shaftway

I've seen people have success with a more legit version of the Circuit City scam.

For the uninitiated / younger generations, Circuit City was the Best Buy of the early 2000's. In 2009 they went out of business and laid off ~60,000 employees. It was a rough time to be looking for work; lots of people had been affected by the financial crisis and a lot of people had gaps on their resume of 1 to 3 years. And then all of a sudden, nobody had a gap. And there were a sudden influx of people who had been managers at Circuit City. And you couldn't confirm it, because Circuit City had just closed.

Nowadays the scam is to find any recently closed, large firm and claim you worked there with whatever BS title you want. A LinkedIn profile can actually be your downfall here, so don't have one. The over-employeed community does this, claiming that they had to take it down because of a stalker. But I wouldn't advocate this. If your company finds out then there are probably legal repercussions.

But it doesn't have to be a scam. Form an LLC, spend some time up-leveling skills, and put that on your resume. It explains the gap, and gives you an excuse for why it looks like you weren't doing anything.

Maybe. I haven't really heard many of the people in my circles describing an experience like that ("opening up" to an LLM). I can't imagine *anyone* telling a general-purpose LLM about memories they cherish.

Do people want an LLM to "know them"? I literally shuddered at the thought. That sounds like a dystopian hell to me.

But I think Google has, or can infer, a lot more of that data than people realize. If you're on Android you're probably opted into Google Photos, and they can mine a ton of context about you out of there. Certainly infer information about who is important to you, even if you don't realize it yourself. And let's face it, people aren't that unique. It doesn't take much pattern matching to come up with text that looks insightful and deep, but is actually superficial. Look at cold-reading psychics for examples of how trivial it is.

This feels like an area Google would have an advantage though. Look at all of the data about you that Google has and it could mine across Wallet, Maps, Photos, Calendar, GMail, and more. Google knows my name, address, drivers license, passport, where I work, when I'm home, what I'm doing tomorrow, when I'm going on vacation and where I'm going, and whole litany of other information.

The real challenge for Google is going to be using that information in a privacy-conscious way. If this was 2006 and Google was still a darling child that could do no wrong, they'd have already integrated all of that information and tried to sell it as a "magical experience". Now all it'll take is one public slip-up and the media will pounce. I bet this is why they haven't done that integration yet.

Google's AdMob has been doing these. Often it's something simple like completing a puzzle. I hate that I prefer these ads because it shortens the time until I get back to my game.

I've worked for two companies that did mobile ads, and one other that did web ads.

The web ad company was hampered by poor engineering and management that had big glory projects that were poorly conceived or too ambitious; they no longer exist.

The first mobile ad company was constrained by ethics and prioritized a better experience over earning that last fraction of a percent (though most people on the outside would disagree on principle).

The second mobile ad company had a decent API designer early, and managed to capture a specific role in advertising. That role gave them access to data that ended up being wildly useful for purposes other than it's original intention, and they've done well based on that. But they are completely mired in in-fighting, executives who only bother to come in and be seen for quarterly results, and they don't do *anything* unless someone else does it first. They don't have a functional legal department and engineers are afraid that their head will be on the block if something goes wrong, and everyone is afraid of killing the golden goose.

So no, I suspect it hasn't happened because almost nobody thought of it, and the people that did are too afraid to be a trailblazer.

And we've already seen the precursors for it. Chaining multiple short ads together to add enough value to be worth it for an in-game reward is the beginning of it. It's not a very far leap.

I can tell you how the ad companies will implement this. For Rewarded ads (the longest ones, that are at least 30 seconds, and sometimes as high as 60 seconds), they'll move to that succession model, but the succession will take you at least 30 seconds. Oh you skipped an ad after 5 seconds? No worries, here's another ad. You watched the first ad for the full 30 seconds? No more ads for you.

It'll probably be a win for them.

None of the rights that people have are unrestricted in that way. The sixth amendment gives you the right to a lawyer paid for by the government, but it doesn't give you the right to pick any lawyer you choose.

The obvious answer is that, if people do have the right to shelter, it is the state / county / city's obligation to make some form of shelter available. And I get that there are "shelters" available, but from what I understand they are effectively not available to a vast number of unhoused people far a wide variety of reasons. Failure to maintain appropriate shelters is effective a constructive refusal.

I liked the concept of the tiny home villages that LA experimented with, but it looks like they did a poor job, or cost cutting got too severe, and ultimately they fell short.

I think it's an attempt to normalize the idea that shelter is a basic human right. As a blue-stater, I'm undecided on whether I agree that it's a right, but I definitely think that nobody has a right to shelter in any property they choose.

It's a pretty complicated issue, and the legal patchwork of state versus county versus city laws can make it really difficult to untangle. I think that given the system we have, everyone in it is pretty much behaving rationally, if in their own best interests. I understand why the squatters would choose a squat over a shelter.

But there's a loophole. Burbclaves will need to let deliverators in, which is a gap in the armor. How are they supposed to defend themselves? Some sort of rat thing?

Not OP, but it's probably about inheritance rules. If you inherit a property then you inherit its tax basis. In fact, if I remember correctly, you inherit the tax basis, but the capital gains basis resets. You effectively inherit a property that has a low property tax, but face zero capital gains if you turn around and sell it.

All of this is subject to limits and rules and stuff. I think prop 19 made it so that you have to use it for your primary residence for the first year. And I think there's a cap on the difference between property value and tax basis of ~$1m.

> > > No chemist wakes up and decides to call it “Steve” because Steve is a funny name and they think it’ll make their paper more approachable.

Lawrencium has entered the chat.

https://lmarena.ai/leaderboard allows you to do your own blind A/B testing, but they aggregate user choices.

Looks like Google is in first place in the vast majority of the metrics, not far behind in the rest, and ahead of OpenAI in every category.

I think everyone uses jj a bit differently. Personally I don't like having a staging area; for me it's an opportunity to forget to add a change to a commit. I don't keep files in my work tree that I'm not going to commit or ignore.

But when I first moved to jj I tried to make it work as closely to git as I could. The model I used back then was to have a commit that I meant to upload eventually, and then a working commit on top of that. Then `git commit --all` was `jj squash` and `git commit foo bar` was `jj squash foo bar`.

Eventually I got lazy. It was an extra command, and I almost never have the situation where I don't want to include a file. In the rare case that I do, I'll create a new commit with `jj new` and squash that file into there (you could have a shortcut for it, but the long form is `jj new -m "foo changes" --no-edit && jj squash --to @+ foo`, and then keep working.

The article says the claimed in court that they're not working on a wearable device. So that rules out headphones, glasses, maybe comm badges.

While I agree (and strongly identify with, and like this position), one could amend the original to be "Gen-X uses pens and print, Boomers use pens and cursive"

Anyone with enough money can cross any moat. That's one of the many benefits of having infinite money.

I think the most relevant quote is from Futurama:

"Eh-de-de-de-de. Don't quote me regulations... I co-chaired the committee that reviewed the recommendation to revise the color of the book that regulation is in. We kept it gray."

I just sold my Harley (literally this morning). And you're totally right about the vibe. I had a 2017 Roadster (a much more upright bike than the cruisers you think of when you think of Harleys) and any time someone asked, I'd explain "I ride a Harley, but I'm not a 'Harley guy'". I would never roll around with other Harley riders.

I think the most telling thing was that when I priced my bike out, average mileage for that bike at that age was ~6500 miles. Which made my 52,000 miles a liability.

It's much more than a 5% decline. I started keeping track of Harley dealers around 2019. When I started tracking, the website listed 1859 locations around the world. Of those, 58 looked like merch stores (no bike sales, no services), so let's call it 1801. The last time I updated my stats was 18 months ago, and the number was 1409. I just looked today and it's 1237. So that's a reduction of just over 31%.

I haven't plugged today's number into my analysis, but the 2024 numbers showed some countries hit much more disproportionately than others. All of the stores in Russia have been closed (for mostly obvious reasons). Almost all of the stores in Central America and the Caribbean have also closed (for not-obvious reasons). In the US I'd say the number looks somewhere between 5 and 10%, but again, that doesn't take into account the last 18 months.

"Having" things is the goal of most humans on this planet. Some individuals can control those baser instincts, but most people can not.

The way I look at it, the longer you stay in a high risk investment, the more opportunities there are four your investment to go sideways (aka you lose your investment).

I see it as similar to flaky tests. Let's say you work on a codebase with ~100,000 tests. About 1% are flaky, where the average flaky test fails 0.1% of the time. On the surface that sounds like it's pretty low risk, but once you do out the math your unit tests will only pass about 36% of the time. Maybe a 0.1% flaky rate is acceptable, but not at that scale.

Long term investing plays the same numbers game. Let's say you invest in a risky stock for ~3 years, where "risky" means it has a 0.1% chance of failing in any given day. There's a ~36% chance you win, but you'll probably lose.

I had the same experience being in downtown SF (near Market) for the first time in a few years, but I attributed it to the number of electric cars.

The whole visit felt weird, and eerie, and off somehow, but I couldn't figure out what it was. And then I was standing waiting for a crossing light and heard the clicking of a scooter's turn signal ~20 feet away. It stood out because it took a few seconds to realize that I shouldn't be hearing it because of other noise.

FWIW, I think this is an adult vs. kid thing. I used to be the kind who would build my own stuff, and my kids definitely prefer to design and build their own things. But at some point I transitioned, and it's more about having a built model, not about the creating process. And I think I'm starting to see the same changes in my older kid, where things tend to stay built for longer.

For me I think the change came when I was able to build more real things. I learned how to solder, and then I learned woodworking, and all of a sudden I could make something that's the exact shape I wanted. Once you have those abilities it's a lot harder to go back.

I don't know about builder's keys from that era, but modern builder's keys aren't vulnerable to this problem. The builder's key uses a deeper cut on one or more pins, but the owner's key can and should be pretty unique. The only real requirement is that there be at least one cut to a high enough number to allow for a builder's key. There's a good video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUCW4OnE6Mc

Maybe they used a master key system instead.

This flow can work with jj also. It would probably be exactly the same. You'd do `jj new` and have Claude set the description and make its changes. When you're ready for the next round, you'd repeat and do `jj new` again for the next revision.

I think jj's mutable revisions are best thought of as automation around `git commit --amend && rebase_everything_after_this_commit`. If you're not using that kind of flow with Claude, you wouldn't use that kind of flow with jj either.

> > You just switch to that commit, fix the typo, and switch back to where you were. Or fix the typo where you were and squash the fix, and only the fix, into the commit that introduced it.

> That sounds the same in Git?

I've always struggled with this myself, and would like to update my git knowledge. Can you walk me through the commands to do this? Let's say the commit id is `abcd1234` and it's 5 commits ago.

In JJ I'd do this:

    vim file/with/typo.txt
    jj squash -into abcd1234 file/with/typo.txt

Or if I was feeling more pedantic I'd do:

    jj edit abcd1234
    vim file/with/typo.txt
    jj edit <<my latest commit ID>>

I agree. I'm also not familiar with Bob Dylan in more than an abstract "he's a musician" sort of way. The second flowed effortlessy, conveying tone, intention, and imagery.

I have a friend who is having twins. I'm using some new woodworking techniques to make a pair of baby rattles for her. The real challenge is trying to make two shapes with organic curves and precise cuts that are as close to identical or mirror-image as possible, while also hiding the joints.

It's very low-tech. No screens, no CNC, the most technically advanced tool is the digital RPM readout on the lathe. It's nice to disconnect from my screens once in a while.

Around 1991 I remember having a book that was a cross between Choose Your Own Adventure and D&D. It was about the same physical size, but it was a full (albeit small) D&D campaign. There was a character sheet at the back of the book you could copy, and then as you went through the game you would roll for yourself and for your foes, tracking hits and HP on your sheet until you won all the loot or you died.

I've tried looking for these, but I've always run up against a brick wall. There's a good chance it was a European thing (I was there that year, and can't remember if I brought it or acquired it).

Any chance the HN hive mind has heard of something like this?

> The CI system picks it up, gets a cache hit from the developer’s build, and produces a release artifact.

Why would you cache developer builds on CI?