steelframe

My concerns are around the normalization of pointing high-resolution cameras at people around you all the time. Perhaps this specific device may have a company behind it that, at least at the moment, will resist handing the video feed with you in it to the data brokers.

Make no mistake though, the data brokers are foaming at the mouth to get access to high-resolution constantly-streaming video content that includes your face, your location, and your activities. Imagine the sorts of things that are going to be sold to whoever is buying.

"Jake Jacobs, who is married, is striking up a lengthy conversation with the young woman seated next to him. His wife might be interested in ads for divorce lawyers."

"Jeff Jones is taking a middle-of-the-week flight to San Jose, and he just finished writing an email to a recruiter from another company who is based out of that city. His company is paying the data broker for intel on employees who may be shopping around, so let's get this info to them stat."

"Jennifer Smith looks to be 3 months pregnant and is flying from Texas to Colorado. She's reading a Planned Parenthood pamphlet. The State of Texas passed a law in 2026 requiring data brokers to report on such activities, so of course we'll let them know."

As competing products come along that are cheaper than the Apple doohickies in part because of the subsidies they get from the data brokers, portable VR headsets are going to bring along a significant deterioration of our already-dismal privacy protections.

Sometimes politics comes into play at the office. "This is the decision. We're just informing you about it because we agreed in our informal hallway chat that it's the right thing to do."

Suddenly all of the doc comments and Slack threads become meaningless and are swept aside in favor of the consensus that a few people came to face-to-face. Remote employees will never be as politically effective as the employees in the hallway.

I'm at a juncture in my career where I'm asking what could really motivate me to do anything that I really feel is worth doing in tech. In my earlier years I remember using both CompuServe and Prodigy. I'm not sure if it just hindsight colored by nostalgia, but I yern for the feeling I had as a young teenager when I could explore a quirky and curated world of information.

I'm starting to think that all this AI stuff has finally pushed the ads-based Internet past its tipping point.

I feel I could be motivated to work on a walled garden with moderation paid for by subscription fees. What would it be worth to you to have an entirely new online experience free of all the enshittification of the past 15 years?

Personally, I pay for Kagi just to have a small taste of what that could be like. But what if not just the search engine, but also all the sites be funded entirely by a subscription fee paid to the service profider? What if privacy could be a foremost feature of that world? What if advertising and astroturfing were strictly forbidden, and human authors would have to be vetted by other humans to be allowed a place in this world? "This content is Certified ads- and AI-Free(tm)."

I really don't know how well something like that would turn out in 2024, but I feel I wouldn't be alone in wanting to give it a try.

> since you MUST slow down

Where I live some of the locals treat a newly-built roundabout like the Daytona Speedway. It's almost as if their mentality is that you must NOT slow down, and they won't hesitate to express their displeasure at you if you happen to be "in their way" going the 15mph speed limit through the roundabout.

> tea tastes fine through a metal straw

I can't help but think about this story every time I hear someone talk about metal straws.

https://www.today.com/health/health/metal-straw-punctures-th...

> HIPAA is not a joke, employees can be held personally liable for breeches

Okay, great. So which employees were held personally liable for these two breeches? I got "The Letter" telling me I was one of the victims for both of them.

https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/compliance-enfor...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthem_medical_data_breach

The article makes a point that 23andMe isn't bound by HIPAA, but even if it were, I wouldn't consider that adequate. The bar for collecting and holding PII, particularly medical, needs to be much, much higher than it is today.

A doctor I recently visited whipped out his iPhone and asked if I was okay with him recording our conversation so that some fly-by-night rando AI company could vacuum up our private conversation and spit out some LLM-generated summary of our visit. "Not to worry," he insisted, "they're HIPAA compliant!"

I probably should have walked out of the office right then and there, but instead I simply told him no, not under any circumstances may he record our private conversation and send it off to some third party over the Internet. He seemed a bit taken aback because I guess I am the only patient he's had push back on it. He tried saying that the service "really helped him" or something like that. It seemed like he was trying to make me feel bad for "making his job harder."

I simply replied that HIPAA compliance didn't prevent the last 5 or 6 letters I've received from both hospitals and insurance companies about "cybersecurity events" leading to the compromise of my PII. And not just any PII, mind you. It was my medical information, supposedly "protected" by HIPAA. These were major insurance companies and hospitals. And you want me to believe that some fly-by-night AI startup is going to somehow be a safe place for a goddamned fscking full audio recording of our private visit, just because they claim to be HIPAA compliant? Are you kidding me?

I've made it a point to start writing my representatives in government about these issues. They need to wake up and start doing something meaningful to protect the people who are being bamboozled by all the yahoos who play fast-and-loose with their privacy, especially medical PII.

> Free markets depend on transparent pricing.

I mean, there are no surprise post-ride fees or anything. They're quoting you what the actual price is, and they're free to quote whatever they want for whatever reasons they want. Nobody's forcing you to agree to it. There's nothing stopping you from getting a competitive quote from Lyft by simply switching apps on the phone. Or by calling a cab company. Also there's nothing that keeps you from choosing to wait for a bus.

*Edit: Per Uber's help page there are exceptions to the up-front price quote actually being charged, but they are exceptions. My basic point that it's still a free market stands. "The upfront price you’re shown may change due to a number of circumstances, which may include adding stops, updating your destination, significant changes to the route or duration of the trip, or you pass through a toll that was not factored into your upfront price. In addition, you may incur wait time fees for the time you take to get to the car at the pickup or multi-stop fees for time spent at an on-trip stop."

For the only significant upstream OSS contributions I've made I was being paid a pretty good tech salary to make them. The first major contribution happened because the organization I worked for was still in an incubation mode and wasn't on the hook to show any P&L results. The second and third major contributions happened because they shipped on a proprietary platform that was built on top of an OSS release, and the company didn't want to maintain those parts in the proprietary layer.

After I left the first company they provided zero maintenance support for the major upstream feature, and I won't maintain it on an individual basis because life moves far too quickly for that. Occasionally I'll happen to run across exasperated posts along the lines of, "Help this is broken for me! Why is my patch being ignored? Is this even maintained any more??"

Chances are you only care because the company you work for wants it done so they can make some money off a product they're building with it. Half an hour dealing with some random patch and/or bug report for an upstream thing I did 10 years ago is half an hour less I have to spend with my daughter before she leaves for college. Nope, fuck you and your bug report.

No, you can't even pay me to fix it. I have a job, and it's already taking more of my limited time on this earth than I want it to take. The email address I used to submit those patches was deactivated when I left that company, and I ain't handing out my current one.

For any minor contributions I made I had to convince the powers that be that there was no real IP or competitive value in maintaining the patch ourselves, and they after much hand-wringing and delay they finally let me push a few small patches up to the maintainers. In hindsight that ended up being more trouble than it was worth because I wouldn't have been the one needing to maintain that patch in the long run. I should have just submitted it to the company-internal repo and let the next guy deal with maintaining that patch.

In spite of all that, my contributions are still there. They still provide tons of value to both individuals and to companies that mooch off of them. Somehow at some point someone somewhere steps up after enough time has passed to review and merge a patch or fix a bug. Or the bug report just withers and dies, and the world keeps turning.

Given the growing health concerns we've been reading [0] relating to food contact chemicals we've thrown away all plastic food containers in our house and replaced them with either glass or stainless steel. I get the feeling we're not the only ones who have been doing that over the past several years.

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41370-024-00718-2

> What is the value of working at Amazon (or even just AWS) these days?

If you're entry-level and will put up with anything just to get Amazon on your resume.

If by "very small" you mean two 12-story office towers in South Lake Union, then yeah.

But note that Apple is on a similar glide path as Amazon with respect to return-to-office.

I am running my own custom-built Debian-based router in a VM and architected an encapsulated networking infrastructure at a FAANG once, so I know perfectly well how to get the device securely connected to the Internet while isolating it from the rest of my network. While I may trust the CoreELEC image I downloaded and audited at one point in time, I won't trust the people-and/or-org that controls the servers it connects to and pulls down updates from in perpetuity. So long as it is stable and has all the features I want in it, it won't ever be talking to anything on the Internet and will be left alone. If a feature or bug ever comes along that I feel I absolutely must get an update for, I'll be pulling an updated image, auditing it, and then flashing it to the eMMC device from another trusted host. But so far I don't imagine that will ever be necessary.

Some of my hard requirements for a media device are that it must not share any of my personal information with any third party and it must fully cache the full-resolution and complete media content prior to beginning playback. If it's going to be connected to the Internet it must receive regular security updates for anything that's not written in a memory- and type-safe language like Go or Rust.

While Go and Rust aren't necessarily magic pixie-dust that can account for all types of security vulnerabilities, if I'm going to be faced with the possibility of some project being abandoned at some point for the next new shiny thing that everyone would rather work on, I'd at least like to give it a fighting chance of remaining secure for some time after abandonment without any updates. Ideally it would be a Rust userspace media management package running on Debian Stable getting unattended upgrades every night.

Since nothing like that exists I've recently decided to give CoreELEC/Kodi a try on an ODROID-N2+, albeit disconnected from any network. I was surprised at how seamless and integrated everything was.

The remote control for my television "just worked" with it out of the box thanks to HDMI CEC support. Arrow buttons, play/pause, back, etc. all did just what I expected them to do. It's a marked improvement from the last time I built a custom media box, which I had running MythTV on Gentoo, when I needed to jump through hoops to set up an IR blaster. And you can't argue with a 12v/2a power supply.

For now I'm keeping it off my home network and am "sneaker-netting" content on a USB drive between my trusted devices and the ODROID. When I get tired of doing that I might add some firewall rules to my router to only allow it to talk to a locked-down VM doing nothing but hosting a read-only file share. But some day I hope to look forward to building a similar form-factor box that has all the media gadgets and gizmos with a Rust userspace that respects my privacy and auto-updated Debian Stable so I can actually connect it to the Internet.

I knew someone who ran a Tor exit node from his research lab workstation at Brigham Young University (BYU), a conservative religious school with an extreme institutional phobia of porn. He ended up in a "special interview" with his graduate advisor. I don't know if he fully groked at the time just how close he came to getting expelled.

I used to care about my photos a lot. After accumulating a few decades worth of photos I've gotten to the point where I don't care about my photos at all.

I used to obsess over megapixel count, portrait mode, FPS, lighting, and so forth, because I used to think that these amazing images would be priceless in the future. Well, the future came and went, and to me they actually ended up being worthless.

At one time I cared about other people on the Internet seeing pictures of me and my friends and family doing things and being places. Now I don't want anyone on the Internet seeing pictures like that. I especially don't want bots to scrape the photos to build a dossier on my activities that data brokers can add to my profile that they then turn around and sell to whoever's buying.

So these days I don't ever bother even taking photos of anything any more. Instead what I do is try to be 100% "in the moment." I try to notice the small details, feel the emotions, immerse myself in the experience. I look for the things that make an impression. I find that a camera will always -- I mean, always -- detract from that.

I suppose that's my way of saying that there hasn't been a camera feature for a phone that I've cared about for many years now. For me the 2017 Pixel 2 was the point where phone camera technology got "good enough" for anything I ever wanted to use it for. Which, these days, is almost nothing.

You should try leaving a company for money sometime. Financial independence really is life-changing, and you can get there surprisingly quickly in the tech industry by putting yourself on the market more often.

Anecdotally, at my current company nearly everyone I know who left did so within a few months of hitting the 4-year cliff on their signing equity. I've left 3 companies in my career primarily because the next company doubled my comp. I've only left 1 company for reasons other than pay.

My car doesn't spy on me. I've pulled the Data Communications Module fuse.

> not only notify insurance companies

I can immediately think of half a dozen ways this would be abused.

The clique of brats in their daddies' Teslas at Sammamish High School bully the unpopular kid.

Black guy who drives through predominately white neighborhoods in the deep south.

Prius with a Harris/Walz bumper sticker in eastern Idaho.

Need I go on?

Cool. Then I suppose I'll buy my dumb DisplayPort screens from rando Chinese knockoff companies that siphon off R&D that suckers like Sony and Samsung fund.

I wonder how much of a thing "long-term culture" really is in the tech industry. The culture at Google in the year 2024 looks very different from the culture at Google in 2010. In many ways the culture at Microsoft in 2024 is radically different from the culture at Microsoft in 2001.

I do agree with the notion that company culture trickles down from the CEO over time. So that suggests that company culture can shift as CEOs come and go. Another factor that can impact culture include market pressure. I can say with some confidence that the relentless squeeze that shareholders put on operating costs undeniably has a direct impact on practices and policies that govern the quality of the average employee's experience at work.

Not annoying at all. I'm more annoyed by people just letting me keep making the same mistake without saying anything. In fact when I first wrote that something in my brain said maybe it wasn't right, so I looked up the word "scruples" and saw the definition "motivation deriving logically from ethical or moral principles that govern a person's thoughts and actions." I thought maybe that it might be a valid interpretation for the ethical or moral principles to be flawed in that context. What I should have done was look up examples of "lack of scruples" being used in sentences; that would have made it clear that I wasn't using it right.

I've dabbled in management a few times in my career. This meant attending manager-only meetings and trainings. I'll never forget one time when a manager in a focus group said something along the lines of, "The tech sector is going through a rough patch, so we can turn the screws on our employees and they'll have to take it because they will have a hard time trying to find a job somewhere else." This is at a company where most of the employees are on work visas, so losing their job can very rapidly escalate into having to leave the country in short order.

After I picked my jaw up off the floor I realized I simply lacked the scruples I'd need to be "one of them." I also started looking into every legal protection I had available to me in my jurisdiction.

I know not every manager is like that. I'd like to think I wasn't. But there are enough of them that think that way that legal protections often need to be there.

For me nothing. I can already torrent a full 4k movie in under 10 minutes with my current connection, which is plenty fast. If everyone else had 1Tb and I could get a movie in 20 seconds or something, okay, fine. That would be kind of neat, I guess, but it wouldn't really be that big of an improvement to my overall life. My vision isn't good enough to appreciate the difference between 4k and 8k, so I wouldn't download 8k versions even if they were available. I'd consider that a waste of disk space.

I might start paying for streaming movies if services would fully buffer an artifact-free copy of the movie on my media player before starting to play the content. I don't think they'd do that though even if I had infinite bandwidth to my house. To save bandwidth and storage costs on their end they're going to continue to enshittify the streams to whatever generally-tolerable trickle people won't cancel a subscription over.

My Zoom calls would be the same. 75% of the people in Zoom calls keep their camera off anyway and hardly ever say anything, so the extra bandwidth wouldn't matter for work.

I generally will continue to avoid any Internet of Shit devices or privacy-ravishing Cloud services, so having extra bandwidth wouldn't impact my propensity to use any of that stuff.

I don't know. I guess I'm not creative enough or prone to use Cloud anything to imagine how my life would get better with 1000x more bandwidth. Maybe some startup would come up with something that would be the next "iPhone moment."

The part I left out was that I also went to a thrift store and found a couple of used 1080p Blu-rays for older films for around $5 each. There were almost no 4k Blu-rays though, and no new releases.

Having grown up in the generation of DVDs and Blu-rays I'm cursed with the inability to ignore streaming video compression artifacts such as blocking, banding, and ringing. They alone can get me annoyed enough that it breaks my engagement with the film. Any sort of hiccup from packet loss resulting in complete distortion of the video or buffering sends me into a "fsck this sh!t" rage. It completely ruins the experience for me. That means I will never watch a film that I really care about via streaming.

I don't have a lot of time to watch films these days, so when I do I always opt for a physical disc to make sure I actually enjoy the experience. In addition I've noticed that it often costs $20 to "rent" a new release via streaming and $30 to buy an actual disc, so it doesn't make any financial sense to me at all to "rent" a crap streaming experience for 2/3 of the cost of buying a high-quality copy of the film.

But now there's another problem. I've noticed that many films being released today are streaming-only. One I looked at last week could be "rented" from a streaming service for $20, "bought" from said streaming service for $30, or bought on physical media in JULY 2025. That's right, an entire year from now.

In years past I've frequently made it a habit to head down to the local Target in the late afternoon to see what new releases they have in the electronics department. However the last time I went there the Blu-ray section had been completely removed. No doubt because studios are no longer releasing new films on Blu-ray until a motherfscking YEAR after they make it available on streaming. When I asked an associate where the films were he apologetically stammered, "Uh, yeah, sorry, we're, uh, turning down our film section. There are a few stragglers left at the end of the aisle over there."

Now there is no way for me to legally get a new release film that I can tolerate watching within a reasonable amount of time. I would garner that it's primarily an artifact (no pun intended) of the current generation having grown up with crap streaming videos, and so they are adapted to it and don't have expectations for quality like those of us from the DVD and Blu-ray generation have.

I suppose this is another way it goes to show that knowing how bad most things are and precisely how they're bad is more a curse than a blessing. As I walked out of Target empty-handed I admit I did have a feeling somewhat like wanting the Earth to be steered into the sun.

And then I jumped on VPN and pirated the film I wanted to watch.

Wait until a manager who's evaluating a technical decision you're making copies and pastes ChatGPT's "analysis" of your proposal and asks you to respond to it.

Thanks for the heads-up about that. If I go this route then it looks like I'll want to measure battery drain both before and after installing the silencing antenna.

I simply yanked the Data Communications Module (DCM) fuse on my GR Corolla, but that has the unfortunate side-effect of also disabling the microphone. That means the only way for me to take hands-free phone calls is with the speaker phone option, so I've simply stopped taking phone calls at all when I'm driving.

When researching how I might be able to do something more surgical I ran across this post by someone who did it with their Tacoma:

https://www.tacomaworld.com/threads/simpler-solution-for-dis...

Reading this HN post on the Chevy Volt it's starting to look to me like the general approach of installing a 50ohm "silencing antenna" could end up working for a lot of different cars out there. I'll certainly be giving it a try on my GR Corolla now so I can get the microphone back while still keeping the DCM disabled.

> This is a ridiculous statement

Ten lines per day?? Over my 20-year career in Big Tech I figure I've averaged about 10 lines of shipping code per week. I've been working in a domain-specific field and have shipped several kernel features. These days I'll sometimes go an entire quarter without writing a single line of code.

Not all of us went down the "Java code monkey" career path.