__jal

Amazon has been feeling downmarket for a long time.

* You can't trust them for entire categories of products.

* You can't trust them, period, about pricing. The amount of effort they've spent ensuring comparison between very similar items is as hard as possible is kind of amazing; discriminatory pricing: this doesn't require explanation; Their relentless efforts to shove certain products at me just started to annoy me at some point.

It all combines to erode any trust I once had in them; they're apparently no more concerned with ensuring I don't feel ripped off than someone selling junk off the back of a truck.

* Their recommendation engine is occasionally funny, but otherwise utter crap, and just takes up space.

I finally cancelled Prime at the beginning of this year, and after a couple minor adjustments, it was no big loss. I still buy books from them when I can't find them elsewhere.

Otherwise, eh. I just don't like them and don't need them.

I don't consider that nice-to-have.

That is essential. If you do not regularly test restoring, you do not know if you have backups. I normally overstate this just a little for effect, "If you don't test your backups you don't have backups", but that isn't precisely true.

And yes, it frequently makes sense to base test/fixture data and whatnot on backup data flows, but unless you don't deal with any PII, you're hopefully not using that data without a sanitization step.

There is a huge gulf between wanting your customers to pay what they owe you and this sort of "audit".

I make a serious point of doing what I can to steer my employers away from any outfit that believes adversarial relations with their own customers are ideal.

Screw that; I want to compete with my real competitors, not waste money on lawyers fighting my own supply chain.

So yeah, I want to see if they go full-Larry Ellison here, but I likely longer recommend anything Redhat and will look at moving away from the things we do use.

Sad, really.

On the other hand, Google has a growing problem with map spam precisely because they accept user submissions.

Choose your poison.

The hate for Oracle is more about Oracle. Their tech has always been weak, their sales force rabid jerks who manage to be even more annoying that IBM's, and they have always taken an adversarial stance towards their own customers.

The best strategy to pursue with Oracle is never speak to them.

"Only shareholders matter" has been gospel for about a generation. And I do think that attitude is responsible for a lot that is wrong with the US.

But it is, I think, fair to note that corporations are not responsible for making sure the rules under which they function work for everyone. That particular failure belongs to government, or in the alternative, all of us for allowing such a shitty government.

What I hate about the rush to subscriptions is the addition of cloud elements where they are not needed.

A great example of this is a little addition I've been using to Mail.app, called MailTags[1]. I've been using it for years, religiously upgrading as I go, because email is my primary communications mode and I had a great workflow built around it.

Now it has gone subscription and is storing metadata related to mail on Someone Else's Computer. That's a hard-no for me, and really too bad, but it did make me figure out that I can replicate the workflow I built around that with Mutt and a few shell scripts.

I don't know how common that is, but their attempt to extract regular revenue meant they lost revenue from me. I do sincerely hope it works out for them - I love indie devs! - but more and more, I find subscriptions lead me to substitute open source for whatever it is.

[1] https://smallcubed.com/scs/

> or (as I suspect) you find them too valuable to dismiss entirely quarantine

You are wrong. I block the known IP blocks of the big surveillance shops and a lot of the small ones[1].

> sour grapes that a mediocre employee at one of these places makes 3-20x what anyone makes

Are you sincerely saying you believe people who are uneasy about surveillance are just jealous?

[1] Twitter is currently an exception, I was playing with something. But I'm going back to blocking them soon.

> You have no right to use my website

Of course.

> Recaptcha is simply part of this negotiation.

It is only a negotiation if I know it is there.

> It’s nonetheless a shame that it’s so universally misunderstood how ad-supported megacorps make their money that even highly sophisticated users of the web still talk about the value of personal data (source: I ran Facebook’s ads backend for years).

That may be the case for some people, but that is not my complaint, nor that of many folks I know.

I simply don't care how FB, Google and other surveillance outfits make money. I don't care about marketers' careers or their CTRs. I don't even care about putting a dollar value on my LTV to them.

I care about denying them visibility into my datastream. It is zero-sum. They have no right to it, and I have every right to try to limit their visibility.

Why? None of your business. Seriously - nobody is owed an explanation for not wanting robots watching.

But I will answer anyway. It is because of future risks. These professional panty sniffers already have the raw material for many thousands of lawsuits, divorces and less legal outcomes in their databases. Who knows what particular bits of information will leak in 10 years, or when FB goes bankrupt? I have no desire to be part of what I suspect will become a massive clusterfuck within our lifetimes.

If you're correct that this data has so little value, then it is more likely it will leak. FB and Google are the equivalent of Superfund sites waiting to happen, and storing that data should be considered criminal.

> If you need JS to run the site

... Then I move on. Those dorky little crapware widgets are basically never worth looking at in any case, and I do take that sort of strategic tooling decision as a signal that I probably don't want to accept the 'bargain' being offered.

Given that the snark is the entire point, it isn't clear to me what you wish others to do with that information.

I don't like lots of things on the internet, too.

See also a similar, disturbingly common attitude about acetaminophen/opiate combinations.

I've heard an RN say the problem is that it doesn't ruin junkies' livers fast enough.

P2P will stay irrelevant insofar that we don't fix networking to make it easy again. And we really want it to be, for values of "we" that != carriers.

NAT and related IPv4 hacks hand a great deal of power to people who want to meter you by the byte, inspect your content for compliance with their business model, and generally define how you are "allowed" to use the internet.

It doesn't have to be that way.

Exactly - ZFS offers everything on the bullet list.

There were nicely branded jailbreaks for the iPhone well before Heartbleed.

> It's such a good idea that the US government decided you were right decades ago.

Perhaps, but it is hardly a universal belief that they have the balance right.

It is hard to pick a starting point to get in to this discussion, because it has been going on for a long time and is really complicated, not to mention largely classified. Perhaps one that dovetails into the encryption debate will be as good as any:

https://www.lawfareblog.com/good-defense-good-offense-nsa-my...

And their accuracy remains.. let's say "unchallenged".

This is very common thinking - people seem to equate the first discussion of a concept with "discovery" with "the important stuff".

If that line of thought were consistent, it would credit Babbage, or maybe Turing, as the last computer scientist to do something useful.

> I’m not sure how an atheistic population could resist the forces of selfishness and tribalism

First you're going to have to explain how religious populations avoid those.

Hint: they don't.

For anyone interested, I highly recommend _Theory of the Leisure Class_, in which Veblen developed the notion:

http://moglen.law.columbia.edu/LCS/theoryleisureclass.pdf

Sounds like you don't phone screen.

I've screened people like you describe, but the only time I've interviewed them face-to-face was when they didn't have a technical phone screen for whatever reason.

FWIW, one of the ways I screen companies when I'm looking is whiteboard problems. I refuse them and move on. In my experience, only HugeCos and places with problems use them. I'm sure that's not true, but I have a necessarily small sample-size, and skipping over firms that do it has worked well for me so far, and there are plenty of fish in the sea. (I do in fact suck at writing on whiteboards, I just don't consider it a skill worth developing to pursue jobs I probably don't want.)

They also selling bonds, after a $20B stock buyback.

No, the point is control. You have no idea what I need.

Any application that doesn't allow me to stop something from being annoying, will be stopped from being annoying by being uninstalled.

If browsers made it such that I couldn't not stop .gif animations (or playing video, or...), I would trash that browser.

Bluntly, you do not get to control my computer.

...Which sounds like a management problem.

If you trust Amazon to know your risk profile better than your security people, you have a management problem of some sort.

> Wouldnt data collection become meaningless?

Data is used for more than advertising.

These data silos are enormous blackmail machines waiting to be activated. There is tons of evidence of crime, adultery, extortion, and all the other fun things humans get up to in there.

Google, FB, and the other big surveillance outfits protect this data now. Who knows what happens tomorrow, or if that protection is "enough", or if $nation_state will grab what's stored in their borders, or...

Building these blackmail machines is incredibly dangerous, _even if you completely ignore_ the garden-variety privacy problems they cause for "little people".

Yep. This is why you never click on ads, period.

Compression may or may not be worse with ZFS defaults, but performance will almost certainly be _better_ with the default ZFS compression settings than an uncompressed filesystem. You're trading a small amount of CPU for IO, and that's usually a really good trade.