cflewis

I’ve ridden in Ubers across Hwy 17 in Northern California and I’m pretty sure some of those drivers had never taken a non-90 degree corner in their life.

More than once I semi-jokingly texted people at work that if I didn’t make the next meeting it was because I met my untimely end in that car.

I rode my first Waymo last week through Inglewood and Santa Monica and I felt so much more safe than I have in other ridesharing systems.

I think ridesharing is not the end game for Waymo. If I could just straight up buy a personal vehicle that was a Waymo I’d do it tomorrow.

I think conflating a security paper which shows something is possible to using the "exploit" to create a database 100s of GBs large and analyze it is disingenuous at best.

As usual, 404 nails it:

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It should be noted, however, that almost no one reads end-user license agreements and many of Discord’s users are children and teenagers. Discord is, first and foremost, a platform for gamers to organize communities and it’s not plausible that a 15 year old looking for a Fortnite meme server ever thought their dumb jokes about Tomato Town would end up in a public database five years later.

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Same as other commenters here: I think this is shameful action under the guise of research and I cannot fathom why any IRB board would approve this (and perhaps it did not in this case, I do not know if Brazil has such a thing).

Back in the day (15ish years ago), I wrote a paper where I scraped the World of Warcraft API. It wasn't hard to do, I started on a realm, looked for arena teams, then went to guilds and got character sheets from there. I took the opinion that if Blizzard doesn't throttle me it's fair game.

Looking back now, I think that to have been pretty naive. I wouldn't say reckless, but definitely naive. In my mind, I had not made a delineation between "I can access this thing manually one at a time" and "I can access all of it automatically". As far as I was concerned, it was just the computer pressing the buttons. It was the same thing.

I think in the fullness of time we have collectively come to realize it is 100% not the same thing. The _availability_ of a thing and the _collection_ of a thing are two different issues with their own thorny problems. The researchers here have made the same mistake I did, but instead of it just being what gear your character was wearing, they took actual communications instead.

I hope this paper gets retracted, all data deleted and a sincere apology offered.

Incredibly I was thinking the exact same thing.

Computers used to fun! I miss the candy iMac theming.

Things can be both a rant and true at the same time. I'm glad Fish didn't attempt Posix compliance.

IANAL but my understanding from floating around open source licensing circles is that you'd have a hard time with the judge if you didn't just ask for the license to be put back as step 1. Microsoft willingly not restoring the license would be more problematic.

The forgiveness clause in GPL 3 is as much an acknowledgement of actual reality than anything else.

Yeah, we have had two of the same and fancy rats make for really sweet pets. But it left a hole in my heart each time they died and I am not sure I can face it again :/

iOS has this problem as well. You search for a setting in the Settings app. It’ll say “doesn’t exist” (or whatever) while it’s looking for something extremely obvious (like “software update”) instead of just showing a processing icon.

Then when it does show the results, they’re usually in some terribly unhelpful order. It took me ages to try and go through the CUJ of “this app isn’t sending me notifications because I turned them off now I want them back on”

I enjoyed this a lot. Congratulations :)

I want to make it super clear (although the site takes pains to not): this comic wasn’t written/illustrated by McCloud. It was created by the person with the “Leah” handle.

I worked on Fuchsia engprod for a while. I am still employed at Google and can't talk about anything that isn't publicly available already (which really means anything gleaned from commits to the Git repo).

I think the best way to look at it is like any software: there's Fuchsia The Artifact (thing that is made) and Fuchsia The Product (how thing is used, and how widely). I don't know anything about operating systems, but my understanding is that the engineers are very happy with Fuchsia The Artifact. Fuchsia The Product has had some wandering in the wilderness years.

Can’t comment on the slowdown, I left the team a long time ago.

The goal at the time I thought was very sound: it was a massive PITA that Go programs that ran on cloud servers (of which I would hazard most of them do) were not Write Once Run Anywhere. It was all the same stuff, right? A blob store. A SQL backend. Etc etc. What we wanted was to say “you write a Go program, here run it on GCP. Then Azure. Why not AliBaba if you’re in China”.

What I am no longer convinced of today is that anyone is really looking for those greased rails because it’s _so much more complicated_ to run on cloud servers than I envisioned. Surely it was going to get more simple? But it didn’t. Networking, authorization, scaling, Kubernetes. The list goes on and on.

A fully uneducated guess is that Wire does what people who come to it want it to do, but it’s not attracting new users because the use cases are more constrained than envisaged.

FWIW the internal Google style guide says to not pass anything via Context unless you _really_ know what you're doing and why. Things that make sense: security tokens and tracing. Things that don't make sense: almost everything else.

I worked on Wire right at the beginning, happy to answer any questions about it.

I just had my annual “career check-in” or whatever they are calling it now at work. I’m at the crossroads level: stick as being a software engineer and accept I’m not smart enough to ever be promoted again on software engeering track, or head for management track.

My guess is I would be either an excellent manager or an appalling one. Either way, I have absolutely no wish to do it. My wife is saying I should go for it in order to continue climbing the ladder.

I can’t pretend I’m not glad to see someone who would have been happy sticking as well. Hopefully you get the chance to demote yourself soon :)

The problem with Java since Java 8 has never been Java. It's been about the appalling ecosystem that infected it with reflection frameworks. It was bonkers that "POJO" was ever a thing that had to be defined.

It feels like these frameworks are now just falling away, which is great. I'm not even hearing about Spring anymore, and if there is any reason to not use it, it would be this cringe "how do you do fellow kids?" blurb I just saw on their front page:

> Level up your Java™ code

> With Spring Boot in your app, just a few lines of code is all you need to start building services like a boss.

I personally would reach for Go by default, but I have no ill-will to Java.

Yeah, I wonder what that is going to ground out to. With the AI race, basically anything tangential is research, at least in the definition of "doing something scientific-looking that's not been done before". That could include a _lot_ of companies from massive to tiny.

That is _possible_, but in the real world if your team has chosen YAML, it’s not because they want to write more reasonable JSON. They want to write YAML.

Yeah, the dreams of what computers could do around Windows 95, and what the Internet could do around Windows 98/Windows 2000... it felt amazing as a teenager who wanted to go into computer science. IMHO social media heralded the beginning of the end, although no-one knew that at the time.

A lot of the 90s nostalgia is just the same rose-tinted glasses as all generations experience, but I think in this one dimension it truly felt a lot better back then.

I would not consider this news, but I am glad it has been written down regardless. This has been true for decades in Computer Science.

1. Undergraduate degrees: Getting things done, getting in on the ground floor. Needs to be screened rigorously because the high variance of graduates.

2. Masters degrees: Getting things done, but with enough understanding of the landscape on how to make money doing it. Usually pretty good in my experience.

3. PhDs: Getting research done. Are not necessarily good software engineers and need to be screened more rigorously than the Masters holders.

The problem for undergrads is the glut of graduate degrees squeezes out the undergrads, if _only_ for the experience level. With all other things equal, you take the PhD over the Masters over the Undergraduate simply because they are older and have more experience. Recruiters also don't want to have to filter through hundreds of undergrad applicants: it's much easier to trim that off and just look at the Masters/PhD applications instead.

You don't get a graduate degree because _you_ need a graduate degree. You get a graduate degree because _others_ need to see it.

Actually we do, the reporting in WaPo itself said they had already put together the copy for Harris and were ready to run it.

The newsroom basically did all they could to say it without saying it.

Watermarking I think is supposed to be the goal, but I don’t think anyone can think that the web is in anything but managed decline. The AI feeding itself AI will just end it all. I think Platformer describes it best: https://www.platformer.news/google-io-ai-search-sundar-picha...

The question is what comes next, and I don’t think anyone has an answer to that.

I had a manager who thought putting questions in group chats would make it look like we were not competent and so should be only posted in DMs. Same about asking questions to other team members in bug tickets: don't do it, others will think the team is incompetent.

Spoiler alert: He was one of, if not the worst, manager I have ever had because, surprise! he was awful in every other dimension as well.

I think most people would see not interacting with coworkers in any sociable way aside from video conferences as a net negative. You can’t form relationships that way. I think this is a key difference between people in this conundrum: some WFH advocates just see no value in building relationships with workers past the screen. It just doesn’t matter to them at some core level, and they don’t understand why it does for others (who I think are the silent majority).

You have more time for relationships outside of work, but for myself I find it much easier to work with others if I have some meaningful concept of who they are, and they have some meaningful concept of who I am.

At least in Photos, the model is not what one would consider working. A quick example: "Halloween with [x]" works, because Halloween is recognized as a specific date. It works well. Christmas throws it for a loop. Christmas isn't thought of as a time but a state. So it'll show photos that look appropriately Christmassy, but the picks appear semi-random: it'll show one of about five taken in quick succession, but the one it picks is someone wearing a Santa hat in profile, but the other 4 are straight on and one would think more likely to be returned.

I don't think anyone can say with a straight face that being unable to properly grok the biggest holiday of the year for many Western countries is sufficient.

Yeah, I'm waiting to see if BM condensed ever arrives. I am thinking it won't. I don't think it would take this long if they really intended to get v2 out the door. It's vaporware.

Agreed. Just log it and move on. The code _probably_ wrote what it needed to even if it didn't close. If truly cared that you got everything out correctly, you'd need to do more work than a blind `defer Close()` anyway and you'd never have written the code like this.

It doesn’t feel like a genuine question you followed it up with a snide jab.

Assuming you didn’t: as a non American who emigrated to the US, the answer is fairly clear. My home country (UK) pretends like if you need therapy you either mentally weak (time to man up!) or on the verge of an inpatient psychiatric hold. Marriage counceling is just a desperate prelude to divorce from people that can’t see the writing on the wall. I would never _ever_ tell anyone on the UK if I was taking psychiatric meds.

America doesn’t have the same stigma, at least in the coastal states. So people get help. People talk about getting help.

Modern life stress is not limited to the US. It’s just the US that talks about it the most. Mental illness is not limited to the US either, they’re just more willing to use medications. And it saves lives. Had I been in the UK with mental illness I have (just the very commmon depression/anxiety power combo) I might be dead by now.

I also take great exception to the idea that there has been some seismic change in life that has resulted in more mental health crises. They were just manifested via more normalized alcoholism and home abuse instead.

I feel like there were companies in the past that did try this, where you would chuck $5 or whatever in an account, and then each page you went to that supported the service would extract a micropayment from the account.

Never took off. Should have done. e.g. in Santa Cruz there is https://lookout.co , which is pretty good, but extremely pricy for what it is. There has to be a way between "pay and get everything", "ignore/go straight to 12ft.io".

Wild guess: most people go "I want the Google TV thingy"