Recently I used Google maps to search for the nearest DHL near me so I could return a package. DHL is not that popular near me and when I specifically typed for DHL, I would get only their competitors in the search results.

There was a DHL service center near me and I had to scroll a bunch to find it. Oh, and apparently big box stores (or anyone) can pay Google to come up in the search on maps, even if unrelated.

I don't think they have skin the in shipping game but their algorithms are over optimized that they don't even show what your searching for, but trying to infer why you're searching for it. That or whoever pays them more. Certainly a search risk

fantasize of all the ways I can hand in my resignation.

Then 3 months go by and still no offer, lower the bar and fantasize of all the ways I can hand in my resignation - but nicer

I feel so powerless, so hopeless.

Bills aren't being passed by lawmakers because like many of us who care about privacy, they have not heard about the abilities of data brokers and have no visibility into how rampant and disgusting and invasive their behavior is.

Friends and family I talk to don't care. "Oh well, what are they going to do, find me personally?"

I feel if people were able to look themselves up in these databases, they would fear it as well

look at it this way, necessities in USA are largely out of reach (health care, education, housing, funded retirement) and luxaries are easy to come by (phones, sneakers, branded clothing, streaming etc).

Whereas in Europe, the necessities are much more attainable for the population at any income bracket. Do you have much more "free cash"? No. Do you need it? No, you have a social safety net.

Even vacas in Europe are cheaper bc for an American to travel to Europe is very expensive by means of airplane. In Europe you can take a high speed train and be in any climate.

On the topic of trains, Public transit is more efficient there than it is to drive cars in the states. Imagine not having to buy a ~$30k car every 10 years? Not to mention fuel and maintain it.

Had a distinguished collegue (from the Bell Lab days) say to me recently:

"IDEs take up a lot of RAM on my machine. Vim takes up a lot of squishy RAM in my head. I need squishy RAM to hold info relevant to problem solving, not options available in my tool chain."

I'd really want to know what's driving them

likely ego

Had a client that couldn't understand a small dataset of data. They needed "something interactive to filter and sort the data for a human to review." We suggested putting it into an excel spreadsheet, and did it for them. Customer didn't know how to use excel so we had to create a knock-off excel table GUI that had buttons labeled "filter and sort".

some people seem to have money they don't know what to do with smh

it helps if you hold ChatGPTs hand and walk it through what you need. For example if you have a regex with 3 requirements, ask it to write a regex for the first requirement, then ask it to modify the previous output to add another requirement, and so on. that way you can sort of "audit" it as it generates the correct regex.

there is some more discussion of this in a similar post from a few days ago.

A step in the right direction but until there are more robust privacy laws in place, this will not go away.

If their gov is restricted on buying from data brokers, are other governments, foreign entities?

The inherit issue is the American's data can be harvested and sold. Setting up legal restrictions toward certain entities will just cause those entities to "legally self identify" as another entity. Or do business with an entity that is allowed access to American's data.

The letter is a post on his own blog . Hard to distill into a summary so I recommend reading it get more context. But it seems to have boiled down to:

• How It Was:

  • Strong adherence to the "don't be evil" ethos, focusing on societal good over profits.
  • Open, transparent communication and decision-making processes.
  • High morale, with a culture of learning from successes and failures.
  • Work focused on benefitting the web and users, rather than Google's immediate interests.
  • Collaboration and lack of internal silos, encouraging innovation and autonomy.

• How It Is Now:

  • Shift from user-centric to Google-centric, and then to individual-centric decision making.
  • Eroded transparency and increase in organizational silos.
  • Decline in morale and a culture of distrust between employees and management.
  • Focus on short-term financial gains leading to layoffs and defensive employee behavior.
  • Lack of clear vision and leadership, resulting in confused and ineffective management.
  • Overall deterioration of Google's unique, innovative culture and values.

Not yet. The rumors are confirmed by Meta reaching out to a Mastadon admin, Kev, from fosstadon.org. He kindly made public the email.

Mail from Meta to Kev, from fosstadon.org, and reply

to add to this, id like standardization of qualification and competencies - kind of like a license so I don't have to "demonstrate" myself during interviews.

I hate being in a candidate pool that all have a degree and experience, we all go through a grueling interview process on college basics, and the "best one gets picked." Company says "our interview process works great, look at the great candidates we hire." like, duh, your candidate pool was already full of qualified engineers with degrees/experience, what did you expect to happen?

There is a very effective approach (34:00), that big companies like cloudflare use, to ship a product in a fast and quality way. It bears parallels to what you are describing. In essence engineers should not get hung up in the details to trying to solve everything.

1. Just build a proof of concept
2. Discard the prototype no matter what and start from scratch keeping the initial feedback in mind
3. Build something internally that you yourself will use
4. Only once something is good enough and is used internally, then release it to beta.

So that tedious process in trying to flush out all the details before seeing a product (or open source effort) working end to end, might be premature before having the full picture.

At work, we started the c++ migration to rust doing the following:

1. Identify "subsystems" in the c++ code base
2. Identify the ingress/egress data flows into this subsystem
3. Replace those ingress/engress interfaces with grpc for data/event sharing (we have yet to profile the performance impact of passing an object over grpc, do work on it, then pass it back)
4. Start a rewrite of the subsystem. from c++ to rust
5. Swap out the two subsystems and reattach at the grpc interfaces
6. Profit in that now our code is memory safe AND decoupled

The challenge here is identifying the subsystems. If the codebase didn't have distinct boundaries for subsystems, rewrite becomes much more difficult

I dont know to what capacity twitter uses cloudflare but cloudflare is rather ubiquitous. Even if twitter didn't have services with cloudflare, when a user's device resolves the domain name "twitter.com" to an IP address, it might go through Cloudflare's DNS servers. And givien the ubiquity of Cloudflare DNS, this is likely frequently. By monitoring the DNS queries for Twitter.com, Cloudflare can estimate the traffic volume by analyzing the number and frequency of requests received.

I don't know why cloudflare's CEO would do that or where he keeps his huge steel balls, but today I learned I can mine Cloudflare's internet usage data. And I might have found a new hobby!

Cloudflare Radar has an API that gives access to Cloudflare’s data on global Internet traffic..

Radar’s API is free, allowing academics, data sleuths and other web enthusiasts to investigate Internet usage across the globe.

7 years ago when I started my career, My first project we sat down and designed the program and interfaces.

Today, we implement features using best practices, never sitting down to design and end up accumulating technical debt that we don't have funds or time to go back and fix.

Time to market is proportional to time to obsoletence. We don't design for longevity anymore :(

duckduckgo (who uses Microsoft's index I believe) is able to find Lemmy instances already.

problem is since every instance has its own domain you cannot search all of Lemmy or the more obscure fediverse. lemmy.world, beehaw.org, programming.dev are all different "websites".

I append "reddit" to my query when I want to search reddit for a human answer to a question. Can't do that with Lemmy, unless the instance is branded as Lemmy.

Unless there will be an org or volunteers that indexes federated instances and makes them available to search engines to they can be differentiated, finding stuff in the fediverse might be difficult...

to be fair, the original poster used the word "tanking" and he knows a thing or two about DNS. I thought "tanking" was too click-baity and toned it down :D

Debian has the advantage of not using snapd like Ubuntu does. You have to not only remove snaps but also instruct the package manager not you pull in snaps as dependencies and not to favor snap packages.

I have fond memories of Ubuntu being my first distro many years ago but pushing snaps onto users to compete with flatpak is a nuisance.

to preface what might sound like slander, I really would love to get my hands on apple hardware. It is engineered rather well and the geek in me can appreciate that. However, getting access to your own hardware is an issue.

While I have some concerns about their objective features, to my shame, the greatest problem is with the brand and their practices.

I think the root cause of all my issues stems from their morals and aggressive/elitist business practice - specifically their quest to squeeze money out of users and hide behind the lie of "we are doing this for the user's benefit".

I have no issue paying money for features I want or entities I'd like to support. In fact, I'm more inclined to financially support those who I believe in.

And apple loves to gatekeep features and keep them exclusive to apple. They effectively benefit from hard work of others who contribute to open standards and services, but at the same time do not share their own. Greedy.