vanadium

I live in an unincorporated area two blocks from the border of Chicago.

By getting the whole "municipality" thing out of the way and falling under county jurisdiction, property taxes are reasonable (and we pay for emergency services from adjacent municipalities), lot sizes are bigger, more choice over who delivers our services (like, say, trash), and we have the benefits of both Chicago and the surrounding areas.

Granted, Cook County and the State of Illinois all have their problems with unfunded pensions, but removing one layer definitely helps.

Respectfully, "we live in a society" isn't an answer any more than "the sun rose today". Plenty of European nations reason about this in far more pragmatic and dignified terms than does the United States.

Assuming the person has complete agency of their body and life, that's not exactly in your wheelhouse to proclaim with such certainty.

As someone who quit a 17-year cigarette habit for vaping starting in the early-ish days (2011, and it's come so far since then), nicotine salts might be the answer to those who relapse from trying to quit via vaping because it "didn't feel right."

Quite frankly, the narrative to smokers who want to quit from vapers who have has been "it's different, but be patient"; if a closer analogue gets out there that closes the gap on attempts versus quits, I really think there's a no-lose situation.

Is it possible to dehumanize the firing process any further than the words, "Resource Action"?

"IBM Watson Marketing Automation" being another I was made painfully aware of recently, which was the result of the Silverpop acquisition at least in part.

Oh hell. I've had the GPU replacement a couple of years back on my MBP Late-2011. That machine might be the Ship of Theseus by now, but it still holds up.

Here's me not looking forward to another failure.

A consulting company I worked at a few years ago had an "Interactive" team whose "UX" designers used exclusively Material Design for everything.

It was...something special. Everything was just sort of cobbled together with zero creativity about it.

It's for this reason Illinois residents don't buy a car in Wisconsin or another neighboring state with a more advantageous tax structure; you'll get nailed post-haste.

But if you're driving up to buy a few cases of New Glarus beer, chances are you're vastly unlikely (at or nearing 0%) that you'd be held to account for that purchase for Illinois tax purposes.

"It turned out that in that version of IE, the console object only existed when the devtools were open. So a stray console.log call was causing an exception because console was undefined. But when I opened the devtools to see what was going on, console existed and so everything ran just fine."

Flashbacks commencing.

Service Workers, probably.

I know more than a couple of good front-end developers that work remotely from rural locales for big-city companies laying down 135k-140k USD salaries.

I also know directors in other companies in said big cities making only 10k more than that, on-site.

I'd say you can read a lot from the general trends, but there are plenty of cases in either position or negative direction.

Whither the Omnibots? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omnibot

None. None at all that anyone's noticed in our home, and I imagine the speed associated with the fewer server requests and their payload offsets any negligible performance degradation that would have been there.

Been running it myself for 5-6 months, and other than the occasional (actually, very rare) complaint from the Mrs. that a link she clicked won't go through due to a blocked tracker/analytics intermediary, it's been a peachy time VPNing into our home network so it works just as well on the go.

Our install Pi-Hole points its upstream DNS to 1.1.1.1, with uBlock Origin where possible installed on our devices. Can't imagine going back.

I can relate to Brad Frost's issues picking up React. Vue, on the other hand, took me a day to wrap myself around and pick up with some certainty.

Bills. Mortgage. Family. The individuals in the development team I lead. All of these things make getting up in the morning and coming to the office well worth it.

Having a hobby that isn't coding, but just as intricate and puzzle-solving, is another outlet I have. I restore and refurb old video game consoles in my spare time. It restores my sense of patience and want for a carefully-deliberated project with problems to solve and no time horizon should I want to step away for a bit.

Coding used to be that hobby growing up. Then, in the dot-com boom, I made it my career. There are rare times I regret ever doing so, but on the balance I make an excellent salary, have benefits, a lot of flexibility, and I realize I easily made the right choice.

Corpspeak. Usually on part of Account Managers and sales folks, where every wheel (including the English language itself) must be reinvented in a cycle of no more than 5 years...

...or you're not "moving the needle."

I've been in agency for a decade or so, and yeah, this is pretty much how it works. Don't even get into the use of the word "agile" around here.

Plenty of the "Amazon's Choice" flags are...a little deceptive. Maybe not deceptive in a conventional sense, but say you see a product in the search results on Amazon and one has that flag. You click on it, because hey.

Then you notice the keywords attached to "Amazon's Choice". Oftentimes, they're strange and esoteric. Oftentimes, that flag is put on what appears to be a random off-brand item sitting right next to a much, much better product more deserving of that "Choice" insignia.

I don't remember a time it wasn't.

I can't help but read this, as a former webOS app dev, with a bit of irony given the source.

Yep, also why I switched from Chrome to Firefox on Android. And my home network/VPN is sitting behind a Pi-hole instance for good measure.

You forgot the part where the Dev team needs to get it under one second, and like most of the articles telling developers to get their experiences loading under one second, completely forget to give the parameters under which "one second" is measured.

I remember the AllAdvantage.com cheat as well. It became so popular to game that one that not only were novel tactics like yours employed, but automatic mouse hijacking apps for Windows made some headway for those that didn't want to sit and click ads ad nauseum.

I may have made a quick buck on this back in the early 2000s.

It also weeds out, disproportionately, those who have major obligations to family and other things outside of work I have no business asking about, regardless of marital status or children.

Guess which socioeconomic groups it tends to disadvantage most?

As a hiring manager (Director), I've long maintained the entire hiring process in tech is broken, and this movement toward requiring an arduous amount of unpaid personal time on "homework" is tantamount to abuse. Respect is a two-way street in the hiring process, and it starts with me showing them that respect for their time and obligations.

I've been dreaming of a viable scramjet since the X-30.

I'll be at MGC in a couple of weeks and kinda hope that Pippin's there so I can have a go at it. :)

With the CD32, though, you could legitimately turn it into an Amiga desktop.

Console hardware collector here. $4K is insanely overpriced unless the thing was never opened in the first place.

I've been meaning to get a Bandai @tmark Pippin from Japan, but we're still talking maybe $500-600 and the "games" are just too hard to find outside of a couple of non-gaming titles. Finding Bungie's Marathon is nigh impossible, for instance.

I've had to uncheck "Preview" and set it to 0.25x speed for best results. And a second pass at anything it didn't cover (which isn't much at that slow speed). Works OK, although it takes forever either way. Just slightly less, ironically, by making the script takes its time.

The tagging and likes are a more manual effort.