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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 14th, 2023

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  • The “fight for $15” (minimum wage increase) has been going on for so long with zero [Federal] success that, due to inflation, it ought to be renamed “fight for $30” by now.

    And the side that won has been fighting the minimum wage hike for “so long”. Who’s the enemy of the working class again?

    The lip service given in supporting unions was belied by how Biden fucked over the railroad workers.

    This is a lie that has been repeated time and time again. He fast followed the end of the strike with helping the workers get exactly what they wanted. He aided their negotiations AND got our supply lines back on line.

    Inequality (the gap between the working class and the 1%) is continuing to spiral out of control and the Democrats had very little to say about stopping it. It’s important to remember that “tax the rich” was only supported by the progressive subset of the Democratic Party.

    Again, which party is it giving the mega wealthy tax breaks? Who is appointing billionaires to run the government? Who controlled the House and prevented tax reform from going through?

    We need zoning reform coupled with switching from property tax to land-value tax, to stop enabling the hoarding of underdeveloped property by protecting it from market forces (i.e. real reforms to make housing affordable again).

    That is state level reform. Obviously.

    We also need things like vigorous enforcement of anti-trust law and consumer protection laws, so that the public feels (and is) less exploited by corporations.

    No argument there, but which party is constantly eroding our current regulations that protect consumers and workers?






  • We affectionately called it “subscurity” on the FE team.

    When our BE apis would not give us any information why something failed, nor would they give us access to their logs. Complete black box of undocumented doodoo, and they would proudly say “security through obscurity” every time we asked why they couldn’t make improvements to usability.



  • Rofl. As a developer of nearly 20 years, lol.

    I used copilot until finally getting fed up last week and turning it off. It was a net negative to my productivity.

    Sure, when you’re doing repetitive operations that are mostly copy paste and changing names, it’s pretty decent. It can save dozens of seconds, maybe even a minute or two. That’s great and a welcome assist, even if I have to correct minor things around 50% of the time.

    But when an error slips through and I end up spending 20 minutes tracking down the problem later, all that saved time vanishes.

    And then the other times where my IDE is frozen because the plugin is stuck in some loop and eating every last resource and I spend the next 20 minutes cursing and killing processes, manually looking for recent updates that hadn’t yet triggered update notifications, etc… well, now we’re in the red, AND I’m pissed off.

    So no, AI is not some huge boon to developer productivity. Maybe it’s more useful to junior developers in the short term, but I have definitely dealt with more than a few problems that seem to derive from juniors taking AI answers and not understanding the details enough to catch the problems it introduced. And if juniors frequently rely on AI without gaining deep understanding, we’re going to have worse and worse engineers as a result.



  • Eh. Honestly, the line of “questions” was rather stupid.

    “Why aren’t you lobbying to make your business irrelevant” is essentially what the interviewer pushed aggressively.

    Sure, I get calling out a CEO for deflecting tough questions with corporate BS. But it was a pretty dumb line of questioning in the first place.

    Why isn’t Google lobbying for privacy protections?

    Why isn’t Comcast lobbying for net neutrality?

    Just make your statement and ask for comment. “Our listeners consider Intuits lobbying against tax reform that would benefit tax payers to be adversarial to their customers. What would you say to them?”





  • Mostly fair, but I’ll push back on the security issue.

    Side loading an apk is extremely dangerous, and an easy attack vector.

    While there are plenty of malicious apps that make it on the Google store, they do attempt to do some automated and even manual curation. This is fact.

    I think it’s wholly appropriate to warn the user that they’re bypassing that standard, if imperfect, Google security coverage. And granting extensive app permissions is done at your own risk.

    3rd party app stores may do their own security curation as well, and it’s up to them to communicate that and educate their users on why they still get the Google warning.