Heads up, Android Studio may ask you to update gradle for Soundstack, don't do it. It will break it, not sure why.
Okay dope, I've justed reimplemented the search and a simple playlist. It's all pretty simple code and will help understanding fragments better and how they interact.
Cool, I still plan on taking a look at your pull request soon. I've just been a lot more busy then I expected to be
I'm pretty sure they should because I just set up the project and it wants me to commit all of the .idea files to overwrite yours. We should all just create our own config files upon setting up the project.
I also need an invite to the Soundstack trello board. Could someone hook me up?
When you have a chance, I also needed to be added to the list of contributors so I can push branches up to the repo.
Not sure if you have had a chance to do it yet, but I'm still getting permission denied just so you know.
I'm having an issue where I run the app in AndroidStudio and the emulator starts but the app never appears. Either of you guys have experience with this? Am I missing something?
Have you tried running it in your actual phone? I've tried it on the Nexus 5 emulator, and it works though.
No, I'll try that next. It's not even like it crashes though. Nothing happens haha
guys I think I will be working on automated testing -- hopefully writing a testing framework... crossing my fingers it can be in java
it's cool, if anything maybe keenin and I can get there early to grab a table?
Will do, let me just update all these live checks and I should be good to go
After days of debugging a broken 6 stage ELK pipeline, I finally find out the lack of flow was due to the disk being full on one of the machines facepalm And one log file was taking up 75% of the disk...
Yeah, the rest of the servers on the pipeline have a clean up service in place but this one got shut off somehow or something. It's surprisingly hard to debug because you don't expect it and the system can have weird symptoms
@brandon @spkaplan Come on guys, I know you want to play some Warcraft wit me!!!!
Maybe the company size has to be large enough? Are your prices different?
They also have deals for the company, if you pay like $25 per employee they get $5 off each time
I think the prices are about the same. But I think Peachd is scared and that's why they are trying to get there prices lower
And you know amazon will bring the prices down once they get stuff figured out
it looks like they are trying to partner with companies and restaurants, rather than individual people right now
Haha that's on my list of TODOs as well! I was thinking about using a pokemon or something
Do you have a good location to find profile icons like that? I don't really no where to look
@keenin uploaded a file: Jira Profile and commented: Feel free to use it!
ELK stack stuff. Getting my "demoable" version into a production environment is a real bitch.
this might be a dumb question but when retrieving a jdk to a server from a repo, would I then extract it?
my manager got a new a manager who doesn't know anything about data engineering / technology...
first meeting w/him and it's funny hearing him talk about the work my team does
Talking with the higher ups is a pain sometimes cause they don’t know all the underlying shit
yeah sometimes all you can do is nod and agree and then laugh off the entire conversation once you leave
i'm sorry it isn't working for you guys either, but i feel better it just isn't me doing something wrong
@andelink Do you always use Notepad++? It's good for certain things because its lightweight but if you haven't tried Atom yet, you should.
@brandon uploaded a file: 9.13.16.PNG and commented: Logged 30 minutes 👍
very cool!
and i always use npp lol exclusively. all i do is write sql for the most part. when i work in R i have a npp extension for NpptoR lol
NpptoR just allows me to execute any R script in npp
It's autodetects languages and has a huge community that write plugins for it. Plus, it looks pretty
atom is like the fat younger brother that responds slow when you try to talk to it
i will try Atom if it can switch to column mode via a hot-key
wow there is some text editor beef going on lol
haha that is one thing Atom needs to work on. People are complaining about it on the internet. I found a couple plugins that enable it fully though.
ohh yess that is the gold mine of all functionality i live for that shit
@brandon uploaded a file: 9.15.16.PNG and commented: Anybody else got this set up yet? It's really fun!
Yeah, I didn't really realize I was using so many haha I think a lot of them stem from chef.
i got rid of the npp one cause it was fucking up the application. maybe once i try atom i will try this with it
mine will be sql 100% unless it also logs excel time ??
npp is simply dope. alt-shift into that column mode all day
haha npp is cool because of how lightweight it is but all 3 text editors have column mode so...
true true but i just don't see what the benefit for me to switch over is other than a dark background ?
so it has sql language support for syntax highlighting, formatting, autocompletion of functions
what npp doesn't have is a variety of dialect support like redshift syntax
Yeah, that's where atom comes in. It autodetects syntax and supports just about everything.
how does it auto-detect oracle sql vs redshift sql?
npp is awesome and lightweight and easy to use out of the box. I still use it if I need to edit a file real quick but it doesn't support opening "projects". Atom doesn't become the better editor until you put a bit of time in to set it up. It also has a large community and is being developed faster. Plus, it's much prettier 🙂
I thought you were linking to the portable version. But that's just a png
A single Kafka broker can handle hundreds of megabytes of reads and writes per second from thousands of clients.
Yeah, so we put Kafka right in front of logstash and that way if logstash or ES fail, Kafka keeps them all in a queue and you don't have to worry about data loss.
Logstash will queue logs too but the queue can fill up surprisingly quickly
Well, I'm not sure it actually fills up...I need to go look. But there is a chance of data loss regardless haha
I found it interesting that GitHub backs Atom. I didn't know about that. Also why is Atom googled SO much more than the others and why is it so irregular? It's like everyone googles atom in spikes. The other lines are much more constant
Oh, good catch. That could be part of it. Here's a more detailed breakdown that shows some of the queries
https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Sublime%20Text,Notepad,Atom
Yeah, they don't really have the full devops capabilities. You can't build or run code
^^^ Yeah, right? One of them is "netbook". Why is that even a related query?
Although all of them include some questionable queries. One of npp's is "sublime" 🤔
@tiaalexa you work at nordstrom right? what dept/group are you in?
Yeah we are! I would be so down for that. Most people I know in seattle are a bit too far for me
I was wondering cause I was just at lunch with a couple people from Looker and they mentioned they are doing a proof-of-concept with a team at Nordstrom
gotcha -- i received a couple emails from a recruiter asking me to come by and at least check it out.
forsure just lemme know when you wanna meet up! I am on 7th and stewart
amazon lifestyle isn't that bad! i don't know what the dev life is like though
is that the westlake station offices, right above the light rail?
sometime next week lets grab lunch. i haven't eaten in that area yet hopefully some good grub
I might hold off on building a desktop and get monitors and a docking station first
but that means do I get a mac and then have to have 2 docking stations or just stick to thinkpads...
I mean I could, but I heard sometimes it's more difficult because I'll need to get parallels and stuff and it just a pain
plus then I would need a new docking station etc... and it takes out of the budget
i see. i am so out of touch with all things cool and dev in the world
Just to add to this conversation I missed. The worst thing I found out about windows this summer is that the architecture isn't case sensitive... I found out when I tried to commit a file to git the other day after changing the filename and it just did't notice the change because windows ignored the change in casing under the hood. If that makes sense..
maybe it was built with the common people in mind
Why?! That's not what you called it! And that's not what its displayed as. You are probably right though.
Haha oh wow, I didn't realize you were still at work. I was going to ask if you wanted to go somewhere in Renton to watch the second half of the game.
haha oh yeah, it's Adult Swim weekend. Are you allowed to work from home at all?
I mean I can but we are going live next month so being in the office and asking questions is crucial
I feel it. Working from home is really ineffective when you need to communicate
Question: Say I am creating directories by retrieving a remote file and then extracting it. How do I use chef to make sure that no files are overwritten? Is that what checksum is for?
Say I had a remotefile to notify an execute block to extract BUT only if a directory is missing. I was going to have in my remotefile : if directory doesnt exist then notify this execute command. and have the execute command action be nothing until notified.
The conditional yes -- but the notifies property that chef has isn't working so partially yes. It hits inside the conditional because I ran a print statement lol aka how I debug in C
@tiaalexa yeah i live in renton. and i am working in renton right now. wfh all day
hmm keenin you didn't work over the weekend i see
when you find out you can have a safari/o'reilly license and get all da books 4 free
Yeah, it's just not the same. And I'm tired of all these blockers. I can't download anything I want to download 😞
Yeah, it's hard to tell on day 1 but so far the labs have been full of randos
Can I get a shoutout for the math center though ... ?
That table alias matching is pretty slick, can be a pain reading long queries and trying to match up the tables quickly
LOL i feel so official chef scripting on my plane ride to my first work trip
Google for sleep function in python and Bing opened up an editor with an exampleeee, Google needs to go this!
That's the only example that came up, but it brought up an example of the function i was searching for which is so useful! And you can even edit and run the code
Right!? I wanna buy one of the keyboard when I get back to work and actually have a desk. I might buy one sooner and have it at home
Hopefully if I get this keyboard in half then I can work on my typing skills
guys im so sappy but I got Ted a care package full of snacks cuz his prototype is due in 2 weeks so I feel like he will be pulling long days in the lab. Then I got amazon prime and my life is forever changed
Thanks!! I just got off the phone with HR and they just want to schedule a meeting in Seattle to discuss the position.
Well, my manager-to-be is on vacation until the 6th, so it might be like next friday, the 7th. I should be getting an email today or tomorrow with next steps and scheduling details. Today was just the call to see if I was interested.
But yeah, I'd be totally down for lunch. I'll keep you posted as I learn more
Okay gotcha, sweet. When you know more we’ll get all the details worked out
Hahaha possibly! But not gunna lie if that's Labor Day weekend I'll probably go to Sasquatch
I might be down! I'll have to see as it gets closer. Do tickets need to be purchased way ahead of time?
Right. If Keenin ever decides to wfh in Bham in Friday's you could catch a ride with me up
lowkey ted is always busy but his 510 hw was crazy. I saw that ish yesterday and it was proof by contradiction and using a pumping lemma on like a language that i can't even explain
yeah but at the same time interesting especially how it ties in with relational expressions
Super interesting if you can understand that shit and solve it, otherwise your just dead in the water lol
@brandon uploaded a file: cs352_wakatime.PNG and commented: In case anybody is wondering if I actually do my work in UNIX.... Thank you WakaTime 😎
Yeah, I'm going to wait and see what he decides on his own first but it's actually really good evidence, right?
python ppl: i need help. I don't know why I can't use the panda lib. I've already installed and it's in the correct folder.
Sorry Tia I wish I could help but I haven't touched python since school. I wonder if @keenin @brandon or @spkaplan could help ... ?
all good, i'm just going to look into anaconda as a platform to control all my different environments and packages for python
I just now trying to set up config behind a proxy server and to not conflict between already installed python and anaconda
I know, the most frustrating is when it can identify packages because it's getting blocked due to proxy servers and what not
true, but when I try and edit the config file from examples online it won't work but it's hard to decipher what is the actual problem.
I haven't worked in Python in ages so I won't be much help. I think @spkaplan still uses it for research though.
yeah he was helping me yesterday and it has to do with importing conflicts
okay so that's like a thing.. I was like okay is this difficult or am I just missing something
TIFU: (yesterday) I was slacking people on the HutchResearch slack during a research reading group. I forgot that Brian is also a member on that slack. He responded to my messages in that channel later, but I'm sure he saw the timestamp and realized I was doing other things on my laptop than looking at the paper during the reading group. Lol
Hahaha right!? I bet he has always had a hunch that I'm doing other things on my laptop too during the reading group. I mean, who doesn't lol
haha those reading groups have such good intentions but i often thought they were a bit too much
I like them and benefit from them, but I get the same amount out if I have 70% concentration as if I have 100% concentration
God I’m an idiot, couldn’t figure out why my config file wasn’t working...
Anyone know anyone looking for an engineering job? I can refer and get 2k
Haha omitting information from a PDF you don't want to fill out by hand again.
Hmm interesting. Like parts of an application or something?
Yeah, exactly. It's surprisingly hard to find good tools for PDFs for some reason. Or maybe it's just that there are a lot of bad ones haha
Gotcha. And yeah pdfs are hard to work with, which is a shame because they are my file format of choice for final reports/documents
anyone good with awk and how to use it to save an array of a column to check against a column of another file?
lol I know, I am just confused by this one thing I found which will do what I want but I don't understand how it uses this a value as a key against an array of values in a column
RANT: I LOVE PYTHON BUT I SWEAR IN A CORPORATE SETTING IT'S LITERALLLLLLY THE WORST.
Time to take a short break from work....Guys, help me come up with a good photo for slack/github!
And tomorrow will be the first time I'm leaving bham without plans to come back..
Well, thats not true I guess since I have to come back Saturday for the ceremony haha still, it feels weird
anyone used aws lambda before / know anything about serverless computing
That does look pretty cool. It would be awesome to have all of those games in my steam library.
Yeah! It makes me really want to get Play on Linux (or whatever it's called) working!! haha Maybe that'll be a project for this coming weekedn
@spkaplan That would be awesome. Then you could play games with Keenin and I!
@tiaalexa If you get a gamecube just promise you will get super smash bros
@brandon I definitely want that to happen! Wanna take a swing at it with me sometime? Even just for an hour or something?
Yeah, I think between us all we should be able to figure that out..at least I would hope so!
Will you guys please join my Wakatime leaderboard so we can all see each others activity/dashboard. I think it would be fun. @spkaplan you are already on there but I think you need to set up the API keys on your new work computer because you haven't been logging anything. Here is the invite URL:
Yeah, i haven't set up it up on either my work or personal laptop. I'll put it on my to do list. It is fun, I just gotta actually go through the set up again
What do you mean? Do you think the firewall is blocking you out or something? I would be down to look at it on your laptop with you sometime.
yeah i'll show you sometime Brandon! It's either firewall or proxy because I finally was able to get the package downloaded in atom but it doesn't log my activity
Well, we will have to look at both of you guys then. Maybe its the same problem. It's supposed to be pretty easy though...
I think that indian lady is doing a little tip of the hat for the gesture lol
Just used Atom's sync-settings package for the first time to synchronize all of my settings and packages to a new install on my mac 🙌 Highly recommend it!
When you realize you are probably going to end up coding in R today... 😨
hey guys qq for you. in your respective jobs and companies, is ensuring your code does the right thing (aka what it is supposed to) more important than getting something done quickly? or is doing something fast valued above doing something right, knowing full well there are mistakes or data quality issues with how its been built?
is that your personal opinion of your companies/managers opinion?
I would say there is a balance of both honestly. If you are forced to do something fast or hack it together, at least make a ticket to follow up on it.
My worry there is how often do those old tickets you submit by yourself to yourself actually get resolved?
I could probably refer you for a data analytics or data science job too? I'll keep my eye out for open positions
My teams backlog gets looked at in each sprint, but we literally just look at it lol don't do anything
The backlog is where you pull all of your current sprint work from, right?
Backlog here seems to be like a place to dump "oh we should maybe do this" ideas or "this is wrong but doesn't have an impact" issue
Keenin I think its cause we are more on the analytics side
Brandon you are on a dev team where shit actually is done right and correctly
All other teams try to emulate dev operations/processes and ultimately fail because business people are like "does that really matter lol shit i have some guy breathing down my neck to do something else right now anyways"
Yeah, I guess so. I don't have other experience to draw from so I kind of just assumed thats how it was done
It is because of this conundrum that I wanted to ask how hard would it be for me to switch to the dev side?
I think you could pick up the dev operations flow pretty easily but you would probably need to get some experience with more structured/object oriented languages to prepare for dev work. That being said, as I said before, I don't have much experience to draw on so I could be wrong.
I know I'm late, but I'm going to chime in anyway haha.
From what I've seen so far, my team and department value doing things right over quickly. Everyone holds each other to a pretty high standard. We have architects in the department and sprinkled around the teams who know what needs to happen, and know from lots of experience how to do things right. They guide most of the work that is done.
We use our backlog pretty rigorously. The roadmap for the coming quarter-ish or maybe more (I'm not entirely sure) gets translated into epics and stories which get put into the backlog. Sprints are then created out of the stories in the backlog. We have "backlog grooming" every few weeks to remove stories that are no longer needed, etc...
@andelink We have an employee referral program. I haven't taken a look at it, but I can look into how the referral process works.
@spkaplan That's a good explanation and sounds pretty familiar to what we do. We do smaller backlog grooming events weekly/biweekly though.
It's the only way we can stay sane and remember what needs to happen lol
spending time actually think about things so you don't fuck things up down the road
i'm getting grilled at work right now because i am not building this reporting pipeline fast enough
i moved teams and was told i was hired to take over the dba and reporting work so the data scientists can actually do data science. guess what? data scientists are not good at data engineering. i am designing an architecture to allow flexible long term growth but my manager is upset because i haven't "productionized" the existing stuff yet. i've been here a week dammit. the existing stuff broke over holiday. like why did you hire me if you wanted to keep the shitty stuff you have?
but anyways thanks for the info. my experience at amazon thus far in a de role, coupled with your comments really makes me thinking about going back to school for a masters in cs or something
and @brandon my team does not use that stuff at all right now. the devs on the other side of the wall do
@andelink that sucks man. I'm sorry you are in that situation. When you say you are building a reporting pipeline, does that mean running sql transformations on the data to create the views necessary to do the analytics or are there other tools besides sql involved in said pipeline? I'm having to skim the surface of data analytics/reporting right now so I'm curious.
And going back for a masters in cs is definitely a worthwhile consideration. Math and CS is a killer combo. There are a lot of factors to consider in that decision too though
there are some internal tools we have to schedule jobs while managing dependencies (e.g. i schedule my job to run on a certain cadence like daily, saturdays, monthly or w/e and specify what upstream data sources - like another table - to depend on, so my job will be put in a run queue at its scheduled time but won't actually kick off until the upstream dependency is satisfied - that table has been successfully loaded with that days data), and there are different tools depending on what type of job you are running that allow you to stitch a pipeline together (e.g. run a Redshift query on Saturday, dump the output to an s3 bucket, use that as input to some python script held on an ec2 instance, then use that output in email distribution/further processing/load back into DB table, etc), but all these tools are just meant to help schedule things. we don't use typical BI tools you see in industry like SAS or SQL server. it's raw SQL (on w/e DB your team uses), custom scripts, and internal job management tools mostly.
so right now i am working with upstream sources to ensure the data is in the right format, if not get it in the right format and loaded with a certain schedule, integrate dependency management, and then do what you said to transform the data and create the views or table necessary for certain reports or analytical work within different teams. Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) is the traditional phrase you will hear (e.g. ETL pipeline) in the data warehousing community
the data engineers are typically responsible for designing the data models, building the pipelines, table/cluster maintenance, and data integrity. then you usually have data scientists leverage those datasets to do their thing, or business analysts to build reporting solutions in tableau or something
@andelink We have fraud data warehouse here. Wanna come work for expedia? haha
yeah man haha expedia is a great company. over on the east side and everything. my uncle is actually a sr. bi architect/developer over at expedia. he really likes it.
I'm glad to hear it! I'm liking it a lot so far. I'd be totally happy to do whatever to put your name in the employee referral system. Let me know.
I will for sure be thinking about it, especially when "bias for action" at amazon pisses me off
Nice, thanks for the info. I'm having to work with redshift and s3 in a similar way right now. Getting a lot of help from the data warehouse people though haha
For the second time, today, I had a bash command perform better on my windows machine than my mac...so weird.
That being said, there are also a lot of times when the mac shell works better but that is to be expected.
nice man sounds fun 🙂 would love to hear more about the stuff you're working on sometime
Yeah, it has been. Definitely out of my comfort zone writing sql though haha
These two commands didn't execute properly on my mac. I didn't dig in to find out what specifically went wrong because it worked elsewhere
subindex=$(echo $col1 | grep -aob '/' --color=never | grep -oE '^[0-9]+' | sed '3q;d') (I pulled the end of this from StackOverflow so don't ask me what it does because I don't remember haha)
install -D /dev/null s3/$col1 (for some reason the mac version of install didn't have the -D flag which I was dependent on at the time)
hey how do you guys file your taxes? hire someone? turbo tax or something?
Honestly pretty worth it, especially once you start having quite a few assets.
that's what i am thinking as well. how do you find someone?
PSA. There is a hazardous Mat, Spill-Leak on 2nd Avenue and Marion. Traffic is aleady getting backed up.
Also a pretty cool site, shows all dispatched emergency vehicles in seattle
5 units? Is that 5 crews or 5 chumps mopping up a dishwasher detergent spill?
idk if they are hazmad suits but the fire department are suited up in something other than their fire gear
I don't think the number next to the units actually corresponds to the number of people on the unit though. There is one with E39 under units and there is no way there is 39 people responding to an aid call.
there is one row that has a lot of units in a list that i didn't see before
sometimes i am absolutely f**ing useless without loud obnoxious music
@brandon uploaded a file: SQL question and commented: @andelink @keenin I've got a question for the SQLers out there. I have the following query which gets the count of page view logs grouped by url where refrmedium='search'. I want to add an additional column to the query that shows the same count but without filtering on refrmedium. What's the easiest way to accomplish this? Basically I want a subcount column and a totalcount column.
Use a UNION to make that search again with the new column. Unioning on the primary key
hmmmm does the union just know which field to "union" on? Usually when I do something similar with a join, I have to tell it how to combine the tables
Ok, cool. I'm getting a syntax error right now but I'm not sure why. I'll let you know if the union works once I figure out the syntax my app/redshift want.
@brandon uploaded a file: Untitled and commented: @keenin I couldn't get that UNION to work but I ended up coming up with this solution instead. It's actually pretty clean since I name each sub-query and then combine them with a join at the end. Not sure how it compares to the UNION solution computation wise though.
Nice, but yea depending on how many rows your going through idk which will be quicker.
What do you usually write your queries in? My coworker showed me this app called dbeaver and it's pretty nice but I'm curious what other tools are out there.
@brandon If the bus is on time, then 540pm. So with the grocery run, i should be home by 7.
alright, sounds good. Tia just got home and we were wondering when we could expect to be ordering dinner
I need to get better at opening this up. Do you guys use the app or the website?
Yeah, I have the desktop app on my home computer and both work computers
Did you get your SQL stuff sorted out? I saw Keenin replied but I haven't read the question or response yet
haha yeah, I figured that out. I'm still working on that project though. I'm joining a couple tables as we speak 😉 haha
You click the "+" sign and then click add code snippet. From that screen, it will try to autodetect the language but you can set it to the language of your choice in the top right if you wish
I haven't seen the case statement used before. Damn, thats an elegant solution. Thank you for that, I'll try to incorporate it in to my project
Ha glad you like! Yeah using case statements in aggregate functions are super help. Neat little use of it that changed the way I write SQL when I first saw it
Thanks Tia, you every deal with SQL in your job?
LOL no not really actually but I start my new job next week and I will be doing more web dev and db stuff
Not gonna lie, not really sure what people mean when they say IoT
I know it means Internet of Things, but what is an IoT application?
Yeah, definitely your phone. Anything that is connected to the internet is technically part of the IoT. It's just expanded way past the idea of computers and phones now so they came up with a more all encompassing term.
@tiaalexa uploaded a file: Pasted image at 2017-02-10, 3:40 PM and commented: SUP @brandon
Short answer: no...kind of.
Long answer: There are different costs depending on transportation options. It's something like: Drive to work alone=$200/month, drive to work alone in hybrid=$75/month, carpool=free parking, Bus=They give you a free unlimited orca pass.
Okay so if I were to drive alone it would be $200/month - they don't reimburse you for that?
No. They pay $8/day but we can use our Transportation benefits to pay for parking with pre-taxed income so it saves you a bit of money
I thought Amazon was f**ing me but I guess everywhere you have to pay if you drive alone
Sam's transportation perks are way nicer haha but I don't think thats the norm
Nope, no reimbursement. I think they get incentives from the city to encourage employees to carpool and bus.
Amazon does a similar thing. We get an orca pass for free, van pool is subsidized / discounted, parking in the amazon parking garages ranges from $17-$25/day
haha yeah, i haven't heard of free orca passes anywhere else. I want Connector shuttles like Microsoft though! 😄
Orca pass was awesome when I was taking the light rail but now that i drive i don't use it at all. Was nice when it was useful though
Yeah the orca pass is only helpful if you live near to a good bus route.
No we don't. Most people drive at my new place but at Nordstrom they gave you $100 a month for commuting purposes
I guess it would be hard as a company to pay for every employees parking in the city because parking rates are so high
It sucks though paying hundreds of dollars each month just to park
Yeah, its just one of the costs of working in the city I guess. I only spend $99 on an Orca pass every month though and that comes out of my paycheck before taxes so it saves me a bit of money that way.
@brandon How long did your commute on the bus from Renton to your office take?
That's nice no transfers. Plus would be free with orca pass. Plus you could recapture that time by doing other things than driving
Yeah, having the time back is the biggest bonus in my opinion. I can use the time to check emails/slack or just read my book and listen to music and there's no stress of being in traffic.
Yeah, that route has you taking the 148 to downtown renton and then hopping on the 101 which goes all the way downtown once an hour. This seems kind of unnecessary. Another option is to park your car in Rolling Hills in the morning and hop on the 102 instead which I think is faster than the 101 because it takes less stops and doesn't go to downtown renton. This revised route (originating from my house) takes ~30 minutes off your commute
I do a similar thing. I drive a little bit, then hop buses most of the way. Having the time on the bus to do stuff is great.
how about this snow huh? kinda cool from the 26th floor!
haha I bet! It's pretty much melted by the time it gets down to us ground level people
lol yeah its gone up here now too. weird weather
Guten tag auto corrected to gluten.... Haha not the gifs I was looking for
aws is having issues and amzn stock is dropping: https://twitter.com/search?q=AWS+S3&ref_src=twsrc^google%7Ctwcamp^serp%7Ctwgr^search
Twitter
"Amazon's stock price is a better uptime indicator than their status page" lol
Yeah, I heard us-east2 has been down a lot this morning. Is it intermittent or completely fucked? I haven't looked too much yet.
the dumb dumb that don't load balance in multiple regions are seeing the error in their ways.
our internal tools are victims of this too. it's making me incredibly ineffective at my job cause i can't do anything.
yeah slack is listed as one of the companies impacted by this
The issues appear to be affecting Buffer, Business Insider, Chef, Citrix, Codecademy, Coursera, Cracked, Docker, Expedia, Expensify, Giphy, Heroku, Home Chef, iFixit, IFTTT, Imgur, isitdownrightnow.com, Lonely Planet, Mailchimp, Medium, Microsoft’s HockeyApp, News Corp, Pantheon, Quora, Razer, Slack, Sprout Social, Travis CI, Trello, Twilio, Unbounce, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and Zendesk, among other services. Airbnb, Down Detector, Freshdesk, Pinterest, SendGrid, Snapchat’s Bitmoji, and Time Inc. are currently working slowly.
I think "impacted" means affected in some way. Not necessarily true that the entire list of companies are completely down or don't have fail overs.
@brandon uploaded a file: PayScale Hack Day and commented: My team's chrome extension for LinkedIn won 2 awards today! Woot woot!
So what does your chrome extension actually do? Map people's job on Linkedin with like a summary of the Payscale page?
@brandon uploaded a file: Slack for Android Upload and commented: Yeah, something like this. It scrapes key stats off the LinkedIn profile and runs it through our service APIs to give additional metrics.
Thanks! That pic is actually the UI designer's mockup but we were able to get most of the way there. We didnt have time to do years of experience. We did a live demo during presentations today though
Damn that is nice. Changes how I will use LinkedIn if it puts the salary estimate right there on the page. Cool stuff
Changed my work laptop password a couple of days ago. I have yet to type to correct password on the first try when unlocking my machine. Hopefully someday... haha
I didn't realize with Amazon Prime you can downloaddd music from Prime music!? Cool stuff
Yeah, prime benefits are quite expansive. I just feel like a lot of people don't realize it. You pretty much gain some sort of benefit on every one of their platforms.
@brandon Well said. I keep discovering new benefits all the time it feels like.
yeah man prime is awesome. thanks for that list keenin. i always forget about it and there are always more benefits every time i re-find it
Gotcha, I definitely agree. In the short term we also need a way to keep the tax revenue from plummeting when millions of workers lose jobs to robots, because it's going to be a really quick transition.
Urban dictionary needs to add BUI to their database.
Haha, that must be lonely. I decided I probably shouldn't be broadcasting info about repos and such that are work-related, so I unconfigured it on my work laptop. But I have it enabled on my personal laptop for any home projects...which have been lacking
Yeah, I'm pretty sure its all private. You had me worried there for a second though because I could see all my source paths haha not that big of a deal since its not like the actual source is there but still definitely don't want that available to just anyone.
That was exactly my thought. Now that I know it's private, I'll consider doing it.
I totally like the idea of it and want to do it, but I just want to be absolutely sure it's okay...paranoid haha
Good humble bundle deal. The lowest bracket gets you 4 games worth a good amount of money. And some have very positive reviews.
https://www.humblebundle.com/jumbo-bundle-8?mcID=102:58c6fe292190d4ee67acf511:ot:58406604f7bb513ff1b7d495:1&utm_source=Humble+Bundle+Newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2017_03_14_Jumbo8_Bundle_mpa&linkID=58c833b235c860455b8b4568&utm_content=logo0
Yea, they just added 3 new games to the bundle. Might get it up to the second tier.
$1 game with 4 player coop teams and pvp. Could be fun to play for a night or two with a group.
https://www.bundlestars.com/en/game/guns-of-icarus-online?utm_source=Bundle%20Stars%20Newsletter&utm_campaign=c75d46550a-Spring_Sale_Icarus_03_17_2017&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_3437eaaeba-c75d46550a-430085649&mc_cid=c75d46550a&mc_eid=6b5b63c9fc
haha yeah, added him a bit ago so that I could migrate away from the group that only the two of us were a part of
Yes, it is me, hello. Ya, I'm down. I dont feel like reading up on it tho so I'm just gonna trust that its worth a whole dollar
Looks like its got a limited amount of keys too, so anybody who wants it might wanna get it sooner rather than later
By the way, for during meetings, I learned a couple weeks ago that macs have a "Do Not Disturb" mode that will disable popups from slack and email and what not while you are sharing your screen. You can access it from the notifications menu that slides out from the right hand screen edge if I'm remembering correctly.
I think windows 10 has an equivalent "Quiet Hours" mode in the bottom right notifications menu
It can do everything for you, even spy on you and send data to the CIA!!!
i sit next to the guy who writes/produces those jingles
New PayScale "WeWork" promo video debuting at a compensation/hr conference today. This is the first real marketing/branding campaign attempt I have seen since starting in January. Pretty cool and classy looking considering our smaller company size. It's definitely targeting our brand/philosophy more so than our actual products though. I would like to see an ad geared more toward our business product and the solutions it offers.
Internal:
Twitter:
LinkedIn:
Facebook:
Nice quality productions. I like the compensation video (second vid on the internal link). Interesting tidbit mentioned in there was most companies hire some consulting firm to gather compensation data and then 6-12 months later they get their reports. Is that 6-12 month lag true?? That seems way too long to be an acceptable timeline for compensation reporting
Yeah, traditionally that is how compensation market research has been done. You hire someone to collect sample data on the target population/demographic/occupation and they do a detailed analysis on the information they collect and deliver a report when its done. Without crowd sourced data, that was really the only way to collect the information needed. And you are exactly right, it is too long. By the time you get the report you requested and paid for, the market has changed and you may have already lost some of your best talent to other competitors.
I used to love those books when I was a kid. Had no idea they were making a movie!
I really like how the art style is the same though, the nostalgia is there
haha yeah, its been so long I barely remember the books. Just remember they were fun and they had these cool flip book animation segments.
Researching VPNs due to the recent ISP laws. Thought you guys might be interested.
Deals: https://deals.androidauthority.com/search?cat=390&query=VPN&sort=best_sellers
Compare Providers:
The one I'm going with based on my research. (only 4 hours left!)
Probably a good thing to care about, yeah. There is a law being passed that will allow your ISP (Comcast) to sell your data (everything you do on the internet) to anyone who is willing to pay for it. Even if you aren't doing anything illegal, its nice to have some privacy. A VPN will make your traffic anonymous by masking it and running it through secure network endpoints.
Oh, yea, I heard about that. Is it a whole $39 dollars worth of me caring tho? Are you just gonna use it for like everyday browsing or what?
Yeah, I think the idea is that you just keep it on your phone and computer all the time.
I believe that is the idea too. Thanks for the heads up about this sale @brandon. Exactly when does the sale end?
Yup. Another plus is that having a VPN allows you to access a website from anywhere in the world so you can get the european shows on Netflix if you want 👍
And one more helpful review website:
Some of the other providers got better scores here but thatoneprivacysite.net says that they keep logs which seems a little weird.
And so far, so good. Snapchat, texting, and Spotify all seem to be uninterrupted on and off wifi.
Yea what’s the drop in ping. For gaming it’ll probably be more noticeable.
Agreed. Might not be able to use it while gaming but audio and video seem fine. Not sure exactly how ping is affected yet.
Nah it’s chill. They say you get it after you pay. But it won’t take my money.
Anyone else planning on using that referral code? Keenin and I both just got $10 and I want to know if I should wait before buying a car phone mount
haha its up to you. You may not ever use it or think about it but I feel like there is a chance they start getting really popular pretty soon. There is also going to be an attempt to repeal the law in 3 months so maybe all of our problems will be solved at that point. I've always just wanted to try one and it seemed like a good opportunity/investment. But if you don't want to spend the money, its probably not a huge deal right now either.
The law is so new I don't think anybody really knows how much its going to effect people yet.
There is so much in the news today about the browsing history bill. Getting a really cheap, life-time subscription VPN service was definitely the way to go 👍 Thanks again @brandon for sharing that info yesterday
I noticed last night while playing Overwatch, it can take awhile for matchmaking because of the VPN.
Yeah, I would kind of expect that honestly. How was the actual gameplay on the VPN? I was expecting the ping to be through the roof since it is being ecrypted and sent on an extra hop through another server.
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Slack really needs to come up with a better way to display threads. The way they're doing it now is incredible redundant.
Yes, you can always just turn the VPN off if its giving you trouble. It's just a desktop app running in the background. I honestly planned on having to do this regularly. I'm extremely surprised keenin was able to game through the vpn last night.
Hmmm interesting. I wonder what the reason for that is. Maybe matchmaking tries to find people close to you geographically and the vpn screws with that? Not sure.
@brandon good idea. That could definitely be the case. The VPN will make it look like you're wherever the VPN server is located.
One of my favorite key cap sets I've seen: https://www.massdrop.com/buy/milkyway-pbt-dye-subbed-keycap-set?1=1&utm_placement=0&referer=RDE85W&mode=guest_open&utm_campaign=Automated%20Daily%20Promotional%202017-03-31&utm_source=SparkPost&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Daily%20Promotional&utm_content=1490962150247.502718366119627162685933
I'm thinking about getting some Cherry MX brown switches for my keyboard (I really like the click feel on Keenin's haha). Anybody know the best place to look for a set of those?
In the finals for "Geekiest Office Space - Seattle" by GeekWire magazine along with Chef, Facebook, Salesforce, and Vicis. Vote for Payscale!!
There's a couple pics in the article though if thats enough to win your vote
If somebody felt like debugging for me, that'd be pretty cool. I think I've been looking at this code too long...
r.taylor: 8 minutes doesn't sound too bad. Glad you got the debugging experience yourself haha
That was after I looked at it for like an hour or two haha and it was just an extra i++
I loved the one where the guy was being attacked by squirrels trained by his ex-girlfriend haha!
Yeah haha that's absolutely ridiculous. Can't believe that happened for reals
I did a quick pass over all the LinuxFest sessions and added them all to my schedule. Unfortunately, the site is kind of broken and my sessions aren't showing up in the saved sessions section.
Here's a link to my saved sessions. Hopefully at some point they will actually start showing up and we can all compare schedules.
Okay that is pretty dope, def a niche market for this product. But the potential is there
i am super interested in what ratings my current outfits get lol
It pairs well with Amazon's more recent push to get into the fashion industry.
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So they only have 5 tickets left for section 306. 3 in row 10 and 2 in row 2.
Bummer, so we won't really be able to hangout with Brian's group. I might still be down to go. What are other people (@brandon, @andelink) thinking?
I'd still be down to go. And sometimes people move around so we might be able to hang out with his group for a bit. Plus, there's always the beer garden! Haha
I can maybe get 4 ticket in section 306, says obstructed view though but I'm down
I agree @brandon.
@keenin, depends on how close the 306 seats are to Brian's group. If they're not that close, I'd rather go for a non-obstructed view.
In my opinion, that's too far away to actually hangout with them, so I think we should go for the 4 seats in section 310, and hope seats close to them open up. What do you guys think?
I'm going to get 4 seats next to each other in Section 12. Closest section with 4 seats AND no obstructed view.
Will you also update Brian with our final location? Thanks again for buying the tickets keenin! Send a cash app request my way
amazon machine learning conference is next three days and the silly data scientists on my team get like a free 3 day vacation... wtf
Updates on tesla's solar roofing:
Comcast Technology Solutions, a local online video subsidiary of Comcast, is located right on the 2nd Avenue Protected Bike Lane in downtown Seattle. The company allows its bike commuters to keep their bikes by their desks or on hanging bike racks located in hallways, and also provides showers and towel service for its employees. This has led to a bike rate of over 10 percent, or more than three times the city average. "Having leaders in our company as active bike commuters also helps employees feel comfortable coming in on a bike – even when the weather is miserable," said bike commuter Brian Hanson, Executive Director of IT. "It promotes a healthy environment, community, and company culture, and tends to draw in quite a diverse employee base. I think it is a key to our company's continued success in our Seattle outpost."
we just hired a dev on our team and i've already learned so much by just sitting next to him. you guys are the real heroes!!
Thought you guys might find this interesting, its a self-driving neural network in GTA
Lol, it just looks at each frame and steers toward anything that looks like a road
It definitely sucks at driving but there were times when it impressed me with its car dodging skills haha I guess I had pretty low expectations though.
keenin: "Charles cannot currently learn on his own. This particular model was trained for a week in a supervised environment. Learning is planned for the near future."
-- I don't think the model is actually actively learning though. It sounds like it was trained for a week and is using a fixed model created from that training to make its decisions.
It's the kinda thing I'll just periodically remember and go back to and it'll be cool to see where it goes as long as the guy sticks with it. I didn't know it wasn't constantly learning tho, thats kinda lame, itll be cool once he implements that
Yea. there are two big things I noticed that bug me, how Charles sees and his throttle control. He just tries to follow lines really, so low resolution guard rails kinda look like streets and he rams into them over and over, and his throttle control seems kinda binary like either off or on so when he crashes, its always big
ryan: Yeah, I see that too.
keenin: No, unfortunately not yet. He was trained for 7 days on 2hr41mins of driving footage.
I definitely agree. But its enough to get Charles on the road. And now that Charles is driving himself around town, he can focus on implementing the "learning" portion which will essentially create an endless supply of training/learning data. Right?
True, but this will all be unsupervised data which won't be as valuable as probably the 2hrs46min of supervised data.
Yeah, the supervised data is definitely more valuable. I'm excited to see how the "reinforcement learning" turns out though because that should result in the model improving itself without additional preliminary training data. And it is being somewhat "supervised" since it will be told to try to improve its travel time from point A to point B so it won't just be driving wherever it wants.
---------------------------------------------------------
V0.03 will begin training soon. V0.03 is coming with a much higher resolution. Charles currently sees in 160p, which is...not ideal. V0.03 will see in 480p which is a massive improvement.
After V0.03, my goal is to focus on reinforcement learning. I have quite a few ideas for doing this step, but I am leaning towards using automated waypoints, measuring the distance/time between them as a reward mechanism.
See, knew you guys would find it interesting haha I didn't do any of that reading but that all sounds pretty cool. Wonder what his timeline looks like, need to know when to check back to see the improvements
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Yeah, I think the 2% is just to encourage you to keep reloading your gift card so they can hold on to your money. The credit card gives you 5% back though so if you want to go that route with Amazon you're probably better off just getting a credit card.
@brandon You can load it with your credit card, so I wonder if you get %5 back (in points) when loading the card, and then another 2% for loading the card.
Oh, thats interesting. If that works, loading a gift card with $100 would get you 500 reward points ($5 cash back worth) and $102 of credit on your gift card. Interesting idea. I wonder if this topic has come up on reddit or something.
Found this FAQ: "
Q: Do I get reward points in addition to the Gift Card Bonus for these orders?
A: Yes, the 5% Gift Card Bonus is in addition to the Amazon.com Rewards Visa Card reward points.
"
I wonder if figuring that out is you guys working the system or their system working...
Haha I like your point. I see it as a little of both. Im sure Amazon knows about it, but I'm also sure a large majority of people don't use this.
Haha fancy wording there @r.taylor . @spkaplan That's great that they answer the question in their FAQ and aren't trying to hide it or anything. I wonder how many customer service emails they had to respond to before they decided to post that haha
And I bet its still a win/win for Amazon because it encourages people to borrow money from them (with the credit card) and then immediately lend it back to amazon (by loading the gift card) thus putting the consumer at risk of owing interest on their credit balance while allowing amazon to invest their own money at no additional cost.
Now, I would say that it's way too much effort to hold on to a gift card just to earn $2 back every time you spend $100, but I'm pretty sure anyone with an Amazon account has a digital gift card tied to their account and you can load it up to the exact cost of your purchases during checkout. Although, this results in the 2% reward being leftover on the gift card thus encouraging you to make an additional purchase with the gift card to use the remaining balance...Aha, and there's the genius behind this. The gift card will always carry a minimum balance of 2% of whatever your most recent purchase was and will never hit $0. And if it always has a balance on it, you will never want to stop using it!!
TL;DR Damn, Amazon has some smart people working for them.
@brandon well said.
As you mentioned, yes it's digital so you don't have to have a physical gift card, which is really good.
Regarding the leftover balance. Couldn't you just fill it up to your purchase amount minus %2? Then you get the %2 bonus when reloading the card, make your purchase, and it's back to 0 (or maybe off by a cent or two)? Or am I missing something? This is what I'm doing with a few things I've been planning on buying, but have just waited.
For some reason I was thinking you wouldn't get the 2% back until after the purchase but I think you're right about getting it back before hand.
And the math is a little less straight forward than that but I'm sure you can work out a formula for it after a bit of thought.
You can't simply subtract 2% from the total because:
For a $100 purchase,
2% of $100 is $98 so you would load $98 on to the gift card. But now you are only rewarded 2% of $98 (not $100), which is a $1.96.
This puts your total gift card balance at $99.96 just $0.04 short of what you need to make your purchase.
TotalCost = Credit + 0.02(Credit)
OR
y = x + 0.02x
Given y, wouldn't solving for x give you the credit you would need to load on the card?
probably not until at least 530ish. Although @kellikatzer might be since she has been home lesson planning today
Hmmm I don't know what Docket 17-108 really entails though. The infographics are nice and all but I want to know the nitty gritty details before I send an automated response in support of a bill. Especially when signing said response might result in my name and address openly available to anyone on the internet. https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/search/filings?proceedings_name=17-108&sort=date_disseminated,DESC
Do you have any additional context/information for us? @spkaplan
Google "net neutrality bill" or "net neutrality protest". The bill is a big threat to the Internet as we know it. It wants to roll back most of the net neutrality rules currently inplace. Tens of thousands of tech companies are protesting it, including Google, Amazon, Facebook.
For sure. I think it's important we push back against the trump administration when they try to do shit like this. I believe ISPs shouldn't be allowed to decide who has access to the internet at what speed, and what content they get to see. Haha, yep, happy net neutrality day!
Hmmm the automated response that the bill has you sign if you select "Express" actually blames the Obama administration which I found a little confusing.
The unprecedented regulatory power the Obama Administration imposed on the internet is smothering innovation, damaging the American economy and obstructing job creation. I urge the Federal Communications Commission to end the bureaucratic regulatory overreach of the internet known as Title II and restore the bipartisan light-touch regulatory consensus that enabled the internet to flourish for more than 20 years. The plan currently under consideration at the FCC to repeal Obama's Title II power grab is a positive step forward and will help to promote a truly free and open internet for everyone.
Hmm, I didn't see that. It is confusing. That message is the argument for the bill. They want a "light-touch" approach (aka. Removing the regulation created under the Obama administration that upholds net neutrality). They claim the current regulation is bad, but in reality, it enforces that ISPs must treat all internet traffic equally. Without these regulations, they could for example decide to throttle your connection when you're accessing a site they don't like, increase your speed when you're at a site they own, etc...
Wait, so you are saying that the statement I pasted above is not in support of net neutrality? That's the statement they almost had me sign when I clicked the call to action on the site you posted. If the regulation is forcing ISPs to treat all internet traffic equally than I want to enforce that regulation.
Sorry for all the pressing questions. I'm just not very educated on the issue and am always afraid I'll "sign on" to the wrong side of an argument like this unknowingly. I'll try to do some more research this afternoon maybe.
Hmmm, I'm really confused about why that message showed up for you. I definitely didn't see it. No worries at all! Yes, I believe the statement you pasted above is against net neutrality, because it is arguing against the regulation imposed during Obama.
Bitbucket's popup modal has a good pre-written letter
The FCC's Open Internet Rules (net neutrality rules) are extremely important to me. I urge you to protect them.
I don't want ISPs to have the power to block websites, slow them down, give some sites an advantage over others, or split the Internet into "fast lanes" for companies that pay and "slow lanes" for the rest.
Now is not the time to let giant ISPs censor what we see and do online.
Censorship by ISPs is a serious problem. Comcast has throttled Netflix, AT&T blocked FaceTime, Time Warner Cable throttled the popular game League of Legends, and Verizon admitted it will introduce fast lanes for sites that pay-and slow lanes for everyone else-if the FCC lifts the rules. This hurts consumers and businesses large and small.
Courts have made clear that if the FCC ends Title II classification, the FCC must let ISPs offer "fast lanes" to websites for a fee.
Chairman Pai has made clear that he intends to do exactly this.
But if some companies can pay our ISPs to have their content load faster, startups and small businesses that can't pay those fees won't be able to compete. You will kill the open marketplace that has enabled millions of small businesses and created the 5 most valuable companies in America-just to further enrich a few much less valuable cable giants famous for sky-high prices and abysmal customer service.
Internet providers will be able to impose a private tax on every sector of the American economy.
Moreover, under Chairman Pai's plan, ISPs will be able to make it more difficult to access political speech that they don't like. They'll be able to charge fees for website delivery that would make it harder for blogs, nonprofits, artists, and others who can't pay up to have their voices heard.
I'm sending this to the FCC's open proceeding, but I worry that Chairman Pai, a former Verizon lawyer, has made his plans and will ignore me and millions of other Americans.
So I'm also sending this to my members of Congress. Please publicly support the FCC's existing net neutrality rules based on Title II, and denounce Chairman Pai's plans. Do whatever you can to dissuade him.
Thank you!
Netflix has a banner directing people to the Internet Association's page
Go to reddit and checkout the logo in the upper left corner when you load the page.
Yea, the first thing that popped up when I googled "obama title ii" is how it is protecting net neutrality for the moment, so I got a bit concerned with the first statement. I want to research Pai a bit, but the second one sounds much more like something I could get behind.
Yeah, I was mistaken with the first response I posted. That was actually an anti-net neutrality message coming from a different source. following the instructions sam originally posted will get you to the right place. I fully support the original link now
The top comment on the official reddit post about Net Neutrality helps describe what our future might be like without it:
On May 16, 2018, Robert moved to a new city. He was excited to start his new job, and lay down roots in the community. He wasn't worried about losing connections to his old friends, because Robert would play games with them every thursday night. Robert arrived at his new house and called the only ISP that services his house, "BIG ISP Co." They sent a technician the next day to set up his Internet service.
"Okay, I've got your modem plugged in, now I just need to know what services you use." The tech looked down at his tablet and cleared his throat, preparing to read from a list. "Just stop me when you hear a service you would like to use." He began to read, "BIG Movies, BIG Music, BIG Storage."
"No, I don't use those, I didn't have BIG Internet at my last house." Robert replied, "I think it would be faster if I just gave you a list of what I plan to use."
"That might be a problem, especially if your services don't fit in a BIG Internet bundle we already offer."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, do you watch movies online from services like Netflix and Amazon Prime?"
"Yes, of course I do."
"Okay, we'll add the streaming movies package." The tech checked off a box, and the monthly price for Robert's quote got higher at the bottom of the his tablet. "What about television, do you catch up on missed episodes online?
"Yes, of course! I can't be around all the time when shows are on!"
"No problem. I'll add the streaming television package too." The tech checked another box, and Robert's quote got higher again. "How about music, you said you don't use BIG Music, do you want to listen to another internet radio service?"
"I have a ton of Spotify playlists! Pretty much one for every occasion."
"Okay, we'll need to add the Music Streaming package, then." Another box checked, another increase to Robert's monthly subscription cost. "Now, how about games, do you use BIG Games to play with friends?"
"No, I connect with friends using Discord, and we play all sort of games."
"Discord, huh? VOIP service too, then." The tech scrolled through his list looking for VOIP services. He checked the box, and the quote got higher. "You play games from Steam?"
"Yes."
"Origin?"
"Yes."
"GoG?"
"Yes."
With each "yes," the price of Robert's monthly fee went up.
"Guild Wars?"
"Yes."
"Battle.net?"
"Yes."
"Star Citizen?"
"Yes."
"Candy Crush?"
"No. I don't play Candy Crush."
"Great, you're going to love the savings of not paying for Facebook games."
"I'm not so sure about that." Robert looked at the tablet. The long list of third party services had come with service charges that ballooned his rate to twice what he expected to pay. "My last service provider didn't charge me extra to use Netflix or Spotify or Steam. This seems like a racket!"
"Well, sir, you're welcome to use a competitor, then. LARGENET services the other side of town. I think their service charges are pretty much the same, so if you care about it so much, you're welcome to move. I won't keep you here."
"That's it, I can pay your fees or move?! Those are my only options?" Robert was incredulous. "This can't be legal!"
"Completely legal, sir. Net Neutrality is a thing of the past. I am a BIG ISP Co shareholder, and I would be furious if they weren't making all the money they could. LARGENET does it. GIANT CONNECT does it. We have to do it to compete!"
"Fine" Robert said, "lets just sign this thing."
"Hold your horses, Cowboy" The technician guffawed at the idea that he was finished. "We haven't even talked about your data cap yet."
Credit to /u/Novelize.
If you don't want to have to pay for netflix by the hour, leave a comment w/ sam's original link
lol that's not necessarily true. But it would let ISP's control which sites you can use and how much you can use them.
That comment I copied over is kind of like the worst case scenario for what might happen, but it's still possible, which is the scary part.
We are in support of the "Net Neutrality" which means "Oh, hell no!" to comcast controlling what we do online.
@andelink It's kind of hard to understand without digging into a couple articles/comments for a couple minutes honestly
I know reading is hard for you Kyle, but I think you can make it through haha
I just sent the thing through battleforthenet, should I also send one through the site Sam shared?
Not sure. They may all be connected to the same backend? But I have no idea.
Both go to the FCC, which is the main body behind the bill to rollback net neutrality regulations.
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had to sift through a lot of pictures of "The Weekend" for that ^^^ haha
I'd watch videos of the talks if they are available afterwards, but I know that I would probably bail the day before on actually going.
Oh is it recorded/broadcasted? If so I won't go either
@r.taylor once you're 21 you'll have an outlet with weekday bar events to manage the aliveness
Haha no, it's pretty great. Only hopes and dreams crushed are the ones about finishing two years early.
Not as great as you might think. You can start making real money sooner but all your friends are still in school and when you visit your girlfriend still in college you're called an old man
Oh yea, it's great. They give out cookies and condoms at the same time...
Hey Ryan if you meet a girl named Claire Jackson tell her I sent you
no worries haha Jackson is a very common last name
I'm in Fairhaven so I don't meet a lot of people outside of it. Maybe I should just run up to every girl I see, "ARE YOU CLAIRE JACKSON??"
Well, blonde is in right now with the young hip females so that doesnt really narrow it down too much
protip: avoid the word "female" outside of science classrooms
just ask every blonde girl are you claire jackson
Oh, that's kinda close to me actually. Of course I know not to say female to a females face, that makes the female act a bit too femaley, you know the type.
I remember Fairhaven being the best cafeteria? What do they call those again?
Dining hall. Yea, I like it the best. Some people have different opinions, but they're usually the people that only get pizza every time.
Oh, there's way too many girls to remember names, I just number them. She may have been seven, sounds kind of familiar, but that was like two weeks ago.
hey does anyone here have xbox live? i got an xbox one a while back and now have live. would like to connect if possible
An Xbox One? When did you get that? What games do you have/play? I don't have an Xbox or anything...just curious haha
right now i've only bought:
- injustice 2
- overcooked
- left 4 dead 2 (throwback)
- 7 days to die (fucking sucks)
but i am on the free trial of the xbox game pass and have access to a ton of games. so i've been playing Halo 5 and NBA 2k16 a lot lately
I didn't realize 7 days to die made it to console. I thought it was just a privately developed game on Steam. Glad I didn't buy it!
Injustice 2 is fun though. My brother had it for ps4 I think. And a cooking simulation game? nice 😆 haha
Did you ever play 7 Days To Die on Steam? Did you like it? I couldn't get through 5 minutes of it on the console.
Yeah Injustice 2 is awesome. Really like that game.
Overcooked is awesome too haha! I was asking my manager about family-friendly games on the xbox (he has kids) since they are so hard to find and Lauren and I really enjoy casual coop or competitive games (similar to mario games) and he recommended Overcooked. Surprisingly fun!
I never played it. Looks like it's still in development on steam though. Maybe you can try it again when they push new updates? I would hope it's still in development on all platforms. It got pretty positive reviews and is less than $10 right now.
Definitely doesn't look very clean though after watching some of the videos.
Sidenote: I think PUBG is coming to Xbox soon so you should check that out.
hmm never heard if it will have to check it out
Psh, negative people are loud. Plus, with all the hype, peoples expectations get inflated beyond realistic levels. It's still in development and is making strides toward greatness.
- They are working on a second map
- They are introducing vaulting/climbing next week
- Bluehole has branched an entirely separate company (PUBG Corp) to manage and develop the game. ()
- Also, a lot of the negative reviews are about streamers and people getting banned for cheating which doesn't apply to me
I will admit they need to address some of the performance, rendering, and ping issues though. There is definitely a lot of work to do but it still has promise in my opinion.
That "Peak Players" count is ridiculous. I think part of the reason we haven't seen too many new features/bug fixes lately is because they have been having to spend all of their time on networking and server scaling problems. Fluctuating to over 2 million users at one time would be so hard to handle.
I still dont get why its so popular. I've tried many different battle royale games and PUBG isn't even unique...
His voice is really annoying lol I guess I just don't like thrill games then. That video still talked about PUBG like it's a game like no other. But, it's not, it's part of a genre. I'm still curious what makes PUBG unique enough in its genre to be so successful. Maybe it was just all the hype it got because it was created by Player Unknown who is pretty well known (heh). But there's H1Z1, Fortnite, ARK even. I just don't get it...
I guess maybe it's because all of the others try to do other game modes in addition to last man standing and PUBG has been able to focus all it's time on specializing in that one game mode? I don't know. I wouldn't say it's unique, but I would say it's the best version of last man standing I've tried/watched. But if you don't like "last man standing" as a game mode, than PUBG has very little else to offer you...haha
qq for you guys. poking around the internet you can see that "data engineering" is a thing, but looking at payscale/glassdoor/linkedin you can see that not many companies actually employ data engineers. do you guys have DEs at your respective companies?
We don't have any at my work. The closest would be Data Scientist I think. Maybe Business Intelligence?
At Amazon, the analytical/data roles are Business/Data Analysts (non-technical), Business Intelligence Engineers (non-technical), Research Scientists (non-technical), Applied Scientists (technical), and Data Engineers (technical). There are some SDEs that have a "Machine Learning Engineer" title but no one knows what the fuck that means.
Edit:
There are also Database Administrators (DBAs), but these folks are disappearing or shifting to DE roles as Amazon completely migrates away from Oracle. And within AWS there exists Database Engineers.
@spkaplan Do you work with them? How would you describe the work they do and their day-to-day stuff?
@andelink to clarify: I only know about the ERS (enterprise risk & security) data team, b/c I don't know much about teams outside of the ERS group. I don't know a lot about them, but they do sit about 15feet away from me haha. Do you have specific questions I might be able to answer?
I'm curious about:
- the focus of their work (maybe how they would describe what their job is and what they do)
- who their main customers are
- the technologies they use
- the technical skill sets they have
- their biggest pain points / challenges
- what work-related matters, if anything, keep them up at night
- their education/work background
Those are all great questions, but unfortunately I can't answer most of them. I haven't had the chance to work closely with them yet. I'll shoot one of the data team members an email explaining that I have a friend who is a data engineer and is curious about a data engineer's role on their team. I'll include your questions.
I emailed one of the data engineers (I'm not sure if that's actually her title). I'll shoot you her answers when she responds.
Architect is definitely more senior. She agreed to answer your questions, then I sent them to her, but she hasn't responded 😕
And on Wednesday a recruiter reached out to me while trying to hire "Data Infrastructure Engineers" so the landscape of job titles is confusing
Yeah, and most of them would be all for not, because the contact info provided is no longer valid. That was pre-Amazon as a name. At that time in 1994 it was Cadabra. It was changed to Amazon in 1995.
So, I have to register for my next quarter of classes tomorrow, and I'm going over all the options I have. Right now I'm trying to figure out exactly what I should minor in. This quarter, I took the first class for a linguistics minor, and it's interesting, but my heart isn't really in it. Are there any other minors you guys would recommend, especially ones that would compliment a CS degree? Or, maybe, I should just stick with linguistics? I was thinking about taking an intro to psych class because it's a personal interest, especially subconscious thoughts and actions, but I feel like a lot of people major or minor in psych, and I don't know if it will even cover my particular field of interest, so I feel like it might not be worth it. Any thoughts? Thanks in advance.
9/10 times a minor doesn’t matter, so take whatever you find most interesting - without fully expecting to use it in life. For instance,
I minored in Energy Policy.
If you really want to compliment CS with a minor, minor in Math.
Yeah, I agree with Kyle. Math is the best pairing, but if something else really interests you, go for it. Do you think you'll be able to take any CS classes this time around?
Hopefully. My options are pretty limited, there's like one 241 class that will be available for me and it's already half full.
Minoring in math would probably be smart. Don't I end up taking a lot of the classes for the minor because of the CS major?
I really hope CS is actually what I want to major in because it's being a pretty big pain right now haha
Another quick question. Do you guys think it is better to take an intro class for a minor along with a CS class, or two CS classes? I just feel like I want to make sure I can dedicate the time and energy that I need to, and if I were to take 241 and 247 or 301, I would be stretching myself a little thin. But, it also feels like a bit of a waste to take an intro class when I'm technically supposed to be entering my third year of college...
Don’t worry too much about any extra time you spend figuring out / starting your major. I did running start and entered WWU with my associates degree but still took 3 years. I understand the pressure to make the expected amount of progress, but you’re still figuring shit out. It’s normal.
Edit: any time you can shave off your university education is awesome
I can’t speak to CS classes. I didn’t major in CS and got a C- in 141
It’s awesome being in senior classes your freshman year though. I met this guy named Joel in those classes who I’m still friends with today. He bought me alcohol. I bought weed from him. And he paid me to write papers for him. He thought I was a genius because I was 18 and in his classes. Silly guy. But good times.
Yea, I think I do need to stop worrying about the expectations as much. It just adds a lot more pressure when people expect me to finish in like two years now, feel like I need to do everything perfect and not waste a single class haha
Yeah man. I just edited my comment above, but I'll say it again. Anytime you can shave off getting your degree is awesome. I feel like the average bachelor degree time is 4.5 years. If you get in two years, amazing. If you get it in 3 years, still amazing
I'm trying to keep that kind of mindset so I don't get too stressed lol thanks for the advice.
Yes, you end up taking a lot of the math needed for the minor during your CS major. I think it's like 3 or 4 extra classes. I'd say take two CS classes if you can just to push forward as much as possible but it could be a larger time commitment. However, I think you can handle it. I thought you only had the option to take 241 though?
Oh, I see how that could be confusing. No, I have other class options, I was just giving an example of how limited my options are within the three classes I could take for CS. I think I may just take it a bit easy for one more quarter just to make sure I want to commit to CS, so, if for whatever reason, I end up switching back and forth between CS and something silly like journalism, it's not after I've taken a bunch of CS classes.
I feel like us here in this slack group have cultivated a culture of “CS or bust” and that simply isn’t true
Tbh, the real money goes to the people who manage software engineers
So imo, there are three routes I’d consider:
1) management / business
General. Can get a decent job anywhere. Can apply to a variety of industries.
2) computer science
Will get you a job if you have okay grades. A comfy job often. But might change in the years to come.
3) math / statistics (no personal bias here)
I’m a data engineer who supports data scientists. These guys make ways more then me because they seriously influence strategic business direction. They can take a crappy product and make it good. They can use data to solve problems the business doesn’t even know about yet. This is where the future is going with machine learning and all.
This is of course optimizing for pay rather than interest.
It's not just this slack, my life has been "CS or bust" for years haha the problem is I have no idea what else I'd want to do, so I just keep slowly heading down the path because it's the best option I have. Pay is always a big part of interest, so optimizing for pay is totally fine lol. I have no clue what a data scientist does, never heard of one before, but that sounds pretty interesting...
If you want to see what kind of jobs a certain degree may bring you, you could check out sites like PayScale (there are others, I'm just biased because I manage this domain...). Just search for a degree and look at the list of job titles for that degree. Just keep in mind there is often a big difference between BA and BS and some majors offer both. Here's a BS in psychology for example:
Can you get a job in the psychology field without a masters? I feel like you need a masters just to get a job as a social worker...
Yeah, unfortunately not really. Or at least it's tough. It's kind of apparent based on the reported job titles. They don't seem to be in the field. A lot of HR and sales type jobs.
@r.taylor sorry it’s been CS or bust. Explore everything.
If it were up to me, I’d go back and keep the band alive and become Blink-182 famous!!
Yea, that's pretty much exactly why I don't want to go into psychology. It's very generic and I'm much more interested in the science and behavioral side of things, patterns in people's actions and slight variations in those patterns, how that relates to what they're thinking, and if they even realize what they're thinking. Like I said, very specific field of interest that I have no clue how to find a career in lol.
That's funny you bring up your band, I was actually just talking about you guys last night. Even mentioned Noose...
Lol oh god. Noose!!??? Smh...
What context were you talking about this in?
I was just having a really long conversation with this guy about music so it eventually came up. I like to brag about you guys sometimes, talk about your groupies from Oregon haha
Hahaha love it. Those girls from Oregon are the only fans we had. We might have had 1 from the Philippines but mostly no fans
Nice!! I think so! Glad you think so too! Although I can’t play guitar at all anymore... sad day
Four Year Strong is still my favorite pop-punk band (aside from Blink)
I've been trying to learn banjo, it's a bit hard with no strings experience lol I just showed some friends Travis Barker the other week tho, still impressive.
Banjo would be super hard. What has inspired banjo?
I totally thought I replied to this... Anyway, I've just always liked the sound of banjos and pianos, so those are the two that I attempt to slowly learn haha
@r.taylor what Travis Barker videos have you been showing your friends?
Wow!! I had no idea he had his own songs like in the first vid. I had always know him for doing covers. The snare drum one is a classic though - such an awesome drummer.
Here are my fav covers of his (might want to turn down the YT volume - audio quality not that great circa 2010):
- Drake | Forever:
- Soulja Boy | Crank That:
- Flo Rida | Low:
- Eminem | 3 AM:
I've heard a few of those, but its been awhile. I'll give them all a listen tonight!
It uses your work email to verify you work for the company you say you do, and then you have access to a company-specific forum. The discussions within the Amazon forum have been about pay, horrible working relationships, VPs getting fired, scandals, etc. Sometimes I can't put it down!!
Also great to see people posting about compensation. Plan to use it in my next 1:1 with my manager...
Have any of you got on Blind? There is a “tech lounge” forum for employees of tech companies and it is crazy how much money a lot of these folks apparently make. It is seriously influencing how I plan to navigate my career. i.e. don’t be a company man, interview and get competing offers from several places to make way fucking more than what was thought to be possible.
@brandon can I borrow your cracking the coding interview book?
No the OP there was asking to evaluate an offer from Google he had received. But you can see that the people who responded were from google but also fb/msft/amazon/uber/lyft/oracle, even got a guy from Splunk on there
@spkaplan someone asked what his experience was but OP hasn’t responded yet. Usually those things come up in compensation posts
The top-tier companies pay premium for engineers with lots of experience, because they are rare and in high demand.
For sure. I’m just always baffled and then filled with excitement/joy that more than just doctors/business owners can make that sort of money annually
And always a refreshing reminder that if you work for a big company, they have more money than you can imagine and so you should do your best to milk it because they surely work you
That is a really dumb thing for them to crack down on... It's caused no harm and is making us tons of money!
If it does get repealed I bet most judges in those states still won't prosecute those types of cases.
I certainly hope that is the case. It would be weird for sure. Sucks for states where its not legalized. I thank the god I never need to try to find a "connect" again
Dude for real, I got a store literally across the street from me... It's too convenient.
Twitter
Looks like another “learn to code” thing. EDIT: interview prep I guess?
A lot of people bring it up in the context in interviewing. Stuff about how it’s becoming an emphasis but people seem bitter about it or something
does anyone have a Citi-Visa card? I am trying to buy tickets to a show but for some reason Ticketmaster is only accepting Citi-Visa card for this event and I don't have one. I will pay you back plus some if you can buy it for me
Yeah it's really annoying and their support line isn't helping either.
Hey guys! Anyone down to grab a beer or something soon. And sorry I don’t have a citi card
Hey look who it is! Been a while.
I'm down to grab drinks. Unavailable tonight and tomorrow night, however.
Next Thursday it is! Where do we want to go? Anyone have a good spot? BWW? We should try to pick somewhere somewhat central, but I feel like the commute is going to suck for Sam regardless unfortunately 😕
Two people said thursday doesn’t work for them. Should be shoot for another day? Haha yeah, I think I am just going to have to suffer the trip lol
Those two people were Tia and Ryan and I think both of them were joking. Tia is the one that suggested either Tuesday or Thursday in the previous thread which is how I came up with those options. And Ryan is in Bellingham...
I only clicked Thursday, but I'm down for either Tuesday or Thursday
Everyone except for Sam works in the Seattle city, right? We planning on just meeting up after work so we don't have to go home first? I leave work at 4pm.
I'm at work by 7:30am.
Sweet. I honestly don't know too many bars in downtown area. The ones I know are in the SLU area but that's a bit farther north for most of you guys.
BWW is a good suggestion.
Ahh sorry I meant that day works for me. I filled it out wrong.. but yes let’s do it!! That’s my last day at Sirqul 🤗
I can do central area or downtown! Whatever works best for the group!! Also turned my notifications back on ... whoops
Just realized I read option 3 wrong.... working 12 hour days slowly loosing it
Downtown is best for me so that I can bus there easily. I don’t want to drive to Seatte at rush hour, but I’m down to bus.
Yeah, I think it's still Thursday unless I misunderstood something. And it sounds like BWW is going unopposed as far as locations go.
Yep sounds good!! See you guys next Thursday at BWW. What time are you thinking? Anytime works for me.
I am down for earlier around 4pm but I understand that is probably too early for you guys. Happy to do anytime.
Yeah, 4 is probably a bit early for me. I imagine some of us will naturally just get there before others anyway though. Just bring your switch with you though and you'll be set! haha
I’ll be downtown so can get there whenever! I can get there a little after 5 and get a table? There’s 5 of us? Anyone bringing +1s?
Okay! Same for me also. Ended up going back home after shopping so I’ll get there closer to 5:30
Have any of you installed Slack on a Debian OS? I'm using Mint and I know Slack is installed but can't find it to actually open it... Haha
Personal. I've been messing around with it a bit. We use GitHub for one of my classes, so it's nice to have a Linux OS for convenience's sake.
Windows 10 also has a Linux subsystem that you can enable as a "dev tool" if you are interested in checking that out and just need a bash shell.
Looks like they actually have real docs for it now too.
Jorell was trying to use a bash shell on Windows and it was causing a lot of issues, it said he needed the Java jdk, even tho he already had it, then wouldn't let him actually install it. He was using Bash on Ubuntu on Windows or whatever so it might be a bit different. I'm also just using Linux for the fun of it tho haha
I'll check that video out when I have a sec. Like I said, I know I have it installed, it's just not showing up when I actually try to find it. I installed it using the terminal, so I can always do it the boring old normal way if it doesn't work out. Just thought I'd check with you guys first because it's kind of a weird question to try to Google, just get installation tutorials.
Yeah, it can be confusing since you have to remember that even though you have installed the Java jdk on windows, you haven't installed it on the linux subsystem. They are completely separate systems running side by side. So, he probably hadn't isntalled the jdk on linux. But yeah, running a full version of linux alongside windows is much more fun anyways. It can just get messy and unnecessary after a while depending on what you are actually using your computer for. I definitely encourage it for learning and exploration though!
What instructions did you follow to install it from the command line? And what command did you run?
Wow a Linux subsystem on Windows? Will definitely have to check that out. I've been using git bash just to do basic ssh/scp-related things because I f**ing hate PuTTY. Works reasonably well.
The command I used to install Slack was sudo snap install slack --classic of I remember correctly... Snap is super weird but I ran it again to make sure after I couldn't find it and it said it was installed then I ran the snap update command and it said slack was up to date so
I'm assuming you guys use a Linux OS at work, which ones do you use? I've been talking with my friend about the differences between like Mint and Fedora, and now I'm curious if any are widely used or accepted on a corporate level.
I also have a windows laptop. It is used for email correspondence, note taking, and any services with a web UI. All of my development work takes place on a cloud Linux box using Cloud9 as the IDE.
I actually do you use Windows 10 for work haha We are a C# shop though so it's to be expected. These other guys will probably have more interesting answers for you.
idk what it is like at other companies, but at Amazon you cannot fully develop locally. No environment quite matches prod, but even less so for your local machine. idk what an enterprise system would even look like if you could replicate on your silly laptop.
The best you can do is develop on a cloud desktop where each instance consumes a standard environment for development. From what I've seen it is a 50/50 split between Windows and Mac for devs. But very few of them actually develop locally. The only ones who do develop locally (in my experience) are new hires or scientists, and when they hit the point when they realize they aren't being very effective, they switch to the cloud desktop with the standard dev environment provided - and even that you customize afterwards. Of course at Amazon we leverage AWS heavily.
I am the only one in my org (that I know of) that uses Cloud9. A lot of devs use Unison for wrapping their dev environment with a local IDE, or a graphic interface. Both are slower than I like.
Most dev environments at Amazon use RHEL. While most science/modeling environments use a custom AMI.
Well, that is a lot of words I know individually, but is a bit complicated for my understanding haha we were talking about it and kinda pieced it out, it's just that neither of us have any experience so we're just guessing. Thanks for the info!
I only learned of these words within the past year, and only in the past six months or so got an okay understanding of them 🙂
Glossary:
* Development Environments (local, dev, prod, etc)
* Cloud desktop
* Unison
* Cloud9
* RHEL
* AMI - Amazon Machine Image
** Amazon has a Linux AMI based off of RHEL
Wow! haha thanks for the definitions. I've never really heard of a cloud desktop. So, is it a lightweight desktop that mostly harnesses the compute power of a remote ec2 instance in aws?
I imageine Amazon is at a point where there is just way too much architecture to ever hope to run everything you need locally. They have probably devoted a lot of time to configuring "pre built" images that are configured to talk to all of the services required to work/develop certain parts of the site. Is that kind of what these "cloud desktops" are. Or do you literally just mean an ec2 instance that you connect to remotely?
On the topic of "local development". I just consider whatever OS I'm using on my computer to be my local environment. I have maybe 4 or 5 services configured and running on local ports of my machine and then several more APIs that I get data from remotely. The framework of my site is actually running on my desktop though which allows me to do pretty powerful debugging. That said, I have a pretty hefty computer with solid state, an i7 (3.3GHz), and 64gb RAM.
Cloud9 is pretty cool. I haven't used it since Amazon started hosting it but I messed around with it a bit in college and deployed an instance to my raspberry pi that I could access from my laptop. Never really had much of a use case for it though.
@r.taylor So, it's complicated out here in the real world. I think a lot of businesses actually do use Mac or Windows because they are reliable and have large companies backing them. Mac is a Unix OS like Linux though so it will have a bash like the one you are probably using for school. I think Linux is still a good system to learn on even if you don't end up using it after school because it exposes a lot of underlying architecture and is open source so it's good for exploration/innovation. It's also much cheaper (free?) compared to other OS which is probably the main reason WWU uses it haha
@spkaplan I'm actually curious what your experience has been as well. Expedia is very large but you work on a very particular service. What is your development setup these days?
@brandon Thanks for pointing me here. Somehow I missed this thread. I’ll reply when I get some time 🙂
When I say cloud desktop I mean literally any host that is provisioned for you by yourself or someone else that lives remotely from you... in the cloud. You can manage it through a web UI but any work you do on it must be done by ssh-ing in. The extent of its out-of-the-box config/environment would vary by use-case and your provider. At Amazon, this is an EC2 instance. Mine is a m4.xlarge instance with the Amazon Linux 2012 4.4 OS. This is a pretty standard setup for developers at Amazon. It comes with some basic environments needed for developing at Amazon, like our build and deploy systems. But on top of that, I can consume most any environment anyone at Amazon has built and made available. When the environments I consume have changed and pushed to prod, the deployment of these updates to my box are taken care of automagically. But I can also rollback or bounce manually as needed.
So yeah you got it right about what it looks like at Amazon.
I also agree with your definition of local development. I really don't do any serious processing locally. All of our apps/programs run on hosts elsewhere, so I don't need too much beef on my dev box. Although debugging/local builds would benefit from better hardware - can be annoyingly slow sometimes.
Yeah I only recently started using Cloud9 - still have a lot to learn about it. I just like how lightweight it is.
Thread everything. @keenin you are the antichrist when it comes to this.
It is so hard to follow topics and conversations without threading.
It's just good hygiene when it comes down to it. All of a sudden, you can see the last several conversations instead of just half of the current one.
Yeah, Kelli mentioned this to me last week. She said there was a public council meeting coming up to discuss it or something. It would be awesome!
Apparently it already happened. There might be more though. We should definitely look into it.
I've been doing a bit of research into writing secure code and how to exploit poorly written code. Started with buffer overflows, which I doubt is ever really an issue at this point since it's so well known, but started learning about exploiting things like timers or a zip file to create files pretty much wherever you want. I was just curious how much any of you or your respective companies think about security and secure code during your every day work. It's just always interesting for me to hear about how professionals are utilizing the information I'm learning, especially as it gets more complex.
Sam is on the Risk and Fraud team at Expedia so he is probably the closest to security but in terms of being aware of exploits in our own code, I don't think we have to worry about that very much because we are using a highly structured and compiled language with a framework sitting on top of it. That means there are a bunch of built in rules and safeguards that keep you in safe space and hide a lot of the low level stuff under the covers. Sometimes, a patch/update will need to be installed that fixes a new vulnerability but that's usually out of our control.
As an engineer for a website that allows users to submit content, there are things that we need to be aware of when user input is involved. Controlling what a user is allowed to input/upload and "cleaning" it before using it is essential. A classic example is demonstrated in this xkcd comic. but that's a bit different than the kind of vulnerabilities you had mentioned. There are definitely people who have to think about these low level problems but I'm not sure any of us work at that low of a level.
I actually just saw that comic today, it was in one of the videos I watched haha. That's kinda what I was expecting tho. I imagine user input in websites is pretty well understood at this point and not much will slip through.
Yeah, there is a pretty standard set of procedures and precautions that you learn about eventually. The stuff you are talking about is important to understand and is also powerful, but we don't really encounter it too much.
Convince your boss that it's about "investing in your performance" 😄
Yea I'm jelly of that...
I think the value in retention is definitely overlooked at most companies. Which Payscale seems to focus very much on.
Anybody know Nolan Price from hutch research very well? He just reached out to me on LinkedIn about job ops at PayScale and I'm wondering if anyone has experience working with him.
I worked with him a little bit when I was in school. He's smart and works hard. I would recommend him.
I've been reading about this for years 🙄 It could be another hundred or thousand years before it happens. It could also be tomorrow though. Fuck it, I'm staying. At least there aren't hurricanes or tornadoes every year.
Did you read the article man? The science is terrifying
1/3 odds the big one in the next 50 years. 1/10 the very big one in the next 50 years
yeah it's quite long
Definitely a good idea to have a huge supply of food and water. The tough part is that you are supposed to keep in outside, since the building will likely collapse, catch fire, explode from broken gas lines, etc… but unless you have a house it is tough to store it outside 😕
Anyone taking advantage of Black Friday this year? Share any especially good deals you have found!
Yes please share! I haven’t heard from ally thought a about it but good deals might inspire.
lol i do black friday at the outlets... s/o to 60% off jcrew and northface
Just pulled all the amazon black friday and cyber monday deals... lmk if you're on the hunt for something
One of our team members is switching teams, so it is to say goodbye. But she is still going to be working in the same org and on the same floor 😂 I think my manager just wanted a reason to celebrate haha
Surviving fine, but ready for it to melt all away and never come back. It sucks traveling or doing anything outside so haven't been able to run and have been WFH. Going back to the office tomorrow no matter what
Yeah, I'm ready to be done with all the WFH as well. Back in the office today. The commute was honestly just fine. I just had to avoid some slush along the curbs.
@andelink totally agree. I am getting stir crazy. I am even going into the office, but I want to be able to go running again.
i love coming into the office and no one is here. so much free coffee to myself and quiet time
I totally agree Tia. The office is so nice and quiet. I can actually concentrate on my work haha.
Aww thanks Tia! I was about to post something here in Slack after this meeting. Beat me to it haha! 🙂
Found on r/freefolk. Hopefully not everyone we love dies!
For those of you with Xfinity Comcast as your internet provider, do you bring your own modem/router? If so, what one(s) do you use?
I use my own modem and router. I bought them ~5 years ago, so I won't bother mentioning the exact model I have. Honestly, I would just Google "best Comcast router and modem". Wirecutter and some of those tech sites should have reviews. I would skim a few reviews and choose a modem and router that consistently ranks highly. I think Amazon also will know which ones are Comcast compatible, and anything with 4+ stars will do the job.
Sweet. I guess my mistake was starting on the xfinity site page of compatible modems rather than doing the google first. Good call!
It feels like I went through the same process just yesterday, but it was sophomore year...wow time flies
It really does. I’m not sure why I didn’t buy my own a couple years ago when moving out. Now I’ve sunk a lot on the stupid monthly rental
Yeah, I need to do this as well. I'm a chump and still pay for their modem
So, which modem did you buy? I recently received a Google Nest WiFi router and want to take the opportunity to ditch xFi.
It probably speaks more to how crappy and old my old router was, rather than how good this one is. But still, for $80, I was very happy
I'm getting >300 right now with xFi and paying for 275 which is great. I also don't know that I need that much speed.
wtf I pay $60/mo for 200mbps + $14/mo for the hardware rental
I checked the current prices to see if I should update my policy/plan when I moved but they don't have an option this good available. I think I might be locked into a good boost package. Luckily, it carried over.
@spkaplan you linked to a router on amazon, any chance you bought a new modem too that you can share?
Sweet! Looks like it might change this December though with that small print in the screenshot 😕
I've heard/read good things about Google Nest WiFi. Mesh is life. Excited to hear how you like it
In the other thread @spkaplan was saying his lasted like 8 years
I'd definitely get the 1000mbps or even the 2000mbps
Yeah, Kelli's mom had two of them and didn't want them for some reason so she gave one to each daughter. She also described it as a "Google Home" so I'm not sure what was going on. I didn't ask questions, I just took it lol
Do you think you'll upgrade your speeds within 8 years? I personally will get 1gb fiber as soon as I can. Not sure when that will be exactly tho
What if I'm using starlink in the next 5 years and have to buy a new internet configuration anyways
But the 500 one pays for itself within the year. Hell, the 1000 one pays for itself within the year lol
I've been paying comcast all my life for no good reason besides convenience.
nahh lol way too judgemental of yourself hahaha
you also didn't have the free google nest for all these years
Now that I've realized the 1000 one pays for itself within the year I'll probably just get that one. Like you said, being able to upgrade to fiber asap would be great.
plus with comcast you get upgraded hardware every couple years so there is that. not sure how impactful it really is but i'm trying to make it seem reasonable to rent since i also still rent
but the truth is i know very little in this space. i do know that if owned my home i would have some sick ass mesh wifi everywhere not this xfi junk
So, we are paying comcast $168 a year for their router/modem. It has some perks like built in network security (if you opt in I think) and being able to monitor, configure, and restart remotely from the xFi mobile app but I'm excited to try something new.
Yeah, honestly it's not that ridiculous to rent. You are right about the built in hardware upgrades and whenever I have had a problem with my internet, customer support is always able to remotely troubleshoot and reset my xFi which is super convenient.
Does anyone use antivirus anymore or do we just rely on Windows Defender or whatever these days?
I think you can check the "threats” it supposedly eliminates to see if you’re actually gonna miss out on much. I’ve always considered that just marketing fluff. I don’t put too much weight to it.
I run windows defender. I have a virus scanner I run sometimes
And do you have additional antivirus installed? What virus scanner do you use?
And yeah, there are never actually any threats in there when I look so that's a good point
No additional antivirus beyond Windows Defender. For anti-malware I have the free version of Malwarebytes. In my web browser I have uBlock Origin
Even better. I wonder how they decide what features to implement natively in their browser because I wouldn’t have guessed a price/shopping thing like that be a priority
Yeah, not sure how they decide. It's interesting to compare Edge and Chrome now because they are both working with the same underlying browser engine and code but they are starting to diverge a bit in what features they focus on. I know everyone is tired of me saying it, but Edge is getting pretty cool. Just sayin...
and you can try it out without any hassle. It will auto import all of your extensions, passwords, etc from Chrome
Maybe worth a try,e specially if it will import everything I have in Chrome 🤔
One of my cats has been meowing outside the bedroom since 5:20am, but other than that life’s been good. Summer has been great.
Hbu? How’s the new house? Still job hunting?
It’s been too long since we’ve all got together.
I know that pain @andelink. It gets better as they get older, at least in our case… crossing my fingers for ya 🤞
@keenin today was off-day! Normally I run at 5:30am so my cats are used to me being up at that time. Sucks for when I’d like an extra hour of sleep
HAHAHA damn yea. they must be a good alarm when you do have to wake up lol
lol yeah dude they are. Although to be fair MOST of the time they sleep in our bed and when they do that they don’t really wake us up in the morning. However I kicked them out last night because they wouldn’t calm down. I guess they got their revenge this morning
Keenin is the 5am gym everyday? Just weekdays? What’s your schedule?
hahaha pure payback. my old cat was like that. She always wanted to be in my room and would raise hell to get in
Oh wtf that’s 2 hours every morning. I admire your resolve
Thanks dude. although like 30 mins is stretch/sauna/shower/get dressed. so it's not all pumping iron lol
Gotta love that sauna time 👌
@spkaplan I was wondering how being a homeowner is treating you too!
@keenin How do you manage to stay awake in the sauna at 7am … I would probably fall back asleep 😴
+1. Agreed staying awake in that situation sounds difficult
@brandon Knock-on-wood… it has been completely hands off after the first month. I think having renters is like firefighting. Most of the time is chill, but when something breaks you gotta fix it quickly and it can be stressful.
Glad to hear it's been hotw so far @spkaplan! I only heard second-hand about your homeownership/renting situation. Big congrats man sounds awesome. Can't wait to get all the deets in person sometime
@spkaplan Wow, that sounds awesome. Sounds like you are doing it right 👍 But yeah, I totally get the firefighting analogy. It's even more tricky when you have to fight the fire remotely! lol
@andelink We missed each other at the last mariner’s game, so I’ll tell you all about it next time we meet up…which should be soon by the way guys! I am coming to the end of my job search, so I will have free time again soon 😍 more deets to come on the job search topic once it is all said and done 😛
@spkaplan that's awesome about the house and job! Are you going through a property manager or are you going to be doing all that yourself? tbh not sure what a property manager does besides fielding requests/fixes for the renter.
@keenin Thanks man! At this scale (i.e. 1 house) we are just doing it ourselves. Listing on craigslist/zillow and fielding inquiries, driving up to show the house for 1 day and 1 more day to exchange keys & security deposit wasn’t bad. We gave the tenant the names of handymen in Bellingham that we trust, that the tenant should call directly incase there is some urgent issue (broken pipe, etc…). That way if we are unavailable or it is an emergency, the tenant can move quickly and get it fixed, and we know the person doing the work is trustworthy… not some rando handyman. It was a good amount of work overall, so I don’t want to make it sounds like a total breeze haha 🙂
Damn, but it sounds like you got all your ducks in a row. That's definitely a great setup, you just get contacted when shit hits the fan lol
We learned a lot of this from our Lender when we bought the house. She owns a bunch of rental homes in Bellingham and she was kind enough to share her strategy/processes.
attempting to run on off weekdays but with traveling my sleep schedule is off.
@tiaalexa Yeah we bought a house in Bellingham! 😄 We’re renting it out right now, but we are planning to move into it in May 2020 and work partially remotely. We will come into seattle for 3 days of the week for work, stay with my mom for those 2 night, then go back to bham for 2 days of work and the weekend. Over time, Steph will likely switch to working in Bham and I will reduce the number of days I have to come into the in the seattle area.
I think in about a year / year and a half i’ll be moving to the east coast and trying out a new city. we should all catch up in person
LOL - yeah we’re looking at Raleigh. Michael’s from the south and wants to be near his family and I want to try something different.
Damn you must be in love if you’re willing to move to Raleigh, NC for him. Congrats
How much do you guys pay monthly for car insurance? I've been on Lauren's plan for a while now but now I have to get my own. Geico quoted me for $103.05/mo for their cheapest plan. Still seems high to me.
I pay 85 for our 2016 Honda Fit with both Steph and me insured. It is designated as a pleasure car, not commuter because we don't commute in it, which probably brings our rate down some. The price also went down when I added Steph to it (insurance likes girls over boys :)). I use Geico and like them a lot. They have always paid out when I had any damage to my car and are great to deal with.
Okay that's reasonable I suppose. I should have said pleasure car. Damn. Occasionally I do commute maybe once/mo but the lowest frequency they had was once/wk so I picked that. Average ~500 miles per year.
Helpful info. I feel more okay about this now. Thanks
Yeah, 100 seems reasonable since you said commuter and depending on the type of car. The nicer the car the more expensive the insurance.
Kelli and I just bought a new car and decided to put it on Progressive. They had a lower quote than Geico. My BMW is on Geico though ($115/month). I'm paying $85/month on the new car and saved a bit of money by paying the full 6 months up front. What kind of coverage did you ask for? I did pleasure, 12,000 miles, 100/300/100
@tiaalexa fucking clutch living the life!
@brandon I went with the bare minimum legal coverage amount is. Whatever that is.
Ah, gotcha. That does seem a bit expensive for the bare minimum. I even lowered my comprehensive deductible from $500 to $100. Have you gotten a quote from progressive yet? I'd be interested to see how they compare for you.
Yeah and my car is an old 2005 Hyundai Accent I wouldn’t classify it as expensive or nice. I got it for $2000 4 years ago.
And no I hadn’t. Lauren’s insurance ran out over the weekend and I just went with Geico really quick to get something. I should get a quote from them too
When you hear news about Uber and the like losing money. Remember this and buy more stock. All in.
Nice indeed! You want to be at a company going through lots of growth! 🙂
I know you guys are huge Alexa fans, so remember to wish her a happy birthday today! 🎊❤️❤️❤️🎊
I will be attending this tomorrow. Is anyone interested in joining?
lol all good I didn’t end up going, I think I had something else going on after all
Wyze data breach: https://www.reddit.com/r/wyzecam/comments/egle73/official_update_on_wyze_data_leak/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
Thanks for sharing @andelink! I really like Wyze's responses to the breach. They provided great detail into exactly what happened.
Do you travel back to Bellingham in Wednesday’s? We should try to do a day where you’re not traveling
Good point. I drive back up Wednesday evening. So Monday and Tuesday evenings are best for me.
Hey @tiaalexa!! Yep, I work from Bham Thursday and Friday now. The goal is to get down to 1-2 days per week over time.
Chicago is awesome! I love it and was so glad I made this change. Happy to hop on another thread. Excited for you and steph with the house and all!
Congrats MSFT on the great earnings report!! 🍾 🥂 🍾 You did this @brandon !!
Does Slack ever just upset you? It sometimes works right but also doesn't work right enough of the time. It is mildly infuriating.
Also, why do I need a different password for each workspace even though it's the same email account?? Drives me nuts
Hmm, I don’t have much trouble with it. The different passwords is a bit strange, but I hope there is some good reason for it 🤞
Dude fuck Slack and its password requirements I am fed up with the multiple passwords all out of sync. I have to reset my password every time I log into this gd workspace because I can't remember it for the life of me
And you can't ever reuse your any of your old passwords
If this wasn't such a good product I would boycott
I respect the revival of this on topic thread. Well done. That is annoying though. There should just be one password that grants you access to all of your workspaces. Then you can show/hide the ones you want in that particular environment.
Salesforce gives us Lastpass accounts and encourage us to use it for all passwords. They like the security of it, but it also means you only ever have to remember a single password
@spkaplan Lyft gives us Lastpass accounts as well but I have not set it up. I have an original, injective function to map account --> password. And with this Slack non-sense, it is broken. So maybe I should invest in migrating towards Lastpass
Has the virus changed your routine? We just got the word from Salesforce to work from home until at least March 31st.
I’m still going in. Lauren’s at home, but only this week at least for now. Not sure what one week will do. Until the end of March is super long, but is really what would be necessary for it to make an impact. Not good for business on the surface, but for sure better than a significant part of your workforce becoming sick and unable to work. Respect to Salesforce for that.
Edit: now I’m staying home
I agree, things are changing so quickly, who knows what will change in the next week. It can't be an easy decision to send so many people home. I feel especially bad for folks working in service industry jobs, etc...who can't WFH, dont have PTO, etc... and who will lose a lot of business if large workforces are wfh, and in turn aren't buying coffee, lunch, etc... It puts them in a really tough situation.
Exactly totally agree that those individuals have it the worst. Feel bad for sure.
I thought a confirmed case was at Amazon..? We received notice to wfh till end of march and so did Nordstrom. Chicago isn’t impacted like Seattle
Yep, there was a case a confirmed case at Amazon which is why Lauren is wfh. I’m at Lyft now so I’m still going in at least for now fiesta
Thank you thank you!
Why are you Uber over Lyft? This is disappointing to hear!
Well after checking email this morning I guess I’m supposed to stay home too. King County Government is recommending trying to stay home until March 31
i just celebrated 6 years with them, i’m a platnium or diamond rewards(?) i basically got into their rewards super early on and have way better experience because of my frequence
i can go on and on but folks who lived with me know how much uber usage i had
Well damn yeah if you’re at their high awards tiers then it’s tough to beat. Idk about the Chicago market, but Seattle overall leans more towards Lyft and I have a worse experience with Uber here.
As a good Lyft employee I deleted my Uber app. Still use Uber Eats tho
Seattle is hit or miss in terms of drivers. I will say, i do not enjoying getting them in seattle compared to different cities
Wow that’s an amazing amount of miles lol how many exactly?
Hopefully everyone is liking their home office during these trying times!
Sam do you get to spend like this whole month in your bham home?
Steph has to go down for some meetings, and I will probably go down with her to Seattle on some of those occasions.
She can for many meetings, but meetings that pertain to multiple people looking at and discussing clothing samples require being in person w/ the clothing sample.
Of course, I think REI should mail the samples to the employees’ homes, but apparently they won’t do it
How many samples per week are we talking about?
I believe it depends on the time of year. Retail is quite cyclic, so some periods of time she is dealing with lots of samples, other times very few. Ah, but you’re probably think about the mailing logistics. Good point, I am not sure what the scale of sample is
All of this WFH has inspired me to upgrade. I'm shopping around for a standing desk (or just legs) and a new chair.
Let me know if you find a good reasonably priced standing desk. Also interested in this.
Can’t emphasize enough how important a quality, ergonomic chair with good lumbar support is. Budget a few hundred dollars for it. Herman Miller is world class, but very pricey. You can find good used ones for reasonable price on Offer Up or Facebook Marketplace though
LOL at my screenshot but this is apparently a good gaming keyboard (?) my bf influenced this a lot
Looks great. I’ve never heard of opto-mechanical keyboards before
Does your bf have a mechanical keyboard? You two will be clickity-clackin away for the next wfh month
yep he has the same one in black lol… hopefully we don’t get too many neighbor complaints 🙉
I love that the box comes with a cut out around some keys so you can clickity-clack to know what you’re getting ahead of time lol
*Thread Reply:* None
thanks for the reminder of them. first time i've listened to shake it in years
What is everyone (those under a stay-at-home order) doing to stay busy at home?
video games - animal crossing
ton’s of cooking (making beef stew today)
cleaning / general chores
working out every other day
records / listening to music
YAHTZEE
Damn everyone says they work more now but I feel like I work less
Yeah, the house stays a lot cleaner and we find more time for home improvements and decorating. I've also been able to stick to a daily workout schedule easier. Also, lots of video games.
Wow, I hadn't noticed how active this thread got, nice! I have been bad about still working 8 hours 😬, so I am implementing some new routines to be more disciplined.
Most of my free time has been spent on DIY-scale house projects. Lots of painting, hanging things, building some basic furniture, less exciting house maintenance like extending gutter downspouts, trimming back trees/bushes, etc... The most interesting thing is that we got chickens. We bought a worn down old chicken coop off Craigslist and restored/modified it.
Also, plenty of time spent fantasizing about buying certain stocks that have been hit hard but will come back strong, and eventually always coming back to the realization that my stock picks could be wrong and I should just be boring and invest in indexes lol.
Nice, sounds like your having no trouble at all staying busy! That's awesome that you guys got chickens. That must be fun. I know Kelli will be jealous since she grew up with them. What games do you play on xbox? I recently got access to some xbox games through an employee preview of xCloud and I'm curious if we have any of the same games.
Staying busy has been quite easy indeed. Cool! I didn’t know she grew up with them. You guys will have to come visit! I am still learning all about them, but they haven’t died yet 🤞 I just started some old Hitman games that were available for free at some point, Red Dead Redemption 2, and the new Modern Warfare battle royal “Warzone”. It’s been a while since I played Apex Legends, but two of my other buddies play that a lot.
they haven’t died yet
😂 no doubt they’ll be happy and healthy and delicious
Nice, those are good games. Don't have any of them though so we're out of luck. Do you plan on eating and breeding the chickens or just using them for eggs? How many do you have?
What games do you have access to?
We got 6 young chickens to start with, 2 turned out to be roosters. We built the coop to be enough space for 8, 10 at the most. We mainly want them for eggs. We will likely kill and eat one or maybe both of the roosters at some point, and raise or buy more hens at some point to maximize egg production.
I have access to a library of ~50 or so games. I've only played a couple so far. I'll take a look in a bit and see if any stand out to me as good multiplayer options. This is the platform I'm playing on. It's aiming to be similar to Google's Stadia.
Nice, sounds like a good plan for the chickens!
I don't have any of those games. Farming Simulator 17 looks like a blast though 😂
There are some really fun games in that collection. Are you playing them on the pc?
I’m unsure whether I want to go, since I went to that alumni event 1-2 months ago.
That’s fair. Would be a lot of university stuff in a short amount of time
@spkaplan I didn't realize how much you had actually done with Brian. You're in the top 5, even beating out David Palmer. Very impressive 👏
Thanks for the heads up. Sounds like they will have more info tonight about how bad tomorrow will be. Hoping this goes away soon
Here's the links if you wanna click.
Emergency Alert. There is super massive cloud of smoke outside of California and Oregon. The wind is changing direction and it’s coming your way tomorrow. You have today to prepare. Let your family and friends know.
▶️Get supplies and create a box fan that filters the air around you. This video shows you how to make it. Or, invest in a professional filtering device.
▶️Go shopping for any essentials today.
▶️If you don't have to go out tomorrow, stay home.
▶️See air quality forecasts at
▶️More information to protect yourself from smoke at
I was pretty disappointed in C# until 2016. I also found it interesting how javascript has just dominated the entire timeline.
https://youtu.be/eCUy0F-oVXA
Time for a new internet router. Anyone have recommendations? Otherwise I will probably go with a highly rated one on Amazon
just easy with good support and regular upgrades to the latest and most capable routers
Yeah, I am tempted for the sake of regular upgrades. However, I had a good experience owning my last router. it worked well for 8 years. internet has started sucking the last month, so i want to get a new router to see if that is the problem
If your router lasted 8 years with no issues, it is definitely more cost effective to own your own
for that reason I am thinking of buying my own again…nothing against renting specifically, but sticking with whats worked so far for me
Additionally, you have some built in anti virus features on the comcast routers now. They actually quit offering free norton 360 this year because they are confident that it's not necessary with their integrated solution. That being said, that could just be a sales move and maybe their contract with Norton just expired and they didn't want to renew.
I want to own my own router but whenever I have internet trouble I'm always afraid they will use that as a scapegoat for slower speeds. If I'm using their router, they don't have any excuses for giving me what I pay for. Plus, they can inspect it and restart it remotely. But that could be considered a con too.
I hate comcast and the power they hold over me.
I think I'm getting close to being in the market for a new phone. What's everybody using? More info below.
hell yea boy get an iPhone 11 Pro or an iPhone 12 Pro
I'm sure you all at least somewhat know by now that I care about my data being mine, so I'm especially curious if anybody has looked into using phones that aren't by one of the biggest players, especially if you're running an OS that isn't Apple/Google based. Or just some info if you've ever looked into it. Or you could always try to sell me on why I should stick to the basics! I've just only ever used IPhones or Galaxies.
Your priorities are very well aligned with Apple's...
You gotta sell it to me Kyle. At this point, I am more likely to go iOS before I go Google's Android though... I'll just miss my customization :/
Haha! Well if I seel you on bits then Brandon will pick it apart 🤣
In all seriousness, Apple's whole shtick is privacy. Every competitor of theirs is ad-driven. Apple is sales driven. Their business model is aligned with what you want. And they make great phones, being the best consumer electronics hardware company ya know. Best chips. Best battery life. Sleekest OS and UI.
You do have to work a little bit harder with customization. But I would love to join you on this journey to see what exactly is missing in that sense, because - at least for things that matter to me - I can customize enough.
iMessage is the most secure messaging software out there and just so nice to use
But, yea, you're pretty much describing why I prefer it over google right now
If you haven't bought a new phone by the time iPhone 13 rolls around in the fall, you can have my iPhone 11 Pro when I get the 13. If you want it at least
For reference on customizability, I have multiple launchers on my phone that can drastically change the look, feel, and behavior of my device.
The default, the one I've used the most, and the one I'm currently using are all attached. And that's just one aspect of customization.
Oh, wow, I'd probably take it if I haven't gotten one by then! Then the choice would be made for me at least 😆
The difference between the first two doesn't seem so drastic to me, but looks comparable to what you could do with an iPhone. The third would be more work for sure. iPhone rolled out widgets last year which, combined with iOS Shorcuts, do a lot to help close the gap.
I'm not super into customization so I don't know the best how-tos and what all is totally possible. I keep it simple and just have a sparse home screen and then everything else I let live in the App Library. My screen is attached.
If you wanna see what's possible, has enthusiasts and their setups
Kyle said he was not too sure that you could achieve what you wanted. I am reinforcing the fact that the sub he linked will show you how to do the things you currently have.
Thanks for all the info and the video Kyle! Wasn't aware the lengths that you could go with widgets, that is quite a bit better than what was available when I had an iPhone. The only other thing I have problems with with Apple is that I'm very much into Free Open-Source Software and Apple is practically the anti-christ when it comes to that...
np np. Sounds like you got some priorities to sort through 🙂
Yeah, honestly Apple wins in terms of privacy and hardware these days and is on par with google in terms of software at the moment. The best camera software belonged to google during last gen but I think Apple has evened the playing field quite a bit. Having a completely open device that I can plug into a PC and install an APK to is personally functionality I would miss and a level of transparency I can appreciate. And I'm pretty tied to googles ecosystem in general (just got google buds!) so it would be a tough transition for me to switch over to the "phone of the masses".
So true about the ecosystem dependencies. Investing more and more into either ecosystem makes the overall experience so much better, while also making it very hard (and expensive) to switch
I would love to do a full switch to experience and compare the G life
@spkaplan Kelli and I are wondering if you have a baby registry? I hear the due date is quickly approaching!
You guys really don't have to, but, if you insist, our registry is here
Finally installed slack on my work computer so I can keep up with this channel again 🤗 Stupid teams...
Don't tease me man I just cancelled the coworking day and signed out of this workspace on all devices except for my personal laptop which stays at home
Posted using /giphy | GIF by Australian Survivor
@andelink @brandon @keenin @tiaalexa @kellikatzer I just realized I don't think I ever said thank you all for the card you sent. The card and your notes were all so nice!! 😊
You’re totally welcome dude!! Hope all is going well and you’re enjoying your leave and time with your family!
Was it a good first Christmas with the little one?
It was low key, but good. We got 6-8in of snow on Christmas, so we celebrated Christmas on Christmas Eve with family, so we could be home before driving got difficult. How was yours?
Ahh nice a white Christmas, how lovely ❄️
My parents came to NY to spend Christmas with me. It was their first time in the city, so I showed them around for 5-6 days and on Christmas we saw Phantom of the Opera on broadway - pretty good!
Veryyy white. And then we got another 8in of snow a few days later.
That must have been fun for your parents! Broadway is a such a great experience
I assumed I would now have a white Christmas since moving over here… can't believe y'all got snow before I did
Aahhhh man that's quality snow right there! I'll share a pic of snow over here when it finally happens. The city snow will not look as good as your yard though lol
I haven't been in snow like this since that huge snow we got sophomore year in Bellingham. I forgot how much fun a lot of snow is!
Definitely send pictures of New York in snow 😍
It really is, so when I saw it on Twitter this morning I just had to share here too 😆
The first two pics are from my apartment. In the second one you can see the One World Trade building (it's the distant skyscraper on the left with the pointy needle on its top)
it's wild how much snow Washington state got. They have had more than Chicago!!
I'm returning to work from paternity leave on Monday. I haven't been on a computer much for the past 5 months. As a result of being on a computer 8+ hours a day now, I'm excited to jump back into Soundstack 😄
Happy new year 🎆 and I hope all of you had a great end to 2021!
Likewise! I see you gaming recently. If you wanna play some Halo or anything HMU!
Lately I’ve been binging Elden Ring. I have been neglecting real life probably too much
Yeah, I've been playing games here and there, probably once or twice a week. Halo seems to be the game at the moment. I'll definitely hit you up when I'm playing next. I'm still ramping up on keyboard/mouse for FPS. It's a struggle haha.
I wish I could play elder ring, but I know I don't have enough time to commit to it 😞
Oh man, controller is the way with Halo. Even most of the pro Halo players use controller because of the generous auto-aim and the higher time-to-kill. It’s more of a back-and-forth with encounters instead of sharp immediate reaction speed like many other shooters. I use controller with Halo haha
Would you be down for trying coworking day again?
You're now the second person who has told me to use controller for Halo, so I'll do that. Hmm, not sure if I have a wired controller though. I'll have to double check.
I'm totally down for co-working day! We should try to get the other fools on as well
Just seeing this. I know, I know; I suck lol It's so much tougher to keep it slack open now that I use Teams for work. I would be down to schedule a group video call to catch up for sure 👍
Glad to hear from you though! How is bham and fatherhood treating you?
Kelli and I are closing on a house this week so that's the biggest thing going on for me right now. It's been a long process getting to this point over the last couple of months!
Thursday afternoon works for me. I go into work on those days but usually head home in the early afternoon. Then I have a standup call at 4:30.
So something in the range of 230-430 would work well for me I think.
@andelink If that day & time works for you, would you want to setup a gcal meeting?
Can someone else set it up? Sorry I don’t want to be the one again
You know, the thing you proposed in this thread a month ago that I just responded to today? 😋 I can schedule the calendar invite.
I scheduled a call for us to hang out on Thursday at 2:30pm. I added a Google Meet link, but we can also probably just use Slack?
If anyone else wants an invite, let me know!
I somehow ended up with a 6:00pm EST meeting so I can only join the first 30 minutes
Sorry I had to leave early! When is the next one?
It's all good. I scheduled one for Friday after next, in the morning, so it isn't late for you.
On May 17, the food delivery service will give you $15 to order a lunch for yourself. The food delivery service even made a calendar reminder you can drop in Outlook or Google Calendar. Simply use the promo code “FREELUNCH” between 11 am and 2 pm on May 17, and you’re taking a steep discount on your midday meal. The code will get you a free lunch unless your order is over $15, in which case you get $15 off your meal.
With all their service fees and stuff, it'll be near impossible to order a proper lunch for anywhere close to that
The $15 only covers the subtotal, so you still need to pay the service fees, taxes, and tip
I have grubhub+ so i don’t have any service fees
Idk about you, but I used to get emails at least monthly with $15+ dollars off but they stopped sending them since I never used them. Still get some in the snail mail though. I guess this just seems like alternate marketing for what they already do all the time.
Only you Ryan can find a way to complain about being given $15
But yeah I haven’t gotten those emails in a long time
Well, my first comment was more like "That's cool but would be difficult to actually use..." But, now I am complaining, I'll give you that, but more about the marketing. What can I say, I'm a bit of a marketing guy.
I haven't gotten my desk back set up yet and am still just a bit scattered
I'll be in the office next Thursday and am not sure what time I'll be getting home yet since I haven't done the commute.
I’m out June 30 - July 5th, but y’all go ahead and catch up!
Had lunch with Patty and her parents today and then I will be over on the peninsula on July 8th :(
I got out of a meeting at 2:00pm and didn’t even realize we had this on the calendar
Do you mind adding my work email to the invite list kandelin@lyft.com and set the visibility to private?
Wow, we suck at this lol I've been swamped all day dealing with demo deadlines and haven't checked my phone. Sorry Sam. Adding it to our work calendar is a good idea, although it might just be better to use a placeholder to block out the time.
Is it the same time/day every week or whatever frequency?
I don’t mind it being on my work calendar. That’s why I asked if it could be set to private 🙂
When's all your guys last meetings on Fridays? @brandon is 6:30_7:00pm and that's for certain
2:30pm is normally when I get out of my last as well
I actually just checked and I don't have a single meeting/event on the calendar today 🥳 That is some kind of miracle!
Like Keenin said, if anyone wants to hang later, I'm down to hang in discord too. We could play some chill game like Fall Guys or Fortnite? Or whatever 🤷♂️
i’ll be around hombre. this weekend i’m just trying to catch up on some sleep
Was just coming here to ask the same thing and see if I should put something on the calendar. I'll just go ahead and do it this afternoon.
Here is a link to the google calendar event. Come hang out @ 10:30am this Friday. Google Meet Link
This link isn’t working for me. If you’re on the call can you send the google meet link?
Oh, looks like you guys are already in a different meeting. I'll try switching over.
My 7 year old Kinesis Freestyle2 keyboard is failing to pair to my laptop...thinking it is time for a new one.
I am looking at mechanical keyboards. What are your thoughts on the different mechanical switch types/colors (brown vs blue vs red)?
Also, do you guys generally find mechanical superior? If so, in what ways? (e.g. decrease typos)
Ooooh you are one of those split keyboard users
Also, do you guys generally find mechanical superior?i use a mechanical keyboard personally. Can’t tell you why
Hmm idk. It’s been a really long time since I used a non-mechnical keyboard. They are satisfying to type on for sure
I do wish I could somehow toggle on/off their loudness
On video calls my typing comes through loud and clear
I have Brandon’s old keyboard: VENGEANCE K65 Compact Mechanical Gaming Keyboard
Kyle has red (no feedback, quiet(er), I have brown (some feedback), Keenin has blue (most feedback).
I bought the red originally but wanted something with more resistance / feedback to it.
I don’t even know what the other colors feel like
Yeah, I think that's a reasonable place to start since it's a middle ground. I think red is the most efficient/fastest since there is no resistance, but it can take some getting used to. I like my brown switches but I wish I could just go test all the different types one after the other so I could really decide definitely.
Although, to be clear, all of them even red are loud enough to annoy everyone around them
Hmm, so I can't type during 1:1s and interviews without annoying people... that might keep me away from mechanical
Thanks guys for the quick advice! I want to order one asap to have it hopefully by monday
But if you go with mechanical, I would recommend hot swappable switches. That way it is easy to take them out and put in a different kind. Useful if you get switches and find out they're too loud or just want to try other setups without buying a whole new keyboard/soldering
OMG, Kinesis has a split, mechanical, with SILENT reds!
https://www.amazon.com/Freestyle-Ergonomic-Mechanical-Keyboard-Switches/dp/B07J1ZJ6X[…]62747153&sprefix=kinesis+freestyle+pro+red%2Caps%2C251&sr=8-1
Loving the new mechanical kinesis split keyboard with the silent cherry reds. I definitely make many fewer typos with mechanical than with traditional (maybe b/c it doesn't require full press?)
Keenin has blue (most feedback)On one of my keyboards. I have Gateron Yellows in my most recent one, less feedback and much quieter.
$8.75 per user per month when billed monthly. $7.25 when billed annually
Apparently we have $250 in credit, and only four active members
Should we move all this to a discord server? Pay for a month and knowledge transfer everything.
If we do pay, does that mean we even get those messages back? Or are they now gone forever?
Slack is being a real asshole. They're just hiding them
Discord doesn't do threads very well, and also deletes threaded messages after a certain amount of time (default is like 72 hours or something)
We could maintain a wiki of some sort. Put anything useful there
Yeah, still paying for the storage of everything
Nothing is really going to be comparable to Slack. Even Teams doesn't do threads as well.
Damn, this is lame. Bad move to squeeze the little guy for $$.
I can't think of a solution yet.
We could try out Discord, and if we feel it is sufficient, then we could do the heavy lift to port all of our previous convos?
We could try it out if we want to. I’m still a little resistant. I. really like Slack. We have $250 in credit. So we can buy a month of premium come tax season (or whenever we want), and then copy over any historical stuff we want to somewhere more permanent.
For ongoing / forward-looking archiving, we could whip up a Slack bot to copy over messages/threads that we tag somehow (maybe with a specific reaction) to a more persistent home.
Yeah exactly something like that.
It makes me wonder how Slack is treating old/expired messages that are pinned or bookmarked. They must be deleting pinned messages too
Wow... Boo slack. This is terrible. Any chance they will revert or modify the rules? Probably not..
That is so lame. Looks like salesforce is trying to turn on the money spigot.
A great free tier is so important
I’ve been using the Kagi search engine for a short while now on the free trial plan (100 free searches), and I’ve decided I am going to upgrade to a paid plan once my free trial ends. It’s a supremely better experience than Google / Bing / DuckDuckGo, and their business model/philosophy aligns well with mine.
I average around 700 searches per month, so I would probably get the $10/mo plan, but I think a family plan could save some money.
Would any of you want to go in on a Family plan together?
Here are their plans:
type plan cost/mo searches/mo
Individual Standard $5 300
Individual Professional $10 1000
Individual Ultimate $25 Unmetered
Family 2 Accounts $14 1500
Family 6 Accounts $20 2000
On my work laptop, I’ve configured Kagi to be my default search engine within Chrome (have to use a Chrome for work)
On my personal laptop and mobile, I use the Orion browser with Kagi default search.
What are the main differences you have found in your day-to-day searches that makes it a better experience? Obv less/no promoted search items, but what else?
No ads is huge of course. For technical results it’s lot more useful, IME.
I think the built-in/native feature set is really nice.
Can create Lenses that are a set of rules/filters I can toggle to include/exclude certain results. Quick access to wayback machine. Personal ranking of websites to tailer results to my preferences. Website info like latency, ads/trackers, etc.
Technical/code search by default includes snippets straight from github.
Shopping search surfaces no affiliate links and prioritizes discussions, and includes a separate view for top review sites.
Nice AI features like summarizing all search results, summarizing a specific page, and Q/A discussion style chats. Also includes access to their Universal Summarizer, which is v nice.
Many of these features can be found in other browsers, some are built-in, some require extensions. But all of them out-of-the-box is nice.
Generally I just feel I get better results and find what I’m looking for faster
You can even configure link redirection using plain-old regex. Like, if you wanted to always open reddit.com links as old.reddit.com, you can configure that accordingly
You should try it out for yourself. Start a trial at kagi.com and then set Kagi to be your default search engine in your browser. You can do that either by installing their Chrome extension or manually configuring it in your settings at:
Okay, okay! You've sold me on it. I'll signup for the trial when I get home. Definitely seems like I'd want to use the trial first to understand all of the nuances and capabilities before actually paying for it
Oh god, yea always block pinterest. Such a disappointing click when you think it's an actual article/image
The Orion browser is pretty nice too. It’s super fast on desktop. But also, it supports both Chrome extensions and Firefox extensions - on desktop and on mobile. It’s been nice having the privacy.com extension running on my mobile browser 💳
The quick answer feature is nice enough to cite its sources! (In the pic my mouse is hovering over the 2nd footnote in the paragraph, which then highlights the relevant link at the bottom
Kagi new pricing $10/mo unlimited searches 🙌
https://blog.kagi.com/unlimited-searches-for-10
My work just implemented a retention policy on Slack 😭 I'm sad and scared. Even my notes to myself will disappear. Anyone use other apps/tools for notes / code snippets? Preferably somewhere queryable? I'm on a mac.
Holy shit, they must not realize how much valuable info is in a team/company's slack. It's like internal Google
Can’t have all those offensive and insensitive messages from executives lingering around for too long 🙊 🙊 🙊
Yeah, it's terrible. The kind of thing legal thinks is a great idea, but will definitely have a real impact on company goals and knowledge retention. People are not happy about it lol
Anyone use other apps/tools for notes / code snippets? Preferably somewhere queryable? I’m on a mac.For work stuff, I almost exclusively just brain dump into my Slack DMs with myself. Outside of work I just stick with Apple Notes because it’s convenient. Although I’ve been trying out the Orion browser notes functionality recently. I kinda like it.
Popular note / knowledge base apps these days are Obsidian, Logseq, Notion
I don’t understand why Epic is doing this. They got cash up the wazooo all that sweet sweet fortnite money
you might have noticed the yellow banner at the bottom of our Slack workspace regarding payment. Our free credits ran out and so we will lose our full conversation history unless we start paying real money.
The per-user cost is:
- Billed monthly: $8.75/mo
- Billed annually: $7.25/mo ($87/year)
Do you guys want to do this? If we do, we should do the annual payment plan and just get it over with.
Old discussion: thread
I'm also happy to explore self-hosted alternatives and host something, but have a feeling it won't be up to snuff for all y'all 🎩
If you can import our history, it’d be quite compelling
I don't get unlimited history at work, might as well suck it up here as well 🥲
And I was already researching point one over the last couple days for fun, so...
Commit to Slack harder (🤢) and create a bot that reposts pinned messages every X days to circumvent restrictionsThis is what my first thought was when they made the retention change
If a simple “edit message” action suffices, then we can do it for all messages
Could work as a bandaid, but we'd probably want to explore more durable solutions still
like finding an alternative and reposting all the messages we come back to Slack to find over the next year, for example
Friends, I’ve paid for a month of Slack premium or whatever. I did this because starting August 26, Slack will begin deleting free-plan messages and file history that is older than one year. See their announcement for details: Updates to message and file history on free workspaces
I’ve used slackdump to export our workspace message/file history to avoid losing it permanently. I needed to upgrade to premium because on the free tier I could only export the trailing 90 days worth of data.
Do people have any ideas on where to host our conversation history? One option is discord. Another is mattermost. Or we could host a “soundstack archive” of sorts using a tool like SlackLogViewer, slack-export-viewer, or slackdump2html.
Thanks, and good day 🎩
Were they just hiding the messages before, while still retaining them in case you upgraded to premium?
I hope ya'll are well 🙂 Life has been so busy, I haven't had the time to keep up in here, share stuff, etc...
Things are going well! Hope they are for you as well. I was thinking the other day that we should try to do a virtual hang / co-working sesh. I might put something on the calendar for Friday if anyone is interested.
A virtual hang would be fun! Work hours is my only "free" time.
Yeah, life is good. Just barely any free time, with the kiddos.
Here’s the border bill that was allegedly blocked by Trump senators.
Bill: S.4361 - Border Act of 2024
Vote: Cloture on the Motion to Proceed Rejected (lost 43-50)
CRS summary:
Introduced in Senate (05/16/2024) - Border Act of 2024
The bill expands Department of Homeland Security (DHS) authority to address the processing of non-U.S. nationals (aliens under federal law) and provides supplemental appropriations for related purposes.
Among other provisions, the bill provides DHS emergency authority to summarily remove or prohibit the entry of certain non-U.S. nationals within 100 miles of the southwest land border. DHS may exercise this authority if DHS encounters an average of 4,000 non-U.S. nationals within a seven-day period.
If the number of encounters reach certain higher thresholds, DHS must exercise the emergency authority. This emergency border authority expires after three years and may be modified by the President under specified circumstances.
Next, the bill establishes an expedited process that authorizes asylum officers to adjudicate certain asylum claims. Among other provisions, these provisional noncustodial removal proceedings impose certain target timelines for determining asylum claims and limit review of denied claims. The bill also establishes a stricter threshold for individuals to remain in the United States pending adjudication of an asylum petition.
The bill extends and establishes immigration pathways for Afghan citizens or nationals, including by (1) making certain individuals admitted or paroled to the United States eligible for conditional permanent resident status, and (2) expanding eligibility for special immigrant visas for certain individuals who were injured while supporting the U.S. mission in Afghanistan.
The bill also increases base pay for asylum officers and grants DHS temporary direct hire authority to hire personnel to implement the bill.
govtrack seems like a nice resource. I like how it summarizes the results and links to the bill pdf as well. It sure would be nice if a brief explanation was provided by each senator along with their vote for or against. Otherwise, the motive is very opaque.
Agreed. Haven’t quite figured out if there is a compelling source anywhere for motive. I think it depends on reporters whose daily beat is Capitol Hill and them asking the questions
What I recall was the reason conservatives voted down on this was because the bill was part of an omnibus bill which included more money for Ukraine. I wish bills like these were separate so there is no room for uncertainty why someone voted for or against. The fact that they were in an omnibus gives them plausible deniability as to their motivation for whichever way they voted.
What is an omnibus and can you link to relevant info on congress.gov?
an omnibus is a bill made up of multiple smaller bills that gets voted on together. All or nothing.
can't find it on congress.gov b/c it was just the negotiations between Democrats and Reps, not written in a bill. Here is a politico article about it.
I've heard about this practice of lumping bills together into a conglomerate. I feel like each side says, "if you get this bill, we get this bill" until they end up with an entire collection. However, I don't really get how it works legally. I would expect a new "bill" to have to be written that includes all of the terms of the agreement. Regardless, let's focus on agreeing on one thing at a time before we start batching them up lolsob
I cannot find much evidence for this being lost as part of some omnibus bill. I do, however, find evidence supporting the allegation that it was blocked at the request of Trump. Allow me to share.
(i) From the beginning this was a bipartisan bill, as it was coauthored by conservative Republican Senator Lankford of Oklahoma, who, per Congressional Record (CR) Vol. 170 No. 88, was applauded unanimously for his work on it.
(ii) It continued to be bipartisan legislation throughout its lifetime (Actions tab), as seen by the four amendments submitted by different Republican senators (Amendments tab) and formally proposed as part of the vote in the senate. Per CR Vol. 170 No. 89, senate unanimously agreed to proceed with the cloture motion during the next session.
(iii) When asked on Fox News why Senate Republicans were blocking the Border Act, the original coauthor of the bill, Senator Lankford, answered very simply:
President Trump said: Don’t fix anything during the Presidential election.He then repeated the statement verbatim:
President Trump said: Don’t fix anything during the Presidential election.
(iv) Per CR Vol. 170 No. 90 on May 23, before the vote later in the day, the months of bipartisan effort was acknowledged. Here is a small snippet:
Three months ago, something truly stunning happened here on the Senate floor. Senate Republicans filibustered the strongest, most comprehensive border security bill Congress has seen in a generation. And they did it because Donald Trump wanted to exploit the border for political gain on the campaign trail.
Well, today, we are going to try again. We will vote to move forward on a border security bill that Democrats and Republicans spent months on together. I hope our Republican colleagues join us to reach a different outcome.
,,,
The Republican leader openly admitted that ‘’it’s actually our side that wanted to tackle the border issue. We started it.‘’ That is what Leader McConnell said.
(v) Per Roll Call Vote 182 on May 23, a motion to merely schedule the voting on the actual bill at a later date failed, with only one Republican “Yea” on record. The coauthor Senator Lankford, plus the authors of the four amendments, along with the remaining 40+ Republicans voted against it.
Here is a politico article about it.This Politico article seems to be referring to a previous bill, as the article was published on Feb 6 2024. The S.4361 - Border Act of 2024 bill was started after that, not even formally introduced until May.
Please tell me I’m missing something. I don’t want this to be true.
Love this:
https://open.substack.com/pub/michaelmoore/p/bucket-list-joe
Anyone know how feasible this actually is?
Unordered thoughts:
I don't think he needs the immunity for most of these, but the lame-duck aspect is certainly there to do things that would otherwise have been politically unfavorable (e.g. Ukraine peace deal)
I don't think it changes anything regarding debt forgiveness. The Supreme Court struck down his attempt at broader student loan debt forgiveness. Medical debt is private and would need Congress to approve funds.
Then there's the question of whether biden has the cognitive ability and will to do this, and/or whether his staff and the 3-letter agencies want these things. There's a reason they haven't attempted to broker peace between Ukraine and Russia.
I always took “lame duck” as representing the lack of political capital a soon-expiring president has, contributing to congress and other agencies not being very incentivized to work with him. Which I think is what you’re saying with Ukraine. So yeah I think you’re right about immunity not mattering
Is Moore implying that passing executive orders, in direct contradiction of supreme court decisions, a crime that Biden now has immunity against? Or is he implying that Biden can muscle other governmental/legislative bodies with legitimate threats of violence now and that he should do so with reckless abandon? Certainly something else?
Is Moore implying that passing executive orders, in direct contradiction of supreme court decisions, a crime that Biden now has immunity against? Or is he implying that Biden can muscle other governmental/legislative bodies with legitimate threats of violence now and that he should do so with reckless abandon? Certainly something else?This isn't clear to me either.
https://open.substack.com/pub/insidemedicine/p/breaking-news-cdc-orders-mass-retraction
JFC. Explicit censorship of the CDC. Cannot publish anything that mentions:
- Gender
- Transgender
- Pregnant person
- Pregnant people
- LGBT
- Transsexual
- Non-binary
- Nonbinary
- Assigned male at birth
- Assigned female at birth
- Biologically male
- Biologically female
Additionally, publications now require explicit approval from a Trump political appointee to ensure nothing contradicts his political views. There is only one appointee currently at the CDC, now responsible for each publishing decision of an org of 100s of people.
For the first time in ~60 years, the CDC regularly scheduled publications have gone unpublished…
Wow, that's crazy that the president is interfering to such a degree in a scientific/medical organization. How often do these terms appear in papers that have already been published, and what is the context?
Also, why is "pregnant person" being targeted? Is it because it's not gendered and "pregnant women" should be used instead?
Yeah, the EO about two sexes feels like a waste of time and pandering to the more religious part of the republican base.
Like they are all for "free speech", but then not when it contradicts the religious rights' beliefs about sex/gender 🙄
Yes. Let's not forget about his EO about restoring free speech:
RESTORING FREEDOM OF SPEECH AND ENDING FEDERAL CENSORSHIP
Section 1. Purpose.
... Government censorship of speech is intolerable in a free society.
Sec. 2. Policy. It is the policy of the United States to:
(a) secure the right of the American people to engage in constitutionally protected speech;
(b) ensure that no Federal Government officer, employee, or agent engages in or facilitates any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen; …
(c) ensure that no taxpayer resources are used to engage in or facilitate any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen; and
(d) identify and take appropriate action to correct past misconduct by the Federal Government related to censorship of protected speech.
Sec. 3. Ending Censorship of Protected Speech.
(a) No Federal department, agency, entity, officer, employee, or agent may act or use any Federal resources in a manner contrary to section 2 of this order.
...
This is part of a broader rolling catastrophe.
data.gov has seen thousands of datasets largely focused on energy and climate removed in the past week.
NASA was ordered to take down their applied science page and are apparently scrubbing the data.
USDA was ordered to take down websites mentioning climate change
It's a mess
They also turned off the whitehouse.gov RSS feed when they took office! I noticed that my RSS reader only had Biden whitehouse entries despite me actively reading the Trump whitehouse releases online. No RSS feed to be found anymore. The bastards
I bet Xi Jinping and his pals are loving this. Popping some champagne. Who would have thought the US would look like China!
Yeah, the EO about two sexes feels like a waste of time and pandering to the more religious part of the republican base.Total pandering. Having a non-scientist police the peer reviewed research of scientists is purely political, there is no scenario where it's not
Also, why is "pregnant person" being targeted? Is it because it's not gendered and "pregnant women" should be used instead?That's the thing, these terms being banned have a real purpose! Like, "pregnant person" is technically correct. "Assigned male at birth" is precise. Referring to someone as a "biologically male" or "transexual" or "LGBTQwhatever" is not gender ideology, it's concise, accurate, and effective communication. These are descriptive terms!
In addition to the free speech contradictions, it's ironic that that, for a campaign all hyped up about streamlining gov and efficiency, this is a horribly inefficient policy... (i) commonly used adjectives being outright banned from the lexicon means using less precise words instead, and (ii) having scientists think about "does my research contradict someones political views" is a waste of brain cycles that will lead to needless revisions before finally getting rejected by the one person who can review it and send back for further editing or even completely discarded. Total joke!
The POV of the supporters of this is likely (I'm guessing here) that medical research related to gender is not worth doing, and thus it is more efficient to not do it.
Talking to my right-leaning in-laws about it, they seem to be doing mental gymnastics with their rationalizations of it, at least from my perspective.
Some quotes:
It's not censorship.
It's biology.
Every single term you listed can be scientifically labeled as
Male
Or
Female
This is science and medicine. It doesn't need to be complicated by needless "gender ideology"
I asked “you’re on record for supporting the banning of the phrase pregnant person and LGBT?” and got the following response:
It's called a pregnant woman.
LGBT isn't necessary to administer general disease cures for the general public.
By streamlining scientific biology to
Male
Or
Female
That sounds very efficient. One would even say... biologically scientific
I mentioned the other energy and science bans going on as well, and had the following exchange:
[them] The energy issue we are on the same page on
[me] So you're okay with censorship so long as it fits your political views. Got it
[them] It’s science Kyle. It’s not a political view
They go on talking about how they don’t want gender impacting their healthcare, only “biology and science.”
They also brought up how who you’re sleeping with shouldn’t be troubling doctors in the CDC. To which I gleefully replied that they’re clearly the one injecting ideology into this because none of the banned phrases indicate sexual preferences. I then said “haha! Roasted!” And proceeded to the gates of heaven victorious
What a great resource they are!
IIUC, their argument is science/research performed at the CDC should be scoped/limited to sex (i.e. male/XY, female/XX), and not pertain to gender/sexual orientation (i.e. the banned terms)? Is that the framing they have?
I can't say I really understand their argument. They didn't clarify for me what exactly the problem is with using these terms. That's my issue with this whole thing. No one can tell me what has been the negative impact of "allowing" this sort of language to be used. Currently, I don't see any downsides to using commonly understood adjectives in a clinical/scientific setting
science/research performed at the CDC should be scoped/limited to sex (i.e. male/XY, female/XX), and not pertain to gender/sexual orientationMaybe. I don't see how these terms suggest that the CDC was doing sexual orientation research though
I would guess that the religious conservative population, and those that don't believe trans (etc...) is a legit thing, actually don't care whether the research was being done specifically on those topics or the research was just acknowledging that they exist. Like if they don't believe trans is a thing, then they wouldn't want medical research papers to refer to it as if it is a thing.
I don't know... 🤷
I appreciate you trying to understand their reasoning. Me? I think theirs is a brain dead take. I could be kind and just say it stems from ignorance, but ignorance can be so easily overcome by sparing 10 minutes to read up on a topic. At what point does it become willful ignorance? Or is it malice instead? Is there a way to tell?
Yeah, that's why I want to get to the crux/root of the divergence in opinions.
This article lists a few research products that are now gone, and also gives a quick overview of what the impact of this might be going forward:
Edit: if it's paywalled
But would really need to sit with them and have a thorough discussion diving deep until we reach that crux.
Hmm. Sounds like the replacement of gender to sex is likely the reason. I guess we'll know if/when the sites come back up.
I feel like I have a totally different reading of that article than you lol
I skimmed, so I might have missed stuff 😄 Also, I don't have an Atlantic sub, so I only get 2 paragraphs
Several scientists I talked with told me they had heard directly from contacts at the CDC that the agency has directed employees to scrub any mention of “gender” from its site and the data that it shares there, replacing it with “sex.”This was the part that had a hypothesis for the removal of the sites
According to the article, the following research or data products have gone missing or been altered:
- Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System: Data from this national survey have disappeared
- Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry’s Social Vulnerability Index: Parts of this index, managed by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, have been removed
- Environmental Justice Index: Portions of this index have also been removed
- HIV Data Landing Page: The CDC's main page for HIV data has vanished
- AtlasPlus Tool: This tool, containing nearly 20 years of surveillance data on HIV, hepatitis, sexually transmitted infections, and tuberculosis, is no longer accessible1
Additionally, quoting several scientists/epidemiologists, there are broader concerns about the removal or alteration of demographic variables, such as gender and sexual orientation, from datasets, which allow the CDC to do its job.
CDC data’s “explicit purpose” is to guide researchers toward the places and people who most need attention, Patrick Sullivan, an epidemiologist at Emory University and a former CDC Epidemic Intelligence Service officer, told me. As the changes unfold before him, he said, “it’s hard to understand how this benefits health.”
If the government chooses to define sex as binary, transgender people and nonbinary people, among others, could be effectively erased. In response to the ongoing changes, some groups of researchers are now rushing to archive the CDC website in full.
Acknowledging and addressing health differences among demographic groups is a basic epidemiological tenet, Biello told me, “so we know where to target our health interventions.”
etc
At a high level, All this gender stuff feels like such a waste of time, like I said at the beginning. So much real stuff to focus on improving
So the changes might be something like, trans man gets reclassified as a woman, and visa versa.
gay people mixed in with straight people. we're going back to the aids crisis where reagan buried his head in the sand because the impact to the population at large (i.e. straight people) was statistically insignificant
Ah yeah, there is sexual orientation as well. Most of the terms listed in your original post were related to trans/gender, but LGBT is snuck in there. I thought they were just going after trans/gender stuff, but if they are also going after gay/lesbian topic, that would be another level
I think it's largely gender based. I used the aids crisis as an example of the sort of thing demographic variables are critical for
Yeah, gender/pronoun seems like the main target, based on campaign topics, etc... I don't feel like gay rights has been a topic on the right for a while now. It's pretty much a settled thing.
DOGE's early moves have been interesting to watch. I'm really curious for when they share a more detailed list of everything they touched. So far, it's only possible to get small pieces
DOGEYes, I was gonna start a new thread for DOGE but spent my time in this thread instead lol
https://apnews.com/article/trump-cdc-fda-doctors-for-america-5263fc6b6cbc723ca0c86c4460d02f33
yeah, i don't see why they can't make the changes without taking the sites/data sources down
Regardless of whether the changes are right/wrong, like why take the sites down.
Because this whole thing is not in good faith about anything reasonable
Yeah, seems most likely, since there's no good reason to take a site down just to change some html
Yeah that looks like it could be. It seems similar to the archived page: https://web.archive.org/web/20250108130906/https://www.noaa.gov/sites/default/files/2024-01/NOAA_Radar_Next-Radar_Next_Program_242901.pdf
DOGE thread dogeparrot
Story: The Young, Inexperienced Engineers Aiding Elon Musk's Government Takeover
Non-paywalled: 👈
I love how this article straight up doxxes these guys. But I guess the point it's making is that federal employees are known to the public, and these guys aren't but they are working for govt and have incredible access to government and citizen data. I really wish this "non government agency" bs would stop. Just make it a govt agency and follow the typical protocols. Would calm me down a bit at the minimum.
What I can't help but wonder: is such drastic action appropriate given the current state of the US? We are economically dominant
It's one thing for these inexperienced nobodies to have such influence and access, and then something else entirely for Musk who was all the business conflicts of interest
What I can't help but wonder: is such drastic action appropriate given the current state of the US? We are economically dominant
Yeah, the reporting/authorization structure here is not clear to me. Would seem less sketchy if they made that clear.
Trump did say all changes are being approved by him/the WH, maintaining the whole "Doge is just advising" thing.
The justification/motivation topic I think we discussed a while back. There are two camps 1) why change, since everything is fine 2) our interest payments on the debt are growing larger and we need to stop them growing/outpacing GDP growth at some point.
You think Trump is saying "no" to Musk at even an infrequent rate?
That's a separate point :D If WH agrees with his recommendation, at least it is the WH in control. Not saying I agree with it, but it potentially settles the "who is making the decisions" critique.
I don't think Trump will ever push back against Musk, given how much he did for his campaign, in terms of both time and money
My real beef is the fucked up organizational issues, the clear and intense financial interests, the lack of any sort of well thought out plan, the fact that congress is responsible for fiscal decisions not the president, and the overgrowth of power held by the executive branch. How much of this is DOGE? Not all of it, but not nothing either
Also, I think there is about 0% chance Trump and Musk actually make national debt smaller
the fact that congress is responsible for fiscal decisions not the president, and the overgrowth of power held by the executive branchIt's funny. This is their main argument as well. Their argument is that much of the spending and regulations (two focuses of doge) were not passed by congress, and thus should not be continued unless put through congress.
But that's as much detail as I've found 😄 I don't know what spending or regulations are in that scope. They have posted some on the doge X account (but very little so far), and there was an X space last night which I haven't listened to yet, but that's about all the first-hand data I've found. They say they will be super transparent with everything, but I'm hoping it's just too early and they aren't putting out much data to the public yet, but eventually will 🤞
If this doesn't happen in the public eye, that would be lame, b/c they said it would
I think there is about 0% chance Trump and Musk actually make national debt smallerLuckily, this should be very measurable 🙂
Forgive me if I am coming off strong. I so badly hope my reading of the situation is wrong, but I can't look at history and recent events and come to anything but a negative conclusion.
Any remotely serious attempt to balance the budget will have to involve serious cuts to some or all of Defense, Medicare, and Social Security; along with tax increases, either new taxes or closing loopholes. Trump+Musk are completely uninterested in doing any of those things, and are in fact going to make them worse.
Indiscriminately firing federal workers whose salaries will collectively make up the most insignificant fraction of the budget is not at all about reducing debt, that's just the thin justification they are using to destroy any independence and competence within the government that might get in the way of their looting and corruption. I don't think I can sway anyone who doesn't already see this as well, but indeed, it is measurable and we can easily look in a few years when the debt is materially worse. These two guys are the most famous bullshitters out there, and they're bullshitting us about this right now.
This is not about saving money, or trying to cut waste or fraud. Musk on twitter is posting crazy shit as some sort of justification, but everything he's doing is reactionary and political. We don't have any accountability left if he is truly the one in charge of our country's finances. It will be great for him of course. After all, he named it DOGE! Might as well be called Federal Bureau of Pump 📈
$TSLA mooned after the election despite its financials worsening. Of course this is due to the market expecting Musk and his companies to benefit from the upcoming/current corruption. Less oversight, more government subsidies, bigger 💰 dogeparrot dogeparrot dogeparrot
Forgive me if I am coming off strong.Judgement-free space 🙂 I like discussing this stuff with ya'll because you guys are smart and open-minded, and I can explore the ideas out loud.
Sorry, works been busy, haven't had time to reply.
Came across this thread which sheds some light on the organizational structure open questions https://x.com/RenzTom/status/1887038847629877714?t=oawKLznEady-AF9XOFYrpw&s=19
I heard something about USDS. Didn’t realize it was simply being repurposed and renamed to DOGE. Such a shame. USDS has really improved at least the public facing tech of gov in the several years. (I think it was established under Obama?)
Here is the source btw:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/establishing-and-implementing-the-presidents-department-of-government-efficiency/
Not sure why the twitter guy opted to take screenshots instead of share a link
Yeah, way too many posts on X use screenshots instead of links. I always trust them less when they won't link to a source.
The team structure described in the EO is interesting… intuitive maybe?
Each DOGE Team will typically include one DOGE Team Lead, one engineer, one human resources specialist, and one attorney.
These are the satellite teams placed across different govt agencies, IIUC.
On a totally random topic, I want a sauna. 4k (for this one at least), plus electrical (can do it myself with my father in law) seems pretty decent.
It looks beautiful. Would it need to be weather-proofed?
Seems common to stain it. Stain on cedar is very rot resistant on its own. Other folks strap a tarp down over it, or attach metal roofing panels. That would shed most of the water.
Just scanned some YouTube video reviews and those methods seem to hold up well for folks.
Yeah the barrel form factor seems surprisingly easy to assemble. Who knows when I'll actually get around to this with the kids, but maybe sometime 😅
Did you order it already or just thinking about it?
Who knows when I'll actually get around to this with the kids,You need it because of the kids though lol
Just dreaming about it. The main hurdle is getting the buy-in from steph that I could have the time to assemble and wire it.
just pay someone to do it if the time part is too much or even just too inconvenient. i assume there is whiteglove stuff
but you keep talking about electrical. i have no idea what that entails
The heater is electric so it needs a 220 volt circuit ran to it. I've done a good amount of electrical work under the supervision of my father-in-law who is a retired electrician, so I could save on the labor cost I'll hire an electrician.
Yeah you're probably right about hiring someone if time is the constraint. But honestly folks in the YouTube video set assembly took about 4 to 6 hours and the electrical wouldn't be more than a couple hours, so I think I have a good chance of convincing steph 🤞
but then again, i haven't evolved into homeowner form yet
I have other projects in mind like renovating our one-car garage into a detached office and gym, but that type of project is definitely waiting until the kids are older. That's more on the order of dozens of hours.
Ahh if your timeframe reference is to major home renovations then yeah lol 4-6 hours is nothing
Nice. I use the sauna several times a week at LA Fitness. I've always thought it would be cool to have one at home someday, along with a hot tub.
I saw a sauna at costco last time I was there! It was one of the smaller infra red models though. Is there a technical reason for the barrel shape? I feel like my head might lay back weird on that angle. Why not a square?
I was reading up on the heater vs infrared. I saw enough folks saying infrared didn't get hot enough that I ruled out infrared. Hopefully it wasn't a mistake/premature.
Not sure about all the reasons for the barrel. Ease of assembly seems like one. Some say the lack of a flat ceiling say it helps with circulation of the hot air vs it getting stuck on the ceiling. There might be more Im not aware of
Chatgpt says they are also more efficient by cutting out the space in the upper corners that likely goes unused.
Do you use ChatGPT a lot? Wondering if you have tried others but settled on ChatGPT
Nah, haven't shopped around. I'm open to moving, just haven't put the time to compare. I used Gemini for a bit.
I have a Kagi search plan but still need to get Kyle to bump me up to ultimate so that I can use the LLM suite as well. It's pretty great. They offer all of the models Kyle captured above, as well as custom assistants that you can program for particular tasks. Kagi keeps surprising me with all of their features. I definitely think it's worth taking the ecosystem for a spin if you want to explore alternatives.
Alrighty, thur is my meeting-lite day. I'll give it a shot today. Does Ultimate require a referall or something?
Does it have like a grammarly-type plugin? I want AI to automatically review my typing and suggest how to make it better.
No, no referral needed. I'm just on Kyle's family plan. He might be able to add you too if you want. Not sure exactly how much the cost savings is.
For the LLM integration, are they all API calls to openai, anthropic, etc...?
Looks like fastGPT is their own hosted LLM? Do I have that rigth @andelink?
fastGPT was a thing they did a while back for idk why. it's no longer under development and they have no real future plans for it. They don't offer their own LLM really outside of specific contexts like search quick answer, summarizer, and doc discuss. The Ultimate plan is an extra $25/mo for the assistant, which is what I shared in my screenshot above. There might be other things included in the ultimate plan but I can't recall off-hand. I do remember them saying they were going to open up assistant access to all subscribers at some point this year
Kagi is worth it for the search alone. It's highly configurable and the results are very good. Very good search experience. I make thousands of searches and I haven't made a google search since getting kagi like idk maybe a year ago?
I'm trying to use the assistant more. Whenever I remember to use it, it's been great. It has saved me some time on some things. I like the custom assistants you can configure. Very handy
I'll take it for a spin. I can't tell if it's essentially equivalent to chatgpt's chat interface, or it has more functionality
Well for one you get every major LLM provider out there, with a much better company providing it to you
Yeah, I like the access to many models. I can pay kagi instead of chatgpt (at least directly).
How is kagi assistant experience on mobile? I use chatgpt on my phone all the time.
My mobile experience with assistant is limited. I've only used it once, and it was yesterday lol, and it was just sending it a link. Like I went to my browser omnibar and entered
!aipp
And then I read the assistants output (this thread). I asked one follow-up question and it was fine. But like that was it, very limited. Nothing really to say. Everything worked as expected. I have yet to spend like a real session in there while on my phone
Yeah it's just a website. No mobile apps at all from Kagi
Oh right. That's new. It's a requirement for them to be listed as one of the default search engine options on Android phones. They needed an app with at least 5000 users. Now they are mid process working with Google to get them listed
I don't know what that app actually does. Brandon would know more
It's just a wrapper around Kagi search. Google just has some dumb rule that says you can't be added to the list of default search providers unless you have a Google Play Store app with 5k downloads. I'm sure they explain it as a way of validating search providers, but it's really just meant to add friction to the process of switching away from Google. There is no reason I shouldn't be able to add my own custom search provider to the list.
Wow, I didn't realize how small the population was. Very cool to be supporting them!
Yeah man it's a very, very small effort! Orion was/is built by like a team of two people
That's why we got the shirts! Among the first to subscribe
Also they are incredibly engaged with the community. I'm in multiple threads with Vlad on their support sites. Their discord is lively. You can see my name in the recent changelog! Love their intention on having such high user feedback as part of their development
@spkaplan set up a free trial and also set it up as your default search engine so you automatically use it anytime you search. our family plan is technically full right now but this sunday i was planning to have The Talk™️ with my dad about kicking him off because he's not using it. (i can see search counts by user for each billing cycle)
if you like it, you'd be welcome to join the plan
this is always the hardest part when i talk to new people joining
some folks even just quit after not figuring it out and continue to pay
I wish I had a better solution for mobile. I've tried to push through Google's BS a couple times and met a lot of resistance. @spkaplan let me know if you find a mobile configuration for android that you are happy with.
Follow up from some thread a while back about having a pro do your taxes... For only $305, she did it all, answered my questions to satisfy my curiosity about some things, and found stuff I had done wrong in the past, so it was a very ROI-positive decision. I'm usually so reluctant to pay someone to do something I can do myself, but this one was so worth it. Might be less worth it without kids, rental property, tax credits, etc... but might still be. Anyway, just a random share!
Good to know! I've always wanted to try it for a year and see if there is a difference in the return.
How exactly does one vet services like these? They file taxes, they keep records of all our finances, I feel like I need to do a security audit or something
I think the CPA license required by the state is supposed to give you some peace of mind there.
Also, seems they use Intuit for their document needs. I'm already fully exposed there
I guess there was nothing wrong with my tax return this year after all 😞
Oh she said she went through my taxes and ended up with the same result that I got. That I owed $30k+
A while back in a thread about national debt I tried to find an article about tax cuts driving it but I couldn’t. I found it again: https://www.americanprogress.org/article/tax-cuts-are-primarily-responsible-for-the-increasing-debt-ratio/
Interesting article. Def sounds like Regan and then Bush messed up a good thing we had going 😭
@spkaplan This is a long slack outage! Can you ping whoever is in charge of slack and tell them to hurry up? 😛
But it's been intermittently dropping messages and failing workflows all morning.
Yeah, you don't realize how critical it is until it's gone. And then you realize it's really difficult to communicate the fact that slack is down lol
@brandon i think you need to hit the "share" button explicitly to allow sharing
I wonder how it would respond if you turned off web access
(It will still access links you give it directly)
Yeah. Maybe I discovered a bug? I have a custom assistant with web access disabled but the prompt is to summarize this link I send it as the first message and it always works
Interesting. Yeah, maybe the web access control isn't applied correctly to the prompt section since it's sort of in a different context.
Not sure about other enterprise customers, but I think it was most noticeable for like 4 hours. It was difficult to measure since some messages would go through and you couldn't really tell if other people could see your stuff. Slack just felt very quiet and alerts/notifications weren't flowing reliably.
The official outage window appears to be 6:45 AM PST through 4:13 PM PST
Yes, please report back if you are able to share anything or notice that they published a blog or something publicly.
I wonder if Sweden and Finland joining nato, AKA sharing a border with Russia, has influenced this decision. Hard to imagine it didn’t.
Hmm I don't follow. Why would Sweden's NATO membership influence them to outlaw E2EE? This seems to me like a move a Russia-compromised/sympathetic government would do. It's Russia who's been caught attacking Signals systems trying to gain access to the Ukranian soldiers Signal messages
Crazy to think that this is the country that once gave us the pirate bay 🪦
The way I was thinking about it is that Sweden is worried about russian spies and the like. So they want to be able to peep into your phone. If things escalate further with Russia, Finland and Sweden are the first to feel it.
I'm glad we're on this side of the pacific. We gotta keep privacy and individual rights.
I mean, we still have Prism and all the Snowden and Wikileaks revelations alive and well
[The agency’s] mission was to make it cheaper to buy cars, heat homes and run businesses.
So fundamentally wrong. Compare to the EPAs first press release back from when it was formed in 1970:
EPA is an independent agency. It has no obligation to promote agriculture or commerce; only the critical obligation to protect and enhance the environment.
What a shame. Every piece of deregulation they are going for is an example of externalized costs that the market failed to properly price. Do you ever feel like we don't get enough mercury in our diets? Or that you long for the cozy coal ash snowfall of days old? Well, good news...
Do you ever feel like we don't get enough mercury in our diets? Or that you long for the cozy coal ash snowfall of days old?You know.. now that you mention it, I have been wanting to increase my Mercury intake!
Why is the White House using Starlink internet service when it is already one of the best connected places in the world, with multiple independent fiber links?
Yeah, I can't think of a technical explanation either. Seems like more advertising for Elon, just like the Tesla car salesman stunt lol
lol what about a car salesman? i think i missed that
Ahh yeah that’s right this was happening during the Tesla vandalizing
This is the most fascinating thing I’ve read in quite some time:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/03/trump-administration-accidentally-texted-me-its-war-plans/682151/
No paywall: https://archive.ph/AP0H4
Hegseth wrote to the group—which, at the time, included me—“We are currently clean on OPSEC.”
Bravo 👏
I was just floored the whole entire read. I can't believe my eyes
Ignoring the egregious security problems, pretty interesting insight into a part of our society we never get to see
i've got it in my reading list for later, so ill have more understanding soon.
More unredacted messages released:
https://apnews.com/article/hegseth-atlantic-war-plans-signal-yemen-houthis-c0addd08c627ab01a37ea63621cb695e
The whole thing is just so embarrassing for those involved facepalm The tech is only as secure as the idiots using it.
It is embarrassing
We are currently clean on OPSECThis just kills me
What did they mean by that? I see it listed in the messages but I don't have the context to understand it.
OPSEC (operational security ie counterespionage practices) was mentioned twice.
The first time was when Pete Hegseth (Secretary of Defense) was responding to JD Vance about possibly waiting a month for the strike. One of his concerns with delaying was about keeping the plan secret for another month, stating:
[...] But, we can easily pause. And if we do, I will do all we can to enforce 100% OPSEC.
The second mention was again by Hegseth when he sent the actual timeline for the strike on the day of. This was redacted in the original article by The Atlantic, but has since been released (see AP News article above):
"Godspeed to our Warriors," he wrote.
"1215et: F-18s LAUNCH (1st strike package)"
"1345: 'Trigger Based' F-18 1st Strike Window Starts (Target Terrorist is @ his Known Location so SHOULD BE ON TIME – also, Strike Drones Launch (MQ-9s)"
"1410: More F-18s LAUNCH (2nd strike package)"
"1415: Strike Drones on Target (THIS IS WHEN THE FIRST BOMBS WILL DEFINITELY DROP, pending earlier 'Trigger Based' targets)"
"1536 F-18 2nd Strike Starts – also, first sea-based Tomahawks launched."
"MORE TO FOLLOW (per timeline)"
"We are currently clean on OPSEC"
This was said before the strike the day of. By stating "We are currently clean on OPSEC" he was communicating that their plans are still secret, no slips of information to unauthorized individuals, and they will retain the element of surprise.
Both of these uses are of course ironic because they are already at 0% OPSEC by including a journalist in the chat with the national defense plans.
It's flabbergasting, really, how fucked this situation is
People have been prosecuted, fined, put behind bars for much much less
Yeah, it's really bad. Gov't data and tech is isolated for good reason, and those restrictions were ignored. Unfortunately, the focus seems to be on how to cover this up instead of how to prevent it from happening again. That being said, I think the focus always tends to be "cover up and distract" when these sorts of things happen.
Indeed. Shortsighted, selfish thinking often rules the day
Waltz and staff used Gmail for government communications, officials say (no paywall: )
This has got to be the most compromised administration in American history. I cannot think of a protocol less secure than email—maybe SMS
Maybe I am dumb, but I imagine all administrations do this to some extent (I am not saying that is good or bad). I have no idea if this is normal flagrancy of the rules or an egregious offense. Every administration has had something like this happen and it's interesting to think, is this administration exceptionally bad or was this just the worst publicly leaked offense from recent/past administrations?
I think it's the most compromised for three main reasons, in no particular order:
- SignalGate
- This gmail revelation
- Elon Musk / DOGE coming in with a bunch of non-government 20 year olds and getting direct access to extremely sensitive data that they were not cleared to access. What a nightmare for the tech security team in the gov. They'll need to completely rebuild their infra/fleet after this sort of breach.
I imagine all administrations do this to some extentKeyword "imagine." I can imagine it to some extent too. But our imaginations are not evidence they have. This is comparing "maybe did it, with no evidence to suggest they did" to "factually did it." Apples vs oranges etc
I have no idea what those bullet points are. I haven't been following past the signal leak.
I say we lock the whole administration in a skif and see who's left after two weeks
The third has been a steady drip since trump took office. mostly earlier
I mean he needs a young staff. They're the only ones dumb enough to think this will work. They're also willing to work 24/7.
Remember the Hillary Clinton email server thing? "lock her up! lock her up!" lol
These things do happen more often than they should for sure, regardless of the administration. However, given that we're only 71 days into the current administration, Trump's staff isn't off to a great start! lolsob
Oh yeah that was a big fuck up. Why she would use a private email server is beyond me. But it did come out that none of the emails were marked classified IIRC
Still a big security vulnerability. People do not understand the technology they use
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/04/doge-workers-code-supports-nlrb-whistleblower/
https://whistlebloweraid.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/2025_0414_Berulis-Disclosure-with-Exhibits.s.pdf
Umm is this a holy-fucking-shit moment??
On or about March 11, 2025, NxGen metrics indicated abnormal usage at points the prior week. I saw way above baseline response times, and resource utilization showed increased network output above anywhere it had been historically – as far back as I could look. I noted that this lined up closely with the data out event. I also notice increased logins blocked by access policy due to those log-ins being out of the country. For example: In the days after DOGE accessed NLRB’s systems, we noticed a user with an IP address in Primorskiy Krai, Russia started trying to log in. Those attempts were blocked, but they were especially alarming. Whoever was attempting to log in was using one of the newly created accounts that were used in the other DOGE related activities and it appeared they had the correct username and password due to the authentication flow only stopping them due to our no-out-of-country logins policy activating. There were more than 20 such attempts, and what is particularly concerning is that many of these login attempts occurred within 15 minutes of the accounts being created by DOGE engineers.
They are totally compromised or… what?
but also like what idiots don't know there is no login when out of country policy?
To add, the whistleblower has been receiving threats for talking: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/nlrb-whistleblower-claims-musks-doge-potentially-caused-significant-security-breach
From his lawyer:
This is a difficult topic for Dan to discuss, but prior to our filing the whistle-blower disclosure this week, last week, somebody went to Dan's home and taped a threatening note, a menacing note on his door with personal information.
…
While he was at work, and it also contained photographs of him walking his dog taken by a drone.
Yeah, Kyle and I invited Carl here so that we can discuss finance / investment topics. Unfortunately, a lot of the historical content is gone, but still a good group of people to chat about these topics with!
I have a dump of our entire workspace history. I can look into a nice frontend for it
Does anyone have a tool that, via hotkey, moves windows (chrome, ide, etc...) to predefined locations?
Problem: when i disconnect and reconnect my external monitors, the windows are all stacked on top of each other, and then i manually have to drag them to different monitors.
I see some tools available, but hoping to save the trial phase by just knowing if you have already tried one that works well.
AI gave some suggestions, so ill let you know if i try them out and find one that works well
For super power window management, I'd checkout Aerospace. you can do anything you want with it:
For a lighter weight solution targeting the specific problem you describe, I might consider an automator workflow (nowadays called Shortcut in the Shortcut app). You can automate window movement/resizing and can schedule it to run when you connect a given peripheral device.
For even lighter weight, I might look to see if the new-ish window tiling functions are good enough for you if you remember the hotkeys maybe. Stage manager may also support this, but haven't used it much myself
Although, if I pause to actually think for a second, I remember that my windows already realign themselves on the reconnected monitor when I plug back in. I don't rely on any of the recommendations I mentioned above for this, so maybe it's a system setting?
Thanks for all the recommendations! Yeah I hope there is some simple system setting. That would be terrific.
Lol, I love the "if I pause to actually think for a second..." I say that so much at work 😅
It's wonderful. I can just scroll back and search for things to my heart's content.
Someday Ill feel rich enough to contribute 😄 maybe when the kids are older
I thought we'd get more than 60 seconds to edit a message. But Im not complaining 🙂
Is that edit expiration a new thing? I just ran into that on my work account as well.
It's super lame, if that restriction is there even for paying customers
I just turned it off since I don't think it was intentional. (if someone turned it on intentionally let me know)
I would hate if i noticed a typo after 61 seconds and couldn't fix it (at work at least)
I guess there may be some scenarios where you want to lock down what happened, like some audit history
I turned on the editing restrictions a few weeks ago. Feel free to change it. Since enabling I also have found myself annoyed by how short it is
I can definitely see value in it. However, I don't think this group is big or organized enough to warrant it. If someone is doing shady shit and abusing this capability, call them out and tell them to stop being ingenuine! (which I guess isn't a "real" word anymore?)
Feel free to change it. I was trying to prevent my messages from being edited/removed going forward, by anyone other than me
Thank you to whoever upgraded our slack space and saved our historyur welcome. it is too expensive to pay monthly. but I upgraded for two reasons:
- (good intentions) to do another export of latest history since the last export.
- (less good intentions 🙂) to resurface an old comment in light of the recent CBO deficit analysis of the big beautiful bill estimating +$2.4T in deficit spend 📈
