sh34r

Those tire kickers are looking for any reason not to hire people. Trying to prepare for their mind-games is a fool's errand. They've almost always made up their mind when they see your face and decide whether you're fuckable or not.

Do you really want to work for people like that?

Depression causes similar memory impairments.

I could do it really easily if I had 30 minutes to write it out. Doing it in a conversation, though? I might prefer being waterboarded. I'll remember a much better example less than an hour after the call ends, too.

I'm convinced neurotypical people just lie through their teeth in these STAR interviews. It'd be so easy to just tell them some bullshit story. It sure seems like they only want to hear some absolute bullshit.

Their "customer support" includes not expecting users to set up PGP to communicate with them. Email is not a secure method of communication by default.

It's fine to send a notification instructing them to visit the secure portal for more info, though. Hence, no-reply.

This is the song it's ~~hallucinating~~ bullshitting about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6NJitdq8Bk&t=1s&themeRefres...

It's like an Irish rebel song but with stomping. I'm not sure how you watch that and think racist thoughts, unless you're the kind of guy who Sieg Heils on national TV.

My answer to this question, having been a victim of this economic crash, is bug bounty programs. Chaos is a ladder. All this outsourcing, layoffs, and AI slop is an opportunity. That Apple AirPlay wormable RCE CVE is an indicator of how bad things have already gotten. It's pathetic how far even Apple has fallen in this race to the bottom.

These companies are running on fumes. They cut to the bone, through the bone, and everything is being held together by a thread.

But security research is really far removed from the skillset of a startup app developer. Realistically, even if you were capable of learning, which most aren't, it'd take longer for you to get up to speed than it would take for the market to improve.

The more relevant answer would be to bootstrap an MVP and pitch it to investors to get funding to scale. There's no piecework model for consumers like "install can lights" or "build a she-shed."

> If a carpenter can’t read a book

Deserted islands don't have libraries.

What are the characteristics that are actually useful on a deserted island? Outdoorsy (ideally, skilled in bushcraft), ex-military, able-bodied. On the first two, the programmer wins. On the last one, it's probably a wash. For every obese slob in this field, there's a carpenter whose back is fucked and is dependent on opiates.

Carpentry offers limited applicable skills if they're stranded 1000 miles away from the nearest Home Depot.

And that's definitely an inclusive-or, too.

On the other hand, managers are usually hiring because they failed to do their job competently with the last person in this role.

Brand-new positions are exceedingly rare these days. The market is worse than it's ever been for SWE. There was likely someone they laid off who could have filled it if management wasn't completely incompetent.

This isn't a growth market at the moment. It's a zero-sum game. Everyone's trying to screw each other over as much as possible, and they're lying through their teeth and pretending like it's not. Nobody on either side is sifting through this torrent of AI slop by choice.

Eastern Europeans and Israelis are so refreshing to work with.

From Philly to Boston, you got a lot of direct Americans, but the rest of the country? No, not really. West Coasters might be the most passive-aggressive people in the world.

You're not protecting your time correctly if helping a colleague out wipes out your morning. Schedule a meeting and time-box the assistance. If it's not enough, schedule something else in a day or two. Teach the man how to fish and all that.

I couldn't disagree more. I try to avoid people like you like the plague. You're never as good as you think you are, and any additional skill you might provide is negated by how much you drag the rest of the team down.

I'm happy to provide leadership to help those who are less capable, but willing to learn, and are actually nice people.

TBH it's really quite boring. You just have to go back in time to the late 2010s. They had an excellent Spark-as-a-Service product, at a time when you'd have better luck finding a leprechaun than a reliable self-hosted Spark instance in an enterprise environment. That was simply beyond the capabilities of most enterprise IT teams at the time. The first-party offerings from the hyperscalars were relatively spartan.

Databricks' proprietary notebook format that introduced subtle incompatibilities with Jupyter was infuriating embrace-extend-extinguish style bullshit, but on-prem cluster instability causing jobs to crash on a daily basis was way more infuriating, and at that time, enterprises were more than happy to pay a premium to accelerate analytics teams.

In the 2010s, Databricks had a solid billion-dollar business. But Spark-as-a-Service by itself was never going to be a unicorn idea. AWS EMR was the giant tortoise lurking in the background, slowly but surely closing the gap. The status quo couldn't hold, and who doesn't want to be a unicorn? So, they bloated the hell out of the product, drank that off-brand growth-hacker Kool-Aid, and started spewing some of the most incoherent buzz-word salad to ever come out of the Left Coast. Just slapping data, lake, and house onto the ends of everything, like it was baby oil at a Diddy Party.

Now, here we are in 2025, deep into the terminal decline of enshittification, and they're just rotting away, waiting for One Real Asshole Called Larry Ellison to scoop them up and take them straight to Hell. The State of Florida, but for Big Data companies.

It would be a mystery to me too, why anyone would pick Databricks today for a greenfield project, but those enterprises from 5+ years ago are locked in hard now. They'll squeeze those whales and they'll shit money like a golden goose for a few more years, but their market share will steadily decrease over the next few years.

It's the cycle of life. Entropy always wins. Eventually the Grim Reaper Larry comes for us all. I wouldn't hate on them too hard. They had a pretty solid run.

Ignoring the serious memory safety and security problems that were exploited to get acceptable performance on contemporary hardware, I’d point to shared document editing, automatic backups via OneDrive, and version history as rather significant features in that missing 5%.

I think rosy recollection is tainting your memory here. How often docs would get corrupted due to those aforementioned memory safety issues, even if that Win95/98 box was never connected to the internet.

Of course it’s gonna be super snappy. It was designed to run on any Doom-compatible hardware. Which includes some toasters now.

Edit: it’s also worth noting that 1997 was right around the time where Moore’s law succumbed to the laws of physics for improving single-core CPU performance via clock speed alone.

Well, we networked all the computers together around that time, and it turned out that all the 1337 performance hacking that people did back then had severe unintended consequences. You’re talking about an era in which the NX bit would not be utilized by Windows for another ~7 years. “Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit” was contemporary work.

It’s not rocket science to eke out oodles of performance out of a potato if you don’t care about correctness or memory safety.

Word 97 will only delight you if you use it on an airgapped computer, as a glorified typewriter, never open anyone else’s documents with it, and are diligent about manually saving the doc to multiple places for when it inevitably self-corrupts.

But at that point, why not be like GRRM and write on a DOS word processor? Those were historically a lot more reliable than these second-generation GUI apps.

Look up what urban planners call “the missing middle.” Amsterdam, Paris, and even Washington, DC get their high density from 5-6 story buildings. You don’t need skyscrapers to have a bustling, walkable city.

Now, I actually like skyscrapers! I think they’re cool. But this one makes zero sense. A 1900 foot skyscraper surrounded by Oklahoma has strong king of sh** mountain vibes. The whole appeal is that it makes no sense. It’s that onion article about Boston, so cute, they’re pretending to be a real city! But for oil barons.

They could’ve built a hundred five-over-1s in a mixed use, transit oriented development instead of this, and it would’ve been a lot better for everyone involved.

It used to be, but there's a pandemic of the blue flu going around. Cops have been quiet quitting for 4 years because they want to be able to murder with impunity again.

Your argument has several flaws. First, we prescribe drugs based on expected risk and reward. The likelihood of successful treatment absolutely matters. Otherwise, we'd require a trial of a homeopathic placebo for every mental health condition, before prescribing something that's clinically proven to work. Homeopathy is 100% safe, and 100% useless. But hey, sometimes the placebo effect works, right? That manic guy who thinks he can fly? Let's give him sugar pills for a year before lithium, just to be safe! Natural solutions and "alternative medicine" are always best, after all. The stuff that actually works is a last resort only! Just look at Steve Jobs, he's doing so well these days! His cancer was completely cured by his weird diet. /s

Second, you assume there's a significant difference between the risk of amphetamines at low doses and the alternatives -- usually off-label anti-depressants with a slew of nasty side effects. Do you really believe the science is unbiased when the DEA has been meddling in it for decades now? Come on now. These are the people that still insist cannabis is more dangerous than fentanyl. They're thugs, not scientists. Every 1960s housewife in America was microdosing speed in the form of diet pills, and it was mostly fine, until Nixon's alcoholic ass started a war on other drugs that broke everyone's brains. Then on the other end, you have Big Pharma corrupting FDA officials to make their newer, more dangerous, and less effective drugs look better than they really are.

More importantly, you assume there's no risk to delaying treatment. It's no big deal that someone loses a job and their health insurance because the "safer" drug you made them trial first did nothing or made things worse. It's probably already taken you months, if not years, to get the diagnosis and an appointment with a psychiatrist. The status quo probably isn't going great for you. Relationships, school, career, etc are suffering. Oh, not to mention the significantly increased risk of death of dying in a car crash when we're unmedicated. But sure, giving us some shitty placebo for three months, that's totally safer for everyone! Including you, right?

Can you people please stop peddling this anti-intellectual nonsense about a disorder you know absolutely fuck-all about, outside of stigmatizing pop culture memes? You're not a doctor. And get your damn vaccines too, while you're at it.

The social model of disability can be useful, but it has its limits. Unmedicated-me pisses me off too.

I'm more inclined to think Garry Tan is a sadist, not a hypocrite. He said "die slow." There's few methods of killing that are faster than the guillotine. Garry clearly believes only ISIS-approved execution methods belong in SF politics.

9. Anyone who doesn’t recognize Roko’s basilisk as a bad ripoff of Pascal’s wager is an ignoramus. Anyone who is seriously concerned about it for more than an hour should consider a vasectomy.

10. I can’t think of a better form of “effective altruism” than paying for LessWrong members’ vasectomies. Not because I’m concerned about their genes. They’d just be terrible parents, and gods those kids would need lots of therapy.

“Big energy” is referring to the oil and gas industry. Utility profits are small potatoes.

I take it you skipped your Econ 101 course the day they went over “rent seeking behavior” and the distinction between accounting profits and economic profits. Economic profits (ie. excess profits) are a characteristic of markets lacking sufficient competition. Considering US antitrust laws haven’t been enforced since the Clinton administration, this finding on excess profits would not surprise any honest economist (ie. not on the payroll of a far-right think tank). The M&A spree of the last 30 years has been a mass pillaging of the American working class.

Look to the example of Russian intelligence officers being indicted by U.S. DOJ for an example that both proves and disproves your point. Governments do indict foreign nationals that can’t be extradited. They also don’t bother unless they’re a big enough fish to fry. Goatse doesn’t cut it. You have to do something like NotPetya to get a four-star cyber wanted level.

I’m not a lawyer, but there are all kinds of extremely broad computer crime statutes on the books. No prosecutor would bring this case. This would flagrantly violate the spirit of the law, which was intended to stop unsolicited dick pics and other forms of targeted harassment. It would certainly not merit extradition to the UK, or the UAE for that matter.

It’s not worth worrying about such extreme what-if cases. If the Feds were so determined to destroy an innocent person in a kangaroo court, there’s easier ways of doing so. They could plant CSAM on the server. They could coerce an informant to accuse you of SA (like they did to Assange).

Realistically, the worst sanction this dev could reasonably expect, is to have their domain taken down. That’s what happened to the OG .cx domain, after all…

If you were on forums in the aughts, it was unavoidable. I think every very online millennial knows what Goatse is. The youngest millennial is 27. Which begs the question: is Goatse what spreads Zoomers and millennials apart?

I peeked at your website and your profile. I’m not surprised you struggle to get jobs… Do you realize these profiles will turn up when recruiters and hiring managers google your name? You’re basically telling them two things when they skim it.

First, on this forum, your headline says, my work isn’t a priority in my life, it’s behind church. Church is about as popular as Congress in this industry. There’s a very funny HBO Silicon Valley bit about coming out to your gay dad as a Christian, that’s a little too close to reality for comfort (like that whole series).

Second, and more importantly, your LLC’s front page tells visitors, “I probably have ODD and am a gender discrimination lawsuit waiting to happen.” Is that the message you’re trying to send? Mate, never mind getting jobs, you’re not even making it past the HR screen with such sloppy social media hygiene.

Have you ever heard the phrase “hide your power level?” That doesn’t even really apply here, actually. You don’t have to hide your faith or your politics. Just don’t make it your introduction. First impressions matter, a lot.

So no, it’s not that you couldn’t have had a job. You’re just choosing to have an extremely unprofessional online presence, and that has consequences.

Am I being unfair, biased, uncharitable, judgmental? Sure, probably. I don’t know you, and I didn’t look very hard. But do you really think the average employer or customer is any better than me?

This is a very poor analogy. For one thing, casing someone's home is not interesting research. It's not news to anyone that locks only keep honest people out. You need physical access to break in. The legal system and the people nearby (neighbors and residents, and their firearms in the USA) are the main lines of defense here. Unlocked doors are a harm targeting one household.

Conversely, with vulnerable IoT devices, we're talking about internet-connected devices. The potential harm is to everyone on the Internet, not just one household, when they're taken over and made part of a botnet. An attacker can exploit them from anywhere in the world, including residents of hostile jurisdictions that are tolerant (or actively supportive) of such activity. Russia, North Korea, Iran, etc. The protections people have relied on for centuries to defend their residences from bad guys don't apply anymore.

These IoT devices can also be used to gain a foothold in your home network, which are usually flat networks. It's surprisingly difficult to find a "router" for home use at a reasonable price point that can setup VLANs, by the way. Even as a technical person.

The better analogy IMO is to building codes, where your property rights are limited by society's interest to keep your family safe, but more importantly, your neighbors safe too, because fires spread. It's still an imperfect analogy for a number of reasons. Cyberattacks are a relatively novel kind of threat. All analogies are going to be imperfect.

It's amazing how many people have been brainwashed into supporting dictatorship in the workplace, isn't it? So-called free men, who find the idea of no gods and no masters to be unthinkable. You have nothing to lose but your chains!