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chaosharmonic

850 karma · joined March 18, 2019

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chaosharmonic··on Britain to make salary disclosure in job ads mandatory
Many of those things you can still just say, in a job description, as details that make you stand out. Many of those specific details do have tangible value (though I'd still say if you include words like "lead" you're describing levels), and you're not necessarily just describing vibes, but what you also aren't describing is a reason why you wouldn't have some idea of what you would pay someone in normal circumstances.

Say that no one you interview has those particulars, and you hire someone who's just -- by your regular, baseline standards -- qualified for the job. Do you have a cutoff for what you would pay those people? Then you should probably post that, and then just act like companies that comply with this stuff already and include some kind of disclaimer, that extraordinary candidates may still fall somewhere outside that range.

chaosharmonic··on Britain to make salary disclosure in job ads mandatory
You could just put multiple ranges and add additional details for what seniors/leads look like. You would have minimums for what those things are too, and those qualities would actually overlap a lot with a previous level's nice-to-have items.

There's valid conversation around the nuances of "what if this need isn't specific to a level?" but those don't excuse keeping people in the dark about what the job offers or requires.

chaosharmonic··on Britain to make salary disclosure in job ads mandatory
You're describing levels. If your range is so wide the top of the range is double the bottom of the range, you're hiring at multiple levels, and you should just say that. You should also have more detailed descriptions that help you and candidates differentiate what those levels are.

More broadly than that -- it's not that you need to pay everyone the same, it's that you need clear structure around how your pay works.

An example that became a problem with one previous employer was that they kept saying "performance" was their only determining factor for pay, after it had come out that exactly one person on our team had been offered bonuses as a performance incentive.

It's not actually performance-based if you have different and better reward structures, or if you can't/won't explain why gaps exist.

chaosharmonic··on Jobless tech workers are being left out of San Francisco's AI boom
First of all, that's not the problem. AI companies are eating up so much of the economy and supply chain that your game console -- whatever it is -- now costs another $200. Crypto at least kept this limited to GPUs. They're also openly advertising on billboards that say things like "AI won't ask for a raise."

Second -- as much as abuse of this program does happen, the problem is that they aren't decent wages or working conditions.

The only requirements of this program are that you're not paying less to a local employee -- which functionally means you can pay the same substandard wages to everyone, and then go to the government saying "we can't find qualified talent in our area." Much like a minimum wage employer with a "NO ONE WANTS TO WORK" sign, at a certain point it's actually that no one wants to work for you... but we don't put strong enough requirements in place for it to function more effectively as a way of filling talent shortages and less as a welfare system for the worst employers in your area.

The solution to this isn't broad crackdowns, or obviously hostile nonsense like that $100k fee. It's actually better labor protections -- longer grace periods so that you can leave an abusive employer, market rate pay, reasonable limits on overtime, and more scrutiny around other violations of stateside labor protections. The problem isn't that specialized fields like tech still need visas to some extent, to attract talent at their hiring bar. It's that there's no validation that these are reasonable jobs that a reasonable person would accept. It's that we shouldn't prop up companies that can't hire on their own merits, or enable large scale market manipulation to every part of our working conditions -- by giving them to companies that are 996ing, or that violate labor protections, or that openly talk about how you won't be happy there if you value pay. Those things harm everyone, and lower our labor standards across the entire industry.

The problem across both is actually the same -- businesses that want to take shortcuts to get employees (real or otherwise) that won't ask for raises, speak up about their other working conditions, or leave for something better.

chaosharmonic··on Ex-Meta Researcher Torrented Pirated Books, Deleted It 'Due to Litigation'
That depends. Is it about cultural enrichment via the arts, or financial enrichment by selling a bootleg generator?

I personally am in the camp that capitalism just isn't a very good model for getting artists paid, but that isn't really the same thing as believing all creative work should be up for grabs by any arbitrary business and/or political campaign for any arbitrary purpose.

You know how talking about wage gaps doesn't necessarily mean that you're a full-blown Communist, or that you're literally saying everyone should be universally paid the same? It's sort of like that.

chaosharmonic··on We're releasing the weights of Mistral Large 4
No, they're still capable of calling it something different, instead of implying open source licenses that they aren't actually using. That's a valid complaint that's kind of unrelated to any of this other stuff.

Whether it's feasible to release everything under open terms is actually a different issue from whether they're being truthful in how they're advertising it.

chaosharmonic··on DoorDash to Acquire Instacart
Instacart stole money from me.

When COVID hit, I got sick and had to spend several days inside ordering delivery. And more than once, the store was missing half my order. So I then had to make new orders for the food I wasn't able to get the first time -- while they refunded me only for the items they didn't have, leaving me to eat the (multiple) delivery fees and driver tips.

chaosharmonic··on Android apps running native on macOS
Whereas for my other line, Fate/GO, I'm pretty sure the reason was just sweet gacha money
chaosharmonic··on The first wired XR glasses powered by Android XR
> The Meta VR glasses will have better resolution I think, but then the Aura has access to the whole Android ecosystem - so that means real implementations of Microsoft Word etc.

Those aren't mutually exclusive though. Horizon OS is based on AOSP, and the more applications cross over into big screens on Android, the more Horizon gains the ability to leverage them too. Whether they actually show up in Facebook's store is a separate question, but I also have no idea how common the use of SideQuest is, just that the store is somewhat of an artificial limitation. (Google Play, on the other hand...)

> But the real choice is the unfortunate one of who is least likely to abandon the whole thing when it doesn't take off and leave you with an un/poorly supported device. Both companies have terrible track records on this.

Agreed. I would never buy a device like this from Facebook, and while glasses as a display are super useful, I don't necessarily see the need for a dedicated compute device for them when this experience could just as easily be powered by a phone. (I could maybe see replacing a phone with this, but more for particular minimalist crowds and not as a mass-market sell.)

chaosharmonic··on Android apps running native on macOS
Yeah, the system spec isn't really what I'm talking about so much as the compatibility layers.
chaosharmonic··on Android apps running native on macOS
And the Frame Verified program, which is most of where I was going with this.

Lepton may most directly target Quest games, but it's not like it wouldn't also enable flatscreen titles running on AOSP, and it's not like Proton is limited to the use cases Valve intended either.

chaosharmonic··on Android apps running native on macOS
Also, a lot of games. This is actually why I stopped playing Pokemon Go, and never picked up a worse gacha game habit haha
chaosharmonic··on Android apps running native on macOS
Optimist take: this will matter less over time as more developers start targeting Steam devices
chaosharmonic··on Legal experts warn Meta's new terms still grant broad scraping permissions
See also: Nintendo
chaosharmonic··on AdFection: Targeted ads turned into a pipeline for zero-click mercenary spyware
Speaking as an escaped Christian fundamentalist -- religious faith and religious nationalism are actually two different things.
chaosharmonic··on AdFection: Targeted ads turned into a pipeline for zero-click mercenary spyware
Dude, the cover we give Saudi Arabia is also shameful. And when you look at "businesses" like NSO Group, those things are even directly related.

But good on you for recognizing that we have a pattern of this kind of thing, even if you've stopped just short of noticing that it's a problem.

chaosharmonic··on Show HN: PS2 games statically recompiled to WebAssembly
I mean, how much incentive is there to buy when the studios won't let you legally purchase from them, or at best don't actually consider it a purchase when they do?

Especially when, for games of this age, we're talking about going through the secondary market, and paying potentially hundreds of dollars for a physical copy, without the creators seeing a dime of that transaction to begin with.

chaosharmonic··on Cloudflare acquires Deno
Did they have any heads up about this, and/or do they have any roadmap for what's happening now?
chaosharmonic··on Cloudflare acquires Deno
That I saw, I was more curious what motivated them to keep it
chaosharmonic··on Cloudflare acquires Deno
I do wonder if it's been shopped around to any of these large-scale users as potential maintainers. Seems in the overall wheelhouse for Supabase in particular.
chaosharmonic··on Deno Is Joining Cloudflare
I personally see it as valuable for similar reasons -- plus the ability to just import via web if a package is compatible with browsers, and it being open source and free for the community to fork and rebuild in case something like this goes south.
chaosharmonic··on Cloudflare acquires Deno
Netlify and Supabase have also been using them for edge functions.
chaosharmonic··on Deno Is Joining Cloudflare
Well this is fucking depressing.

So what's the story with JSR sticking around then? Does it already see meaningful use among people using Workers, or do they just really want an escape hatch in case we see more long-term issues with GitHub and NPM?

And does it at least mean the stdlib will see continued development?

chaosharmonic··on Yes, and
> AI is a great TA

> Another thing that I tell my students is that AI, used properly, is a tremendously effective TA. If you don’t use it as a code-generator but rather as a partner to help you understand concepts and techniques, it can provide a huge boost to your intellectual development.

I've found this useful myself here and there in picking up new concepts and just generally working my way around their basics. If you toy with this around cybersecurity stuff in particular, you can also test different models for guardrails this way.

I actually put together a writeup[1] a while back on using this and my own logging data to give myself a crash course on SQL. (And still end up referencing it semi-frequently...)

[1] bhmt.dev/blog/osquery

chaosharmonic··on Trump administration is suspending Microsoft from a green card program
The problem isn't just whether they're hiring below market. It's that market rates themselves are impacted by there being a whole underclass of workers who can't just freely move between jobs, and has to speedrun getting a new one if they ever lose their existing ones. The precarious nature of it makes an H1-B worker less likely to speak up about most things related to working conditions due to the precarious nature of the job. And that impacts everyone else -- because the fastest way to get a big raise is by getting a new job, so there's less incentive to pay people better if fewer workers can actually move around and you can threaten the ones that can purely through the existence of ones that can't.

I don't think the solution is just getting rid of them all -- actually a longer grace period (say, a year?) would make it easier to leave abusive employers. But it should include more scrutiny on whether employers really can't find local hires in the first place, or just aren't willing to train them or work with people that have even slightly more bargaining power.

Abuse of the H1-B program is broader than just hiring people for less money right now. It's also about hiring people who won't ask for more money over a longer timeline. It's about having a whole class of workers that is uniquely vulnerable to terrorist bosses, which then gives those employers more leverage over everyone else. And it's about the large-scale market manipulation that comes with having this easily accessible.

chaosharmonic··on Shipping JPEG XL in Chrome
And no, L isn't for large, we have W for that

(You know... for "Wumbo")

chaosharmonic··on Shipping JPEG XL in Chrome
See I would think lossless is the one you have to specify. (Also, it stops being "large" when you extend this gripe to similar formats like AVIF and WebP.)
chaosharmonic··on Shipping JPEG XL in Chrome
I've been wishing for years that all of these codecs with hybrid lossless/lossy modes would just add a single l to their file extensions, purely for the annoyance of it.

Like, you can do this individually, but it's not the same thing as actually having it in the standard.

chaosharmonic··on Friendship ended with Deno, now Node is my best friend
Generally, a bunch of batteries included out of the box, in which I don't have to care about installing and configuring a toolchain full of third-party deps in order to do stuff like formatting or CSV imports. (Yes, I'm counting the JSR stdlib when I say this. I did say "third-party." This isn't, and in fact it is intentional about being cross-runtime where possible.)

Not needing to have opinions about the details has been one of the most freeing things when working on a project, even if it now means having a slight opinion about not wanting to use npm anywhere that I don't have to.

I realize at this point Bun offers a lot of overlapping "Node-like but with lots of extra niceties." But I happen to like that this one is actively trying to contribute stuff back to the core ecosystem -- the stdlib, initiatives like WinterCG, infrastructure like JSR (which is open source and at least a little bit more resistant to consolidation relative to npm)... Instead of just trying to extend it with a kitchen sink full of first-party features.

Like others here said, I don't think it's just one thing.

chaosharmonic··on Everybody’s home. No one’s coming over
Or, it's because no one can afford spaces to host company:

https://fortune.com/2026/06/22/1-in-3-young-adults-living-wi...

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