amerkhalid

When we were kids, it was common knowledge and cheaper to use headphones as a mic. Just plug headphones into mic jack and they work as mic.

We don’t hear about traditional banks freezing money as much online banks. Maybe people who use traditional banks are mostly running traditional businesses with well understood risk profiles.

Also traditional banks make you go through a lot of paperwork upfront, so they probably don’t have as much as risk online banks which approve everyone without much paperwork. So that’s why online banks aggressively block anyone who is high risk and start doing big enough volume.

I think they should get rid of all deductions at the individual levels. They just cause confusion and hide true cost of things.

For example, I went to buy Jeep. 4xe version was $8000 more. But its battery lasts only 2-3 miles and it would have taken forever to breakeven. But dealership kept insisting that I will get $6000 in tax rebate/deductions so the actual cost is only $2000 more.

They had marked up the car by how much government was going to give rebate on and there was no savings for a taxpayer. I tried to have them issue give me discount now and claim my car on their taxes but, of course, that was not going to work. I ended up buying a cheaper model.

EDIT: Just checked the range, it is actually 21 miles on battery, which would have been enough for my usage. At that time, salesperson informed me that it was 3 miles or so. At 21 miles per charge, I may have bought 4xe. Math still doesn't workout, since I work from home I probably fill the gas tank once every 2-3 months. About $200-300 per year for gas. So it would have taken 7-10 years to breakeven after rebates.

> Change your job. Change your relationship. Change the city where you live. Change your primary hobby. Change your friends. Go back to school or start a business. Go somewhere you've never been before, the further away the better.

Agreed. It worked for me, at least, when it came to job. I was feeling stuck in my last job. There was nothing to complain about but something didn't feel right. Switching job improved my mood 100%.

Just a fair warning, after initial excitement of new job dies down, you may get buyer's remorse and miss your old job a lot. It was comfortable, you knew what you needed to do, you had built up respect and reputation. Now you will need to start over; just work hard through this period until it passes. Soon excitement and energy will return to you and you will be glad that you switched your job.

> Multiply it by say 10k users and you've done some serious harm in the world.

I would disagree.

While resume driven open source projects are indeed painful to sift through, you have no idea where these projects may lead to. We should not discourage people especially new devs from contributing. It should be upon experienced devs to learn how to quickly identify code that is worth exploring in more details. Like a year old project with no recent commits, maybe not worth looking further.

Lol, I was actually defending ads. Like ads are perfect for taking a break to grab snacks or use restroom. Also ads provide pretty good stopping point, we are not as much binge watching TV as when on Netflix. Even when you can forward ads, it still makes you get out of the show into the real world and you realize how much TV you have been watching.

Maybe Ad industry should promote these benefits, so people will hate ads less.

It has been so long since last I saw any ad on TV/videos that when I subscribed to YouTube TV a few months ago, watching ads made me nostalgic. I told my wife that I was really enjoying these ads.

But after about a week it got really annoying. Now debating if it is worth keeping.

* generated audio that would summarize what had happened since last I logged in. Perhaps more details on family and close friends, and less on acquaintances.

* maybe along same lines, a dashboard with summarized text version of updates. Updates that we should respond to. Etc.

* automatic muting or removal of political, religious, news posts. Basically, anything that is not personal, just don’t show it.

* everyone is verified. No bots or scammers should be able to get through. If everybody is paying then maybe easy to keep scammers and bots out.

Along the same lines, does anyone know what's the state of VR/AR in Godot?

I have been interested in exploring this space, not sure if first-party libraries like ARKit would be easier to start with or a game engine. (Not planning on touching Unity).

Prevent creating accounts in countries they cannot operate responsibly. Disallow comments in languages they cannot moderate.

Thank you, looks perfect for my use case. I will check it out later today.

I take voice notes. I would really like a way for voice notes to be transcribed with timestamps. There are SaaS services that let you do that but they are for professionals and too expensive for stream of conscious personal notes.

A while ago, I did find a tutorial that would do this in Python but never got around to it.

I lean towards absolutist position but I think the big problem is algorithms here. If algorithms are promoting something then it is no longer a simple case of free speech.

I hate it that these megacorps are hiding behind free speech when they are essentially acting like editors and sponsors. They will destroy free speech in order to increase their engagement metrics.

> I do not take the time to remove duplicates etc, it would take weeks. I can do that when I'm retired

I used to take a lot of time organizing my photo library in Lightroom Classic. Now I have similar philosophy, just leave it. I am sure soon enough we will have AI that will organize photos decently, fix minor issues in photos, and delete dupes and really bad photos.

Early in my career, I was laid off during offshore outsourcing mania. Initially, they hired one of consulting company to handle oncall after work hours. We loved it, spent months training our replacements without knowing. We also documented a lot of our tribal knowledge during this time.

Then one day they brought everyone in a big presentation hall and fired everyone. We got 3 months advance notice and then minimum of 2 months of salary as a severance. Ironically, they didn't use the afterhours consulting company. Instead, they hired another offshore consulting company for the actual dev work. I guess they were spreading their risk.

We were ordered to train our replacements in our respective areas. That was the most painful part. The original offshore team also felt betrayed, I guess, and there was very hostile environment.

But three months of advance notice was very nice. Some of us got jobs during those 3 months, and started making double salaries. Managers were also part of layoff, so they didn't care. Executives were absentee mostly and they possibly didn't care either.

I needed an excuse for a long vacation, so I didn't look for work immediately. Instead I enjoyed traveling, my hobbies and side projects.

2. No. Other than that it happened during GFC, I don't think it impacted my career. I have gotten multiple simultaneous job offers since then.

3. No, don't think anyone cares.

I never understood the appeal of AirBnB. All these points about having a kitchen or living room to hangout sounded negative to me. But someone finally explained. It is vacation vs travel.

I’m a vacationer, I don’t want to deal with parking, cooking food, cleaning the place. On vacations, I just want to relax and probably spend as much time out doing things as possible. When tired and not sleepy, I rather hangout in hotel lobby or by pool.

Travelers want to experience new places like locals. So AirBnB appeals to them because they can do grocery shopping in local stores, experience different parts of city that normal tourists don’t.

This is a really good point. I don't understand the obsession with single family homes.

We own a single family home and it kind of make me feel bad. We rarely use our yard, it is just maintenance for no good reason. Inside the house, we have also so much useless space, just costing money to heat or cool it.

I am seeing a lot of similar theaters popping up with full service, dining and drinks, etc. I really enjoy going to these type of theaters because to me it is more of a dinner with a movie instead of a movie with a dinner. Even if movie sucks, at least, you had some good food.

And being married for 10+ years, there are not many topics we can to talk about on date nights. So these are perfect place for date nights for old couples.

This is such an important point that most of the people don't get. For example, at one of my friend's company that hired a lot during pandemic and then did massive layoffs, the criteria to layoff was simple: Start with the newest hires in last 2 years (probably also highest paid). Then, if still need to fire more, layoff the lowest performing employees.

I think you can still reconnect with your former colleagues even if you haven't talked to them in a while. Starting a business or looking for a new job is a great excuse to do so. I have been on both sides of conversations and it never really bothered if someone messaged me out of blue or didn't respond to my message.

And if you do message, keep it short and to the point, only time I get really annoyed is when someone starts a conversation, asking about work and family then after several messages, they would bring up their real motivation. Usually, it is MLM related and when I say hard NO, they disappear again.

Something like "hey X, been a while, hope you are doing well. I am freelancing these days and looking for a new project. My main focus is tech a but can also do tech b and c. Please let me know if you have any leads. I would truly appreciate it."

And if you really want to build better relationship, you could say something like, "And we should grab coffee one day and catch up. I miss working with you."

Shareholders are not in management chain.

Great suggestions so far. Here are some of my ideas:

Landscape designer: There is a lot to learn about various plants, climate zones, etc. I am learning for our home but feeling overwhelmed. We are considering hiring a consultant and probably would do actual yard work myself. But there are a lot of landscaping companies that will do everything for you.

Realtor: I have real estate license, you meet a lot of people, explore new areas, learn about so many things. It was really enjoyable experience without being pushy salesperson as I didn’t need money. I stopped as most of work happen in evenings and weekends, and as a dad I felt it was not fair to my kids.

Handyman: Along the same lines as landscaping but probably more in demand. I personally rather do work outside.

Portrait photography: It has a lot of competition but also very rewarding and not as stressful as wedding photography. You get explore new places for the shoots. And it is very fulfilling to make people happy with your photos.

Laser based mosquito killer machine. I remember seeing something about it once but cannot find it now. I think it would be awesome.

Been doing this on and off. In my ideal world, I’d have a powerful remote computer that could be used for all kind of dev work including game development. And locally I would use iPad to remote in. But so far whenever I used remote machine, it is used primarily for webdev with WordPress or Laravel.

Usually, it is $5 Ubuntu VM from Linode. LAMP stack mostly. Switched to neovim from vim recently. Been trying to setup docker file to make it easy to replicate my vm but always seems run into issues.

And I use Blink shell on iPad to access it. Lack of hot reload and dev tools make it a little more challenging but not really too bad.

I am from guess culture, it is almost impossible for me to decipher needs of everyone and communicate my needs without asking. Unless those needs are very standard traditional needs like offering water to a guest, giving up seat for an elder etc. And it is not just me it seems everyone seems to misunderstand and everyone complains about others who didn't guess their needs correctly.

Using the example from article, the mover would be complaining about everyone who didn't guess that they needed help with moving and how they had given soup to all those people.

I really appreciate ask culture and find it much easier to navigate. It is so much easier to hangout with friends who can just ask for what they want or just say no. I have learned to ask but still find it stressful to say no.

Speaking of no, in my culture, apparently, no means, "ask me again I am just being polite, I will say yes after your ask me 3rd time."

> to create a cool website for them for a few hundred bucks

I think this price range will push away serious businesses. I knew a consulting company that had hard time getting customers when they were charging under $1000 for simple WordPress sites. They had better luck when they raised their prices to $5000. It was 10 years ago for simple WordPress sites.

Microsoft Access was great for this. You could built a quick app in couple of hours and deploy in local network with a shared database.

I haven’t done this but have read about idea generation and validation processes like this:

1. Start with problems, small or big. Write them down. Do it for a few weeks or months.

2. Go through the list and come up with solutions to each problem or discard it.

3. Choose your top 5-10 problems and solutions.

4. Now for validation, create a form that collects email addresses for each problem. Write some marketing stuff there too.

5. Define your target audience for each idea and create ads. Link to your forms.

6. After a few weeks or months, see which idea generated most interest. That is probably what you should work on.

Recently, my friends and I were discussing same thing about climate change that we are focused on symptoms instead of the main cause.

It is a bit controversial but I think the best way to deal with climate change is to have less kids. I say that as a parent.

It sounds authoritarian and having kids is basic animal instinct. And probably smarter minds have already thought about it and realized that it would be easier to do everything else except ask people to have less kids.

Instead of calling it contracting, call it consulting.

Your top heading should be something like:

Ruby/Rails Consultant 2013-current

Then each of contracting gig should be subheading under it. Remove job title here. Just the company name, company location, dates and project details.