eskibars (u/eskibars)

eskibars commented on I want an iPhone Mini-sized Android phone (2022) smallandroidphone.com/... · Posted by u/asimops

eskibars · 2 months ago

Man this hits home. I'm a reasonably sized human, but there are almost no devices on the market outside of iPhones where I can reach from bottom right to upper left with 1 hand without shifting the phone around in my hand. I hate it.

I'd be willing to take less battery life to get something like this, but nearly everything that's anywhere close either has no NFC (which means mobile payments are out the door) or doesn't have 5G or just has such an awful camera/processor as to be basically unusable for many every-day tasks.

eskibars commented on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2025) · Posted by u/whoishiring

eskibars · 2 months ago

SPREAD | https://www.spread.ai/ | On-site (Germany) | Product Manager | Full Time

SPREAD is a software company built to help electromechanical companies (automotive, aerospace, defense) build their products better and faster by bringing together the different data they have into a single system.

We have several of the largest automotive OEMs as customers already and are looking to expand our low-code platform.

https://spread-gmbh.jobs.personio.de/job/456964?language=en&... has job details and you're welcome to email [shane] at our domain as well

eskibars commented on That Dropped Call with Customer Service? It Was on Purpose theatlantic.com/ideas/arc... · Posted by u/dustincoates

atYevP · 2 months ago

Could you give me that ticket number so I can chase it down with legal?

eskibars · 2 months ago

Email me at shane@[my username].com or send me yours and I'll follow up with a ticket number

eskibars commented on Airpass – Easily overcome WiFi time limits airpass.tiagoalves.me/... · Posted by u/herbertl

Zambyte · 2 months ago

Fortunately bikes (and even e-bikes!) exist.

Edit: Also Google Maps says San Rafael to Palo Alto will take 2 hours give or take a few minutes on public transit, with 3 buses, but the middle one you could easily cut out with a bike or a 4 block walk. That doesn't really seem absurd at all for an occasional trip. People do 2 hour drives for an occasional trip and no one bats an eye.

eskibars · 2 months ago

This is just wrong. FWIW, I owned a bike, and this is wrong under both "bike" and "non-bike" conditions.

If you live directly next to the San Rafael central station, that'd be easiest/fastest. But San Rafael is much bigger than that. I'll get into that in a second. There are 2 basic options to do this trip:

Fastest option 1 was to go to San Rafael Station (I'll call it SR here on out) then bus to SF, then bike/walk to the Caltrain station, which was about a 25 minute walk. The buses from SR to SF ran often as rarely as once per hour, and occasionally they just don't show up at all. The ride took 30-60 minutes depending on traffic. There weren't always bike spaces on the bus, so sometimes you needed to lock your bike up in SR and you were going to be walking in SF to Caltrain. But because of the variability on traffic times, you have to leave incredibly early if you want to catch the fastest train to Palo Alto. And if you're going to California Avenue (which was where I was going to), the express option basically doesn't exist.

Here's how that plays out: 10 minute bike to SR station (or 30-40 minute walk, depending on your walk speed), you have hopefully timed things right to get on a bus leaving once every 30-60 minutes and that the bus is actually showing up: otherwise, you're waiting 30-60 minutes for the next one. Then a 30-60 minute ride into SF. Then a ~5 minute bike ride or 15-20 minute walk to Caltrain. Then a 45-60 minute ride to Palo Alto, but again the transfers aren't timed (they couldn't be, given the difference of where the bus dropoff is)

The second real alternative is replacing the first bus leg with a ferry leg by going to Larkspur Landing. There is the SMART train that goes there, but for some wild reason drops people off a 15 minute walk from the ferry and then has no timed transfer.

I did the journey dozens of times and never completed it in less than 2h 30m but more commonly was 4h and had more than 1 occasion where it took much longer than that.

eskibars commented on That Dropped Call with Customer Service? It Was on Purpose theatlantic.com/ideas/arc... · Posted by u/dustincoates

atYevP · 2 months ago

Yev here from Backblaze - we'd be happy to chase that down if you're willing to reach out to support so they can take a look: https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/requests/new

eskibars · 2 months ago

I already did this.

For transparency to others here, here's what happened:

I submitted a support request and separately a GDPR request for my information and removal. I let the legal team at Backblaze know what happened as well by e-mailing legal@.

- The support request auto-responded with "We will respond to your support request (<insert ticket number here>) within one day." That was 21 days ago. No response.

- The legal team stated that my information has never been sold to 3rd parties. Strange unless Backblaze is operating its own AI cold calling en masse and then refused to complete my GDPR request of telling me the data it had collected on me. They refused to acknowledge that I had gotten an AI cold call

So no. This is frankly a BS path forward. Nobody at Backblaze as far as I can tell is taking this seriously

eskibars commented on That Dropped Call with Customer Service? It Was on Purpose theatlantic.com/ideas/arc... · Posted by u/dustincoates

hbarka · 2 months ago

I wonder if the coming AI Customer Service chatbots will be programmed with “sludge” as part of their operating procedure or can we expect an Asimov-like set of ethics from it where it will optimize to be as helpful to the best extent possible. Software does not need an attitude and it won’t get tired either.

eskibars · 2 months ago

Even worse: I got a sales call from Backblaze a few weeks ago that was an AI voice agent. It seemed super suspicious the way it was talking, so I asked it directly if it was an AI, and it then said yes.

I asked it to talk to a real person: a manager, legal, or compliance employee and it hung up on me

eskibars commented on Airpass – Easily overcome WiFi time limits airpass.tiagoalves.me/... · Posted by u/herbertl

Zambyte · 2 months ago

Fortunately trains and buses exist.

eskibars · 2 months ago

This is so absurd.

1 year ago, I lived in San Rafael (Marin county, Bay Area). I occasionally needed to go to Palo Alto for work meetings. The fastest public transit option was to take a 40 minute bus to Larkspur Landing, then a 30 minute ferry to the SF Ferry building, walk for 20 minutes, and then take Caltrain for 45 minutes or more and then walk from there. With transfers, at minimum it was a 2.5h journey, but typically 3+h

All to cover a 60 mile / 100 km distance

eskibars commented on Heads up: Backblaze is using AI SDRs · Posted by u/eskibars

toomuchtodo · 3 months ago

https://www.donotcall.gov/report.html

eskibars · 3 months ago

Yes, already done. Also found the e-mail of their legal/compliance team and e-mailed them.

Wanted to let this group know because this sort of thing is an appropriately sensitive topic in this community, which is also directly their target audience. The AI agent did not identify itself as an AI agent until I asked, which likely violates other laws as well.

eskibars commented on Ask HN: What projects do you donate to? · Posted by u/xeonmc

neom · 3 months ago

Here I am for the millionth time, on HN, reminding everyone of an amazing gift: 2016 report by Nadia Asparouhova - "Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure"[1] - Please do take the time to read and share it, it's been almost 10 years since Nadia published this work with the hope of inspiring some change outside of the OSS world, I'd suggest we need her words now more than ever. Thank you!

https://www.fordfoundation.org/work/learning/research-report...

eskibars · 3 months ago

This is super important, and critical reading for anyone commenting on OSS financing.

I've been a product management lead for 2 commercial open-core companies and people drastically overestimate:

- How much code the community contributes (in both cases, >95% of all code was written by employees hired by the commercial company) - How few commercial resources are needed to support the community (running forums, answering GitHub tickets, etc) - How much financial support is actually forthcoming when there's not some "locked commercial features"

As the paper points out, many of these widely used commercial projects receive a few hundred thousand dollars at most in donations (often much less) but need to employ more developers than that financing can support to maintain a baseline capability to address basic bug fixes (including security fixes) once they become "popular enough" to be known by the masses.