kstrauser

A lot of that is because airwaves are a finite and shared resource. Me abusing them means that you can’t legitimately use them.

Yeah, I'm sure there are some people who need to spend down their FSA or something. Withings ran the numbers and decided it was worth their return on investment, and they know way more about it than I do. However, I would not have guessed it would be enough to turn a profit.

Mine was $130.

What’s a better one? Are you thinking of something like Keybase?

Hey, it's me! I was livid when I wrote this. Some people on Mastodon questioned whether I was sure I didn't accidentally watch a streaming version instead. To get in front of that here on HN: I'm absolutely, 100% positive that I told it to play the local version stored on my NAS. I've used Plex for years, I ripped the DVD to my NAS myself, and I know how it all works. I was watching a my own household copy, on my own LAN, and Plex kept interrupting it to show me ads.

Now, it might've been a bug, and I'm a lot more forgiving of that. However, if that was a trial run to see if people complain? Aww yeah, we're going to be doing some complaining.

No, it's absolutely not a good thing. First, I trust Apple with my health data more than I trust Withings. They have many more billions to lose if it gets out that they're abusing PHI. Second, even if Apple were evil, that means Withings is charge you $100 to send your PHI to Apple. They're profiting off the evil.

There's no reasonable way to describe this as a good thing.

I replaced my deprecated Apple Watch Ultra with a Seiko 5 GMT. It has about two days of life on a single charge, and it takes me about 10 seconds to charge it each morning by winding the little knob on the side. It's pretty and has built-in Do Not Disturb mode.

I spent a decade with a smart watch. Then I took the ultimate step against enshittification. There's nothing to subscribe to on this thing, even if I wanted to, which I certainly don't.

Not relevant to the discussion at hand, but sure.

Well, crap. I really like Withings's scales. They're very nice and the results closely match medical equipment readings I've had, so in my experience they've been great for keeping track of things between checkups. Their privacy policy is (or at least was) one of the only ones I'd trust with medical data. The iOS app started to get annoying with its extra subscription features, which I couldn't care less about because I get them through other means.

But subscribing so that the scale in my bathroom, which syncs to the app in my phone, can sync to another app on that same phone? LOL, hell no. That simply will not happen. And even though it only applies to new users now, if there's not enough pushback that it loses them more business than it gains them, my official prediction is that within a year it'll cover new accounts, or new devices added to existing accounts.

I mostly like it, but it randomly changes what commands it accepts.

Last week:

Me: Hey Siri, turn off the bedroom lights. Siri: I’m sorry, I can’t change a scene. Me: Hey Siri, turn the bedroom lights off. Siri: OK!

This week:

Me: Hey Siri, turn the bedroom lights off. Siri: I’m sorry, I can only do one thing at a time. Me: Hey Siri, turn off the bedroom lights. Siri: OK!

Next week:

Me: Hey Siri —— Siri: The red zone has always been for loading and unloading of passengers. There's never stopping in a white zone.

Like, please just pick one and stick that in the integration tests. I promise I’ll learn the syntax if you choose an official one. Any official one.

Berkeley Mono ruined everything else for me. It’s so, so good.

It’s neither fine nor un-fine, just not unjust. It just is. In all arrangements involving humans, the outcome’s better if the other participants like you. We’re social animals.

While I understand and have shared that sentiment, this is a classic "is versus ought" trap. It ought to be the case that sheer technical skills can carry you. It is the case that they can't. This is generally true for just about every job in the human experience.

If nothing else, those human connections can be the difference in outcomes when you inevitably screw up. If you've invested in relationships, when you make a mistake, it's more likely someone will say "bluefirebrand means well, and I can see how their good intentions led to this outcome. Let's figure out how to fix this so it won't happen again to them or anyone else." If no one at work knows you except as the person who sits off to the side and never talks to their coworkers, the response may very well be "bluefirebrand who? Alright, let HR know we need to hire a replacement."

Again, it ought to be the case that none of that matters, and everyone is treated the same regardless of their personal network. But it is the case that this isn't how the world works, and it's not reasonable to wish it otherwise. I mean, are you as likely to help a stranger as a friend even if their needs are identical? Most people would say no.

Correction: FAANG salaries are almost always better. You get a lot more equity with startups. It’s a gamble. You’re betting a short term paycut on the company’s success.

But the main reason I’d generally work at startups anyway is because it’s more fun. When something needs to be done, you can’t contact the department that does the thing. You are that department; go figure it out!

And yes, that’s also a lot more pressure, but I wouldn’t trade it for a 9-5 desk job. (Other people absolutely would, and do. I never criticize their decision making. That’s what’s right for them. It’s just not what’s right for me.)

Bullshit. I met a lot of my favorite people in the world working in startups, people I want to stay in contact with for life because they’re good and I enjoy being around them.

There are bad and good people everywhere. I’ve seen new fewer good people at small companies than large or non-tech ones.

Yeah? We had an old Unix server that printed its logs in realtime to a dot matrix printer. How are you going to gain control of that?

Read-only is a strong control with lots of solid implementations.

That’s exactly right. There all all sorts of read-only architectures where the device can be monitored without every directly accessing it:

- The device’s control has a radio transmitter that emits its readings, but no receiver. Listen for those messages to monitor it but there’s not a physical path to reply to it.

- The device’s controller writes a database or message queue. Its code never reads from that source. Monitors listen to those messages.

And many, many similar methods with the same core concept: the item transmits its status but doesn’t have a method to receive replies. You just have to commit to using any one of those thousands of mechanisms.

Good. I’m not happy that this happened. That’s a large financial loss. I don’t like thinking about all the good, edible food thrown away instead of nourishing people. But the infosec thing that keeps me up at night is the utter lack of SCADA security. “Relax! This dam won’t collapse as long as no one guesses our public IP address!”

Lots of industrial controls haven’t been updated since they were deployed in the 90’s. “And why should they be? If it ain’t broken…” Well, because they’re freaking broken!

So I’m glad that this happened in a tangible, public way people can easily understand without it involving something much more drastic. If your family asks about this, explain that you’re glad no one blew up a gas pipeline… yet.

Ergo has that built in now. It Just Worked when I installed that server and connected with Halloy.

The voice thing always sneaks up on me as a requirement, because I never, ever personally want to use that. I'm not saying it's not a good feature, just one that doesn't occur to me. You're probably right, though.

Yeah, Halloy is "interesting", although I haven't personally run into issues yet. It just clearly not a native Mac app, which is fine, but not my ideal.

But Textual! I just stumbled across this yesterday: https://www.textualapp.com/news/a-new-chapter

TL;DR someone bought Textual and are restarting development. It's not a PE-style purchase, like a Bending Spoons / Evernote kind of thing. According to the buyers, they bought it because they're heavy users and wanted to take it over so they could resume active development. I always keep a healthy skepticism, but I'm hopeful.

Who doesn't tip the car valet? I surely do.

To be clear, I was listing examples of traditionally tipped jobs. That wasn't comprehensive.

They need to work that out internally. Anything over and above list price + taxes is a tip.

Timely! This weekend I spun up a little friends-only server on a VPS I had laying around. I used Ergo, enforced TLS, enforced authentication, and I hand-create accounts with temp passwords for my chums. For clients, I'm using Halloy on my Mac and Goguma on iOS. Their are other prettier clients, but Ergo and they all support a nice set of IRCv3. For example, they all have client history built in. Whenever I connect, the server replays all the messages I missed while offline (with a 30 day retention), no bouncer required.

Honestly, I'm trying to remember why we collectively moved away from this. I was terminally online in the 90s and the hadn't touched IRC in many years, but this is... actually quite nice.

No way. I routinely tip 20%, rounded up. If the place has a mandatory tip, I add max(0, 20-[service change]) to make up the difference between that and 20%. If it's 10%, I'll add 10% more. If it's 20%, I'll add 0. If it's 25%, I'll leave a bed Yelp review and never go back.

I've drawn a line in the sand. I'll tip (and tip well!) for traditionally tipped jobs, like waiter, bellhop, barber, barrista, bartender, etc. The hundred new things that corporations are begging for? Hell no. Absolutely not.

I will not tip at a drive-through oil change service.

I will not tip at a fast food counter.

I certainly will not tip at a convenience store.

Every single new tipping situation is a company begging me to subsidize their employees' wages instead of increasing them. Screw that. I'm not participating, and they can't make me. Those existing jobs were grandfathered in: waiters make below minimum wage on the expectation they'll make it up in tips, and that's f'ed up, but I can't change that by myself and I'm not going to stiff someone making sub-minimum to prove a point. All the others? Those cheapskate bosses can get bent. Pay more if you want to keep good help. Don't literally beg me to donate money to your employees as a charity.

They absolutely do not want their developers to mass migrate to another platform. Walk into any SF startup and you'll see 100% Mac laptops, except for the Finance guy who needs Excel on Windows, and that one dev who insists on Linux, and all those devs build webpages that work on Safari, and iOS apps before they (maybe) eventually get around to making an Android app.

Apple is highly incentivized to keep devs on Macs, even if it turned out to be a loss leader for them.

If you're using a language compiled to bytecode or interpreted, then the OS and arch don't matter a whole lot (so long as you don't have to deal with Window's weird filename conventions or other oddnesses). If you're using compiled-to-bytecode languages, there's a huge advantage in forcing your code to be cross-arch safe from day one, lest ye accidentally end up with something that can only build on the exact CPU in your devs' laptops or can only run on the flavor of WSL you're using that year.

Writing on Mx Mac and deploying on Intel Debian is a little harder in the beginning, but spares you oh, so many footguns down the road. Eventually you might want to deploy to a different OS or arch for cost or convenience reasons. That's a really bad time to find out that your project can't be made to work there without heroics.

Yeah, the details are a little different, but I think the concept's similar. Is null < 0? Uh, not sure. Is it equal to zero? No clue. Is it greater than 0? Can't tell. So, are any of those true? No way of knowing.

  SQLite-3.54 in-memory-> select NULL < 0 or NULL == 0 or NULL > 0;
  ╭──────────────────────╮
  │ NULL < 0 or NULL ... │
  ╞══════════════════════╡
  │ NULL                 │
  ╰──────────────────────╯

Hah, well, I stand corrected. And also, huge congratulations on profitability!