drahardja

drahardja, 8 months ago to random

Ah yes, this is a great way to turn “Can I see your driver’s license?” into “Can you hand me your unlocked phone so I can rifle through it?” at a traffic stop.

Yes, it’s more convenient than having a separate card, and it may serve as a great backup in case your physical card is lost or damaged. But please don’t use this as your only driver’s license, especially if you are an often-targeted demographic.

“Californians can now carry driver’s licenses on their phone as part of pilot program”

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-09-03/californians-can-now-carry-drivers-licenses-on-their-phone-as-part-of-pilot-program

drahardja, 8 months ago to random

A study on #UniversalBasicIncome #UBI from 2020 is now peer-reviewed and published. The study gave $7500 cash to homeless people in Vancouver and compared their outcome versus a control group. The result was clear:

“The recipients of the cash transfers did not increase spending on drugs, tobacco, and alcohol, but did increase spending on food, clothes, and rent, according to self-reports. What’s more, they moved into stable housing faster and saved enough money to maintain financial security over the year of follow-up.”

Further, each person who moved into stable housing one year faster saves the city over $8000 per year, which makes this program cheaper than existing housing programs.

Universal Basic Income works. It sounds so obvious when you say it out loud, but: giving people cash lifts them out of poverty. We need to do that more.

“A Canadian study gave $7,500 to homeless people. Here’s how they spent it.”

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/21528569/homeless-poverty-cash-transfer-canada-new-leaf-project

drahardja, 10 months ago to fediverse

I am once again encouraging #Fediverse #admins to add a clause to prohibit using their server’s data for machine training into their Terms of Use, because at some point in the near future there is likely going to be a lawsuit against some major company for scraping and exploiting users’ data, and we should make sure we have a legal leg to stand on.

Please ask your server’s admin to do this.

@seb please consider doing this. https://mastodon.world/@Chimaera/110652906429977656

drahardja, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago) to random

Here’s a thought experiment: If you had a small group of skilled mobile, desktop, server, and web front-end engineers who have access to time and money, and are eager to MAKE THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE USING THEIR SKILLS (and not just spin up yet another exploitive startup) what would YOU have them do?

Be specific.

Assume cost is no object.

It’s time to stop bellyaching about how bad tech is, and start brainstorming about what good it can do.

Please repost for exposure.

EDIT: Let’s add hardware, industrial design, and UX engineers in the mix as well, to round things out.

#TechForGood #humaneInnovation #empathy #solidarity #humanity #FridayDevAdvice

drahardja, 6 months ago to ai

Just in case you still entertained the thought that #AI is anything more than super-fancy autocomplete:

drahardja, 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago) to random

WebMD’s parent company, Internet Brands, released a cringey and abusive internal video threatening their employees to #returnToOffice. “We aren’t asking or negotiating at this point”, the CEO says. “Don’t mess with us”, the video reads at the end. The video features employees dancing and celebrating RTO (at gunpoint? or at least under threat of firing by HR?).

I know corporate videos are all kinda crappy, but this one is…spouse-beating levels of terrible.

#flexibleWork #remoteWork

https://www.vice.com/en/article/7kxqnx/dont-mess-with-us-webmd-parent-company-demands-return-to-office-in-bizarre-video

drahardja, 8 months ago to random

Workers: DO NOT OVERWORK YOURSELF to avoid getting laid off.

• You’re damaging your life and health.
• Your employer doesn’t actually notice (no, really, they don’t.)
• Your behavior enables future mismanagement of resources.
• When layoffs come, you’re gonna get laid off anyway.

Remember that a company’s job is to extract maximum work from you for minimum pay, so your job is to extract maximum pay for minimum work. Somewhere in the middle, both parties find an equilibrium that they agree on. Do not voluntarily modify your side of the bargain to your detriment.

#FridayDevAdvice

drahardja, 4 months ago to apple

I guess this is how #Apple does #layoffs these days.

First they require in-person #returnToOffice, then they relocate business units from one location to another, and force those who can’t uproot their lives to leave.

The Apple location in #SanDiego isn’t going away. But they intentionally forced 121 people to choose between moving to #Austin, or lose their jobs. Make no mistake, this is a layoff.

Never mind the fact that #Texas is hostile to anyone with a uterus, or is not cishet—why the hell anyone would move to that state? If anything, Apple should be shutting down their Austin office, and paying for people to relocate to a state that better ensures their safety.

“Apple to Shutter 121-Person San Diego AI Team in Reorganization”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-14/apple-to-shutter-121-person-san-diego-ai-team-in-reorganization

Unpaywalled link: https://archive.ph/TnOUv

drahardja, 7 months ago to random

This is so cool! The engineers at MIT discovered that cement and carbon black (paracrystalline carbon) can be mixed to create a supercapacitor that still behaves like cement. That means you can build cement structures that store energy. They estimate that 45 m³ of this material is enough to store 10 kWh (about a day’s worth of energy for a home).

“New Breakthrough in Energy Storage – MIT Engineers Create Supercapacitor out of Ancient Materials”

https://scitechdaily.com/new-breakthrough-in-energy-storage-mit-engineers-create-supercapacitor-out-of-ancient-materials/

drahardja, 8 months ago to random

So #Grindr staff chose to #unionize, and company leaders enforced #ReturnToOffice as retaliation. Company leaders know #RTO sucks, and they are using it punitively.

They started enforcing #RTO of two days a week, and HALF THEIR STAFF RESIGNED.

The response of the CEO is hilarious. “The team will be smaller than where we were before and where we want to be…So that’ll obviously impact margin in a positive way in the near term.”

That’s like saying “The bad news is I lost my entire left leg. The good news is that I finally got my weight under 160 pounds.”

#unionize #unionStrong #solidarity

“Grindr loses nearly half its staff to strict return-to-work rule”

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-09-07/grindr-loses-nearly-half-its-staff-to-strict-return-to-work-rule

drahardja, 1 year ago to ai

“The entire case for “AI” as a disruptive tool worth trillions of dollars is grounded in the idea that chatbots and image-generators will let bosses fire hundred of thousands or even millions of workers.

That’s it.”

Yep. Spot on. This is the fundamental reason that #AI is getting so many billions poured into it. It’s the lure of replacing expensive labor with automation. Corporations have endlessly squeezed blood from lower-cost labor and they are salivating at the prospect of getting rid of high-cost labor.

This is unfortunate, because AI has actual uses. As models get more specialized and smaller, I can see AI automating a lot of rote work away at reasonable cost. Unfortunately, the corporate hype is so strong right now it’s muddying all the conversations.

“Google’s AI Hype Circle” by @pluralistic

https://doctorow.medium.com/googles-ai-hype-circle-6158804d1299

drahardja, 9 months ago to apple

Tomorrow, Apple will shut down My Photo Stream, after 12 years of service.

I wrote the code that ran the service on iOS devices back in 2010, and it has been faithfully syncing hundreds of millions of photos between iPhones and iPads and their respective macOS Photo libraries for more than a decade. It survived the introduction to iCloud’s Shared Photo Streams (I also wrote its client software), the shutdown of Aperture, and the introduction of iCloud Photo Library. And today, we finally bid it goodbye.

It’s been a good 12 years. 1000 photos, hosted for 30 days, for free, so you can save them on your Mac—those were the days, eh?

https://www.macrumors.com/2023/07/25/apple-my-photo-stream-shutdown-what-to-do/

#Apple #iPhone #iOS #iPhoneOS #macOS #photography #softwareDevelopment

drahardja, 8 months ago to austin

Had a conversation with my friends today about why #Austin is failing to be the next #SiliconValley, despite the “progressive” nature of the city, the lower cost of living, the zero state income tax, and all the incentives they’re pushing to tech companies, and I’m wondering if it’s because it’s LITERALLY SURROUNDED BY #TEXAS.

If you’re not a conservative cis-het white able Christian man (or his cis-het child-bearing wife), Texas literally wants to exterminate you. If you have a uterus, they want to control it. If you want to teach your kid about black history, they want to prevent you. Austin may be an oasis, but it’s very much part of the state.

Maybe that’s why tech people don’t want to move to Austin. Have you seen who does tech every day? The same people they want to kill and control. Maybe that’s why they’re not attracted there. Just spitballin’ here.

“'Where ambition goes to die': These tech workers flocked to Austin during the pandemic. Now they're desperate to get out.”

https://archive.ph/fnXL2

drahardja, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago) to random

Oh hey, the Attorney General of Indiana has published a snitch line for schools that teach LGBTQ+ issues, or make Woke materials available to their students!

Here’s the URL. Use it responsibly. Don’t use it to report Godzilla flying the Trans flag or anything like that, ok?

https://in.accessgov.com/attorneygeneral/Forms/Page/attorneygeneral/education-transparency-form/1

drahardja, 8 months ago to random

Thanks, I hate it.

I mean, I know paper cups have polymers to keep them waterproof, but I hate the fact that I can’t actually get away from plastics or toxic trash, ever, anywhere.

I prefer paper cups and cardboard takeout boxes to plastic clamshells, but I bet those paper products are still coated with plastic to keep them waterproof. Short of bringing tiffin carriers into US culture (can we? please?) I don’t really know how we can do better.

“Sorry, Your Paper Coffee Cup Is a Toxic Nightmare”

https://www.wired.com/story/paper-cups-toxic/

drahardja, 1 year ago to humanrights

The correct term is “forced-birth extremists”.

Not “pro-life”, not “anti-choice”, not “pro-birth”.

FORCED-BIRTH EXTREMISTS.

#abortion #humanRights #fundamentalism

drahardja, 4 months ago to random

The Y2K bug is a great illustration that a well-handled potential disaster looks like “nothing happened” in retrospect. The fact that Y2K seemed to be a non-event is a testament to how seriously people took this emergency, and how everyone buckled down and averted a worldwide infrastructure disaster.

I started working at Honeywell Aerospace (AlliedSignal back then) in 1998, and by that time people were already working on Y2K issues. We were in the GPS navigation business, and there were real issues that would have caused aircraft navigation to go awry unless they were fixed.

People buckled down, found the bugs, ran simulations, got FAA sign-offs, and deployed the fixes to all affected aircraft well before Y2K. Thanks to the effort, “nothing happened”. But I assure you (bad) things would have happened if we did nothing. https://infosec.exchange/@tychotithonus/111670219441506220

drahardja, 8 months ago to anarchism

Hi #anarchists #anarchism, I’m curious and would appreciate some reading materials that address this question:

As I see it, Anarchism has existed throughout history, almost everywhere humans have ever been, in the form of “tribes” or communes, in subsistence communities, and in indigenous cultures around the world for thousands of years. Yet much of them repeatedly collapsed in the face of European colonization in the last 500 years or so, to Mongols, Macedonians in the further past, and so on.

So my question is: how does a modern Anarchist society defend itself against external powers (who are decidedly not Anarchist) who would colonize it for its labor or resources, without also building a military and a command structure, and its governance which manages its personnel and resources, i.e. the beginnings of a State?

drahardja, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago) to photography

So I went to a couple of car meets today and did an A/B/C #shootout on an #iPhone14Pro and #GooglePixel7. All images appear in this sequence:

1. #Halide app on #iPhone 14 Pro, RAW with as many post-processing options turned off as possible
   2 iPhone 14 Pro camera app, #ProRAW
2. #Google #Pixel 7, RAW

The photos are mostly images of cars, not people.

All images are shot with the default 1x lens.

All images are imported as .dng into Lightroom and left as-is except for Halide shots which are all inexplicably overexposed by around 1.5 stops. For those shots, I manually lowered exposure, but left all other sliders where they were.

Halide produces 12 MP images even when I choose 48 MP. iPhone camera produces 48 MP images. Pixel 7 produces 12 MP images. It’s pretty obvious that the “48 MP” and “50 MP” images are synthesized out of binned-pixel 12 MP sensors. The images uploaded here are downscaled to 1080p jpgs using the same Lightroom settings (sRGB, 95% quality).

OK, on with the show!

#photography

drahardja, 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago) to random

Haha I love this Australian anti-COVID PSA.

AVOID INFECTING PEOPLE YOU DRONGOS

Edit: OK this is making numbers, and I now think it’s more than likely that this is a clever edit of the original. Welp. It’s hilarious anyway. Enjoy it for what it’s worth!

Edit: The numbers seem to have come from this article:

“People who had more than one COVID-19 infection were three times more likely to be hospitalized and twice as likely to die than those who only had one infection. Those with multiple infections were also more vulnerable to other dangerous conditions; they were 3.5 times more likely to develop lung problems, 3 times more likely to have heart conditions, and 1.6 times more likely to have brain changes requiring care than people who had only had COVID-19 once.”

https://time.com/6232103/covid-19-reinfections-effects/

Underlying study: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-02051-3

There is discussion on the credibility of these numbers here: https://mastodon.social/

drahardja, 9 months ago to fediverse

Once in a while I have #hunches about a software system that keep nagging at me, and over time it usually becomes clearer why something has been bothering me.

Tonight’s moment of clarity is that there is a fundamental problem with the #Fediverse, and it is that SERVERS CONTINUE TO OWN MY IDENTITY ON THE NETWORK. They may not be commercial servers, but they are still someone else’s computers over which I have little control.

Moving between servers is a high-friction activity: I lose all my posts and all my friends. Sure, I can reimport those lists in my new home, but my friends would have to rely on a forwarding note I left in my previous server to find me. I sure hope that old server won’t block my friends or go out of service, because then they’ll never find me.

drahardja, 11 months ago to random

I would go even further that the “controllers” in the modern #AppKit / #UIKit world are even further away from the original conception of #MVC, and they’re hardly “controllers” in the original sense any more.

A Window Controller (AppKit) and View Controller (AppKit/UIKit) are tightly coupled to a specific Window or View, so much so that they are basically one and the same—no architectural advantage is lost by combining the Window Controller with its window; or the View Controller with its View.

I’ve always argued that the distinction between Views and View Controllers are quite arbitrary. VCs are used to house lots of functionality that regular Views don’t have—but you could have achieved the same by declaring a View subclass that conforms to the additional protocol, and doing away with the view-creation logic, couldn’t you?

IMO, the “MVC” in UIKit has no controller at all, when you think about it.

https://collindonnell.com/mvc-isnt-mvc

drahardja, 11 months ago to swift

I’m getting pretty fluent at writing #Swift these days, but I still miss writing in #ObjC. I banged out a command-line tool in ObjC and it was glorious. I love the laid-back nature of the language, its verbosity that makes the code immediately readable, and its not-super-eagerness to get everything fixed up at compile time.

Would I recommend ObjC over Swift for new projects? No. I think most people will create better programs in Swift than ObjC. But I do miss those good old days. The Delegate pattern with optional methods is still exceedingly powerful and IMO yet to be surpassed with callbacks, builders, or what-have-you. The ability to cheat and directly examine the runtime without too much type safety in LLDB is extremely refreshing too.

Anyway, back to Swift.

drahardja, 1 year ago to random

From the “Americans will use any measurement unit except the metric system” department:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/may/19/new-york-city-sinking-skyscrapers-climate-crisis

drahardja, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago) to UX

The iOS #calculator meme that’s going around where “50+50×2=” yields 150 and not 200, is a great example of hidden states in UX design.

Low-cost desktop calculators perform (most) operations strictly left-to-right: press any operator button (+-×÷), and the display is updated to show the result of the calculation so far, and that result becomes an operand for the operation. There is no other state “inside” the calculator that affects the solution—what you see is all you get.

On the iOS calculator, you’re entering the entire expression into a hidden buffer. You can’t really see what you entered (and there’s no option to make it visible, as far as I can tell), and the final result is only shown when you press =. The confusion arises because a user’s mental model may not correspond to the hidden model used for the computation.

All this is to say that hidden states often break #UX expectations. Making hidden state visible goes a long way to remove confusion (see how PCalc does it in the second image).