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sjogress

130 karma · joined October 14, 2014

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sjogress··on Canada to order military plane fleet from Sweden in shift from US suppliers
Remember that Trump also had a term before Biden where he undermined cross-atlantic relations.

Under Obama you had the reputational fallout from the Snowden leaks.

Before Obama you had Bush Jr's wars, with especially the Iraq war being very controversial.

sjogress··on Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act
Raising a kid takes a village.

It is not like parents are the only influential figures in a kid's upbringing, they are not the only role models, they should not be the only ones paying attention and guiding kids to adulthood.

Parental control options as they stand are severely lacking. If you add the actively predatory enshittification efforts conducted by seemingly all larges tech companies, you are left either forbidding your kid from accessing anything (this does not work if the kid's friends have access) or allowing far more than you are comfortable with.

Lets take YouTube as an example. As it stands you have the options of YouTube (with both the most wonderful content available on one hand, and toxicity and brain rot shorts on the other) or YouTube Kids - an app with controls that do not work. How about allowing parents to whitelist content and/or creators instead of letting the algorithms run the show?

Spotify is another example. How about letting parents control whether the kid's account is plastered with videos, podcasts and AI slop?

How about your run of the mill browser, letting parents review and allow websites on a case-by-case basis? Maybe my kid is ready for news sites but not Reddit? Maybe 4chan and 8kun are better reserved for the more adventorous adults as opposed to impressionable kids?

I agree that age verification is a bad solution, but what the hell are parents supposed to reach for? It's not like Silicon Valley are stepping up with any real solutions or even propositions to these problems, it is left for - at best clueless - politicians to navigate the problem space.

Raising a kid takes a village.

sjogress··on Resizing windows on macOS Tahoe – the saga continues
Personally replaced Windows 10 with Linux Mint on my very computer illiterate mother in law's laptop a few months back. Haven't heard any complaints so far.

Linux is ready for prime time for anyone not bound to Windows/MacOS software.

Personally, I'm still on MacOS for work, but all my personal devices run some form of Linux. It's been liberating to say the least.

sjogress··on FreeDroidWarn
Perhaps a Fairphone 6 with /e/OS (which is a de-googled Android)?

https://shop.fairphone.com/the-fairphone-gen-6-e-operating-s...

sjogress··on Show HN: Vaev – A browser engine built from scratch (It renders google.com)
I'm of the opinion that these passion projects are incredibly important.

Your passions projects were problably also far more important to your growth than you give them credit for.

Scratching an itch is how we, as programmers/engineers/whatever, grow. It is also how we stumble into solving real problems and make our mark on the world.

Who knows, this could become the next big player in the browsersphere, or maybe it'll pivot into something else, or perhaps it will spark someones imagination. At the very least it has (probably) already been a source of creative bliss and pride for the ones involved, which in my opinion makes it worthwhile.

sjogress··on We’re opening up access to Gov.uk forms
And Norway: https://www.designsystemet.no/
sjogress··on Austria's data protection authority has found that Google Analytics is illegal
Im not a legal scholar in any way, but perhaps a solution would be a fully independent Microsoft EU that licenses Microsoft US tech for deployment/use within Europe?
sjogress··on Austria's data protection authority has found that Google Analytics is illegal
An optimistic take would be that this forces European companies to think through their analytics/ad needs again, perhaps resulting in less invasive solutions and thus fewer popups/banners and improved privacy.

At least that is what I'm hoping for, however unrealistic it might be.

sjogress··on Austria's data protection authority has found that Google Analytics is illegal
As far as I can tell this ruling means that transfering PII to any company/service controlled by an American company is illegal per the GDPR.

I work for a European company that is already being impacted by this ruling. Our first step is to replace Google Analytics, but I believe we are also looking through all cloud usage for any traces of PII.

I think this is a huge opportunity for European companies to get a foothold in the Analytics/Ads/Cloud/Office spaces. Perhaps also an opportunity for good open source alternatives, like Matomo Analytics, to get adopted.

sjogress··on The ER charged him $6,589.77 for 6 stitches, cost that led his wife to avoid ER
It seems like you've done the research here: how do you know how you are supposed(?) to do the test in the US?

Here in my municipality in Norway the media keeps repeating how/where/when to get tested, and if anything important changes the municipality will literally send a SMS to all its citizens to ensure as many as possible are up to date.

From my admittedly limited experience with the US (NYC/tri-state area) I get the impression that information is often hard to find and hard to understand. This could of course be caused by cultural or lingual differences since I'm neither American nor a native English speaker.

sjogress··on Show HN: Tara 2.0 – Fast Jira alternative with automation based on Git events
I think for most/many European companies, especially those that are potentially handling PII, there are regulatory concerns with using US based hosting/companies.

My employer for instance has put a ban on deploying anything new on AWS/Azure/Google Cloud until legal issues have been settled after Privacy Shield was invalidated.

Everything new right now needs to be on EU/EFTA data centers run by EU/EFTA companies. This essentially means self hosting since most clouds are owned by US companies.

sjogress··on The Framework Laptop is now shipping
I must say the Framework laptop is a very enticing offering!

Do you plan on offering it in Scandinavia with Scandinavian keyboard layouts?

sjogress··on GitHub blocks entire company because one employee was in Iran
I agree with you that Office 365, AWS and Github are great products. Hard, if not impossible, to catch up as a competitior, especially when you have trillion dollar companies backing them.

However, if you cannot trust those products then you cannot use them.

Remember, this thread is about Github blocking an entire company due to one employee due to American politics. If a non-US company risks to lose it project management/code management (Github), its infrastructure (AWS) or its documents (Office 365) on a whim due to American policies then they cannot use those products.

If a big enough chunk of the world can't use the American offerings, then there is a market for alternatives.

sjogress··on GitHub blocks entire company because one employee was in Iran
At this point it is kinda an open question whether using AWS/Azure/GCP for anything involving PII is even fully legal under EU/EFTA law. I know at least my employer is working towards having more options to jump ship at a moments notice these days.

I think EU/EFTA is large enough to enable the growth of at least one 80% offering given enough time. Or otherwise large enough as an economic bloc to force America to stricter legalisation so that they can use and depend on the American offerings.

sjogress··on EU countries team up for semiconductor push
I guess their goal isn't necessarily to make a world leader but rather to ensure they're not left behind if the geopolitical climate keeps worsening.
sjogress··on EU countries team up for semiconductor push
I dont' think the difference between EU and US taxes on revenue are all that different.

If you compare Panama, or other tax havens where multinational companies like to stash their revenue, to the EU then you probably have a point.

sjogress··on Overmind.js – Frictionless State Management
The main boon of Redux et al in my experience is that they impose some rules as to where and how state changers are handled, meaning less weird inconsistencies when working in a team (especielly if the team members change over time).
sjogress··on Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers
> To say it’s on the engineer to do no harm puts them in the tenuous position of doing the job or being replaced by someone who will. That isn’t setting us up for success.

If we were to introduce an oath we would have to take further inspiration from doctors, e.g having a certification required to do the job, or, failing that at least having an industry-wide union/guild protecting the position.

sjogress··on Norway advises citizens to avoid all travel abroad
TL;DR We had it under control, but we are losing control. So we need to take action now (limit importation of new cases and new local spread) before a new lockdown is needed. Hence the holiday (from social distancing measures) is over.

The problem is that Norwegians have essentially had a vacation from worrying about Covid, since there has been more or less no new cases since May-June. This has made the Norwegian population more relaxed, meaning more social gatherings have been taking place, bars have reopened, etc.

However, during the summer months there was some tourism to and from other European countries, which seems to have caused a potential new outbreak of Covid.

So, when the health minister says "I think most of us have now understood the holiday is over" he means that it is time to start thinking about social distancing, thinking about work-from-home policies and your personal hygiene again.

sjogress··on Norway advises citizens to avoid all travel abroad
I believe Norway has similar rules, i.e you should be able to travel here from anywhere as long as you have some kind of residency.

As far as tourism is concerned, the government has divided European countries into two groups: traveling from "red" countries requires a mandatory quarantine upon entry, traveling from a "green" country does not mandate a quarantine. AFAIK all non-European countries are considered "red", meaning quarantine on entry.

sjogress··on Only 9% of visitors give GDPR consent to be tracked
Opting out of tracking is not the same as opting out of cookies. Per the GDPR a site is still allowed to set any cookies required for the site to work, including a "tracking consent cookie".
sjogress··on ‘Hey Siri, I’m getting pulled over’: Records police interaction, sends location
I thought the police were largely required to wear body cams plus have dash cams in the US. If that is true then there is no need to share the footage, since law enforcement should already be in possession of recordings of an incident.
sjogress··on A Critique of React Hooks Addendum
We decided on the useReducer-hook instead of using a proper state library.

We did this since the thing we are currently building is essentially just a set of forms with a lot of client-side and server-side validations.

Of course, if we were building a large SPA we would probably reconcider at this point. It feels like we're already at the edge of what useReducer was designed to do and I do not think what we are doing now would scale cleanly to a larger project or a larger team.

sjogress··on Farmworkers key to keeping US fed are wary of virus spread
It seems to me like this is a different problem than the one the OP was discussing.

I believe we need to make sure food production is not impacted by the current pandemic in the short term (next few months/years). The tools we have are tests, quarantines, and maybe a pay hike to insentivize people to keep at it.

In the longer term I believe that you are right. We should probably automate more, to ensure efficiency, and decentralize more to ensure sustainability and redundancy. However it would probably be incredibly difficult to do this during a pandemic. Though, i guess decentralization could be achieved in a way by people replacing their lawns with food producing gardens.

sjogress··on Pinebook Pro – First Impressions and Setup Tips
The ads are served from static.haydenjames.io. Looks like a Wordpress plugin called Advanced Ads Plus[0] is used.

0: https://wpadvancedads.com

sjogress··on This Page is Designed to Last
SVGs are human readable and human writable.

I used SVG as a templating/markup language for years. We were writing software for a specialized, embedded, browser that only understood JS and SVG.

It only took a few days of acclimatization to move from writing HTML to writing SVG.

sjogress··on The Siege of Carrie Lam
Interesting, according to Wikipedia the results of the popular vote was: Pro-democrats (57.10%), Pro-Beijing (42.06%), Non-aligned others (0.83%)

Seats were divided like this: Pro-democrats (81.00%), Pro-Beijing (18.58%), Non-aligned others (0.42%)

Looks like some democratic reform is in order even if HK is able to gain universal suffrage and keep the one-country two-systems indefinitely.

sjogress··on The Siege of Carrie Lam
> Even in the recent local elections the pro-protest candidates garnered on average less than 60% of the votes despite record turn out on their side.

I'm interested in your source for this, do you have an English language source?

I haven't seen any results per candidate, and I don't have a proper understanding of how local HK elections work, but according to SCMP:

> Among the 452 seats up for grabs, the pan-democrats were victorious in 347, the independents – many of them pro-democracy – won 45, while the pro-establishment camp had to make do with 60. [1]

Sounds like a pretty clear victory to me. If the elections are anything like my local elections such a result would be considered a landslide victory.

1: https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/3039151...

sjogress··on The Cornell Note-taking System (2001)
Would it be possible for you to share your templates?

I'm very interested in ways to improve my meeting notes, and it sounds like you've already done a fair bit of testing on your templates.

sjogress··on Ask HN: Burning Out
A few questions:

* How is your sleep?

* Are you able to rest properly?

* Do you feel exhausted every evening after work?

* Are you arguing more with your SO/family/friends than you used to?

* Do you have enough motivation to plan things that aren't work-related, like trips, dinner parties, going out with friends?

The big problem with burnout is that your ability to recover and rest is severely hampered. If you are anything like me that lack of rest will make you have a very negative outlook on, well, everything.

If you are able to I'd take a long vacation, long enough that you are able to get some distance and perspective on the situation. Then I'd see if leaving the company is the right descision or what would be necessary to salvage the situation.

I've personally gone through burnout the past year, to the point where I was on sick leave for a few weeks. Those weeks were enough to give me some perspective. Quitting that job and taking a few additional months off was the only was to get through it, though truth be told I'm still suffering from some symptoms of burnout, like a lack of motivation.

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