It’s incredibly difficult to run a large social platform without it quickly devolving into a cesspool of hate speech, pornography, extremism, misinformation, propaganda, etc. It’s a never-ending tightrope walk, and you ultimately need to empower a team to make decisions they believe are in the best interests of the site and its users. But you can never please everybody. People who leave comments like this only reveal their naivety. But leaving comments like this today reveals something worse than naivety.
Readit Newsdrblastoff commented on Susan Wojcicki has died twitter.com/sundarpichai/... · Posted by u/grandmczeb
drblastoff commented on Weak Soft Skills: Why you are stuck at the Senior engineer level pathtostaff.substack.com/... · Posted by u/sidwyn
This assumes that working 40.0 hours a week of $x/yr is going to be worse for your family than working 60.0 hours a week for 15% or 20% more. If you're already making $175k/yr in Omaha it's very unlikely that making $205k/yr but missing dinners and school functions and not being able to chaperone class trips is going to give you such a huge quality of life increase that it's worth it.
This assumes the staff engineers work more hours (not my experience)
Deleted Comment
drblastoff commented on Costco membership scanners coming to clubs in sharing crackdown axios.com/2024/08/07/cost... · Posted by u/cwwc
Your spouse can get her own card.
Having said that, this will probably piss me off. Why can’t the cashier do this and deny at the time of purchase.
Costco’s customer friendliness is why I shop there, and this is not customer friendly. Seems like a bean counter had a brilliant idea. /s
The card check at entrance and “club” concept serves another purpose: it deters random people from going to Costco to steal or cause problems. Retail theft is a major problem for most stores these days, unfortunately.
I’ve fallen victim to this, though perhaps fortunately with digital synth plugins that take up no physical space.
This is related to another problem of mine: ignoring things I’m naturally good at, and fixating on things I’m naturally bad at. In this case, I have no real musical talent, can’t play instruments in rhythm, can’t arrange a song, and I’ve nevertheless been pursuing this in my spare time for a decade with no results. Sometimes I buy new gear thinking it will help, but people with musical talent can do much more with much less.
On the other hand, I showed promise for visual arts but never pursued it. My frustration with being bad at something seems to overpower my desire to be really good at something.
drblastoff commented on Weak Soft Skills: Why you are stuck at the Senior engineer level pathtostaff.substack.com/... · Posted by u/sidwyn
I’m constantly torn by the natural inclination to climb the ladder and enjoy the financial rewards, but I have little interest in the day-to-day tasks of my staff engineer coworkers (mostly sitting in meetings and writing emails, very rarely writing code because that’s considered beneath their pay grade and they’d likely be chastised for it at my company). If I had a family to provide for, I think it would be a much easier decision to take the money.
If I put a gun to your head and told you where to live, would you feel that I was giving, or taking away, your personal liberty? Which of these two things should our government be responsible for? My Constitution says the former.
Without threat of violence, housing projects such as the Harlem River Houses have been immensely successful. Other than the US and Canada, do any other first world countries have homelessness problems of the magnitude we're seeing? Why does the US lead the world in homeless and prison populations; if stricter laws were the answer, shouldn't that have worked by now?
If the city says “You cannot live on the sidewalk, in public parks, or in Bart stations,” that’s a far cry from putting a gun to someone’s head.
The city can offer other options:
- shelters in the city
- shelters outside the city if shelter in the city are full (this is my controversial opinion, but if you can’t afford housing in a specific place, you may need to live in a different place until you can afford it. I’d love to live in Malibu, but I can’t afford it. I don’t think it’s my right to plop myself down on the sidewalk and shoot heroin until the city of Malibu builds me free housing. That’s not a realistic expectation.)
- bus fare return to family
- treatment for addicts
If you cant offer something better than jail why stay out of jail?
The point is that you don’t incentivize moving to SF with no money and no job and no prospects and living on the street until you get free housing.
Newsom tried this while he was mayor. His conclusion was that for every person they put in housing, two new people showed up on the street.
Another issue was that most people they put into “temporary” supportive housing never moved out. A significant portion of SF’s budget goes towards paying for the housing of formerly homeless people. The city won’t put them out on the street, so why would they ever leave?
Homeless shelters really do suck from what I’ve read. Theft in particular is an issue.
I don’t think it’s fair to extrapolate from that statement that people wouldn’t take up the offer of shelter if quality and safety were improved.
There will always be holdouts, but a practical solution will make those the outliers rather than the common case.
Do you let the shelters become drugs dens? Because many chronically-homeless people in SF are addicts, and they prefer to live on the street than give up drugs to sleep indoors.
Addicts should have a choice: shelter, treatment, or jail. If you bring drugs in the shelter, your choice becomes treatment or jail. Drug encampments on city sidewalks should simply not be an option.
Some chronically homeless people in SF also suffer from mental illness and cannot look after themselves. They may also not do well in shelters. But leaving them outside is not humane. Institutions had a reputation for poor living conditions, but leaving them to suffer in the street is no better. And institutions can be improved.
drblastoff commented on A Swiss town banned billboards. Zurich, Bern may soon follow bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/toomuchtodo
By graffiti, I assume you mean tags, i.e. not the ones with some artistic value?
I live in Zurich and also wasn't under the impression that it's noticeably worse than elsewhere, but it's certainly an unnecessary eyesore.
There was some reporting on it recently, saying that a major issue are private building owners. Public spots are usually cleaned up quickly. They said the city has some form of very cheap service/insurance offering that building owners can get, which assures that any reported sprayings will be washed off by city workers within x days, but that this service seems to be not widely known. So at least, people seem to be aware of the issue and doing something.
Nothing preventing tackling both issues at the same time, in any case.
Yes, tags, and really anything illegally spray painted on public or private surfaces. No problem if the city or a building owner wants to commission or invite graffiti artists.
I spent time in several European cities recently (and in the past), and Zurich was the only place where the amount of graffiti really stood out to me. Maybe there was an expectation that a wealthy city/country wouldn’t have tagging, which made it stand out more. Berlin had a lot of both good street art and tagging, but the tagging seemed more concentrated in specific areas.
The graffiti stood out more to me than billboards, but as an American I’m surely desensitized to billboards.