codyb

This is why I built out a Shadow Sessions program for our internal tooling teams at my BigCo.

The users are right there, go make friends. Learn what they're doing day to day. And how it fits into the larger picture.

These sessions are lightweight, and auto schedule every three weeks with no required action items and people come out of it amazed every time, lots of little bugs have been fixed, and connections are being made.

The culture of not engaging with the end users when they're so readily available is an odd one to me. And you can really get to say 80% of macro picture understanding and user experience design fundamentals with a fairly low lift.

To do this I created a sign up form and an auto scheduler that interacts with the Slack API. The scheduling and getting folk on board is the hardest part. Also finding time if you do things outside the product road map.

Is the personal expense not dying or getting less sick or something?

Managing upwards beats being managed in my experience. Seems to work with most managers, and reduces surprises which reduces stress all around and causes course corrections and course alignments earlier.

I tend to do status updates in public channels before anyone can ask me but I've been the fortunate loner for the last couple years where I get to work with a lot of people but outside a lot of process.

I'm not even really advocating for or against the copyright position.

I also think you're missing my point a bit. Just cause you study lots of works and create an original creation which borrows influences isn't the same thing as requiring use of a copyrighted piece of work.

It's pretty silly to suggest I was implying artists have no influences cause I classified works without any copyrighted material as original.

My point was more... just cause a bunch of copyrighted work becomes available does not necessarily imply creators and artists lives will be substantially different or better off.

I think citation would be needed on this. Obviously any artist producing fully original music or art doesn't.

And many content creators might benefit from an expanded public domain, or they might not... There's already tons of creators, they seem to be getting by? Well, actually, some are getting by and most are probably hobbyists or underwater much like most arts. I'm not sure expanded quantities of available characters would necessarily change much.

I've been using DuckDuckGo for the last... decade or so. And it still seems to return fairly relevant documentation towards the top.

To be fair, that's most of what I use search for these days is "<<Programming Language | Tool | Library | or whatever>> <<keyword | function | package>>" then navigate to the documentation, double check the versions align with what I'm writing software in, read... move on.

Sometimes I also search for "movie showtimes nyc" or for a specific venue or something.

So maybe my use cases are too specific to screw up, who knows. If not, maybe DDG is worth a try.

Why can't we use non-potable water for these data centers too?

Seems like we're bombing a bunch of low level, poverty stricken fisherman who occasionally bring a load of drugs from point A to point B.

I'm sure the complete lack of effectiveness will be worth the condemnation and lost intelligence by our allies, and further erosion of our separation of powers.

I use Firefox Developer Edition as my daily driver and it's a nice experience. I think there's an AI option in the settings I have turned off? Wolud

I don't see how AI would improve my experience, although I have found myself using the fast answer AI summaries in DuckDuckGo a bit more over time.

My initial inclination is to root for a less busy browser.

Definitely time for structural change.

Here's my ideas...

The Senate - Give the territories 2 Senators, the tribes in the reservations 2 Senators, and DC 2 Senators - Find some minimum number of citizens to get a Senator and lump certain states like the Dakotas together

The House - Same thing, add a rep per reservation, add reps for the territories, add reps for DC - All maps drawn in a non partisan manner to encourage competitive races between the parties as opposed to unlosable districts which can never boot these representatives who literally do nothing (won't even _come to the table_ during this recent shutdown, literally left DC for 7 weeks, wtf is that shit)

- Abolish Citizens United, politics needs to be boring conversations about policy handled by decent representatives of various constituencies, not a constant never ending shit cycle where single individuals can pump tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars to promote their own agendas

- Ranked choice voting everywhere

Maybe the territories get less representation.

The Senate has actually been a decent bulwark against the more extreme positions some of these House members espouse, presumably because of the sufficiently large samples you need to get to win a Senate seat compared to some of the extremely gerrymandered unlosable House seats.

There should be repurcussions for these Senators and House members... congressional approval is famously less popular then things like cockroaches, and it's been this way for decades. Constant gridlock, totally toxic.

Time for change. Time for real representation. Time to get back to boring. Time for choice. The time is now. Cause this race to the bottom with unfettered dark money is doing nothing good for anyone.

As much as there's a lot of reasonable arguments for ending the minting of the penny, the method in which this president waves his hands and fundamentally changes things such as our White House, our currency, our trade policies, our universities leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth and it's hard to support even sensible decisions this authoritarian regime makes.

All green notes are barely there anymore... the dollar bill itself. Even the five has some color now.

The sign on the door said "no scrapers", which as far as I know is not a protected class.

I mean... sort of.

But let's look at the structure for a bit...

- Citizens United has allowed unfettered amounts of dark money to flow into our elections, disproportionately benefiting the uber wealthy

- The Senate greatly favors rural states, sometimes 60 - 1 by vote weight

- The House is pretty much a race to the bottom in terms of gerrymandering, where many districts are pretty much unloseable

- Many states purge rolls and make it harder to vote by closing polling places, restricting early access, adding id requirements, and restricting mail in voting. Combined with the fact that election day is on a random Tuesday which we don't take off as a nation to go vote

- Education is... not in a great place. Many many people have _no idea_ how the system works at all, or what's happening within it day to day. But they are getting inundated with 7 second flashes of information and misinformation on infinite feeds which bubble their users, lead them to increasingly extreme content, and make it hard to distinguish between fact and fiction

So yea, he's well understood in that half the country has no idea he's all over Epstein's list and think the felonies he's been charged with are bogus while cheering on the prosecution of Letitia James for renting out an apartment that said she could rent it out in the contract she signed

And we voted for him in the sense that only 7 states seem to matter in our presidential elections, and we're constantly inundated with information about how our votes barely matter cause of all the imbalances in elections at every level

We're just a year away from full self driving!

Took a train from NYC to Chicago and it was so nice. Similar amount of time, about two days I think all in all. And just rolling on the plains, got myself a bunk, was more expensive than the plane ride home but 25 times more enjoyable and fulfilling.

Ditching my phone as much as possible has been the best decision I've ever made. Life always feels a little slower when you're not constantly inundated with outside noise.

I still pay attention, but instead of constantly paying attention and doing nothing, I pay attention a good amount, and do things instead.

I guess I do remember adding drivers here and there for scanners and printers back in the day

Devil's advocating here... when have kernel extensions _ever been_ a part of the average user's experience?

I sincerely doubt it'll do much, but my next computer will not be Apple. Sadly, I just upgraded a year and a half or so ago, and sadly, good lord those damn arm chips are nice.

So hopefully in 8 years or so when I need a new machine, there's some decent options available to me.

But nice aint worth the cost when it comes at the expense of supporting something which is undermining everything else you believe in.

Where is it illegal to smoke in public spaces?

NYers are out here smokin' bogeys and joints on our streets all day, and when I went to Florida the tables had ashtrays, even occasionally inside. Certainly was the same in Lisbon and France.

Also, taxes have increased on gambling recently, although prediction markets appear to be a loophole.

And I dunno, I guess people are gambling on the screen a lot but I completely missed it. I'm not sure, do people think gambling is cool? I definitely missed that one. But I can see people getting hooked on the fun part if that high is their thing

I believe, although I'm not going to look it up for you, that the public health campaign against smoking is well documented as exceedingly effective for dollars spent. But hey, in today's day and age, we all gotta do our own research!

I understand, and am against the constant advertising of it.

But it's also important to remember just how successful the smoking psa campaign has been. Especially given the cost! Rates have fallen dramatically, just by telling people to "watch out!" in public spaces that reach young folks ears.

Internal corporate tooling can be greatly improved by promoting scheduled "water cooler chat on steroids" calls between engineers/designers/product/tpms/managers and the actual users.

What's nice is that these sessions bleed into everything. You don't need to look through users' eyes that many times to find great improvement in UX sensibilities.

Since scheduling is the biggest pain point here, I just built a scheduler and a signup form at work. Everyone who gets a session walks away with positive feedback, the company as a whole becomes more interconnected, and now I'm working to get more and more folk on board.

My goal is to unleash a whole flotilla of white collar workers who understand the value of talking to the users such that they too push for lightweight, no action item, scheduled sessions which becomes standard practice as part of our careers and we all end up with better software as a whole.

That is _nuts_ that the basketball season is longer than the MLB season. I never would have guessed that.

Let's go Jays! Looking forward to this World Series.

Also not a fan of the constant inundation with gambling ads even if they have literally no interest to me. Just seems like a net negative for a society that realized cigarette ads are bad, but can't seem to figure that out for alcohol or gambling.

At least the public education campaigns have started earlier, I definitely see ads talking about where to get help if you're having an issue fairly frequently.

All these comments assume that 30 million is _all_ the mob has made with these machines, and that the tech must be very expensive.

Usually when they pull out the big piles of drugs for the TVs, I assume that's the tip of the iceberg. So why is it that here, with four families involved, we think the only money they've made is what's been shown to us?

Also, x-ray tables, rigged card shufflers, and funny glasses don't necessarily sound like they're the most expensive things in the world.

So my guess is...

Combined with these fellas other hustles this was probably a nice chunk of change to bring in for a relatively low amount of work post initial set up. I mean, you're sitting around playing rigged poker with a bunch of millionaires and basketball players or whatever. Probably having some drinks, I'd imagine there's pretty ladies around, cigars, cocaine. Whatever.

Sounds more relaxing than extorting deli owners block by block like all those movies about the 70s show.

And the best part? The people you're robbing are probably much less likely to resort to violence as recourse.

To every billionaire in America right now who can read this...

I haven't used any of the AI stuff that's been released so far. It doesn't appear to have affected my day to day in any manner but I'm not particularly connected in the first place I suppose.

But this browser, with the AI on the top of it? I haven't used it yet. But it sounds life changing. I'll be surprised if I have a job in three weeks now that this is out. And coming off that Sora drop? DAMN! Haven't used that either but I heard it's a really expensive tic tac that gets boring after 10 minutes.

Anyways, please give all your money to Sam Altman. He needs 7 trillion dollars. And with results like these, the path forward must be paved with gold. So pour, all of your money, right into this one, please.

I suspect that this will always be just one more year away like Tesla's robotaxis

I don't know if this is true. A pack of cigarettes in Virginia costs... what 4 bucks? 5?

Those Virginia taxed cigarettes are sold in NYC for 10 bucks a pack now or 1 dollar a loosey (a... friend told me). That's 2x on packs and 4x on looseys.

That gives you a pretty healthy margin before busts could impact your profits.

Presumably you're also buying them in bulk in Virginia for cheaper than the 4 or 5 dollar store price too.

Cigarettes are probably a nickel a piece coming off the line?

According to the Enforcer's (https://www.youtube.com/@EnforcerOfficial) stream yesterday

They just use prevailing wind routes, and toss tons of balloons up, and have 'em float over the border cause cigarette taxes are so high in Europe that it's worth it.

And then there's people waiting along the wind path to pick up the balloons as they come down.

There's a lot of inefficiencies built into smuggling operations. You can absolutely grab huge amounts of smuggled items in busts and not end up denting profits for the smugglers cause they're smuggling so much (see cocaine, fentanyl, cigarettes in blue states in America).

I wouldn't entirely rule out the Russians or Belarussions doing probing moves, but the Enforcer's been a great source of information for these events as they occur.

There's a fair number of articles from previous encounters - https://fortune.com/2025/10/05/hot-air-balloons-smuggling-ci...

It's entirely possible that the operations are in cahoots and this is an intelligence operation being conducted as a smuggling operation.

Absolutely. But, what if the point of using the knives, is to be able to understand how to use the machines which can use knives for us, and if we're not replicating the learning part, where do we end up?

It's pretty great if you understand how to do resets, interactive rebases, understand the differences between merges and rebases, keep your commit history fairly clean, and just work with the tool. I haven't had a problem with Git since I spent a day going through the git book something like 10 years ago.

Meanwhile this is in a discussion about tools which people spend incalculable amounts of hours tuning, for reference. The number of articles on Hacker News about how people have tuned their LLM setups is... grand to say the least.