ventana

Tabling as they do in the US, or tabling as they do in Britain?

Your reasoning makes sense, and I was concerned in a similar way when I filed my arbitration case (for about $8k) against the manufacturer of my leased car. The so called “Lemon law” in California suggests the arbitration as the first step. Surprisingly enough, I won the case, and it only took me about an hour of collecting documents and filling in the forms, and 45 minutes of the phone call.

Even though the car manufacturer does indeed pay for the arbitration, I never felt the arbiter was biased, and the judgement was completely in my favor.

For the past two years or so I've been trying to follow this philosophy too, preferring to ship (that is, publish) my hobby projects as soon as they are even remotely useful for someone, and it more or less works for something that can be published e.g. as a website.

For apps, it's a whole different story: app reviewers won't let incomplete apps in their stores, and even for compete apps filling in all the paperwork (privacy policy, support contacts, age ratings and whatnot) can easily take a day (or more, if you're doing it for the first time). I kinda bite the bullet and work on making my whatever prototype into a publishable MVP, but that part often feels just like work and not like a fun project as it's supposed to be.

Not at all. For example, arrival of Uber was very visible and destructive to taxi industries in many places; I witnessed it in Moscow, Russia where I lived for a few years back then. In 2012, if you needed a quick ride from an underground station to your home, you needed to bargain with some random dude waiting near the station in a very shitty car, and pay cash (good luck if you need change). Fast forward a year or two, and you can hail a ride from your phone using either Uber or a local Yandex.

TL;DR: yet another California city decides to dump Flock.

Here's a quote from their terms and conditions:

  Governing Law; Venue.
  All claims arising out of or relating to the AdSense
  Terms or the Services will be governed by California
  law, excluding California's conflict of laws rules,
  and will be litigated exclusively in the federal or
  state courts of Santa Clara County, California, USA,
  and you and Google consent to personal jurisdiction
  in those courts.

Okay, I do indeed live in Santa Clara County, California, so if I ever get in a situation where I might want to sue Google Ads, I might as well try and see how local courts work, especially if the claim is small enough for the small claims court. For those who do not live here, it might be a prohibitive requirement.

Cops love Flock. I'm subscribed to some of the local police department accounts in social networks, and Facebook shows me more of those across the country, and I see a lot of posts like “a serious crime happened, we tracked the car using the Flock license place reader and the suspect is now in custody”.

I think it's true that Flock indeed helps with the actual policing, no doubt about that. But it also seems like police departments across the country really try to promote the view that Flock is a good technology that helps safety, because some cities ultimately voted to disable Flock [1], and I'm sure police are just mad about this and don't want this to happen.

I can't wait until this finally reaches the Supreme court and they hopefully decide that those cameras are unconstitutional.

[1]: just a local example: https://www.mountainview.gov/Home/Components/News/News/1211/...

Most likely it will work. It will also look very LLM-generated, “claudish”, and people will be able to tell that they are looking at the vibe-coded frontend.

Inside, there will be dragons: you will probably learn that all your CSS and JS are inline in your HTML, and that each page has its own implementation of the header and the footer, and other things like that, but if you don't plan to support it as a real product, you probably won't care.

> You can be a software developer without ... any licensure.

Don't jinx it. We are extremely lucky in this regard, and it actually looks like a rare exception.

  > NEGOTIATE (A2A Network)
  > According to YC data, a B2B company needs
    an aggregate 800 cold emails (factoring open,
    response, and conversion rates) to secure a
    single customer, while spam thresholds tighten
    to 0.3%. We replace manual email ping-pong
    with direct Agent-to-Agent negotiation.

Absolutely nothing can possibly go wrong if you let an LLM agent negotiate for your business.

The paper is basically like this (spoiler alert):

“Some random user on Reddit posted a picture claiming that this is the longest straight line path on water possible on the Earth. We implemented a smart algorithm to solve this problem, found the elevation data, ran our algorithm... yes, that random user was right. Also, here's the longest path on land.”

Thanks, I really enjoyed reading it, even though I hoped that they would disprove the original claim!

Edit: here are the gcmap links to the two paths: sea [1], land [2].

[1]: http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=25%B017%27N+66%B040%27E-58%B037...

[2]: http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=24%B033%27N+118%B038%27E-37%B02...

Actually, ICQ had no relation to Russia in 1990s.

It was acquired by AOL in 1998, went through several rounds of enshittification and protocol changes to defeat third party clients which did not show ads, and finally landed in Mail.Ru group in 2010. In about 2-3 years no one cared about ICQ anymore. Then, it slowly died.

I registered my account in 1998 (got a 7-digit number starting with 9) and the whole thing felt like a miracle back then. My first employer in 2003 used ICQ as a corporate messenger similar to how we now use Slack. Since I mostly used Linux back then, I was very happy to find centericq, then centerim, then finch. One of my first contributions to an open source project was a small patch to centericq, something about contacts panel resize if I remember correctly.

I believe the last time I actually launched any ICQ client was around 2012, and never since then.

It's interesting that this piece stands well enough if you replace mathematics with probably any other intellectual profession, including software development or pretty much anything else.

  And, I lie to anyone who asks me why I’m a mathematician.
  It is much easier to claim “I love learning the laws of life,”
  while literally handwaving, than it is for me to flashback to
  the twenty or so pivotal moments that lead to me walking out
  of Gainesville with a PhD in Arithmetic Geometry.

Since “normal” people mostly don't understand what the software development job is about, handwaving in response to regular questions: “what do you do at work?”, “what do you like about your job?” – is pretty normal. I think that most of us have some prepared answers ready to use.

  Mathematics is the thing you try to understand, don’t,
  get frustrated about, and then do.

Just like the software development. I truly believe that the only people who can survive a software job are those who can tolerate the constant feeling of frustration caused by things not working or breaking for random reasons, and persevere in this environment to do the things you need to do.

ICQ? Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time... a long time.

The majority of the side projects I work on just because it's fun to work on something; if people actually use it then great, but if not, the project will just wait until someone eventually comes in. With this approach, it's not “marketing”, it's just working on a hobby project, which, besides the coding, may include marketing activities, SEO and whatnot.

This is a long, but well written and very reasonable document. I especially like that they acknowledge that there cannot be one-size-fits-all approach to AI in education, that they recommend against regular AI detectors, and that they encourage AI use acknowledgements. Sounds like a healthy approach with no panic and no BS.

I would guess this is what the managers and PMs had been feeling for all those years while we developers were happy writing our code. I actually feel much more sympathy to my managers now that I'm kind of managing a team of very productive, but very much not brilliant agents. So sad.

The main question is whether you have SSN or not.

If you worked for American companies from abroad, you probably filed W-8BEN and were considered a non-US person for all tax purposes, had no TIN and nothing was reported on you to Equifax or other credit reporting companies (e.g. Transunion or Experian).

If you filed W-9 as US person, you gave them a TIN, which in the majority of employment related cases is your SSN, and then they most likely reported your employment to Equifax.

In my 20-something years in the industry I worked for teams that claimed they use scrum, sprints, or some combination of those, multiple times; in all 100% of cases it had nothing to do with how the “real” scrum is supposed to work.

The majority of the teams are actually doing morning meetings which they call “stand-ups” even though everyone is sitting in the conference room or at home, working remotely, and go around the table updating the status. Sometimes these meetings are daily, sometimes every other day or so.

Some teams have some kind of sprint review once every 2 or 3 or 4 weeks which involves a somewhat deeper discussion of the open and closed work items.

That's as much as people call “scrum” and “sprint” around me.

I can totally imagine writing a blog post just because I want to write something, having zero interest in hearing anyone's comments on the topic. So while some blog authors want to make it easier to respond and comment to their posts, others might make it hard or impossible just because they don't need it.

Such places definitely exist, but it's a choice to live in a food desert vs live in a city with public transportation and walkability. There definitely exist cities in the US where you can live without a car. It's mostly a question of choosing how many square feet of personal space you want to have; it's not really technically possible to have a big house with a backyard, with all neighbors having the same, and being served by a good public transport at the same time.

Out of my 3 big tech employers, only one reported just a fact of my employment with them to the credit report, but all three reported everything to The Work Number.

Except in the credit report they only list your lenders and how much money you owe, and your payment history, and it's technically possible to not get any credit and have no information, or at least no recent information, in your credit report. In The Work Number, they not only list your employers, but also all your paychecks, and it's hardly possible to opt out.

When you apply for a software job in the US and go through a background check, most of your former employments are verified through The Work Number. As an employee, I'm not aware of a way to opt out of this data collection, and I assume if there is a way, it will surely make the future background check harder.

Now that they allow to look at your personal report, I went ahead, registered and requested a copy. This is just wow.

First of all, I noticed that American Express casually requests my report a few times per year. Well, I guess, if I lose my job, they will know soon! Besides Amex, the only other requests were the background checks when I actually applied for jobs, so everything else is fine.

But you know what else is there? All my fucking paychecks for all companies I used to work for here in the US. Nowhere in my employment agreements I did explicitly agree to my paycheck information to be transferred to Equifax, and yet, here we go.

Looking forward for the moment when all this data is leaked, because, you know, Equifax has some history [1].

[1]: https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/refunds/equifax-data-breach-...

As the article correctly mentions, Lisp as a concept is much older than any of the popular languages used these days; so are the attempts to get more people use it. Most of them are, unfortunately, unsuccessful, because it's probably impossible to understand Lisp after a quick and friendly introduction.

I first met Common Lisp during my college years in early 2000s: we had an enthusiast teacher who taught it for free, in his free time; it was interesting for me as a freshman to learn something new, but also I literally had no idea how to write Lisp code properly, without resorting to using `progn` here and there. For those not aware, `progn` is a form that allows you to write expressions in a sequential way, pretty much like you use the C compound statement, a `{ ... }` block. It works, and after some time you find that you're writing in some crappy imperative programming language with a lot of brackets but you don't learn much about the functional programming.

It took me more than a year, and definitely more than any short “friendly introduction”, to understand the functional approach.

Now, Racket. I first noticed it while doing my daily LeetCode; they added Racket as a supported language and you can go use it to solve a task. After not using Lisp for 20-something years, I appreciated the opportunity, but I found the type contract syntax infuriating. This is LeetCode #1, “Two sum”:

  (define/contract (two-sum nums target)
    (-> (listof exact-integer?) exact-integer? (listof exact-integer?))
    )

I don't know what you feel, but this makes me want to close this tab and never return. So if I find myself wanting to write some Lisp and there's a daily LeetCode task I want to solve, the first thing I do is I delete all this garbage and come back to the clean option:

  (define (two-sum nums target) ...)

which, except for the minor syntax differences, brings me back to my college Lisp years and I can actually enjoy it.

For me, $3 a click would've worked for some projects, but $30 would not work for sure. Knowing that it's $30 and not $3 before the start of some campaigns, I would've saved some money. I instead paid that money to Google for this lesson.

That's great!

I was experimenting with Google Ads traffic to one of the websites I cared about, and even just looking at the existence of mouse move and scroll events, let alone the patterns, made me understand how many bots, or users who just (mis)clicked the ad and never did any action on my website, were counted as paid clicks in Google Ads. Analyzing for patterns like in this article would've made even more sense.

I know, it's just less obvious and probably not at all convincing for a person with no mathematical knowledge. Even talking about (1+1/n)ⁿ is not easy without a bunch of calculus.

Now wait until someone asks the author to prove that e or π exist. The whole reasoning they used for √2 is based on the fact that √2 is a root of a simple equation x²-2=0 which has rational coefficients; with e or π no such equation exists.