theneverfox

theneverfox, 1 month ago

Definitely not - the boomers are finally on the way out. The boomers have held on way past their time, and we can’t afford to let Gen X have a turn… They’re the ones who need to take a back seat - they’re nearing retirement age if they haven’t hit that point already, millennials are in our 30s and 40s

We need to support and join together with the younger generations. We might not be as young as we used to be, but we’re prime age to start taking office and organizing/enabling

theneverfox, 1 month ago

The answer is “fuck em”. If your business model requires restricting the rights of people, your business shouldn’t exist

They can still function as a staffing agency…

theneverfox, 1 month ago

It also just got crushed in a collapsing hangar? 4 years after the test flight? That doesn’t sound like a failure, it sounds like it got mothballed and forgotten

theneverfox, 1 month ago

How does that help? You can tell any computer it’s Google.com or IP 8.8.8.8. you can tell your device that the other computer is correct, and middle man yourself

Except, we have one key to rule them all, one key to bind them. There’s literally a group of people who split the root key among themselves, and scattered it across the world (when they went home). They get together ever year or two, and on a blessed air-gapped computer, unite the key to sign the top level domains again. Those domains sign intermediate domains, and down the chain they sell and sign domains.

If any of these root domains fall to evil, these brave guardians can speed walk to the nearest airport and establish a new order

(I think we actually just started installing all the root and some trusted intermediate domains on every device directly, so I’m not sure if they still bother, but it’s a better story)

The solution you’re looking for is DNSS, where we encrypt the DNS request too so they can’t see any of the url. Granted, they can still look at you destination and usually put the pieces together, but it’s still a good idea

Ultimately, packets have to get routed, all we can do is do our best to make sure no one can see enough of the picture to matter. There’s more exotic solutions that crank that up to 11, but the trade offs are pretty extreme

theneverfox, 1 month ago

I don’t think I’d pick this guy… Despite failing his goal miserably while working himself to the bone, I haven’t heard him acknowledge this reality

I’d need to hear it…denial is a hell of a drug

theneverfox, 1 month ago

Yeah, and programming skills are available to most people. Except some people will take to it like a fish and some will struggle. Also, you have to have already learned it… You don’t learn those skills without the right environment and a predisposition

Making $64k as a salesman is a very achievable goal already, if you have that talent you don’t even have to work hard

He got a job at a call center and hustled for the rest - he basically just worked two $35k jobs… Anyone in reasonable health can do that, you just have to sacrifice everything else (including your health, both mental and physical)

theneverfox, 1 month ago

That last one seems like one of those “trackless trains” China is developing. They really live in the future

theneverfox, 1 month ago

If you own a company, that’s not a job. If you are also the CEO and bring in half of the work/sales personally, that’s obviously a job. The same person could be both, we all wear many hats, but even if you choose to call yourself the owner over CEO the CEO part is the job, the owner title is not a job

Collecting rent isn’t a job. Maintenance is a job, and building is certainly a job.

If your dad is still doing maintenance, that’s work. If not, I’d say he’s retired, and renting out homes isn’t the problem here

In this context, landlord means someone whose “career” is just owning a bunch of property. Unless your dad is a developer and “built” a bunch of homes by hiring a bunch of people and taking the profits, he doesn’t deserve to be called a landlord, even if the term has been watered down

He rents out a room/house, after literally building it… That doesn’t define him in the same way, he’s not the problem and he shouldn’t be painted with the same brush

theneverfox, 1 month ago

That’s honestly the most disgusting part of it to me. The amount of money they make doing it is barely enough to insulate them from the effects of living in a worse country

If they got $250k to redirect $1m in funding to a company, I wouldn’t like it but I would understand why someone without morals would sell out like that

But it’s more like $100k over a decade at the cost of billions to the country. Half the time, they’re basically just funding their next campaign… they’re burning our society, and they don’t even come out ahead

theneverfox, 1 month ago

looks at England George Orwell might’ve gotten a bit too detailed on the world building…

theneverfox, 1 month ago

I always found it to be a real PITA… It felt like a parallel system to file permissions, which meant I had two things to configure instead of one and I never really saw the purpose. It seemed like it could be more granular than the default, but if it did anything more than that I never learned about it

Granted, I’m a dev, not an admin. I go back and configure the firewall after I shut it off because it was in my way… Eventually

theneverfox, 1 month ago

To put it another way, humans just aren’t that special. We started from the assumption that we are somehow fundamentally different

We keep finding out that all sorts of animals have language and culture, and it blows my mind that apparently, just about everything seems to have something akin to a name

theneverfox, 1 month ago

I feel like they go through cycles of “hey, we just remembered we have de-facto monopolistic power, what are we doing with that? Let’s do stuff with that” And “everyone got mad at us for anticompetitive practices again… Let’s lay low and play nice until governments stop threatening to break us up”

theneverfox, 1 month ago

I feel like it’s gotten significantly worse (on Android at least). I remember when I taught it a word or corrected often enough, it would learn I use that word frequently

Now, it keeps trying to capitalize random words and turn them into acronyms out of nowhere

It’s cool that it has rudimentary grammar checking now - it’s very hit or miss but still useful. Not worth the trade off though

theneverfox, 1 month ago

As I get older, I’ve learned it’s incredible how many things go away if you ignore them hard enough

theneverfox, 1 month ago

Wait… Can’t you just pick a version in steam?

theneverfox, 1 month ago

Short form video is genuinely pretty bad though… Most social media is too, it’s not just a new medium people are scared of, it deliberately trains people to maximize use of it

Facebook pioneered most of the (unethical) experiments that make it so bad. They experimented with what makes people use the app for longest - controversial topics, quickly decreasing the amount of “desired” content as you scroll to push you to the optimal reinforcement schedule in operant conditioning, and copious amounts of alerts to give you fomo

Video games can be bad for the same reason - they can also be built to cultivate addiction. And social media can be built without it… The difference between Reddit pre-investment (which coincidentally, I think was also related to tencent/bytedance… They have an obscene amount of money invested everywhere) and Reddit now is a good example

It’s not just people clutching pearls about the new thing or a rise in mental illness coinciding with the growth of social media - there’s a science-backed arms race between engineering more time in app and understanding/treating the effects

(That being said, I agree we millennials are starting to emotionally reject new technology - in this case there’s just solid science showing how this is being misused with bad effects)

theneverfox, 1 month ago

Like you said, that guy is more comedy than anything. I really can’t stand his videos… While I agree with most of the positions I’ve seen him take, there’s a clear bias (maybe in the name of humor… He seems like he’s going for a Jon Steward/John Oliver thing, but I just don’t find him funny)

Most of all, he seems like he’s got researchers pumping out scripts at a furious pace

I don’t think that’s a great source for this, the guy isn’t a science communicator - social issues and current events sure. This is a hot pop science issue turned cultural - you really want to hear from experts on this kind of topic, it’s such a muddied issue. They’ve been writing articles about how “social media is destroying the children” and “social media isn’t as bad as it seems” for a decade and a half.

I agree there’s a lot of confounding factors. Smart phones exploded along with social media after all, that alone was transformative

But that’s if you look at it all together, I’m not claiming that social media is the source of all our problems (I’d argue there’s a good case, but one near impossible to prove)

I’m saying social media is bad for you, particularly short form video. And by that, what I mean specifically is that it’s highly addictive, incentivices the spread of misinfo, and is a displacement activity (eats up any amount of time) that doesn’t improve mood or life satisfaction. And unlike the previous new forms of media, it was designed to be addictive by big data crunching - sensationalism isn’t new, but this was too fast and too centralized for the natural push and pull to happen

I can go into each of those aspects deeper, but I don’t think anyone is arguing this is a better way to socialize or a net good for mental health

theneverfox, 1 month ago

I got “don’t worry, it should go away by the time you’re 30”

I was 19 at the time, and it did not

theneverfox, 1 month ago

as a point of principle for me, I want to be correct, so if I’m not correct, I’d rather be corrected.

Couldn’t have said it better myself. It stings at first to be wrong, but once you get used to it all that remains is the joy of learning something

It is pretty wild how quickly endless hieroglyphs turn into barely hints.

My sorta boss and I started building this accounting system for our customer a few months out. We knew nothing about accounting. What’s the difference between a sales receipt and an invoice or payment? What’s the difference between the identical objects, customers and vendors? Wtf is a class… It was just a flag you can put on things. What’s the difference between a chart of accounts, journal entry, and a ledger?

I still don’t half understand the why (half of these things are combined versions of other things), but 3 months in I suddenly understood what double entry accounting was, I had heard of it in an anime but had no idea how you would do it. 6 months in and we’re brainstorming if we want to drop journal entries and just do in chart of accounts

I have zero interest in accounting (it literally gave me headaches for the first few weeks), my dad likes doing that sort of thing. I found myself explaining accounting to him the other day

How the turn tables indeed… It just creeps up on you one day

theneverfox, 1 month ago

That’s imposed by the job market, not natural thing to exist. In fact, it’s very much unnatural.

I mean, maybe my first job was an outlier, but I literally mean chose to specialize. Out of the people who graduated within 5 years of me, two got into Python because of the project, and just stayed there like you said… One of them could only never have run his code before pushing commits, the other one was middle of the road.

Another went strict UI - he wasn’t unable to do other things, he got hired after a couple years and said this is what he wanted to do.

Two more started in Python, then decided they wanted to do exploit stuff, the guy ended up going back to programming after he was let go for non-work reasons, and I don’t know where he ended up… He worked for Amazon for a while.

I guess a good chunk did keep using what they’re using and happen to specialize like you say, but I saw a lot of people choose something intentionally, a few years after doing something different too. Most of the team looked for something using their existing languages or even stack when we all moved on, regardless if they picked it or fell into it

I don’t think it’s difficulty - like you say, if you’ve learned a couple high level languages, jumping to a new one is mostly syntax

Maybe it’s a comfort/effort thing? A lot of the people who chose to specialize left their work at work. Only one person I worked with was like me - several would adapt to whatever was practical without difficulty, but without a clear best opinion I always pick something new, because it makes things more fun… He was fun to work with, because the client loved him and he pitched the weirdest and most fun features

Maybe it’s just personality thing… I’m now convinced my school probably wasn’t an outlier though

theneverfox, 1 month ago

Congrats on the new job!

That’s kinda crazy, because I know literally none of the accounting terms you used… There’s probably terms for both sub-fields, mine might be bookkeeping or something?

I like to tell high schoolers that programming is great because it mixes with everything, very few coding jobs don’t touch on some other field - I guess the same applies to IT.

My least favorite response that I hear when dealing with users is that “I’m not techy” because it demonstrates a willful ignorance of the technology that they use every single day, and an unwillingness to learn that technology.

I used to believe this, but I did some summer IT work for a small business once. I’m going around, updating things, and the accountant is super stressed about me touching her computer…I tell her I’ll be able to roll it back if something goes wrong and the other computers are fine, and she grabs lunch.

Then I see this sticky note on her monitor: windows, excell, file, open file. There’s others, import to peach tree, print invoice - all of her sticky notes are all the buttons you have to press to do something. Super weird, I figured she just never bothered removing them.

Then a while later, I come back and need her to grab something from an Excel file. I give her the flash drive, she opens explorer from the start menu, drags it into her documents, and she picks up the Excel sticky note. At this point I’m feeling anxious - I explain she can just double click on it and it’ll open, but she tells me “no, that’ll just confuse me, I need to do it my way”

This woman, who has been doing accounting for the company for almost 40 years, and doing it on a Windows PC many times a day for decades, has not learned how to open a spreadsheet. It’s not an OCD thing either - she genuinely read off the next step and starts looking around for it and (viscerally uncomfortable now) I tell her “file” is in the top left corner. She thanks me and reads the next step on her sticky note, “open file”, and I’m just sitting there slack jawed. And when done, she made sure to exit out of Excel before relaunching it for the other file.

She’s an outlier for sure… My dad for example can use a computer fine, I found him a guide for an antivirus scan and he ran and uninstalled it no problem, but he’s the type that would get frustrated and go to IT

But this woman, who had been in front of a computer longer than I’d been alive at the time, genuinely did not know how to use a computer. She was perfectly fine in her spreadsheet, arrowing around and processing the numbers faster than I could, but the concept of opening a file was something she was unable to process.

Then I realized the sticky note was new. Year after year, through multiple versions of Windows, she had been copying this sticky note. She unstuck it every time to read it too… How long could that last? A week? Maybe 2? And there was a good dozen of them for all sorts of operations

Bare minimum, she’d written it down 500 times, and she didn’t remember the steps. She’d easily performed the steps well over 10k times, and nothing stuck. She did not remember the file button was in the top left corner.

I started grading technical attitude based on how much people can tolerate before their eyes glaze over. Imagine you’re doing something like cycling Wi-Fi because it stopped working. People that watch silently or check their phone? Average. People who look confused? They could be technical if they bothered to learn. People who ask questions? I start watching how they see technology to recommend a discipline to them.

And then there’s the people who immediately get a thousand yard stare, they go into a trance when presented with a screen. It’s like they were cursed at birth to never understand anything about electronics, specifically. They can be accountants or doctors. It’s not about complexity, they’re not necessarily stupid, it’s like a deity cursed them to rely on computers but to be unable to use them

I just can’t understand how a mind can work like that, but I’ve seen it

Life is an adventure, you’re bound to get more wrong than right, the important part is how you handle those situations. IMO, that’s what defines you. I want to be known as someone who isn’t afraid to ask, isn’t afraid to be wrong, and isn’t afraid to learn something new in order to be helpful.

Hell yeah. That’s one of the pillars of who I am and strive to be - I live to learn and create, and I pride myself on turning on a dime when I realize I’m wrong mid argument

Otherwise, why be here? If you’re not learning and growing, you’re just waiting for death

theneverfox, 1 month ago

I mean, in general, sure? It’s a very expensive area, 100k is middle class even with the public servant housing programs they run

It’s community college though - is she teaching a class a week or full time?

I’m more concerned about elementary school teachers being sucked dry for $55-75k with higher degrees ( that’s 10k up from what it was a decade ago… I hope I’m way under but I’m probably over)

theneverfox, 1 month ago

No, see they’re mostly there so children learn to obey through intimidation talk to police, and they definitely never use it as a punishment detail for officers who got in trouble for anger issues

theneverfox, 1 month ago

Both. Each side of that equation makes the other one worse