unhomedcoder

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2017/08/02/worl...

if you doubt my claim that CIA gave ISIS over a billion dollars, that link proves it--they admit it themselves.

honk honk is a meme that means "irony." as in the noise of a clown's nose being squeezed while someone tells you something that is clearly self-contradictory and requires you to ignore the evidence you see in front of you.

i don't know what these quick-to-politicize-speech downvoters mean when they unpack a rather innocuous meme. memes are the Lingua Franca of the Internet. it doesnt matter where they originated, or who may have used them because after they are recycled a billion times all over forums, they lose whatever original meaning they had and become common slang.

i don't care about being down voted and i don't care about pleasing tattletale censor Karen's.

when i look at the 500,000 Galaxy Brain coders working at GoogaAppaFaceSoftZon, i hear a giant sucking sound from the open source ecosystem.

if only 10% of tech talent leave before 5 years, that is still a lot fewer Ronin wandering out there who might eventually threaten the Shogun.

i often wonder if the same strategy is at play in Private Military Corps. having tens of thousands of retired and hungry for action SOCOM super soldiers could be a disaster. Having a large pool of idle mercs would make it easier for some Dr No to hire them to launch coups or terrorist attacks, like we have seen with the Zetas Cartel and the Mexican military in general. so PMCs serve a purpose to soak up excess SOCOM labor capacity, and keep them busy on movie script busy work that doesn't actually accomplish very much. The Pentagon doesn't have to worry about a veteran's coup like Smedley Butler's Business Plot against FDR in 1933.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot

while PMC's lavish compensation seems to us like an irrational market, counter-intuitively it is perfectly rational compared to the counter risk cost of coups and terrorism.

i would go even further and say 99% of the Infosec/CyberWhatever DFENS industry is also the same strategy of soaking up excess hacker labor on make-work. how much duplication of effort and futility is there in the Infosec industry. as we have seen from Snowden leaks and the Shadowbroker leaks of NSA source code, all digital security is a joke to Nation State hackers. NSA doesn't even need to break a sweat to disable all versions of every known AV, firewalls and traffic mirrors never spot them because they have countless exploits to root the scanners. so what purpose do marquee Computer Security corps like Crowdstrike, Mandiant, Symantec etc serve?

Infosec corps soak up hacker labor so we dont have 50,000 underemployed hackers who will get bored or angry and hack the planet.

it's cheaper to give potentially dangerous people fake jobs than to risk them destroying The System.

it's funny how a cruel and exploitive economy tends to backfire when the one wrong guy is crushed by it, and then dedicates his life to overthrowing that economy.

umemploymemt in the Reich in 1936 was 1%.

like some wise economist said "it's the economy, stupid."

i hear today US unemployment is 30+% and will hit 45% by July. i guess if America was ever going to repeat the steps from Weimar to Reich, that time is now.

what was Hitler's formula for his economic miracle? it was dead simple.

1. default on the War Debt (owed to America)

2. pour over 50% of GDP in the re-armament in preparation to go to War.

America is -$27 trillion in debt now. if we start ramping up the war machine to test drive the eagle against, oh, say, Chy-na, then start to worry about the new Weimar to Reich tramsition.

may you live in interesting times.

FBI/DOJ wiretapped the Facebook comms of 19 illegal aliens who were MS-13 gangsters in North Hollywood. the wiretaps spanned 2017-2019. the gang murdered 6 people. the last murder was a random killing of a homeless guy as an initiation ritual to get into the gang.

i happened to be 50 yards away from that murder when it happened. i didnt hear a thing because i was sleeping and it was rarely raining in LA that night. those gangsters could have randomly picked me to kill instead of the other homeless guy. i was woken up by a cop politely asking me to move. i looked over and there was a tarp tent over the body of the victim with a dozen cops standing guard.

i may have even helped to open the case because 1 year prior, i emailed the Chief of the NoHo LAPD to tell him i was seeing MS-13 graffiti all over that park where the murder occured. he replied back within an hour thanking me for the tip and the graffito was removed the next day. so MS-13 activity in that area was certainly on LE's radar.

i am an obsessive reader of Snowden leaks and am pretty anti-NSA, but i thank god the FBI was able to order Facebook to hand over the comms of that MS-13 gang. those gang bangers were so stupid that they were literally coordinating murders over Facebook Messenger and boasting about their 100's of crimes spanning years on Facebook.

ACLU is in the wrong here and i support not unsealing the wiretap documents. because think of how many other idiot MS-13 gangsters across America will also broadcast their murders and crimes on Facebook? if they all know for a fact that yes, the FBI is using Facebook to track them, then they will all go dark. that means the next time MS-13 attempts to ramdomly murder a guy like me, then FBI won't be able to so easily convict them.

i have read every page of every Snowden leak. my views on mass surveillance have evolved since 2013. at first i was horrified because of the shock that it was happening. but over time i have come to realize there is no closing Pandora's box. every year the CPUs get faster, storage doubles, bandwidth triples and the software gets smarter. there is no way to freeze computing progress in time. which means every year, mass surveillance gets cheaper like Moore's Law. i now see it is entirely naive and unrealistic to stop mass surveillance. there is no technical solution to a political problem. you can't un-invent the machine gun.

all we can do is demand our Intel Overlords only apply mass surveillance to legit protection of our society, like for busting murderers and rapists and MS-13 and cartels. and we must force FBI/DOJ to stay the fuck out of abusing mass surveillance for corrupt political purposes, like spying on Presidents, or wiretapping 37 Congressmen, or bugging SCOTUS for 12 years, or blackmailing Presidents and Congress with sex tapes, or harassing antiwar activists, or persecuting whistleblowers and legitimate joirnalists who publish leaked top secrets.

this FBI operation to crush a murderous MS-13 cell hit pretty close to home for me--it was terrifying to realize i only got lucky that night being in the right place and right time to avoid being the sacrificial victim. this experience definitely changed my perspective on FBI surveilling Facebook. everyone is opposed to FBI surveillance until they almost get murdered. then it's "great job FBI, do more gumshoe police work and less political meddling!"

you specifically said "You almost certainly need to seek psychiatric care."

that sounds like you're pretending to be a medical doctor and clearly diagnosing me. and in-patient psychiatric care is an even bigger logic leap for you to take without even knowing anything about me. in-patient care is for the extreme cases of mental illness for people who present imminent threats of harm to themselves or others or who are catatonic or physically incapacitated. the vast majority of people with mental illnesses can function in day to day society and only need help with managing their illness. but you immediately lumped me in with the former group of extreme mentally ill patients, not the latter.

you don't know me. next time when you think you're doing the Internet a favor and telling someone living in extreme circumstances that they are "certainly" mentally ill, well, you should resist the urge to spew your worthless opinions on the Internet and conserve the electrons and close the tab without replying.

QED.

(oh, sorry, there i go again quoting Latin... being smart and well read is now a mental illness... so it goes)

http://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machine...

i never said i prioritize the only great idea for a startup that i have ever had above my job search. obviously, since i have been sitting on the idea for 8 years and only half-heartedly tinkering with building it, "making some money now" is what i have been doing instead. all i said was that it was an idea for a dream of mine that i've had for a very long time. isn't this a forum dedicated to startup dreamers--"the crazy ones... the round pegs in the square holes"? i only mentioned that i had a startup idea to show that "hey gang, i'm one of you too."

that troll commenter said "if i talk like i write then he can see why nobody will hire me" and to "talk 90% less."

you consider that "genuinely trying to help"?

and i'm not supposed to stand up for myself in reply? since i'm on the bottom of the ladder of life, i don't count, and whatever insults people throw at me, i should just take it because i'm a beggar? i'm the one slowly dying here, not that original poster. and i'm only supposed to write dumb, in single syllable sentences and at a low enough reading comprehension level so that you and the troll don't get "exhausted"? neither you nor the troll know me, so that is a pretty big and insulting assumption to make about how i may or may not act IRL. for your information, when i am at work, i am only there to make money for the company, and i'm the nicest guy you'd know in person, and i don't "talk like that" to my coworkers.

perhaps the stereotypes are true when non-technical peasants rightly perceive "Tech Bros" and the Silicon Valley Internet Monopolist MegaCorps as being a Vampiric culture lacking any decency and empathy towards their fellow human beings.

and people like you who hand wave away the homelessness crisis by declaring "you're all just mentally ill, so i am absolved from any personal civic responsibility" are the people with "textbook grandiose delusions."

and what do you think those links to city services provide? people have this delusion that Big Govt is offering free doctors and drugs and padded cells to the mentally ill, but those dang lazy crazy druggy bums just refuse help and they choose to live on the street. if Big Govt was actually offering such comprehensive services, there wouldn't be over 50,000 homeless people on the streets of LA today right now. and it's going to be 100,000 homeless on LA streets within the next 5 years after the next recession hits. and you might be one of them.

I got GR two times before. it's $230 per month. they only make you come in to the welfare office with a list of 10 jobs that you applied for per week, to prove you are not just living high off the fat of the land with that whopping $230 per month. both times i was on GR they cut it off after 2 months. then i go into the welfare office, wait 3 hours in line, talk to a new case worker who is a foreigner who doesn't speak English natively, and they are confused about their own system and have no idea why the payments stopped. then they say "well, re-apply to GR and start all over." they force you to wait a minimum of 30 days from when you apply for GR until they deposit and cash into your EBT card account. the reason for the wait is because LA DPSS case workers are so swamped with applicants that it takes a month for them to look at a dozen checkboxes on one piece of paper and approve it in the computer.

while going through the GR process, i just laughed at how many city employees were involved and how many hoops they made us jump through to create busy-work for low level govt clerks, just for $230 per month. GR is more of a welfare program for govt workers than it is for the homeless. 90% of people on GR are the homeless. i bet the administration costs of running the GR program dwarfs the amount of cash aid given to the poorest people.

one thing i found the funniest and saddest about GR cash aid is that i'm jumping through hoops and begging the govt for my own money that i already paid in taxes. when you get GR, they make you sign a form that you understand and agree that GR cash aid will be deducted from your future Social Security income. so in the grand national scheme, none of the States are even giving cash aid to their homeless populations out of the State budget and local taxes--it's all coming from FedGov using Social Security to fund it through the backdoor.

and there is no temporary housing assistance in LA. you can sign up, but the waiting list is over 5 years. i can personally confirm this is the most recent data that LA DPSS told me back in June 2019, the last time i went to the welfare office.

a few times per year they will offer hotel vouchers as temporary housing. but the hotels are in Orange County--an hours drive away, assuming i had a vehicle. i suspect this is another backdoor scheme by which LA covertly ships its homeless population to Orange Country to roll us off the count to juke the stats, so the mayor can have a press conference and say "We are doing something and it's getting better." Also the kicker about the hotel vouchers is that you also have to pay for it from your GR cash aid. coincidentally enough, the amount you would pay for 30 days of hotel vouchers is the entire $230 you would get from GR per month. so your choice is either "here, have $230 per month and stretch it out and try to not die on the street" or "here, go live in a hotel in El Monte in Orange County and have zero dollars to live on." the FBI should probably investigate who owns these hotels used for housing the homeless paid by Social Security funds and who in LA City Govt is getting the kick backs for this scam.

i wasn't exaggerating when i say my mind was blown when i went to the welfare office to get help and saw with my own eyes how little was available and how much of a scam it was.

that was my "Joker" moment.

But I don't look back and say "well, I dug my own grave by resigning, therefore I deserve to suffer the consequences." Nobody deserves to be long-term homeless in the wealthiest country in history.

I recently got rejected from TripleByte! I have coded well over a hundred thousand lines of code in my career, including a 1,500 LoC custom AWS deployment system in Node.js 2 months ago. But since I couldn't code Tic-Tac-Toe in 30 minutes for TripleByte, they told me the usual "we won't proceed, but we'll keep your record on file and let you know if any matches come up in the future blah blah blah." I look at the software industry's urge to "move fast and break things" and treat coding like a race (to the bottom), and then I look at all of the big data breaches and devastating security exploits (cough cough WTF is going on over at Intel?) being reported weekly and monthly. And then I draw a straight line between the pressure to code fast and the low quality and high fragility of code in the wild. Coding things slower and fully thinking through your problem domain always produces higher quality than throwing slop against the wall and shipping it.

I used to rely hugely on Craigslist for getting work, but in the past 5-7 years it has become a wasteland. This has hurt me so much, because it used to be pretty easy to get small dev gigs. I wonder where did the dev gig economy move to? I have seen many "Learn To Code" gigs on CL, but never applied. First, I have been shocked that so many of them are near minimum wage. What has happened to our software industry, when we're at the point where we're paying minimum wage to instructors to essentially lie to young people to trick them to take on a bunch of debt for bootcamp thinking they will get six figure jobs? I never applied because it felt like I would be a fraud--who would want to learn to code from a homeless guy? Obviously, the coding thing didn't work out too well since I ended up homeless.

The nearest Costco is really far away from the 3 square mile box where I have been stuck for 2 years. It has killed my meager budget to not be able to buy food in bulk. If only I had storage and a fridge (it's regularly 100 degrees during LA summers), I could live on $50 of beans and rice for a month.

Kind of like a soldier, I walk 5 miles or more a day carrying my gear, so no need for a gym. Ironically I'm probably in the best physical shape of my life. The slimmest I have ever been and the strongest. Since I can't afford to eat any junk food or sugar or fat at all, and can only afford the simplest foods, counter-intuitively I am probably eating healthier than ever in my life. Lack of regular meat does worry me though. I drink whey protein powder when I can afford it. One of the biggest lessons I have learned from being homeless is how little food you actually need to get by. I have found it is healthier to only eat enough to remain a little bit hungry. You get used to the sensation of hunger. The food industry in America makes us binge eat on an extravagant level. Our portions are absurd--always cut it in half or by a third.

I do have a PO Box and instead of pepper spray I have several military surplus knives for self-defense, which may be of questionable legality in LA county. But self-defense in no joke in the area where I'm stranded. I'm in a ghetto area which has multiple foreign gangs and a large homeless population. I once almost got shot by some MS-13 gang bangers. They fired but they missed me lol (gulp). That was scary and the closest call I have ever had and don't want to experience that again.

Getting free food from small restaurants would be awesome, but I haven't figured out how to do that yet. I'm not quite extroverted enough to be able to schmooze the staff to pull that off, but I wish I was.

And you're 100% right about the subliminal message when interacting with the Govt Handout Machine. Every step of the process feels like it presumes you're a benefits scammer and is intentionally designed to dehumanize you and discourage you to go away and make you feel like everything is your own fault. I am in a slightly different situation than 99% of homeless, because I have had a career, and I have paid a few hundred thousand dollars in taxes. I have more than over paid into the system, but when I need help from the Govt, there is nothing, because Trump and the whole permanent criminal class of bandits in DC are too busy spending another $2 trillion dollars on the Pentagon's xmas wishlist.

and the cherry on top of it all is that the CEO of that multinational conglomerate offshoring all of the high paying tech jobs to India is Steve Feinberg, CEO of Cerberus Capital and one of Trump's best buddies who Trump appointed to audit the entire US intelligence portfolio.

If I had to do it all over again and quit my job to protect American software developers and become homeless for it, I would do it again without hesitation because I did the right thing. Somebody needs to stick up for the American worker. We can't count on help from phony politicians on both the Left and the Right, nor from greedy billionaires.

I have applied to hundreds of devjobs both in LA and remote using all of the top job boards. I got only a handful of interviews. Obviously, the problem is me. I do really well if I can get past the HR firewall, and get an in person interview to talk shop with another developer. Recruiters tell me that I'm a "job hopper" and that "it'll be difficult to place you." Is that the new code word for "you're too old to code"? Now that I'm branded as a job hopper, how am I ever supposed to stop being a job hopper? Only low quality, high-turnover companies hire job hoppers, so I end up permanently stuck doing more job hopping.

Do you or anyone you know have some dev work that you could hand off to me ASAP? Anything that can keep me going to live to fight another day to someday achieve my dream of founding my own startup (I have had the startup idea that I want to build for 8 years--it's a far out crazy idea for a hardware device involving Lidar that nobody else is doing). Maybe your company or your friend's company is looking for a Node.js/Javascript web developer? I'm open to working with any language on any project. I have also worked with a little of Go/Python/Perl/PHP/Scala/Lua/C. I don't have any means of transportation, which has severely constricted my options in the vast sprawl of LA, so you would have to get me to you or I can work remotely. I do keep clean enough that if you passed me on the street you wouldn't even realize I'm long-term homeless. I should also add that I'm open to working anywhere world-wide, and not just in LA.

Thank you for reading this and thank you for any help or advice or encouraging words.

unhomedcoder@tutanota.com