VonGuard

I reported every single ad for Legos I saw for a week. I ended up with more ads for Lego scams, too.

I'm completely unsurprised. I cannot be the only sucker in here who bought something off of a Facebook ad, and got a token piece of China-shipped junk instead. Mine was a video of a steel light saber being disassembled and put together, with all working parts. I was stupid, I paid $30 for it, and a month later, a box from China shows up with a $1 plastic sword.

After that, I started commenting on every Facebook scam ad I saw, and guess what? That just got me into the queue for MORE scam ads! Facebook sees me commenting "SCAM" on ads about cheap Legos, and it says "Hey, this guy likes cheap Lego scam ads!"

Plus, these ads go to different sites, have different company names, and different images every time, but they are the EXACT same scam, guaranteed. It's like Facebook is incapable of having a legitimate and ethical advertising business at some genetic level, and all the money from these obvious scam ads is just too good.

This shit is so prevalent and so brazen, I've considered setting up my own scam ad, maybe sell a Qanon book that's blank and say "Fuck you, idiot" inside... I mean, why not? It seems like people are getting rich by fucking over Facebook users, and Facebook LOVES it!

They have such utter contempt for their users. And here I am still using it because it's the only platform I can see pictures of my family members on, as they are non-technical users. Am I supposed to run some kind of internal family campaign to get them all to move to some non-existent alternative? I hate this so much. I feel trapped by Zuck's heartless machine.

I had a Mac SE with an ethernet card in 2001, around when Red Worm was loose. We put an HTTPd server on it, and watched as each RedWorm attempt came in. This ancient super slow machine not only stayed completely safe despite being on Mac OS 7.5 or something around there, while Windows machines of current vintage were being taken apart around the world. Added bonus, the slow speed of the SE meant it took about 10 times longer for each Red Worm attempt to give up, so we at least monopolized some tiny portion of those infected systems for a bit, keeping them from infesting others for a few more seconds...

Ignore the haters. I loved this game. Yes, it is very difficult, but every play is totally different, and the environmental effects are truly things you have to think through before just blasting through.

The game may be difficult, and in fact, too difficult, but I still enjoyed it. Finishing it seemed unimportant, as just making progress feels like an incredible accomplishment.

Yes but there's a shipping number associated with it in China, and there is a confirmation that a thing was shipped to the US address. That's what they are after here, and nothing more.

That stupid little scroll ball was a piece of junk. It was just like an old mouseball: rollers got all gunked up and stopped working very quickly. Even faster than a real mouse ball because yer dirty finger was rubbing on it all the time.

OMG some guy has signed me up for EVERYTHING from Home Depot to every dating site, to porn sites to cheating sites. It's absurd. I get daily emails from these services still even with unsubscribes and blocks. They're insessant.

Hey you know that and we know that, but the real estate industry is barely able to handle email, let alone secure it.

This should be a monster. We have no direct game development tools exposure on the stock market, unless you count Autodesk, but their tools are usable by other industries. That means it's gonna be shouldering a burden for an entire industry, and one that the stock market doesn't understand or appreciate. Potential for going either way, really.

Development tools have traditionally been a poor investment long term, but that's not been the case since about 2010, especially since Atlassian went public.

Unity is also gonna be a proxy for Unreal. Since these two competitors are not directly competing on the stock market, Unity should be a bit of a mirror for what the market thinks Unreal would be worth on its own.

The reliability is a huge thing. Some of the ancient software these things run are the backbones of major systems: Power grids, water systems, air traffic control systems, flight booking systems, weapons controls, or banking systems.

Sometimes, these systems are unable to be run in what you'd think about as a traditional distributed systems model. You don't just run that one COBOL program 100 times and kill one process everytime it jams up.

The software inside of some of these systems was written in a time when it could be optimized to the absolute bit. At that level of optimization and skill in development, you're not really going to do better or get more throughput with a rewrite. Instead, you just keep wrapping that thing in outer layers and message queues.

So, if you need a computer that can absolutely 99.99999% never stop working, including redundant everything (Power, ram, cpu, network) and you're running something that's super old but super efficient and has worked basically perfectly for 30 years, you just buy another one to replace the original, and add some containers into the mix for the queues, or storage adapters or whatever, rather than spend a billion dollars re-engineering the whole thing from scratch as microservices that may or may not work.

That, or it's a giant fucking database server. That's usually the case: one big floppy database that runs everything in the company and it's SAP system.

Some landlords are not easy to work with. Our non-profit is paying half rent, as thats the best we could get out of them, but it took months for them to come around. They were very clear that if we did not pay they'd invoke the clauses in the rent that incur penalties. We were ready to break the lease and move, but they ended up working with us. Sure, there are no commercial evictions now, but they can always call it late rent when things go back to normal and demand it then.

The USA values money above 100% of other things. In all cases, in all situations. Reading comments on HN over the past 4 years, I've also noticed that's basically what half the people in here are after now too.

What part of "opt-out" Do you not understand? Contact them, ask them to remove it, they will, on an author by author basis, rather than as a blanket publisher request that everything be removed.

IA is not a national treasure, it is a world treasure. They can do anything they want in my eyes, because absolutely 0 organizations are doing the work they do publicly. If IA is bankrupted by this, the publishers, lawyers, authors, everyone involved should feel like complete assholes.

IA did something nice for the people of the world locked down by Corona Virus. But fuck them, right? Gotta get that money, as there is literally nothing else worth anything in the human experience. Doing the right thing for humanity is completely bad for businesses, all of whom will be sending, what, 10 cents back to the authors per book. Gotta save those publishers!

Fuck everyone who's saying IA shouldn't do this. You're all seeing the world through your wallets.

How many views does your book have on IA. Very curious to know if it's actually impacting your sales.

Again, libraries are closed. Libraries do this every day. People are locked in their homes with nothing to do, so they opened their archives as a gesture of goodwill and generocity to a nation of people who cannot get books from libraries. While this may not be legal, it is humane. The problem with this country is that the humane thing is often illegal. We cannot give this food to the hungry, we could be liable.

It's honestly what sucks most about this country: if someone is making money on it, everyone else who comes near it is powerless against it.

Yes, they are breaking copyright law. Who gives a flying fuck about copyright law when there are 100,000 dead people and riots in the streets?

mine was a 2013. You pull the monitor forward and it breaks the cable mount that connects it to the motherboard . The tollerance diference between opening it and breaking it is like 1 millimeter, i swear. It is unopenable without a special tool.

You're both so right. The only thing that matters is money.

They did it because the pandemic has closed libraries coast to coast, and it was a nice thing to do for people. Imagine that, making a decision not based on money or liability.

I know, fuck them, right? /s

Publishers: You cannot save our books without our permission.

Also Publishers: Oh, damn.... uhm... you want THAT book? Uhm... we don't even have a copy anymore... Sorry.

I did this 4 years ago, with a move to Linux after well over 20 years of being a diehard Mac Fanboy. What did it for me was the fact that Apple hardware cannot be fixed except by Apple. I used to take apart Powerbook Duos, which were a huge pain and not made to be easy to take apart, but at least, Apple didn't actively work against you taking it apart.... LIke the Power Mac 8500, it was a really tight, difficult to get into design, but you could still do it.... Now, you open an Imac and it's broken by opening it. Permanently. On the motherboard.

Sometimes it is, but you still have to get to that point, and it can take years.

VMware does it too. It's in the Eula.

This right here is the way to deal with the problem. Lowering a salary should only happen if someone is a fuckup or reduces the amount of work they have to do. Doing it over time like this is super classy.

Fine by me. All I'm really saying here is that if Mark Zuckerberg moved to Topika, they wouldn't lower his salary.

This happens where I work now, and only one person I know has done the Jump-ship thing and moved to a rural area.

It's easy to say "move to the bay, get a job with Facebook, move out" but getting a job with Facebook isn't easy, and moving is a ton of work. It's kinda like a problem that I really don't think would exist on a large scale. If the employee is worth X in the big city, they're worth X in the small city too, unless they were a shitty employee to begin with. In the end, the right people make the company, and if you're going to quibble over 10k of their salary, they should probably go somewhere else.

This makes sense in the hiring process, but once you've hired someone, it's a super dick move to lower their salary in spite of their performance. Seems like the sort of decision a robot would make.

I mean, this was kind of an exception case, where there is a big old technical war of words back and forth. Almost a "He said She said" except here, He is an absolute expert, and She is just some marketing dorks at Mongo.

I, for one, welcome this by-hand moderation because it keeps this issue alive, and allows Kyle to keep the discussion going.

As I commented in a previous post, Kyle is the Chef Ramsey of database testing, and here, he's in a position where some idiot has just served him an undercooked hamburger. Bits will fly, marketing people will be flayed alive, and Kyle will be the only one left standing at the end.

Without this by-hand moderation, we'd be missing out on the second act of this intense thriller!

I expelled Apple from my life 5 years ago and couldn't be happier. Before that, I'd been using their stuff for longer than you. I was quite close to the company for a time, covering them as a journalist full time. I have 3 Linux boxes and a Windows box. I shit on Apple from great height. Their entire ethos has been lost, and they don't make anything easier. My folks continue to use them, and my father's business life has been nearly ruined by their CONSTANT updating of the OS and ending of support. He's almost 80, he's not going to learn anything new, but he hit one button accidentally when it prompted him, and now he's been updated to god knows what newer-yet-still-unsupported version of their OS and his email client stopped working and his legitimately paid-for iTunes music stopped working. Apple has not only contempt for its users, it has contempt for its developers and fans. It treats them all like morons.

I thought this was computing for the masses.

Lying about your test results from Jepsen is like going onto a reality show with Chef Ramsey, being thrown off for incompetence, then putting his name on your restautant's ads "Chef Ramsey ate here!"

I'd pay to watch Kyle screaming at people in the MongoDB offices, not that he screams or anything. Just a spectacular mental image: "IT'S NOT ATOMIC! IT COULDN'T SERIALIZE A DOG'S DINNER!"

Ah, Apple. When you can no longer innovate, just start removing features and call it simplicity...