techsupporter

I think you mean UF---

(Does anyone remember Geek Code? Does anyone else still have their Geek Code .sig file?)

I still have my "lifetime" User Friendly membership card signed by Illiad and "Evil Geniuses in a Nutshell, a User Friendly Guide to World Domination" from O'Reilly. I wish I had found a copy of the first UF compilation book, and that my copy of "Ten Years of UserFriendly.org" hadn't been destroyed in a move.

For those of us who have been doing this for a very long time, User Friendly was the salve to the dry business side of Dilbert. Think the xkcd tech support cheat sheet (https://xkcd.com/627/) but with far more snark and characters.

> it denies the recipient the chance to read the message and tactfully choose to ignore it for some time.

This is exactly why I don't like it, I don't get the chance to prioritize work. Just like the examples in the link, if someone replies with just "hi," I will put it at the bottom of the request pile because I have 19 other things to do. All of those things are known quantities, this "hi" isn't.

I'm sure it's confirmation bias but it feels to me that the times of late when I accidentally or, out of a thought that I should be more nice to people, break pattern and reply, I always get sucked into a vortex of fail.

> Thieves used to break into (relatively unsecured) travel agencies, steal the blank paper tickets, and resell them at astronomical markup, with the agency "on the hook" for paying the maximum value of the tickets stolen.

As I recall, the room security for the ticket printer was a requirement of our sponsoring travel agency and our insurance company. I had to meet with a representative of our insurance company, a person from The Hartford who was dressed identically to an IBM salesperson of old, for them to inspect the arrangements. According to my boss, who was in the meetings to get set up, we were just barely a big enough company that our owner (the company was private at the time) didn't have to sign a personal guarantee for something like $3 million worth of potential ticket losses.

Of course, us eggheads in the IT department didn't fully know any of this until the stupid printer blew up.

Oh and thank you for the links. I did kind of wonder where those incredibly cheap but shady looking travel deals in the classifieds came from...

> one carrier always has the best rates for my city, middlemen rarely/never cost less

Couple of things: First, the post is from 2014 which was still during the rise of online travel agents like Expedia and Orbitz and Travelocity and all of their kin. There was a lot of money sloshing around in those companies to try to give "exclusive discounts" to customers so that people would become accustomed to using the online travel agent instead of booking direct. Bundled travel packages are still very much a part of this and the spiff from a hotel being included can be used to buy down the cost of your ticket so the package looks cheaper.

Second, if you are in a city where one carrier is in a position to dominate the rates for your area, an online travel agent isn't going to help you much and the carriers to your area know this so there's little incentive to try to slash prices to compete. But related to this is that a lot of people don't know that, so they still go to the sites they see advertised on TV or elsewhere and plug in a starting point, a destination, some dates, then sort "lowest to highest" and pick the smallest number next to the $ sign.

> When you buy a flight or a journey, you are actually buying a ticket. This used to be a paper ticket, but now it's electronic. But the actual process is the same as before, it's just an electronic implementation of the paper. The ticket is your proof to the airline that you paid an organisation it trusts for the flight. The airline will only distribute its unique ticket paper to travel agents it trusts.

Back a very long time ago, I worked for a company that had a lot of traveling employees. We were our own travel agent and had on-site all of the things a retail travel agent (at the time) had. As a junior sysadmin, I was responsible for the computer parts, specifically getting the ticket printing machine placed in a secure room--TWO keys and a reinforced door and door frame--and working with our telco vendor to get the dedicated circuit connected to the nearest Sabre Global Distribution System hub.

One day, the ticket printing machine experienced a fault and ran a whole stack of ticket paper through at high speed, shredding all of the blank ticket stock we had. Though it didn't look like it at the time, this wound up being an absolute nightmare. We could only get a certain amount of ticket stock at a time (since there were few digital controls, if I took a blank ticket and typed my own details onto it, free flight!...until someone matched up the audit number). We couldn't just ring up our sponsoring corporate travel agency and ask for more ticket stock because they had the same limitations on themselves.

I spent all weekend picking all of the pieces out of the machine and taping them back together to get the audit numbers off of enough (I think 90%) of the destroyed ticket stock, along with pictures of the shredded pile and of the inside of and nearby the machine. The pictures were developed at a K-Mart and the whole works sent off via FedEx first-AM overnight (the most expensive parcel I'd ever shipped, $135 at the time) to an address somewhere in Colorado. Three hours after delivery, I had a phone call saying our request for replacement ticket stock was granted and they sent a stack of ticket stock via hand-delivered courier who I had to meet at the nearby airport.

Fortunately we didn't need to issue any tickets for our employees to travel that weekend.

> When you validated your identity in person with CBP, this was not that.

This isn't snarking at you directly, just all I'm really hearing is that the government will happily mix whatever it knows about me for its own purposes but when it comes to making things easier for me (wherein they've literally seen me in person and looked over a stack of my identifying documents), no way that's "violating my privacy."

If we are going to have an all-seeing panopticon can't it at least be convenient?

I just wonder what kind of extra hoops we'll have to go through to use an existing login.gov account with the IRS. I read in some article somewhere that the IRS didn't use login.gov because it isn't "as verified" or some kind of thing as the IRS needs.

Yet the reason I have a login.gov account is for my NEXUS enrollment which means I've been fingerprinted, background checked, had my passport number linked, and been interviewed in person by two different governments. That seems pretty identity verified to me.

If I have to go through some other step, especially if it involves yet another biometric or interview check, that's going to be annoying.

> Today qt.io refused registering an account because they didn't like said domain.

Did their form say what wasn't liked about your domain? I'm curious because I remember a time, you may as well, when lots of account forms only accepted domains from known residential ISPs and would try to guess domains used by freemail providers.

These days, I'm curious why a group like QT would care.

Which was one of the several points raised on the discussion at the time along with the idea that it would only embolden the address speculators trying to use the waitlist. The theory was that the speculators would go to the trouble of making shell companies or "gaming" a transfer as part of a merger-and-acquisition, while so-called legitimate users would either not bother or would just go to the secondary market from the beginning.

Which is essentially what is already happening. There was a minor uproar, that seems to have died out, on the RIPE address policy working group listserv over companies and individuals signing up for multiple RIPE accounts (called LIRs) to be able to get multiple /24 allocations from the waiting list. People register multiple LIRs primarily because the cost of signing up for a RIPE account--prior to 2022, it was a 2,000EUR sign-up fee and then a prorated portion of 1,400EUR annual fee, now it is a 1,000EUR sign-up fee and 1,400EUR annual--and waiting out the two years for IPv4 addresses to be eligible for transfer is a fraction of the price a /24 can fetch on the address resale market.

Several people on the list, including someone who has made quite the sum from collecting allocations and then reselling them, were outraged that this is going on and deem it in violation of the spirit of the waiting list (that spirit being that it is supposed to give small entrants one last method of getting onto the Internet with their own /24). One of the proposed changes is to make transfers of IPv4 space received via the waiting list non-transferable retroactive to January 2021. Of course, transfers that have already happened wouldn't be reversed, since that wouldn't "be fair." Thus, all of the people who got the last "free" /22 blocks around November 2019 and who have gone on to resell those addresses (like the participant on the list who is now advocating that addresses shouldn't be allowed to be transferred) when the 24-month transfer delay expired get to keep their gains. Everyone who comes after who signed up under those rules gets the rules changed out from underneath them.

The whole system of dealing with IPv4 assignments and allocations has gotten completely out of hand. We have these large entities all acting like they are just volunteers doing a charitable thing keeping this polite ad-hoc system going, when that hasn't been true for at least a decade.

What's even more frustrating is the disparity in who can get them and how even if they are cleared for use in your country. The author here points out that New Zealand's medical system doesn't always pay for CGMs, while the Australian system does. In Ireland, the Dexcom G6 system is available but the FreeStyle Libre 2, an updated version of the FreeStyle Libre with more frequent reads and better alarms (Libre vs Libre 2), is not.

CGMs are available over-the-counter, just like finger stick machines, in a variety of countries like Canada and Ireland. But in the United States a prescription is required for any CGM even if insurance doesn't pay for it and insurance generally only pays for it once you are actively on full-time insulin treatment, so type-2 diabetics can't avail of insurance to reduce the cost of potentially not needing to go on recurring insulin by getting a handle on being pre-diabetic. (Plus many doctors won't write a CGM Rx for someone who isn't type-1 or very symptomatic type-2. This has resulted in nutritionist businesses springing up whose purpose is to turn a credit card charge into a prescription for a CGM.)

But of course different countries have different regulatory systems, we all know that. This is to say that even when you find a system and method that has worked for others in your online community, that method might not be available to you, and it causes even more stress to have the idea, right or wrong, that a useful tool is just out of your grasp. And carbohydrates help you if you dare move between countries.

> I don't care if it will mean millions of people in the insurance, hospital administration, public and private health policies will be out of jobs. Sorry I don't.

As someone who works in this industry, though for a non-profit medical practice group, we want it gone as much as the patients. It's an absolute nightmare to do anything. We have a staff of twenty people just to deal with the paperwork side of the business, and that doesn't include answering phone calls from patients. All of those people could be put to far more productive use doing anything else; half of them are people who wanted to get into medicine but not through a full-fledged medical degree and are now toiling away shuffling forms. We would love to move them to patient care assistants or anything else but we have to have them in order to get paid.

(I know for sure we would like to have them do other things and they would like to do this because our group has a role rotation program where people can rotate in and out of groups to try other things. The insurance/paperwork group has virtually no one want to rotate in and almost the entire group is on the list to rotate out for a month or two a year to do something different.)

> Also for doctors, medical schools, state medical license issuing bodies, you are gonna allow minimum 10x increase in new doctors entering your field.

I also completely agree with this. It's frustrating to deal with the regulatory issues, too. We had to move a practice office (that is, where patient care is provided) from a place we leased to an office we bought as part of a commercial condominium a few years ago. Getting that approved took months of back and forth because the rules of the licensing body didn't fully contemplate an "office condominium" like we purchased.

I'm exactly in this position, yet when I said in another thread that I was quite content with my salary that's mid-tier for Seattle (but fantastically wealthy in a lot of the rest of the country), at a company that's all but certain to be around for at least the rest of my working lifetime, doing work to enable that company to do work that I consider useful (we're a medical practice group), and had no plans to change, I got incredulous replies.

One of the things I legitimately struggle to understand about other people is the willingness to exchange an irreplaceable thing, time, for a very replaceable thing, money, and suffer while doing it when other choices exist. The "when" in that bit is very important. A lot of people do not have that choice, and I understand why they continue; there's no other option. But for people who do what we do and how we do it, why chase the brass ring for so long? You don't have to suffer at Amazon, no amount of stock options are worth it. You will never get back that night you spent working on that one last thing instead of going home to your partner or kids or friends. The marginal impact of another $5,000 when you already make $125,000 in a year is very small.

And, as a bonus, not only are you helping yourself, you're helping the rest of our industry. Since we are largely allergic to unions in this industry, the only leverage we have is if enough people finally realize that it is possible to have a good work as part of a good life.

There are hundreds, you'd have to play whack-a-mole with myriad VoIP and second- and third-tier wireline providers to get them all. And that presupposes that the accounts are even legitimate. A lot of robocalls are delivered through hacked SIP credentials.

I know people like to pick on them because they do seem to turn a blind eye to all but the most egregious spammers, but Twilio is only the source of a lot of spam calls because they are a large carrier in their own right. It's like all of the people moaning about Californians being the most common place of origin for people moving to their area; that's true, because California has the most number of people.

> Do the courts show up less for HOAs because owners sign arbitration clauses? I don't otherwise see why the courts should be less relevant to HOAs.

Sometimes arbitration clauses are the cause. More often, it's because a homeowners association is a private, non-governmental entity and the case between the property owner and the HOA is, legally, a contract dispute.

There's an often-brought-out idea that the Constitution, be it state or Federal, only binds the government and not private parties. "Twitter can censor whatever it wants but the Department of the Interior can't," that sort of thing. Governments at all levels have to follow the Constitution and are generally a lot more restricted in what they can do, and the presumption is that people have much more broad rights to push back through the courts.

But with an HOA, many of them have been set up as quasi-governmental bodies, as in they act like governments--some even have the power of condemnation and foreclosure through their position as technically holding a lien over all of the properties in the development--but they have none of the responsibilities of governments. And if a property owner sues, a court is largely limited to looking at the plain language of the contract and the instrumentalities recorded against the parcel and see if those are being followed. (Occasionally there are state laws that deem some contract provisions to be "against public policy" and unenforceable in that state's courts, but states are very reticent to do this for anything other than quick political wins, like overturning prohibitions on flag poles.)

If they are being followed, the court's ruling is "well, you signed it, tough cookies."

> Fred Meyers here in WA still doesn't support contactless payments (QFC, owned by the same company, does, however)

Some Freddy's do, at least intermittently. A few weeks ago, the one in Lake City had it enabled on their pads at the self checkout and I successfully used tap. But when I went back a week after that, tap was turned back off.

Kroger uses their smaller brands as testbeds for stuff and since QFC is somewhere in the bottom five for size-of-Kroger-operated-brands, I guess it makes sense.

> If you want good online validation for the public, you need a third party right now.

In all reality, this is fine. I have no particular problem with using facial recognition, but I want it regulated and I want recourse.

Fine, outsource it to ID.me. But the terms of service better be a page, maximum, and include the ability for me to appeal a decision that says I am not who I say I am and to use other forms of validation that may be slower or more procedural (such as presenting myself to a Post Office). I want no binding arbitration clause in the agreement, and if that means the Federal government has to indemnify ID.me, then so be it. I want it in the TOS that the data ID.me uses for this will be segregated and kept for a very limited time and that I have the right to review and correct it.

Use the third party for what they are good for but enforce suitable rights for the rest. This is doable, it just wasn't fully done here.

> We definitely have public transit here.

I suppose this light rail train I am watching go by outside my window is just a mirage or something. Same for these buses, obviously a plant.

> Open concept offices are awful.

The only people I've met who seem to like them are people who do sales for a living or the exact kind of coworkers who I would really not like to be in an open office with.

I have a really nice office in Seattle. Since I am the second most tenured person on the team, I even have a water view and am right next to the snacks. I haven't seen the inside of this office since May 2020, and probably never will again.

All of my colleagues and I have agreed that we don't see the need to go back and our employer is likely going to sell our admin building (we have several other buildings for actual patient services) and distribute some of the money to those of us who worked in that building as a bonus or as an allowance to buy equipment for home.

I've visited the open offices at friends who work for Microsoft and Google and they're just awful hives of noise. I would rather have my own door and own bathroom.

No, they "solved" that "loophole" by amending the law in the 1996 Immigration "Reform" Act to state that place of birth is used, not place of nationality.

(Just another law in the long series of laws containing the word "reform" that makes things so much worse for the groups covered by the law.)

Having dealt with ARIN, RIPE, and APNIC quite a lot over the years, this is bang on. APNIC is fairly ambivalent. ARIN expects everyone to be a formally organized entity. Only RIPE seems to truly get that an individual person could be doing something on their own behalf, probably because forming a proper limited company was such a huge paperwork endeavor in most of RIPE's service area.

ARIN really needs the concept of sponsoring LIRs, because right now everyone has to deal directly with ARIN and that means ARIN has to fit their policies to try to fit everyone. While it's technically possible to get IPv6 PI space from ARIN as an individual person end user, and it's gotten easier than in the past, it still looks really daunting to the hobbyist or small network operator.

As for LIRs handing them out like candy, I joined RIPE as an LIR and RIPE will allocate an IPv6 /29 to an LIR for the low cost of zero Euro (well, except for the membership, which is a bit spendy) and that's 524,288 /48s so no reason for me to not slap up a web page and see if I can earn back a few of the EUR I will be paying to RIPE. I'm glad people do it for the pittance we see here.

This is something that I really disagree with in our modern discourse, that people or groups of people are apparently incapable of change.

Mozilla did a thing, Mozilla got crap for it, Mozilla undid the thing and apologized. How does continuing to be publicly mad at them and ending one's use of their product inspire future people or groups to actually change?

It's the same as when people dig through old social media posts and then slag on someone in the here and now for it. "Oh, so you say you are a supporter of [thing] but what about that time in 2005 when you made an off-color joke about [thing] and left it laying around the Wayback Machine for anyone to find with barely an hour's worth of digging?!"

> These are the elected positions I vote on.

What about Port of Seattle, Seattle Public Schools, King County Council, and King Conservation District?

> but from the average Pierce County resident who's chance of admission in a given week (not age or health adjusted) of 0.000125, I think it's understandable why they may not feel like participating in all of the restrictive measures.

I know (and I don't mean that in a sarcastic way, I do agree with you), and I get it. In our practice's case, we're not taking transfers of patients who would be in the ED/ER (we don't have those facilities), we're taking patients who are in for the "long COVID" type symptoms or who need other kinds of longer-term care. I think, though I don't know for sure, that some hospitals in Pierce and Thurston are asking outfits like ours to take patients prior to the ICU getting full so those hospitals can leave a spare bed or two for the true emergency cases.

I guess what I'm saying is it feels like so many of us on the "invisible" end, from medical providers to service workers to public health officials to warehouse folks to all the rest, are expending so much effort to keep things going that to hear people complain that their wellbeing is impacted because they have to exercise behind a mask six days a week just...falls flat. And I feel guilty even typing that out because MENTAL HEALTH IS ABSOLUTELY IMPORTANT and for some people that does mean physical exercise and yes anxiety CAN result from mask wearing. But it seems like there are those who genuinely experience those symptoms, and then there are those who are hiding their petulant "I don't wanna and you can't make me nyah" behind claiming those symptoms. And the overlap between the latter group and the group of people who flatly refuse to be vaccinated so that we can all dump these masks and rules is damn near a circle.

Anyway, I think we largely agree, and I'm just tired, but not as tired as some.

I'm sure it is. In my experience, the willingness to be vaccinated is directly, if loosely, correlated with the willingness to do other COVID prevention measures, like wearing any form of face covering properly (as in, over the nose and mouth as opposed to a chin diaper) when in an enclosed setting.

Because we are a not-for-profit medical group that receives funding from the federal government, we are covered by the vaccinate-or-test requirement from CMMS. In my department, IT, we had two employees quit over it; both of them live in Pierce County. Meanwhile, all of us (so far as I know, obviously I am not privy to everyone's medical records so I am going off of what is claimed and who remains employed with us) who live inside Seattle were fully vaccinated months before the requirement took effect.

I'm also sorry if I come across as unsympathetic or uncaring. Even though I "just work with the computers," this has not been easy for me or my department, and I have seen nurses and doctors I have worked with for years and become work friends with reach and then exceed burnout and press on anyway out of a sense of duty and obligation.

So it is just a bit disheartening to read yet another thread on Hacker News where people keep insisting we'll just have to live with it and this is just how things are now and the West Coast is obviously bad because we've tried to put this godforsaken virus first of mind for stamping out. I know we're past being able to eradicate it, but to just throw up our hands and say "well, even a disposable mask with earloops is JUST TOO MUCH" makes me deeply sad.

> Puyallup, and the COVID restrictions are much more relaxed (if present at all).

Meanwhile, the medical group I work for in Seattle is being absolutely swamped by patients being transferred from overwhelmed hospital and urgent care facilities in Pierce and Thurston counties. We've had to stop doing anything but COVID-related care and the only reason we have the capacity to do that is because we don't operate an emergency room so we can't take on the worst-of-the-worst cases.

According to our daily COVID update report, we have a handful of patients who gave residence addresses--we ask for this because the county and state departments of health want it for statistics, among other reasons--inside Seattle and just a few more inside King County.

It's a very stressful time for many of us, and it isn't helped by the disparity in level of care, let's say, over COVID prevention measures even inside the region.

Because all of the "send a newsletter to a bunch of recipients" services insist on wrapping all of the links in a message into tracking URLs so that metrics can be gathered and data harvested.

The person who posted this is likely on Turing Pi's e-mail list and they simply copied-and-pasted the link they received.

One reason is because the Supreme Court held in late 2020 that unless you can prove you were actually--not theoretically--harmed by an exact instance of an entity covered under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, you do not have standing to sue.

> Held: Only a plaintiff concretely harmed by a defendant’s violation of the Fair Credit Reporting Act has Article III standing to seek damages against that private defendant in federal court.

Per the Court, this means something like you were provably denied credit on the basis of the incorrect reporting, and you either didn't have an opportunity to explain yourself or your explanation was not accepted in favor of the information from the credit reporting agency's information. This is a very, very high bar to clear and is made even more difficult by the fact that almost any agreement of substance includes a mandatory binding arbitration clause. Thus, you don't even get the chance to go to court.

(Many businesses lauded here on Hacker News have such clauses, so even the "good" entrepreneurs can't resist taking away rights to the courthouse from their users.)

More coverage and links to the decision at SCOTUSblog: https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/transunion-llc-v...

I don't mean to complain--actually, yes I do, so never mind that--but do you march into a fast food restaurant that claims to serve "the best burgers in town" and demand to have the manager issue a correction because the other place across the road also advertises the best burgers?

Or do you return a hat that reads "one size fits all" when you find a toddler whose head is too small for it?

I fail to see the need for such pedantry, at least put in such a way that seems very demeaning to the author (who, I note, does not appear to have English as their first language and so might have learned this turn of phrase by reading other advertising). If it bothers you that much, make a pull request to correct the record: https://github.com/pavlobu/deskreen