- Not reporting large cash transactions (over $10,000)
- Using someone else's ID can be interpreted as identity theft (sharing student ID discount, Costco cards, epic passes)
- torrenting copyrighted content (textbooks, music, movies, TV shows, audio books). I'm sure most of my classmates in school torrented some of those $200 textbooks.
>- Not reporting large cash transactions (over $10,000)
If you're talking about Currency Transaction Report, only financial institutions have to file those.
>- Using someone else's ID can be interpreted as identity theft (sharing student ID discount, Costco cards, epic passes)
Is "identity theft" actually a distinct crime? Or is it just fraud? If it's the latter, it's not a felony unless you're getting absurdly high amounts of benefit.
>- torrenting copyrighted content (textbooks, music, movies, TV shows, audio books). I'm sure most if not all of my classmates in school torrented some of those $200 textbooks.
Copyright infringement is a civil infraction unless you're doing it commercially (eg. burning bootleg DVDs to sell)
I was in jail with tons of people with identity theft indictments. In Illinois it is absolutely a separate crime with a whole list of ways you can easily commit it.
Could seeding a torrent be interpreted as distribution?
You're right most of these would result in a slap on the wrist or fines. Perhaps 3 misdemeanors a day? But I think the overall sentiment still stands - that it's hard to be a saint.
It's only criminal for "willful" infractions. If you sold a car and forgot to file, that's probably not willful. Moreover, how often are people really doing >$10k cash transactions? "it's hard to be a saint" is a massive shifting of the goalposts from "3 felonies per day".
>Could seeding a torrent be interpreted as distribution?
From wikipedia: United States v. LaMacchia 871 F.Supp. 535 (1994) was a case decided by the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts which ruled that, under the copyright and cybercrime laws effective at the time, committing copyright infringement for non-commercial motives could not be prosecuted under criminal copyright law.
"Willful" is one of those things highly dependent on whoever may be prosecuting you. If you have from some disliked class then the state is going to push very hard on you doing it willfully.
I feel you are mixing something up here. Assume that the student ID discount or Costco card, etc, are being borrowed: used with the card holder's blessing. Or borrowing a Netflix password.
It is the institution giving the student ID discount, or Costco or Netflix, who are not happy about it, and call it theft.
> "The CEO was wavering until Tom found out they both owned the same obscure Italian motorcycle. Tom took him for a ride along the coast. Contract was signed the next day."
As a junior, I often wonder how many deals are signed in exclusive country clubs, on golf courses, and at the dining table with endlessly flowing Maotai.
For a successful career, is it better for one to prioritize network over skills? It seems to me that the latter can be commoditized by AI, while the former can not. Rather than learning Lisp, maybe it's time to pick up golf. I'm only half joking.
> As a junior, I often wonder how many deals are signed in exclusive country clubs, on golf courses, and at the dining table with endlessly flowing Maotai.
Virtually none in our business. (Databases.) What does get deals is listening carefully to what customers actually want and putting together offerings that get it to them at a reasonable price. Incidentally, good sales people are vastly better at this than devs. There are a number of skills that go into it but being a good listener is the most important.
I'm afraid that css is so broken that even AI won't help you to generalize centering content. Otoh, in the same spirit you are now a proficient ios/android developer where it's just "center content - BOOM!".
Why do you think this is only a meme? Flow modes, centering methods and content are still at odds with each other and don't generalize. This idiotic model cannot get it right unless you're designing for a very specific case that will shatter as soon as you bump its shoulder.
Edit: I've been in the AI CSS BS loop just a few days ago, not sure how you guys miss it. I start screaming f-'s and "are you an idiot" when it cycles through "doesn't work", "ignored prereqs" and "doesn't make sense at all".
What if I have text nodes in the mix? And I don't know that in advance, e.g. I'm doing <div>{content}</>? What if this div is in a same-class flexbox and now its margins or --vars clash with the defaults of its parent, which it knows nothing about by the principle of isolation? Then you may suggest using wrapper boxes for all children, but how e.g. align-baseline crosses that border is now a mystery that depends on a bunch of other properties at each side.
Your reply is correct, but it's exactly that "just do this specific configuration" sort of correct, which punctures component isolation all the way through and makes these layers leak into each other, creating a non-refactorable mess.
looking at most websites, regardless of how much money and human energy has been spent on them:
yes I think we're okay with divs not being centered some of the time.
many millions have been spilled to adjust pixels (while failing to handle loads of more common issues), but most humans just care if they can eventually get what they want to happen if they press the button harder next time.
(I am not an LLM-optimist, but visual layout is absolutely somewhere that people aren't all that picky about edge cases, because the success rate is abysmally low already. it's like good translations: it can definitely help, and definitely be worth the money, but it is definitely not a hard requirement - as evidence I point to the vast majority of translated software.)
Humans can extract information quicker from proper layouts. A good layout brings faster clarity in your head. What developers often get wrong: it's not just about doing something, it's also about how simple and fast to parse and understand it was (from a visual point of view as well, of course information architecture and UX matter a lot as well). Not aligning things is a slippery slope. If you can't center a div, probably all the other things that are more complex in your website / app are going to be off or even broken. Thankfully AIs can center divs by now, but proper grid systems understanding is at best frontier.
I could imagine a vision-enabled transformer model being useful to create a customizable “reading mode”, that adjusts page layout based on things like user prefs, monitor/window size, ad recognition, visual detail of images, information density of the text, etc.
Maybe in an alternate universe where every user-agent enabled browser had this type of thing enabled by default, most companies would skip site design all together and just publish raw ad copy, info, and images.
Neither. They're describing the philosophical similarities of:
* "Has only been that way so far because that's how computers are" and
* "I just want to center the damn content.
I don't much care about the intricacies of using
auto-margin, flexbox, css grid, align-content, etc."
Centering a div is seen as difficult because complexities that boil down to "that's just how computers are", and they find (imo rightful) frustration in that.
This sounds like a front-end dev that understands the intricacies of all of this when, again, this person is saying "I just want the content centered".
> again, this person is saying "I just want the content centered".
You can't just want. It always backfires. It's called being ignorant. There are always consequences. I just want to cross the road without caring too. Oh the cars might just hit me. Doesn't matter?
> This sounds like a front-end dev that understands the intricacies of all of this
That's the person that's supposed to do this job? Sounds bog standard. What's the problem?
At some point, sure; but there is always value in comprehending why someone might find an existing flow overly obtuse and/or frustrating when they "just want to do a simple thing".
To imagine otherwise reminds me of The Infamous Dropbox Comment.
Addendum: to wit, whole companies, like SquareSpace and Wix, exist because web dev is a pain and WYSWIG editors help a lot
> Addendum: to wit, whole companies, like SquareSpace and Wix, exist because web dev is a pain and WYSWIG editors help a lot
But these companies DO care (or at least that's the point) and don't "just want to do a simple thing".
The point of outsourcing is to give it to a professional with expertise like seeing a doctor. Dropbox isn't "just a simple thing" either, so no not the same.
> "Criticism seems sophisticated, and making new things often seems awkward, especially at first; and yet it's precisely those first steps that are most rare and valuable."
This is what makes silicon valley is so amazing. It's filled with those who want to make good new things, who aren't afraid of looking awkward. This type of culture is actually quite weird. In most other places, you'd be dissuaded by conventional wisdom, or "who-do-you-think-you-are-isms".
> It's filled with those who want to make good new things
It's crazy you think this is even remotely unique to SV. Broad swaths of the country (referred to as "flyover" by coastal people) are fully employed in the production of new things that are essential to the survival of the human race.
Just, for some reason, you think "new things" is just bleep bloop and not moo oink.
All new inventions have tendencies to overturn existing power structure (i.e. disrupt the status quo). It's probably why certain cultures disincentivize innovation and spurn entrepreneurs.
But I think creative destruction is a net good, and I'd argue that micro-dosing on revolutions is essential for dynamism and social mobility.
Hi Simon, how do you decide when to blog on your personal website vs something like substack? Do you post identical articles on both? Do you prefer one or the other?
The one challenge I'm having at the moment is where to put short "thoughts" that aren't accompanied by a link. I used to use Twitter for those, but now I'm cross-posting to Bluesky and Mastodon and Twitter - but cross-posting a "thought" doesn't feel great.
I may have to invent a fourth content type for my blog (which is currently just entries, bookmarks or quotes) for this kind of very-short-form post with no link. Molly White started doing that recently so I may borrow her design: https://www.mollywhite.net/micro
No idea at all. My blog does really well on Google, so I think if either site is being penalized for duplicate content it's probably the Substack.
It looks like 8% of my newsletter signups are "from the app" according to the Substack dashboard - which I think is how they show signups that they've encouraged as opposed to signups I had myself.
I'm really just using Substack because they've solved email deliverability and they're free for me to use to send out emails.
If you have a blog with RSS and just need something that auto-emails people your updates you can run my project on a raspberry pi. No need to tie yourself into the substack ecosystem if you don't want to
I find that for me to deeply understand something, I have to reinvent it. There's SO many nuance not captured in textbooks or papers. I reminds me of the feeling of attending lectures by great teachers. Everything makes so much sense until you start the homework assignment.
I remember I used to complain in graduate school about the insane amount of work I had taking four engineering courses every quarter.
Then I learned that my cousin in Asia studies more than 12 hours a day. Goes to sleep at 11PM and wakes up at 6AM to study. She is in high school and her life is literally study, eat, sleep, repeat until the college entrance exams. High schoolers in the US are incredibly stressed about SAT and college application prep too, but its much worse in Asia where your entire life trajectory depends on a single set of exams that optimizes for maximal studiousness and pure g factor.
But I think stamina is something you can build over time. I also think it is a function of how interested one is in the work. I can work forever on some tasks, but some others are like chewing glass and I tap out in less than an hour.
While I absolutely loved the writing, I want to challenge that last part and the dichotomy created. Perfection is an ideal. You can strive towards it at 25 or 45. It's too deterministic to say as soon as you're in your forties, it's game over. Permanent imperfection. Pure facticity. No transcendence.
"[to be human] is to be constantly on the precipice of perfection – just a little further and you’ll get there – but you never get there."
- Using someone else's ID can be interpreted as identity theft (sharing student ID discount, Costco cards, epic passes)
- torrenting copyrighted content (textbooks, music, movies, TV shows, audio books). I'm sure most of my classmates in school torrented some of those $200 textbooks.
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