onesociety2022 (u/onesociety2022)

onesociety2022 commented on OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Defends Pentagon Work to Staff wsj.com/tech/ai/openai-ce... · Posted by u/cdrnsf

Arainach · 9 days ago

> absolutely none of these things will fly on an interview feedback in any big company

Sure, you never write "no hire because they worked at Palantir". You write "candidate didn't ask clarifying questions about {X} and jumped to answer {Y} which is not what I expect from a candidate of this level, no hire".

....this assumes that anyone at all reads your detailed notes if you submit an initial rating of "no hire", and I have very little evidence from my interviewing career across multiple companies to believe that's the case..

onesociety2022 · 9 days ago

If you want to blatantly lie and hide your true reason for rejecting them by making up other stuff in the debrief notes, that would be possible. But at that point, you are the unethical person. You can technically do the same thing just because you wanted to discriminate based on race, sex, etc (that would be both illegal as well as violation of corporate HR policies).

onesociety2022 commented on OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Defends Pentagon Work to Staff wsj.com/tech/ai/openai-ce... · Posted by u/cdrnsf

jesse_dot_id · 9 days ago

It's not quite as bad as working for X, xAI, or Tesla, but engineers continuing to work for these companies are taking hits to their reputation as far as I'm concerned. Like, if I see it on a resume beyond a certain date, I'm not considering them types of reputational damage.

onesociety2022 · 9 days ago

I assume you work at some small startup where you get to dictate who you will hire based on your interpretation of what a candidate’s past work history tells you about their morals/ethics. But that shit won’t fly if you are interviewing at other large companies. You can’t reject someone just because they have OpenAI on their resume. In fact I have never heard of any FAANG company ever blacklisting candidates from some other company. So you rejecting someone is not going to move the needle much. They can leave OpenAI whenever they want and Zuck will offer them 8-9 figure pay packages :)

onesociety2022 commented on iPhone 17e apple.com/newsroom/2026/0... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

1970-01-01 · 10 days ago

$599 still feels like they're setting whatever price they can get away with. It's been 20 years, why don't we have sub $500 new iPhones yet?

onesociety2022 · 10 days ago

I’m pretty sure they determine the price upfront and then figure out what bells and whistles they can ship without eating into their margins. Their goal is to hit a certain average selling price across their massive user base when they upgrade their old phones. They are not going to jeopardize that by releasing an attractive cheap iPhone.

For the people who really don’t want to spend a lot, obviously the easiest option is to just buy an older iPhone or keep your phone for longer. My partner doesn’t care about having the latest tech. So first I use a phone for 3 years and then they use it for another 3 years. We essentially get 6 years of life out of it (Apple is good about releasing software updates for 6 years).

onesociety2022 commented on Stripe reportedly makes offer to acquire PayPal cnbc.com/2026/02/24/paypa... · Posted by u/nodesocket

onesociety2022 · 16 days ago

> Stripe hit a $159 billion valuation on Tuesday and said it was on track to reach an annual run rate of $1 billion this year.

Wow! This is the quality of reporting from CNBC? The $1B ARR number is just for Stripe's Revenue products (Billing, Invoicing, etc). That doesn't include their main business (payments-related products).

onesociety2022 commented on Microsoft gave FBI set of BitLocker encryption keys to unlock suspects' laptops techcrunch.com/2026/01/23... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

Noaidi · 2 months ago

> Apple does not have access to them

Unless they are given a warrant, then they magically have access to your encrypted data.

https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-fbi-icloud-investigati...

If they can get access to your icloud, they can get access to your laptop if you store your decryption key in your keychain.

onesociety2022 · 2 months ago

You are conflating iCloud Keychain with the rest of the iCloud data. iCloud keychain is always end-to-end encrypted. Apple cannot decrypt it even if they receive a subpoena. The other iCloud data like your photos are not end-to-end encrypted by default unless you turn on Advanced Data Protection (ADP).

https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651 There is a table showing exactly what is E2EE under Standard vs ADP mode.

In the news article you shared above, it's very likely this person did not have ADP turned on. So everything in their iCloud that is not E2EE by default could be decrypted by Apple.

onesociety2022 commented on You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass geohot.github.io//blog/je... · Posted by u/mefengl

1dom · 2 months ago

I lived the original post and left working in tech a years ago for essentially the reasons in the post. I agree the article stops short of offering solutions, but you also acknowledge there's a legitimate problem but then don't engage or offer alternatives.

From my experience, the problem I saw, and why I really respect OPs post, is that many good and smart people were lying to themselves in those environments. They'd do exactly what you do and try find reasons to justify working in tech.

Go into your average modern tech engineering team at e.g. Amazon, and ask them how many of the engineers in there use and support the software they're creating. They tiny fraction of people who say they do use it and support it, go check their usage, and you'll see half of them were overinflating it. HN knows it better than anywhere: many of these tech companies are not producing great tech to improve people's lives.

To you point "no constructive alternative" - think about it this way, if you're spending your life writing something you won't even use for reason that boil down to "it's just not valuable for me, especially knowing how its made", then doing literally anything other than working there is a more valuable use of _your_ time for you.

Look at your household and figure out what you need and what would improve your lives. If it's "6 figures salary and a world owned by megacorps", then working in places like Amazon is the best thing you can do for your family.

If you're a small household without kids, like a lot of people in these engineering environments, then instead of spending 12 hours a day mon - fri addicted to trying to solve this really cool little engineering problem (which just so happens to help e.g Amazon), you'd be far better solving some really cool little engineering problem that just so happens to help your family, like building some cool home automation thing for them, or working on your own house to make it more efficient so you can use less energy so anyone else working in your house can retire earlier with smaller outgoings. Or even just being a housewife/husband will improve the lives of the people you care about in more valuable and appreciated ways than anything you could do working at Amazon.

Now, I appreciate I'm in a lucky place to be able to do this, but if you've been able to work as an engineer in top engineering environments and this post is relevant to you, then you are already more than lucky enough to be able to walk away from those environments do things that are consciously useful and appreciated by other humans whom you value.

onesociety2022 · 2 months ago

This is such a weird take - why do you have to personally use something for that to be useful? I could be at AWS working on their metering/billing system. I’d never use a billing system of that scale in personal life but that doesn’t mean it’s not a useful thing to build. And I think AWS as a whole is a very useful product for the world.

Working to make your home more efficient is not going to suddenly make anyone retire early. That’s the stupidest take I have heard. If you have some cool idea which makes home energy usage lower like a revolutionary heat pump, you should build your own company and sell that to everyone and scale up. You sound like a FatFIRE person that has quit professional life and is now trying to justify why sitting at home and helping your family members is a virtuous thing to do as opposed to working for some BigTech.

A lot of the danger with BigTech is just the fact they are very big and so have accrued a lot of power. A simple solution is to use the anti-trust laws to break them up into smaller entities. I don’t think the problem is the products/services they build.

onesociety2022 commented on Iran is likely jamming Starlink timesofisrael.com/iran-ap... · Posted by u/ukblewis

bawolff · 2 months ago

I imagine the people with illegal starlink terminals are fairly tech savy and can use custom protocols. Living in Iran they probably already have a lot of experience with vpns and lower level protocols to evade censorship.

onesociety2022 · 2 months ago

Illegal just means there’s a black market. You pay some guy in cash and he gives you a smuggled Starlink terminal. Neither buyer or seller is likely to be anymore sophisticated here than someone trading in any other smuggled goods (cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, etc).

onesociety2022 commented on Swapping SIM cards used to be easy, and then came eSIM arstechnica.com/gadgets/2... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar

shlip · 2 months ago

Title should read "I had to switch to eSim [...]"

well yeah, of course esim is shitty, as is everything imposed by big tech monopolies to their users without consulting or caring about what they really want. Did you think they were here for your wellbeing and not the money ?

onesociety2022 · 2 months ago

If what you say is true, why would Apple ever force a switch to eSIM? I’m now less likely to buy a new iPhone because I don’t want to deal with this eSIM fiasco. It’s to their detriment. If their goal is to sell more phones, they would want to eliminate all friction to switch to a new phone. So what you are saying doesn’t add up.

onesociety2022 commented on Swapping SIM cards used to be easy, and then came eSIM arstechnica.com/gadgets/2... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar

x0x0 · 2 months ago

I occasionally buy travel data, and 3 of probably 8-ish instances had me on the phone with support for at least 20 minutes (and once an hour) to make an esim work. Perhaps the problem is android. But I've never had that experience with a physical sim. :shrug:

onesociety2022 · 2 months ago

I have used the AirAlo app to buy data-only eSIMs for so many international trips. It works well but I have only tried it on iPhones.

onesociety2022 commented on Google is 'gradually rolling out' option to change your gmail.com address 9to5google.com/2025/12/24... · Posted by u/geox

meitham · 2 months ago

How do you propose fixing that? Let the kids take both parents last names? In few generations you end with kids having their entire family tree as their last name! It might even make marrying within the tribe attractive again to keep last name single word!

onesociety2022 · 2 months ago

First there’s absolutely no real reason for a spouse to change their name just because they got married.

You can do hyphenated last names for a kid and let the kids decide what names they want to carry forward for the next generation. Or they can make up their own. The point is it’s up to them and they can choose whatever they want and not be coerced to do something because of some tradition that is rooted in sexism.