wtracy

Online shopping has decimated brick-and-mortar retail over the last decade.

The Internet had a large influence on the 2016 election in the USA, particularly in getting Trump the Republican presidential nomination.

Misinformation about COVID spread across various forums potentially caused thousands of deaths across the USA and Europe in 2020.

Facebook had a key role in the 2022 genocide of the Rohingya people in Myanmar.

How much more real do you want?

Interesting. The GOP has such a track record of being anti-regulation/pro-business that I find this conclusion counter-intuitive. When was the last time the GOP fought to ban automation?

Although, then again, I could absolutely see some members of that party railing against AI in public, then quietly killing all attempts to regulate it. The first analogy that comes to mind is the way the GOP comes out against off-shoring in public but rarely does anything about it.

> Just to be clear, I'm not a Bezos fan, and I think anyone who is fine with having accumulated that much wealth, should perhaps think a bit harder about, things, to say the least.

I think it's always useful to treat a person's general intelligence, skill in a particular field, and personal ethics as orthogonal properties.

Jekca dabbles with this idea. They sell Lego-like parts that lock together with a tiny wrench:

https://www.jekca.us/

At one point they sold a set around building toddler-sized furniture that could be disassembled and repurposed as the kids grow up. Now it looks like the closest thing they offer is desk organizers (which is still cool).

(EDIT: I just realized that parent already touched on some of this.)

On the flip side, trailers spend more time parked at warehouses where they can charge leisurely.

Eliminating the need for fast charging could extend battery life or even allow for the use of cheaper battery technologies. Maybe we'll even see a future where the tractor draws most of its power from the trailer.

Then there's the other things you could do with a trailer that has always-on power. Climate control and realtime GPS tracking (and other telemetry) come to mind.

In the USA, sending a wire transfer is usually $15-$20, and some banks charge $20 to receive a wire transfer.

Also those borrowers were receiving inflationary Anchor tokens as rewards. When the value of Anchor would spike high enough, borrowers were actually paying negative interest rates.

Anchor did a decent job of obfuscating the nature of the scheme.

That's why DAI isn't really an algorithmic stable coin. Overcollateralized stable coins really belong in their own category.

That's not too say that DAI is safe, but any sort of algorithmic stable coin faces massive systemic risks unique to their design.

There's one cutely named Synthetix. If you look into the rabbit hole of "algorithmic stable coins", many of them use the same mechanism.

What made Terra interesting to me is that Luna is usable for paying gas costs. All equivalent systems that I've seen have a backing currency that has no uses other than minting synthetic assets or pure speculating.

Sure the donation isn't taxed, but why wouldn't the original (fraudulent) sale be taxed?

Selling an item at auction and buying it yourself isn't exactly a charitable contribution.

> I also find it useful as a low-fee way to transfer assets between exchanges, because it's one of the most widely supported coins across exchanges.

Are you looking at a different set of exchanges than I am? Neither Blockfi, Coinbase, nor Celsius support Doge.

- you use the auction house hack to inflate the value of the painting from $1_000_000 USD to $20_000_000 USD buy buying it from yourself

Isn't that a realization event right there?

Obviously, the described scheme could still work if you sold one painting to yourself, and then donated N paintings based on that valuation.

From what I hear through the grapevine, the most successful 20% projects are contributions to existing products.

Both Google and Valve use stack ranking for performance reviews, which is a pretty brutal system.

So the picture I get of Valve is that yes, you can pick whatever you want to work on, but choosing poorly will bite you in the ass.

I've never ever heard of that actually becoming a requirement.

What happens is that some managers really don't buy into the 20% concept, and don't provide time for it. Employees in those teams determined to do it anyway end up doing 120%.

There is absolutely no requirement at Google to put in time on a 20% project.

That said, what happens in practice is that 20% projects are the way that Google engineers are able to move across teams: You pick a team you want to join. You do something for that team as your 20% project with the goal of getting that manager to request your transfer to their team.

So if you're desperate to get off your team without quitting Google, you could get backed into committing 120%.

I would never try to judge a work environment by the recruiters (unless the recruiters are unusually bad, which could suggest a toxic management culture). If at all possible, talk to actual engineers.

My two cents on Google and Amazon: Both companies are large enough that making blanket statements about company culture is a dangerous game. What you need to do is find out which silo you would be working in, and try to figure out what the culture is like in that silo.

One thing you can grill the recruiters about is what the employee review process looks like. Both Google and Amazon use stack ranking, which is about the most brutal system there is. At Google, feedback from fellow engineers factors heavily into your performance reviews. Amazon seems to be more focused on measurable performance goals and demonstrable contributions to the company's bottom line.

I think minerjoe is trying to emphasize that fossil has all the features of GitHub included in the VCS itself, eliminating the need for any of the tools you listed above.

I haven't followed Fossil, so hearing that it includes things like a wiki is news to me.

Soaking as someone who is completely unfamiliar with Pijul, the explanation on this page is pretty lackluster.

"It is based on changes rather than snapshots"

Well, every VCS I'm familiar with is based on changes/deltas. I assume that these terms have specific meanings here that I'm not familiar with, but it manages to sound like the author has never heard of git or Mercurial.

This is more a limitation of smartphone hardware than of Android. In most phones, calls are entirely handled by the baseband processor, and the ARM chip never sees any of the audio data.

Android doesn't expose it because the hardware doesn't expose it to the OS in the first place.

What is a handheld device that can make phone calls that you recommend instead?

The author seems to use the word "workstation" specifically to refer to machines running a proprietary Unix variant, usually using a specialty (non-x86) CPU architecture.

What you're describing are workstation-class PC-compatibles, not workstations (as the author defines the term).

What the author is really talking about is the death of systems where the hardware (sometimes all the way down to the CPU architecture) and the OS are produced by the same organization as a single, integrated solution targeted at a specific vertical.

That seems to more or less already exist: https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/raspberry-pi-keyboard

Ok, how about the number that are actually production ready?

Django CMS looks nice from what I've seen, I'll give you that.

I hadn't encountered satchmo before. Their website seems to be down now, which is not encouraging.

> Those satisfied the MVP in an afternoon criterion for a developer already familiar with them.

Which is completely missing the point. I got WordPress up in under an hour on my first attempt. How many Python solutions can claim that kind of learning curve?

I hadn't encountered saleor.io, thanks.

Oscar, from what I've seen, is very difficult to get started with. The code and documentation are rather hostile to newcomers. I was left with the impression that the documentation is designed to funnel you into associated consulting services, rather than help you get started on your own. I would love to be wrong about that.

None if the other e-commerce solutions on Django packages seem to have a sizeable developer community around them. I would be hesitant to use them for anything business critical, unless I had the resources to maintain everything in house.

Facebook's codebase is overwhelmingly written in PHP.

If the F in FAANG doesn't qualify, then I don't know what does.

> what's the argument for using it instead of another mature dynamic language like Ruby or Python?

A massive body of existing code that you can leverage.

I keep putting off picking up PHP, but when you look at the number of off-the-shelf easily-extensible solutions for CMSs, CRMs, and e-commerce platforms, there's no contest. PHP wins.

If anyone can point me at a Python e-commerce solution that will let you deliver an MVP in an afternoon, and your first original feature within a week, that would make my month.

Since so many posters can't seem to wrap their heads around what banana_giraffe is saying, let me try to put it in terms you can all understand:

Imagine you go to a cocktail party, tell someone that you're a software developer, and they immediately tell you that you should "do blockchain".

The next morning, you talk to your neighbor on the way out, mention that you work for a tech company, and they say "You should try this Rails thing!" "You mean Ruby on Rails?" "Oh, you've heard of it?"

Now imagine having variations of this conversation every single day, only it's about the intimate details of your personal life.

You wouldn't give career advice to a fellow developer without at least taking a moment to understand where they are in their career, or what their specialization is. Good advice for a junior developer writing WordPress plugins is not good advice for a mid-career embedded systems engineer, which is not good advice for a senior machine learning specialist.

Don't give advice to strangers about chronic medical conditions without first taking a few minutes to learn about their situation. If you're not comfortable asking about how long they've had the condition and what remedies they've already tried, then you're in no position to offer advice. It should go without saying that if the person doesn't want to discuss the details of their condition, then they don't want advice.

Context matters, people.

> We say deaf & hard-of-hearing please, not hearing-impaired.

Whoops, my apologies.

> Flashes / vibration are common alerts yes.

A quick search reveals that there's a mishmash of different ways to use a phone's flash for notifications. Are there any equivalent options for desktop/laptop systems?

In any case, thanks for taking the time to engage with me.

I'm going to take this as an excuse to ask some questions about how the hearing impaired use video chat:

How much does the video component help? I'd assume that most modern video chat solutions are adequate for sign language (but you know what they say about assumptions!). I've heard that reading lips over video is difficult. Is this a case where it's possible to read maybe half of what people say, or is it just impossible to read anything?

What happens when a deaf person receives an unexpected call/message when they're not looking at their PC or handheld? Is vibration from a mobile device usually enough? Are there any visual systems for a desktop to signal the user at a distance? (I'm thinking of something like the flashing light alarm clocks.)

Is communication via sign language over video chat feasible with a mobile device? I honestly don't know how much can be communicated with only one hand free. If one hand isn't enough, is propping the device up on a stable surface enough to be able to communicate this way? (Common sense says that at this point everyone would just be texting, but sometimes you just need that human connection.)

I don't have any practical need for any of these answers. It's just something I've been curious about for a while.

It's not entirely true that regulators haven't plushed back: in the USA, there's a minimum amount of cream required before the vendor can call the product "ice cream".

The products in that category that have been puffed up with air (and don't meet this minimum) get sold as "dairy desserts".

(I don't work on the food industry, so I won't be shocked if I got details wrong.)