If you're looking to detox, but don't want to regress all the way to a dumbphone, Unihertz has some great tiny Android phones: https://www.unihertz.com/
Everything works (Maps, Uber, etc) but the screen is so small you won't want to use it very much.
This is an excellent book explaining the wonders of Xerox PARC and what they wrought for us all. It also explains succinctly why and how Xerox failed to monetize all of the innovations created within. (Their sales force didn't know how to sell something without a lease and a per-imprint charge (where's the click), and management didn't really understand why what PARC created was important or how to monetize it. Also, the people at PARC had some measure of trouble knowing how to commercialize anything.)
I read the book at a 17 year old shortly after it came out, and found it very very compelling.
The single best command that made working with `git rebase` infinite times easier is
git reflog
At the very least it will stop you from "oh I fucked up the <rebase/merge/cherrypick/whatever> so bad that I must delete and clone the repo again".
At best you can salvage commits that have been rebased out, get back whatever you happened to checkout and basically it's the best command I found that does true to the "it's almost impossible to lose something in git once you've commited it"
This line shocked me: “We made it—we made it specifically for this [drug trafficking] too,” Ramos told undercover agents, according to a transcript included in the complaint.
Rule #1 for managing products with grey-market applications: never acknowledge the existence of the illegal market (or any activity that opens you to up to material civil suits).
That instantly exposes you to all kinds of criminal and civil liability; the fact an individual said it vs. "the company" likely makes you personally liable as well, the corporate veil won't help you much here.
You're not making cheap guns for gang members to kill people with, you're developing affordable security options for lower income citizens who are exercising their 2nd amendment rights.
You're not creating tools that help criminals hide their past, you're helping good people clear their record from legitimate mistakes and errors... or evade privacy invading snoops... etc.
Always talk about the white hat applications, never the sinister ones...
What's the static electricity story here? I personally avoid any and all metal fixtures around my work desk, because I invariably end up being painfully shocked by them every time I shift on the chair[0]. At this point I habituated having small metal objects around me (e.g. key bundles), that I can use to discharge static before/during getting up, sitting down, etc.
Where 'ianthehenry mentioned here[1] they've made a desk surface out of steel, I pretty much fainted reading it.
(Worst related working experience in my life was, a few jobs back, customers' brand new headquarters built in the "modern" style of carpets + glass + aluminum. There, every single surface would shock me when I touched it with my bare hands - even glass window panes were out to get me.)
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[0] - Any of the several chairs I tried. So it's not just about the chair, I think.
Claude Shannon defined information in part by its ability to distinguish from noise.
Certain objects are so ubiquitous and their signaling so minimal, it’s to the point of background noise and contextlessness.
The Casio F-91W is one such object.
The monobloc chair is another[1].
The community jokes a CIA analyst looking at a gritty Polaroid of a monobloc will have no ability to discern if the picture was taken in Djibouti or Denmark.
In a certain, Cayce Pollard / William Gibson “CPU” aesthetic, there is cachet and delight in signalling contextlessness - and a small cult has grown around these objects. They collectively call objects that share this anonymous property “monoblocs“ for short and their is a bit of fun in acquiring the most base form (counter to our every instinct!)
I liked your article’s tangent on incompressibility. As, like fluid, noise is incompressible and by reinforcing your F-91W, you have made it doubly so.
Viator is not a terrible place to book, but there are many alternatives. A good travel agent or hotel concierge can deal with this for you, and also advise you about guides.
You could put your services behind a reverse proxy such as Traefik with forward-auth and expose it to port 443 (HTTPS) on your router, or (that's what I do and am happy with) use the cloudflared [1] demon to connect your services to Cloudflare where they can be protected behind Cloudflare Access using an SSO provider such as Okta (or Github or Google) for authentication. This method does not require you to expose any ports on your router and can all be done on the free/dev tiers of Cloudflare and Okta.
Unitarian Universalist Church. Ethical Culture Society. There are quite a few non-credal churches or "not-a-church" organizations built along churchy lines.
I’ve found that many sites these days have an RSS feed, but don’t advertise it. I’ll come across a site with no mention of it, and then just start trying urls to see if any work. For example:
/feed
/blog/rss
/rss.xml
I wager whatever content management system they’re using automatically creates it.
If I just need to make plain GET requests in my web scraping, I've found the easiest way to bypass Cloudflare on most sites is to make the requests via the Internet Archive. That has some rate limiting, but it can be worked around by using several source IP addresses in parallel.
b) Become an academic in computer science with a focus on artificial intelligence.
c) Become a MLE in "regular" statistical applications. Aka bayesian classification, "core" statistical principles.
d) Become a specialized computer vision/natural language processing focused MLE.
e) Become a generalist software engineer who can whip out the above if needed.
In no way is e) the inferior option.
Generalists who can write code fast with 100% test coverage and pristine logging are by far the segment the industry has the shortest supply of.
There are TONS of math guys. Vanishingly few Principal Engineers who can write a design document and lead a project.
(Machine learning customers are OBSESSED with test coverage and verifiability. Believe it or not, multinational corporations generally don't want to unleash a {your_adjective_here}ist algorithm on the world.)
2. Study the above, properly.
To study the math, Elements of Statistical Learning/Algorithms by Goodfellow.
Start on page 1, do every second exercise. Publish a summary of every chapter you finish with your answers to GitHub.
3. Pursue your goal in a publicly verifiable manner.
I think it does. If you look at the lives of a lot of artists (and a lot of scientists throughout history!), it seems that a great many of them had miserable lives because of this tortured search for "something that could be better, something missing, something needed."
There's an old legend where I live, in the Czech Republic, of a fire bird. The hero sees the bird and his horse tells him, "If we turn around right now, you'll have a nice life, a quiet, happy life... but if you capture that bird, you'll cry and you'll suffer, and your life will be an amazing adventure." The horse begs him to chose the former, but of course, the hero's journey is the latter.
Without a doubt one of the best technical books I have ever read.
To me, it was a missing piece of the big puzzle of "how do computers work". I read many a book to answer this question, and came away with three books:
- CODE by Charles Petzold explains the CPU
- Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces by Arpaci-Dusseau explain OSes
- Crafting Interpreters by Robert Nystrom explains programming languages
I wonder if a lower cost service like VPNs could reasonably create an “endowed” account: basically pay enough up front that when invested, the returns on the up front cost are about the same as the monthly cost. If you’d need to make €60/yr, you could probably achieve this with a one-time €1,500 payment. Does it make sense for anyone to pay that much up front? Maybe not. But for people that REALLY want to see the business model succeed and/or are way too wealthy considering their mental laziness, adding an option to pay a totally absurd amount once and then forget about it might be useful, even if that payment is way higher than any normal person would pay.
I see this has not gotten any better in the last 5 years. For future reference, if you as a dev are interacting with a product that is this hard to use and there is no other option but to use it (CUDA), you should buy their stock.
Time for me to advocate again for people to use Common Crawl. Please don't slam peoples' websites, look for alternatives before scraping. There are probably other, better options. APIs, data set downloads, etc.
From what I've heard this doesn't really represent the on the ground reality of NK. From what I've read, thumb drives of South Korean media are rampant and pervasive in NK for those rich enough to have something to play it on which is seems like some substantial portion(wild guess 20-30%) of the population.
So I'd imagine most of those people have seen squid game. This just seems like more of a good headline to get to reference squid game and NK together and pick a specific example of some guy getting caught.
I scrap government sites a lot as they don't provide apis. For mobile proxies, I use the proxidize dongles and mobinet.io (free, with Android devices). As stated in the article, with cgNAT it's basically impossible to block them as in my case, half the country couldn't access the sites anymore (if you place them in several locations and use one carrier each there).
If you are a new dev, here are a few things to consider:
Many companies hire most during the first and last quarters of the year (Feb-Apr), (Sept-Nov).
Last quarter: New budget for next year allows us to increase devs. Early training opportunity during the slow season.
First Quarter: Things are picking up, we need more devs for the new projects.
Trying to get jobs outside of those periods may be challenging. You’ll likely face a competitive hiring process to fill vacant positions.
The easiest way to get your foot in the door in this industry is either you know someone personally that can refer you to an open position, or seek tech recruiters. (I’m not including individuals that graduates at top colleges as they should have no issues getting jobs).
Tech recruiters does have a bad vibe in our industry due to many reasons, but due to the challenges of securing that first tech job as a brand new dev, the opportunity is a fair trade.
Tech recruiting firms work closely with actual hiring managers. They know what managers are looking for. The hiring process can be fast.
Fulltime positions with benefits: Expect harder interview and bias skill aptitude from hiring manager.
Contract to hire: Easier interview. Higher initial hourly pay due to no benefits.
Things I didn’t include but are equally important, have finished personal github projects, good resume detailing your projects tech, purpose and value.
Brush up on algorithms, OOP and designs. Data structures. Work on acing the interview process.
If you live in an area/city that does not have the available framework/tech that you are interested in, move or suck it up and learn it. (Things are better now, in the US that is)
Be sure to ask what’s the salary range of the position(s). Don’t sell yourself short. And be firm on a potential salary transition. Negotiations can always happen after the 5-6 months contract. Be reasonable.
Upload your resume to dice.com. You will get about 40 spam calls per day. Take one of those jobs - they are all around 100k/year. Definitely enough to get by in any major city.
Let me just say these guys do not care who they hire. Many of my colleagues had zero technical competence, and once we became friends, they told me they paid someone to attend their interview. Many never even went to college, but paid agencies to fake their transcripts.
Moreover, once I had a colleague who was fired for not doing any work for 6+ months. This individual then reported half the office to the US Gov for visa violations, copied us on those emails, and then threatened to sue everyone for discrimination. Us employees were naturally shocked by this, so we googled this persons name. The first result was a previous lawsuit where the individual did the exact same thing at a past company -- we were floored. Our employer did not do even the slightest due diligence on this person or really anyone else frankly.
I tend to believe that someone who can do magic CSS is about the ability to weave it with Mathematics and patterns. Other than that, the way you use CSS as it evolves become more and more syntactic sugar.
Once you are comfortable with CSS, try to dig a tad deeper into design philosophies and patterns. Work with established designers who understand that spacing is not just margins/padding of a designated number but a rhythm across screens of varying shapes and sizes.
For instance, understand the reasoning why a good designer will tell you that the typographic scale for desktops will be major-third, while for the smaller mobile phones, it will have to be minor-third.
Advance topics to research and have peace with CSS are vertical rhythm for spacings, modular scaling for typography, and the Cicada Principle, etc.
Here is an anecdote to illustrate the above;
There was a "Careers Page" redesign for one of the biggest banks in the world - after about 10+ years of their old one. When I landed in London, they already had a "Senior front-end developer" mid-way into the project. I went as a replacement for one of my team who had a family emergency. I haven't written much code in years.
They had engaged a brilliant designer and had a wall plastered with some of the most beautiful glossy print-outs. Everyone, including the client, loved it. Unfortunately, the struggle was -- the front-end output had irregular margins (pixel mismatch), fix another but breaks the other, etc.
I saw that they had screen rulers that try to match the design with what comes out on the screen.
I requested the designer to spend few hours explaining his reasoning behind the spacing and asked him the rhythms (similar to musical notes) that he has used, the scaling of the font sizes. This was when I realized the designer was brilliant, but the engineers would not understand or appreciate his effort.
I wrote out the Sass functions and mixins and steadily replaced many hacked in numbers and values. Introduced Design Tokens, a simple style guide, etc.
The website is still there and will likely last another 10+ years. I'm also sure many of you might have stumbled on it or have applied to jobs with it. :-)
> but there's only so much time in life to hoard useless shit
There’s this very strange episode of the original run of the series Amazing Stories starring Mark Hamill in which some sort of gnome whom only he can see follows him around telling him that the most important thing in life is hoarding toys. He spends his life homeless, hauling his toys around in a shopping cart, completely alone in the world. When he’s like 80 years old and literally planning his suicide, a wealthy collector bumps into him on the street and buys his toys and he becomes rich overnight, and the episode ends with old Mark Hamill and old gnome dressed like rich folk, apparently very happy with themselves and giving off an “it was all worth it” vibe.
Even childhood me, who was very into this tv show (the introduction to which featured computer animation!), Steven Spielberg, toys, and Mark Hamill – even that young version of myself could see this was a terrible message.
okay that's not it. forget everything you think you know about instagram, especially anything about vanity, anything that bothers you about the pursuit of vanity or your assumptions about it. you'll also be re-assigning what you think you know about instagram follower growth systems.
buying an instagram profile is more similar to a merger and acquisition deal, in the sense that you are actually buying all the direct messages (DMs) - the customer rolls. A popular profile does business through DMs (you also are buying the "og email account" to pass security measures, so if anyone emailed you get that too). They've done business with people that want to do promotions on their profile, business with entire networks of profile buyers and sellers. Buying a profile buys you that whole customer list. The customers are even the innocuous empty private accounts with 0 followers that are the point of contact for heavy traders. Things you may not have known existing. This is your way into a steady stream of unlisted accounts that are for sale. You can repeatedly just ask them what else they have.
when you choose an account for rebranding, you are looking for something similar to what you will rebrand to with certain levels of engagement and reach, and ideally with similar demographics although it will already be heavily correlated. wealth and motivation can be rebranded to some playboy guy, women's fashion can be rebranded to baby stuff, rinse repeat.
the general profile is targeting the whole world, so none of the "lets normalize this super progressive thing" matters at all. traditional gender roles are in vogue.
congratulations you've skipped the rat race of growing a profile. all the apps and systems to grow a profile are more expensive and time consuming than just owning an already grown profile.
you break even by doing promotions. promotions are people paying to be tagged in one of your posts for a few hours. then you delete or archive the post. or you do it on the story.
now lets go back to the apps and systems that are targeted to people trying to "grow" instagram accounts. you can use them, but its only to offset the attrition. when you rebrand you lose followers when they notice they are following something they don't remember following and don't want to. your goal is to just slow down the unfollowers, the banned, the deactivated, by having new followers replace them. But not to actually "make numba go up".
Now back to gen pop. the general population likes popular shiny things. I was just at a party yesterday where an adult woman was fawning over this "famous" person who "is really famous" and "has, like, 25k followers on instagram". This is a nearly perfect currency that doesn't actually get spent. "Oh my god, someone has an advantage with women I hate this let me find something wrong with it, aha! fraud!" nope. Notice that these are real followers, real engagement, real views, less or different work. Brands, companies, anyone wanting promotion or attention actually do offer things for free or pay. Worry about the people that are doing less effective things. But if you must be bothered, selling an account is against Instagram/Facebook's terms of service, so you have that going for you. The terms of service.
I've been aware of this, from sporadic participation, for half a decade now. Brand accounts, influencer accounts, you name it, just when you think its oversaturated and nobody will give them time of day, another year goes by and it still is interesting to people and the trading networks are more refined.
With multiple profiles you can also more easily grow your other profiles. Basically giving yourself free promos, or anyone you like. They are real human followers, after all.
I love Firefox ethos, Firefox keeps redesigning itself over and over, and this time, for the worse.
I have a 400 LOC userChrome.css file because the new redesign was barely usable since Firefox beta received this makeover.
- There is no tab contrast, and very difficult to tell tabs apart. Made worse on sides without Favicons.
- I loved the mic/speaker icon when a tab is playing/listening audio. They had to make it TWO lines in the tab, and made it difficult to notice when you have more tabs.
- I could use some icons in the right top menu. It looks nice and easier to use in Edge, that has icons for every option.
- Compact mode is gone, that was discussed here before.
That said, I like the native elements (buttons, up/down arrows, etc). The new icons in the addressbar look nicer and fits nicely in.
Everything works (Maps, Uber, etc) but the screen is so small you won't want to use it very much.