dccoolgai

I was wondering when this was going to breach the Zeitgeist. I've been reading about it for a while now. I'd really love to watch the recent show about it (that apparently triggered the awareness of it in the U.K.) but I can't find a way to watch it on any of my streaming services in the U.S. Does anyone know how to see it in the States?

Made a comment above. If SEs understood or could deign to get involved in politics at all, this would be reformed. It's 1) enormous 2) Poorly understood/ discussed

Another big factor (that doesn't get as much attention because it's wonkish) is the section of the TCJ Act of 2021 that forced software engineering to be amortized over 5 years instead of written off as an expense. Absolutely responsible for a huge pct of layoffs in 22 and 23.

"Lucky's Dad" is low-key the best character in the show.

Those places exist, but they are the exception rather than the rule in 2023. I'm not offering a full-throated apology of Kissinger (or, by extension, Nixon) just pointing out that a lot of the people jumping out to proclaim what a terrible human he is a few hours after his death was announced might consider that they would be demonstrably worse off if the forces Kissinger worked to keep at bay had prevailed.

Before Henry Kissinger, there were walls in the world - just as there are now. The difference was those walls - by-and-large - were designed to keep people _in_. A very subtle but meaningful difference. The people who built _those walls_ wanted you inside with them. That was their dream - and they were quite frank about it. Just something to ponder.

This was later adapted into Club Caribe for Q-Link. I regard it as deeply unfair that only those of us born in a brief window of history got to experience the pure magic this represented at the time. It lit up areas of the imagination like nothing before or since.

I think it's just the after-effects of the layoffs working their way through the system. If you want to read something that makes you feel better, I'll give you a link... But more than that, I'll explain the meaning behind it that you might not pick up on unless you've worked around the press/PR industry.

The link: https://www.businessinsider.com/airbnb-boss-laid-off-staff-p...

The deeper story: Business Insider does not write these stories themselves. They just take articles basically "pre-written" by corporate PR/press flaks and reprint them... Maybe, maybe, _maybe_ they might reach out for a "pushback/response" quote and add "x,y,z refused to comment for this story" if they don't get a response within a couple hours. Or they might spend 5 minutes fact-checking something - but probably not: if it's a source they "trust" who gives them articles that make their life easier by feeding them stories people click on, why bite the hand that feeds?

So what? Well, this story was written by _AirBnB_, most likely at the behest of Chesky either directly or indirectly. And the narrative essentially reduces to "Brian Chesky cares about the people he laid off". Why would he pay people to create that narrative? I won't lead you all the way there, but suffice to say it's good sign.

I'm up to like a whole two minutes now. I'm done after this, but here's some more pretty direct quotes:

"French KFOR troops refused to come to the assistance of the Serb residents of Svinjare, even though their main base is located just a few hundred meters from that village. The entire village of Svinjare—all 137 homes—were burned to the ground within viewing distance of the main French KFOR base."

"In the large town of Kosovo Polje, only a few UNMIK police and no KFOR personnel came to the assistance of the besieged Serbs, leaving a handful of local KPS officers to protect more than one hundred Serb families scattered around the city. One Serb was beaten to death, and at least one hundred Serb homes were burned, as was the main post office, the Serbian school, and the Serbian hospital."

link: https://www.hrw.org/reports/2004/kosovo0704/6.htm

It goes on and on and on. For anyone who knows much about the region, this is pretty close to "common knowledge". But you won't hear much about it in the Western Media - which circles back up to my original point that "Maybe the Western media has been telling us the easy/policy-confirming story instead of the real but messy one".

Another 20 seconds using Google yields from HRW:

"In others areas, local KFOR units have been unable or unwilling to intervene to prevent displacement or destruction of property"

https://www.hrw.org/reports/1999/kosov2/

"Between the arrival of the Kosovo Force (KFOR) in June 1999 and the 2004 unrest in Kosovo, more than 140 holy sites were destroyed, about half of the historical ones from the 14th and 15th centuries"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_Serbian_herit...

Among other things, this is just what's findable in 40 seconds on Wikipedia.

There was a lot of borderline propaganda on US news media during the war in the 90s that a lot of people swallowed whole without thinking about it too much: "Serbs are bad. Everything they do is bad. Albanians and Croats are just simple innocent victims." (To the point that even the reporter doing most of the coverage at CNN was Albanian and no one thought that was a conflict of interest).

The reality is, of course, a lot messier and more unpleasant: The region is filled with people who hate each other and tend to massacre each other along ethnic lines whenever one group gets the upper hand over the others. There's a reason every World War starts there. So NATO stepped in and basically said to Serbia "If there are non-Serbs in _your_ borders, they may form breakaway republics and you must let them secede. However, in Kosovo (your former state) Serbs may not do the same thing." Serbs were basically ethnically cleansed out of Kosovo under the "protection" of NATO Kfor. There are multiple accounts of NATO forces standing a few feet away and watching as Albanians burn and loot Serbian Orthodox churches and villages.

I'm not sure what "the way out" of this is, but I think US/NATO has a responsibility to treat all the sides equally, which they don't exactly have a great track record of doing.

Or like... if the actual _company_ that claims it "needs that worker from outside the U.S. so so so much" actually took the risk on instead of foisting it on the poor employee (and by extension, the entire labor market). My 2-step process for fixing the H1-B system.

1. H1Bs are _auctioned_ instead of raffled. You really need that H1B? Prove it - pay for it. 2. Sponsoring companies are responsible for cost of living for that employee for the entire duration of their H1B. That obligation can be transferred to another company.

3. (Bonus) After reaching a certain threshold of "taxes paid to the U.S." (maybe 300k or something) H1B holders _automatically_ get their green cards. No questions asked. If you can take that much of their money, they can be citizens.

They basically ran one of the most beloved coaches in NCAA football - Jim Tressel at Ohio State - out of town. The reason? Because while these ghouls were profiting off of his players' NIL to the tune of millions per year, a couple of them had the gall to take a couple hundred bucks for themselves - and Tressel didn't do enough to "turn them in" proactively.

"even if" you can change the program (and like some other comments indicated, I'm fairly certain that's not how linear memory in WASM works), WASM still runs on a "capability model": It has access to only certain file handles, sockets, etc. that are provided declaratively.

I was once a huge detractor and naysayer of WASM, but now I'll readily admit that this is the way security "always should have been done".

There really needs to be some option you can choose that's like "I don't want to cheat on my taxes like a billionaire and pay 3 percent, but I also don't want to spend 2 weeks of my life scrambling to recover documents from 20 different banks and past employers so I can pay a normal rate instead of 70 percent".

This is the inexorable mean to which heavy government regulation inexorably regresses: The fantasy that large evildoers will lose some of their ill-gotten gains (for the IRS, billionaires privatizing gains and socializing losses... for the FTC, Pepsi being forced to disclose product placement) faces the brick wall of lawyers and lobbyists. So they aim at "softer targets": hassling middle class tax payers and businesses who don't have those lawyers and lobbyists.

"That was a real pretty dance, that dance they just did," said Hazel.

"Huh" said George.

"That dance-it was nice," said Hazel.

"Yup, " said George. He tried to think a little about the ballerinas. They weren't really very good-no better than anybody else would have been, anyway. They were burdened with sashweights and bags of birdshot, and their faces were masked, so that no one, seeing a free and graceful gesture or a pretty face, would feel like something the cat drug in. George was toying with the vague notion that maybe dancers shouldn't be handicapped. But he didn't get very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts .

I heard something on a podcast a week ago that blew my mind: tribesmen who come from cultures without a word for "blue" cannot distinguish _the actual color blue_ when shown a series of swatches of different colors (blue, red, green, etc.). The author was using it to point out how in Homeric poetry we have references like "wine-dark sea". The way our culture encodes information seems to go as deep as even our _basic perceptions_ which is just wild to think about. Temba, his arms wide.

I don't understand all these comments coming out of the woodwork like "oh, no - one day they may raise prices and try to be the bad guys". I don't plan on using fly personally, but I don't understand how you could look at another provider entering the market and parse that as a "bad thing".

Sound and practical advice from a fellow grizzled veteran that I will put to work my next go-round. Thank you, sir.

Nielsen/Norman. No other resource quoted here comes even close to distilling important first principles and citing research to back it up.

Bonus Round: "100 things" series by Dr. Weinschenk and coglode.com maybe after you finish N/N.

But I can have my cake and eat it, too! I'll find the one who is stupid enough to do these things, but smart enough to build my industry-disrupting product!

"The problem is, we're not hiring people to build to a spec. We want to assess your decisions and ability to go from a basic problem to a first implementation"

You could have told the candidate that, then. That would have been some useful information to have for the hours the candidate put into their submission. Or like "hey, we're going to just skim over this with a subjective list of check boxes".

I have enough experience that I probably would have smelled this before I got that deep into the process and noped out, but for the hopeful mid-level/new-senior devs this sounds pretty demoralizing.

It's a little worse than that even - in that example, I think the feds are just trying to get him to repeat something _he said_.

The way it works, is they meet with you alone: You say "A, B, C". They take some notes and write down "D, E, F" because it's what they want to hear or what they wish you said. A few weeks later, they present you with a written statement to sign that says "D, E, F". You protest "but I didn't say that, I said A, B, C!" And then they threaten you: either sign the statement or we charge you with lying to a Federal Agent (a felony).

According to my Father in-law (an attorney with decades of experience), it happens way more than anyone would like to admit.

Recent case in point: Walt Nauta, who got charged along with Trump. Had he just kept his mouth shut, he probably wouldn't have been charged, but they got him dead-to-rights saying stuff they're pretty sure they can prove he was lying about. And this is it "working the way it should".

The darker version is a Federal Agent says you told him something you didn't even say because it helps the case he's building. He asks you to repeat it on record and when you balk, he threatens you with a felony for "lying to a federal agent".

Don't ever do it, even if it's an investigation you're sympathetic to. If _your_ lawyer is there taking notes, they know there's less shenanigans they can pull.

Workers communicating and coordinating with each other for their own safety, well-being, and ability to retain some of the vast wealth they create for their employers benefits their employers just as much as them. How do you like having a weekend? Or not having your 9-year-old child work in a dangerous mine? Everyone benefits from that.

I hope one of the "secret spots" is the Quarterdeck.

There is _one_ thing that can allow "two machines in the same room to talk to each other without sending a request to a server farm in Virginia". It does require the _first_ request to populate the app: Web Bluetooth. Unfortunately it's only implemented in Chrome,but it does work.

I hate this industry so much. I know what a trie is, but having it dangled over my head by some smarmy git like this: Just the thought of it fills me with so much sadness. These "Junior year computer science problems" just make me so angry even reading about them. I'll start interviewing in a year or so, it just fills me with despair knowing this is what I'll face when I do.