5,268 karma · joined June 18, 2013
Suddenly all of the doc comments and Slack threads become meaningless and are swept aside in favor of the consensus that a few people came to face-to-face. Remote employees will never be as politically effective as the employees in the hallway.
I'm starting to think that all this AI stuff has finally pushed the ads-based Internet past its tipping point.
I feel I could be motivated to work on a walled garden with moderation paid for by subscription fees. What would it be worth to you to have an entirely new online experience free of all the enshittification of the past 15 years?
Personally, I pay for Kagi just to have a small taste of what that could be like. But what if not just the search engine, but also all the sites be funded entirely by a subscription fee paid to the service profider? What if privacy could be a foremost feature of that world? What if advertising and astroturfing were strictly forbidden, and human authors would have to be vetted by other humans to be allowed a place in this world? "This content is Certified ads- and AI-Free(tm)."
I really don't know how well something like that would turn out in 2024, but I feel I wouldn't be alone in wanting to give it a try.
Where I live some of the locals treat a newly-built roundabout like the Daytona Speedway. It's almost as if their mentality is that you must NOT slow down, and they won't hesitate to express their displeasure at you if you happen to be "in their way" going the 15mph speed limit through the roundabout.
I can't help but think about this story every time I hear someone talk about metal straws.
https://www.today.com/health/health/metal-straw-punctures-th...
Okay, great. So which employees were held personally liable for these two breeches? I got "The Letter" telling me I was one of the victims for both of them.
https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/compliance-enfor...
A doctor I recently visited whipped out his iPhone and asked if I was okay with him recording our conversation so that some fly-by-night rando AI company could vacuum up our private conversation and spit out some LLM-generated summary of our visit. "Not to worry," he insisted, "they're HIPAA compliant!"
I probably should have walked out of the office right then and there, but instead I simply told him no, not under any circumstances may he record our private conversation and send it off to some third party over the Internet. He seemed a bit taken aback because I guess I am the only patient he's had push back on it. He tried saying that the service "really helped him" or something like that. It seemed like he was trying to make me feel bad for "making his job harder."
I simply replied that HIPAA compliance didn't prevent the last 5 or 6 letters I've received from both hospitals and insurance companies about "cybersecurity events" leading to the compromise of my PII. And not just any PII, mind you. It was my medical information, supposedly "protected" by HIPAA. These were major insurance companies and hospitals. And you want me to believe that some fly-by-night AI startup is going to somehow be a safe place for a goddamned fscking full audio recording of our private visit, just because they claim to be HIPAA compliant? Are you kidding me?
I've made it a point to start writing my representatives in government about these issues. They need to wake up and start doing something meaningful to protect the people who are being bamboozled by all the yahoos who play fast-and-loose with their privacy, especially medical PII.
I mean, there are no surprise post-ride fees or anything. They're quoting you what the actual price is, and they're free to quote whatever they want for whatever reasons they want. Nobody's forcing you to agree to it. There's nothing stopping you from getting a competitive quote from Lyft by simply switching apps on the phone. Or by calling a cab company. Also there's nothing that keeps you from choosing to wait for a bus.
*Edit: Per Uber's help page there are exceptions to the up-front price quote actually being charged, but they are exceptions. My basic point that it's still a free market stands. "The upfront price you’re shown may change due to a number of circumstances, which may include adding stops, updating your destination, significant changes to the route or duration of the trip, or you pass through a toll that was not factored into your upfront price. In addition, you may incur wait time fees for the time you take to get to the car at the pickup or multi-stop fees for time spent at an on-trip stop."
After I left the first company they provided zero maintenance support for the major upstream feature, and I won't maintain it on an individual basis because life moves far too quickly for that. Occasionally I'll happen to run across exasperated posts along the lines of, "Help this is broken for me! Why is my patch being ignored? Is this even maintained any more??"
Chances are you only care because the company you work for wants it done so they can make some money off a product they're building with it. Half an hour dealing with some random patch and/or bug report for an upstream thing I did 10 years ago is half an hour less I have to spend with my daughter before she leaves for college. Nope, fuck you and your bug report.
No, you can't even pay me to fix it. I have a job, and it's already taking more of my limited time on this earth than I want it to take. The email address I used to submit those patches was deactivated when I left that company, and I ain't handing out my current one.
For any minor contributions I made I had to convince the powers that be that there was no real IP or competitive value in maintaining the patch ourselves, and they after much hand-wringing and delay they finally let me push a few small patches up to the maintainers. In hindsight that ended up being more trouble than it was worth because I wouldn't have been the one needing to maintain that patch in the long run. I should have just submitted it to the company-internal repo and let the next guy deal with maintaining that patch.
In spite of all that, my contributions are still there. They still provide tons of value to both individuals and to companies that mooch off of them. Somehow at some point someone somewhere steps up after enough time has passed to review and merge a patch or fix a bug. Or the bug report just withers and dies, and the world keeps turning.
If you're entry-level and will put up with anything just to get Amazon on your resume.
But note that Apple is on a similar glide path as Amazon with respect to return-to-office.
While Go and Rust aren't necessarily magic pixie-dust that can account for all types of security vulnerabilities, if I'm going to be faced with the possibility of some project being abandoned at some point for the next new shiny thing that everyone would rather work on, I'd at least like to give it a fighting chance of remaining secure for some time after abandonment without any updates. Ideally it would be a Rust userspace media management package running on Debian Stable getting unattended upgrades every night.
Since nothing like that exists I've recently decided to give CoreELEC/Kodi a try on an ODROID-N2+, albeit disconnected from any network. I was surprised at how seamless and integrated everything was.
The remote control for my television "just worked" with it out of the box thanks to HDMI CEC support. Arrow buttons, play/pause, back, etc. all did just what I expected them to do. It's a marked improvement from the last time I built a custom media box, which I had running MythTV on Gentoo, when I needed to jump through hoops to set up an IR blaster. And you can't argue with a 12v/2a power supply.
For now I'm keeping it off my home network and am "sneaker-netting" content on a USB drive between my trusted devices and the ODROID. When I get tired of doing that I might add some firewall rules to my router to only allow it to talk to a locked-down VM doing nothing but hosting a read-only file share. But some day I hope to look forward to building a similar form-factor box that has all the media gadgets and gizmos with a Rust userspace that respects my privacy and auto-updated Debian Stable so I can actually connect it to the Internet.
I used to obsess over megapixel count, portrait mode, FPS, lighting, and so forth, because I used to think that these amazing images would be priceless in the future. Well, the future came and went, and to me they actually ended up being worthless.
At one time I cared about other people on the Internet seeing pictures of me and my friends and family doing things and being places. Now I don't want anyone on the Internet seeing pictures like that. I especially don't want bots to scrape the photos to build a dossier on my activities that data brokers can add to my profile that they then turn around and sell to whoever's buying.
So these days I don't ever bother even taking photos of anything any more. Instead what I do is try to be 100% "in the moment." I try to notice the small details, feel the emotions, immerse myself in the experience. I look for the things that make an impression. I find that a camera will always -- I mean, always -- detract from that.
I suppose that's my way of saying that there hasn't been a camera feature for a phone that I've cared about for many years now. For me the 2017 Pixel 2 was the point where phone camera technology got "good enough" for anything I ever wanted to use it for. Which, these days, is almost nothing.
Anecdotally, at my current company nearly everyone I know who left did so within a few months of hitting the 4-year cliff on their signing equity. I've left 3 companies in my career primarily because the next company doubled my comp. I've only left 1 company for reasons other than pay.
I can immediately think of half a dozen ways this would be abused.
The clique of brats in their daddies' Teslas at Sammamish High School bully the unpopular kid.
Black guy who drives through predominately white neighborhoods in the deep south.
Prius with a Harris/Walz bumper sticker in eastern Idaho.
Need I go on?
I do agree with the notion that company culture trickles down from the CEO over time. So that suggests that company culture can shift as CEOs come and go. Another factor that can impact culture include market pressure. I can say with some confidence that the relentless squeeze that shareholders put on operating costs undeniably has a direct impact on practices and policies that govern the quality of the average employee's experience at work.
After I picked my jaw up off the floor I realized I simply lacked the scruples I'd need to be "one of them." I also started looking into every legal protection I had available to me in my jurisdiction.
I know not every manager is like that. I'd like to think I wasn't. But there are enough of them that think that way that legal protections often need to be there.
I might start paying for streaming movies if services would fully buffer an artifact-free copy of the movie on my media player before starting to play the content. I don't think they'd do that though even if I had infinite bandwidth to my house. To save bandwidth and storage costs on their end they're going to continue to enshittify the streams to whatever generally-tolerable trickle people won't cancel a subscription over.
My Zoom calls would be the same. 75% of the people in Zoom calls keep their camera off anyway and hardly ever say anything, so the extra bandwidth wouldn't matter for work.
I generally will continue to avoid any Internet of Shit devices or privacy-ravishing Cloud services, so having extra bandwidth wouldn't impact my propensity to use any of that stuff.
I don't know. I guess I'm not creative enough or prone to use Cloud anything to imagine how my life would get better with 1000x more bandwidth. Maybe some startup would come up with something that would be the next "iPhone moment."
I don't have a lot of time to watch films these days, so when I do I always opt for a physical disc to make sure I actually enjoy the experience. In addition I've noticed that it often costs $20 to "rent" a new release via streaming and $30 to buy an actual disc, so it doesn't make any financial sense to me at all to "rent" a crap streaming experience for 2/3 of the cost of buying a high-quality copy of the film.
But now there's another problem. I've noticed that many films being released today are streaming-only. One I looked at last week could be "rented" from a streaming service for $20, "bought" from said streaming service for $30, or bought on physical media in JULY 2025. That's right, an entire year from now.
In years past I've frequently made it a habit to head down to the local Target in the late afternoon to see what new releases they have in the electronics department. However the last time I went there the Blu-ray section had been completely removed. No doubt because studios are no longer releasing new films on Blu-ray until a motherfscking YEAR after they make it available on streaming. When I asked an associate where the films were he apologetically stammered, "Uh, yeah, sorry, we're, uh, turning down our film section. There are a few stragglers left at the end of the aisle over there."
Now there is no way for me to legally get a new release film that I can tolerate watching within a reasonable amount of time. I would garner that it's primarily an artifact (no pun intended) of the current generation having grown up with crap streaming videos, and so they are adapted to it and don't have expectations for quality like those of us from the DVD and Blu-ray generation have.
I suppose this is another way it goes to show that knowing how bad most things are and precisely how they're bad is more a curse than a blessing. As I walked out of Target empty-handed I admit I did have a feeling somewhat like wanting the Earth to be steered into the sun.
And then I jumped on VPN and pirated the film I wanted to watch.
When researching how I might be able to do something more surgical I ran across this post by someone who did it with their Tacoma:
https://www.tacomaworld.com/threads/simpler-solution-for-dis...
Reading this HN post on the Chevy Volt it's starting to look to me like the general approach of installing a 50ohm "silencing antenna" could end up working for a lot of different cars out there. I'll certainly be giving it a try on my GR Corolla now so I can get the microphone back while still keeping the DCM disabled.
Ten lines per day?? Over my 20-year career in Big Tech I figure I've averaged about 10 lines of shipping code per week. I've been working in a domain-specific field and have shipped several kernel features. These days I'll sometimes go an entire quarter without writing a single line of code.
Not all of us went down the "Java code monkey" career path.