the_local_host

It seems like you're anticipating a divergence (or at least communications gap) between the generally-in-office and generally-remote sets of employees.

Have you considered that it might be the remote employees that are more productive?

The benefits you've stated for in-office work are that you will be more likely to hit the gym, get low-cost healthy food, interact with random non-teammates, and meet in-person, none of which are slam-dunks for the company bottom line.

Even if obtaining old tweets was theoretically always possible, actually facilitating this seems like a combination of poor judgment and obsessive hoarding.

If the "smattering of tweets" means everyone's tweets will be publicly available in perpetuity, then this is a downright inhumane policy, and should not be pursued by any organization worthy of respect.

I've been interested in recording music using free software on Linux. The exchange above is similar to the cycle I've been in... encountering problems, finding magical incantations that fix things in some ways but often involve some sort of tradeoff, and making gradual progress toward being as productive as I am using Apple's Logic.

But I've been doing this three steps forward, two steps back routine for like three years now. I have most things working but it has really taken the full force of my frustration with Apple to keep returning to it and making progress.

I cannot stand the way that albums on an iphone/mac get fragmented into separate albums when there are tracks with guest artists.

E.g. for Outkast's Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, I see tracks 1,2,3,6,8,9,10,12,13,15,17,19. Track 16 is on another album by "Outkast featuring Kelis."

I just want the tracks that are on the CD to show up together as the same album.

I think cryptocurrencies are idiotic, but this essay just does not make a case for a blanket ban at all, nor do I think one is necessary.

The environmental impact should be regulated, but other than that, governments should just stay out of it and let the cryptocurrency landscape be the wild frontier its proponents want it to be. May the best obfuscated smart contract code win, until no one wants to play anymore.

Pebbles and sand might be safer to hold if they are less volatile than BTC. A company like Paypal needs stability, not a directional bet on an asset.

I think it would be fairly shocking to find that something like dreaming would evolve in two species whose most recent common ancestor didn't dream.

To have two non-closely related species implement sophisticated cognition in a way that overlaps so much suggests that intelligence and consciousness, or at least the kinds that we experience, doesn't or can't take a wide variety of forms.

It's not surprising that a dog dreams; there's a dog analogue for most human things, right down to the eyebrows. But an octopus? Wow.

Can't you just assume that anyone who is pro-bitcoin owns it, and anyone who is anti-bitcoin does not? Anyone who doesn't fit into those categories would (I guess) be unconvinced of their own analysis, but publishing it anyway?

Wait, what? How are other people allowed to use the content? I mean, I'm sure it happens, regardless of being allowed, but it seems like a content owner would be able to issue a DMCA takedown to stop it.

How do you get the ship to fall into the hole at the right moment?

> The impact of synthesizers is already over. They were used far more imaginatively in the 70s than they are today

1970s-style modular synthesis has been making a comeback over the last... 20 years. (It was a slow comeback at first).

I agree that the impact of synthesizers was diminished during the "preset era" of the 1980s until almost the present, but interest in re-taking control of synths is growing (just look up "modular synthesis" on Youtube to see many examples) and I expect that we're on the cusp of having synthesis become interesting again as artists sort out what to do with all the new stuff.

As far as I know the goal of free software was never "free for those who pull their weight by contributing." It simply meant free to run, change, and distribute, without any obligations except that the right for others to do the same had to be preserved.

The reasoning wouldn't be how many people died of the virus vs. how many in a world war; it would be how many people die in a world war vs. how many might die if the adversary does increasingly worse things going forward. The threshold for fighting all-out can't be "as soon as the adversary does".

Egypt's population is enormous as well, mostly crammed along the Nile; and the PPP GDP per-capita isn't that different the China.

The software Eric Schmidt co-wrote in the 1970s (Lex) was used for decades. For all I know people still rely on it.

I suspect that for people who like vinyl, the experience of music isn't just about the sound. Putting on a record, as a ceremony, just seems more appealing than menu-diving down to a playlist on your phone.

> Only on the FOSS world, because it is the only way to force devs to pay.

What about the approach that the Qt library uses, where they have a free GPL version and a paid commercial license? People might pay to avoid GPL obligations while using the library.

> An asset that cannot be confiscated by the government

It might be intractable to confiscate bitcoin by attacking the math, but why wouldn't governments just put people in jail until they pay up? With adequate control over the internet, governments would be fairly able to track who's transacting.

Moreover for the vast majority of people on earth would still have basically zero money relative to the emerging bitcoin oligarchs. It would be a grossly unequal society, where there would need to be some non-math-based approach to getting money from the wealthy to redistribute to the less fortunate.

> Taking mass of few solar systems and building a tiny microscopic vehicle that fits inside the bubble is not practical way to travel.

Fully agree. If interstellar travel ever occurs, it seems more practical to simply freeze people for thousands or millions of years for the journey and stop trying to fit it into the current human lifespan.

How can there be a backdoor in a smart contract? Aren't they necessarily readable in full (even if the behavior is obscure)?

If I understand correctly, there can't be any actual secrets; you have to read carefully, then caveat emptor.

I suspect the algorithm isn't experiencing anything at all. I know I am experiencing something even when I'm wrong or being deceived. I strongly suspect other people experience things.

> I think subjectivity is an illusion.

If subjectivity is an illusion, then who or what is being deceived? It seems like even a false subjective experience would have to be experienced by someone or something, subjectively.

What's wrong with shilling?

> If I wanted to have a service that would certify someone uber wealthy or old money and display an icon, I bet it could be done.

$1000 isn't enough to charge to establish that someone is meaningfully wealthy; the app should have cost $10 million.

I have to say the spirit of this fake_contacts app is very appealing. Why stop at defending your data, when you can attack?

Even if you don't keep them in your contacts, the connection tracking can be problematic if they keep you in their contacts.

"But what if you didn’t give Clubhouse access to your contacts, specifically because you didn’t want all or any of them to know you were there? I regret to inform you that Clubhouse has made it possible for them to know anyway, encourages them to follow you, and there isn’t much you can do about it... I got followers who weren’t in my contacts at all — but I was in theirs."

https://www.vox.com/recode/22278601/clubhouse-invite-privacy...

> Also good luck running a system that operates on few hundred of terabytes of for instance YouTube data locally.

Why can't that be scaled down to a few hundred megs of data running through a system, end-to-end, on the local machine?

Not being able to scale down seems like a code smell to me. Is there so much overhead in the microservices that even at idle, or very low usage, they can't even be started?

By "settle", do you mean "visa not required", or permanent residency?

> How did things progress so far backwards in stability?

Because they just changed the foundation that the entire system is built on top of.

I agree that expecting permanent employment based on passion would be an overly-entitled attitude. But the author's complaint, that employees treat the product as "a tool to advance the employees career, not a passion, mission or economic game changer", seems ridiculous in a context where an employee can be fired as soon as they're no longer useful. Why should he complain that employees look out for themselves if no one else is going to?