me. So I told her the answer was sitting right next to her and she says “No, STUPID is six letters.”

I’ve found that counter offers don’t really work. If a person is willing to resign it’s best to just let them go.

Sigh. I just had this experience a few months back. I went out on a limb, hired a junior guy, and after six months of getting him up to speed on a fairly complex fintech application he resigned and went to a a random web development job that paid more.

I’m probably nowhere near your level technically, but I’m 52 and still going strong. I love this field so much, and best of all I’m a hiring manager and so I get to welcome all these young kids into it. Warms my heart when some youngster comes in and knocks it out of the park. Just reminds me so much of being a kid and dreaming about one day being a “real” programmer. Skipping school and reading Roger Wagner’s Assembly Lines - the Complete Book, and hoping some day I’d get my hands on a real computer. Sounds silly, now that we all have supercomputers in our pockets. But I still treasure the memories.

When I was a kid we didn’t even have ones! We had to write all our code with zeros. Apologies to Scott Adams of course.

https://dilbert.com/strip/1992-09-08

The new Navy camouflage is designed to keep your uniform looking clean when you are working around paints and oils and so on. It’s purely for workplace aesthetics and not intended to hide you from anyone.

That’s kind of like hunters who buy expensive camo and then their wife washes it with laundry detergent that contains brightening agents. To human eyes it still looks like camo, but to the deer you end up looking like Barney the Dinosaur.

What is the color of the boathouse at Hereford?

Roger, Roger.

My all time favorite was when I took the SAT (long time ago) and the proctor confiscated my calculator.

At the end of the test there was a final question:

“Which of the following approved calculators did you use on this test?”

My calculator was option B.