Once, when I was fresh out of college, I worked at a mortgage company, a really rotten place. All day I looked at loans, applied some rules, issued a thumbs up or thumbs down. Some couple in Honululu Hawaii with x income trying to get an n amount mortgage. Denied. Approve. Denied … all day every day, people reduced to just a set of facts, and I, a faceless “underwriter” in some far off corner of the country have final say over whether or not they get the house they want, that they might dream of. It’s dehumanizing.

Before I jumped to tech, I took one more shot at credit underwriting, and interviewed at a company in New York City that did something called “factoring”. On paper, it seemed like an ethical, maybe even highly beneficial application of finance. You buy a company’s invoices so they get money today instead of 30-90 days from now. Decent enough, this is probably useful I thought. I go to the company’s office in New York, in financial district for the interview. Goes fine, I ask what kind of customers they have, what interest they charge and it quickly becomes apparent that this company is basically a roundabout-welldressed shylock.

I guess the interview went well enough and it’s a smallish company so the CEO wants to personally vet potential new hires, I meet him in his office. An ex wallstreet banker that started his own company, imagine al Pacino from that movie where he plays the devil. It was a really odd conversation, and it was obvious to both of us that we didn’t see eye to eye. The one thing I remember saying, and the context begets me, I said “we really do build our own personal hell in this world don’t we?” And I remember it being kind of a Freudian slip of a realization, as I sat across from this man who was obviously quite proud of his own self-built cage. He just looked at me funny and asked what the hell I meant by that, and I couldn’t really articulate it, however they still they gave me a job offer (it was terrible, I didn’t take it, the interviewer was practically abusive towards me on the phone for not graciously accepting it or even negotiating).

I just think to myself, these people in their endless drive for personal material wealth, their complete inability to grasp the value of anything worldly and good, how did they stray so far from the path? Who/what led them away and blinded them from seeing natural goodness?

These companies are the closest you can get to a legal mafia, they are effectively charging companies around the world to keep them "safe". In other words, a job that is traditionally considered to be a basic service of the government is now being privatized by people that nobody knows if we can really trust.

They certainly have no problem sending billions of tax payer money and sign missiles to m*rder children.

I think the point here is to prime the public for this discriminatory use of AI. Today it's "bad hamas", tomorrow it can be whatever the current government deems "bad". And by then, it'll be too late.

The Apple security paper describe how to disable ADP through a key rotation sequence.

This will be a "forced rotation", they just need to decide how to communicate to users and work out what happens to those who don't comply. Lockout until key rotation look like an option as someone said.

What kinds of things would you say are best as annotation vs in the test method name? Would you mind giving a few examples?

Also, are you a fan of nesting test classes? Any opinions? Eg:

Class fibrulatatorTest {

  Class highVoltages{

      Void tooMuchWillNoOp() {}
      Void maxVoltage() {}

} }

The force of competition at work. There are vanishingly few desirable opportunities in music and sport, and many potential contenders who will be selected on their individual skills and performance vying for those spots. Often to put in the hours needed to be competitive you have to also love the game; in all fields including knowledge work I’d speculate the top performers are more likely to enjoy the activity for its own sake than the median performer.

Knowledge work like programming is just much less competitive. In a graduating class of 5000 computer science majors at a good university, I’d be surprised if the majority fail to “make it” to a 100k job and be able to support themselves. Once you secure a spot in the workforce it’s pretty easy to hang onto it as an average contributor without much objective measure or comparison against your peers.

Compare to sport, at the same university maybe there are 50 spots on a sports team, and 10 good teams at the school. What percent of kids who start out playing a sport at 10 years old get to have one of those spots, and what percent of those who make the college team go on to make 100k, support their family etc playing the sport?

That competition forces rigor - if I had to compete like that to get a software job, maybe I’d be “practicing scales” on the weekend too, not just when gearing up for interviews.

I highly recommend people who live in hot environments to keep a spare capacitor on hand. Even if you know how to fix it, if the AC dies when your local HVAC supply store is closed (eg not between 7am-7pm Monday through Saturday usually) you’re either stuck paying out the nose to a contractor who has one on hand during emergency hours or you’re sweating it out waiting for the store to open. While they are readily available components that consumers can purchase, they aren’t things that Walmart carries. But HVAC supply shops will sell them to you, you don’t need to be licensed or anything to buy them. You can also just get them on Amazon, likely for cheaper than the HVAC supply shop will sell them to you.

It really is an easy repair. Needs a screwdriver and knowledge enough to shut off the electricity to touch the wires. According to code every one of these condenser units outside has a disconnect right there so you don’t even need to turn off the power at the breaker box. Just pull that disconnect, open up your outdoor condenser unit, snap a pic of the specs on the capacitor (it’s the only thing that looks like a soda can) and order one off Amazon and stash it somewhere. It’s a tiny part. It will take like 5 minutes max and save you several hundred bucks and a lot of sweat eventually.

FWIW, when ac dies it’s usually in this order of root causes:

Float switch: your condensate drain line got clogged because it just does and you need to clear it. You can proactively prevent this by pouring bleach or vinegar down the line periodically (what clogs it is usually some sort of gnarly plant like growth from all the moisture) or if it’s clogged you need to clear it. The hvac guys will charge you 300 bucks to blow pressurized air through the pipe or you can literally just duct tape a wet shop vac to the thing and suck it out yourself. Attachments can be purchased on Amazon for reasonable price.

A capacitor issue is the second most common. If it ain’t the float switch almost always it’s the capacitor. You can increase your capacitor longevity and also decrease your electric bill by changing your air filter regularly but also hosing down the outside condenser coils every few months or so. Almost everyone knows about the air filter but few people know about hosing down the coils. This makes a HUGE difference. We are talking like 20-30% of your electric bill in hot climates if you don’t do it. Just take a hose and spray downward on the grates and get all that dust and dead grass from mowing out of there. You won’t hurt the thing. Why does this help? Well, it’s better to think of AC not as adding cool air. There’s no such thing as adding cool air. Only removal of heat. How does heat get removed out of your house? Through that condenser unit. If those grates are clogged up the heat cannot escape and the unit must work harder to do less effective job. So keep those coils clean.

Everything else after that is way less common. Yeah compressors do die. Motors die. Refrigerant leaks. Computer components die. Thermostats fail. However it’s very rare that the issue is something other than these two things in comparison. Like probably 80% of all HVAC residential calls are probably the above two things I mentioned.