richthegeek (u/richthegeek)

richthegeek commented on Google fires 28 workers in indiscriminate act of mass retaliation twitter.com/katejsim/stat... · Posted by u/kome

richthegeek · a year ago

Which parts of their actions should be protected by law? They stopped doing their job, interrupted the work of others, and were in parts of the building that they did not leave when asked. These would normally be completely normal to treat with disciplinary actions and in the last case, they are trespassing.

Just adding in the 'but they were protesting something' doesn't change this by default. And even in Europe (where I'm from and still live) their actions would not be protected. They wouldn't get fired, but they would face some repercussions until they protest in a manner compatible with the law.

I cannot simply say "I'm not going to do any work, because I don't like that my company makes software used by the Metropolitan Police" and expect my company to say "fine by us, we'll keep paying you".

richthegeek commented on Clanging en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cla... · Posted by u/joegibbs

jiggawatts · 2 years ago

Something I immediately noticed with the different temperature settings is that very low values result in output reminiscent of autism, and high temperature settings are reminiscent of the crazy rambling of the homeless people outside central station.

I wonder, and I mean this in a genuine scientific way, if there is a deeper connection than just the superficial? Maybe that's all these illnesses are, just a tunable setting in our brains set to too-high or too-low values, perhaps by insufficient or excess neurotransmitters or the like.

richthegeek · 2 years ago

Sounds like a meta Turing test... after conversing with an AI, how would you describe their personality and mental state?

Presumably we want to tune somewhere between "unimpeded ADHD monologue" and "crazy guy on the tube", leaning closer to "trusted family Doctor you've known for 20 years" over "sleazy politician".

But I suspect it's more likely that you're pattern-seeking than we've uncovered some deep truth about the human condition. GPTs are, after all, simply automata good at sounding good. They are NOT actual simulacra of human brains.

richthegeek commented on Rich text editors and rendering engines writer.zohopublic.com/wri... · Posted by u/lewisjoe

geokon · 2 years ago

A bit of a tangential question ...

If one were to write a simple text editor from scratch - is there some place with a "spec" or list of standard modern text editor UI paradigms one would need to implement to make the editor feel natural/normal ? (so it feels like Kate/GEdit/contenteditable)

I kinda get there are a lot of little subtle quirks and corner cases that need to be covered so it doesnt feel weird or janky

For instance EMACS CUA-mode is an example of a incredibly incomplete implemention

richthegeek · 2 years ago

I work on a project at a large (although not Google-scale) company building a collaborative RTE.

The short is answer is no, there are very few universal truths about how text editing works. You'll experience differences between combinations of operating systems, input modes (Japanese IME for example), software keyboards on Android, languages (RTL languages) and that's just for text itself.

Then when you are thinking about more complex features simple things like "what happens when I double or triple click on this" are a complete crapshoot.

richthegeek commented on Google ordered to pay $500K to Montrealer over links calling him pedophile montrealgazette.com/news/... · Posted by u/pseudolus

logicalmonster · 2 years ago

Just speaking strictly on a moral level, there seems to be a qualitative difference between Google saying "Joe is a pedophile" versus "That guy Bob over there is saying that Joe is a pedophile". The first statement is either true or false. The second statement is inarguably factually true and casts no moral judgement on Joe.

richthegeek · 2 years ago

Keeping the metaphor, it's responding to the question of "Do you know Joe?" with "Yes, and that guy Bob over there says Joe is a pedophile" whenever asked.

richthegeek commented on Meta wants EU users to apply for permission to opt out of data collection arstechnica.com/tech-poli... · Posted by u/snehk

charcircuit · 2 years ago

I think some major differences between Meta and IAB is that IAB was sharing the data with other companies where Meta keeps your data to themselves. Additionally as a part of personalizing the non ad posts on ones feed the data is already being collected and processed. Showing a relevant ad isn't much different privacy wise than showing a relevant post. Tracking how you interact with a post isn't much different from tracking how you interact with an ad post.

richthegeek · 2 years ago

This is a completely circular argument which also happens to completely miss the point.

1. They want to show personalized adverts

2. So they collect and process the data to do so

3. And therefore because they've collected the data, they must be allowed to show personalized adverts.

Aside from it being complete nonsense, the contention is around the 2nd point. They should NOT be allowed to collect and process the data for that purpose without permission, which EU courts have repeatedly stated.

richthegeek commented on Framework Laptop 16 frame.work/fr/fr/blog/int... · Posted by u/wdavidw

GuB-42 · 2 years ago

It is not legal, but the advantage is that you don't have to deal with shady software like that pirate KMS server. Even though it is a breach of contract because it is not how these licences are supposed to be used, it is still recognized as genuine by Microsoft, so you get all the updates, etc...

You may get your license revoked it the seller get caught and as a result, you may need to get a new one. As an individual, you are extremely unlikely to get into more trouble (same thing as with cracked software), but I wouldn't use these licenses as a business.

richthegeek · 2 years ago

If the breach of contract is by the seller, then how does that result in illegality on the part of the buyer?

richthegeek commented on Web fingerprinting is worse than I thought bitestring.com/posts/2023... · Posted by u/Bright_Machine

ale42 · 2 years ago

Is this _only_ figerprinting then? If the profiles are different, do they manage to extract some UID from the profile (which I would assume is a bug in the browser), or do they store data client-side using persistent storage APIs?

richthegeek · 2 years ago

Chrome does give access to localStorage/sessionStorage in Incognito and this can be used to communicate between tabs on the same domain, but just like cookies and cache this data is wiped if you close the Incognito instance.

It's certainly a mystery, because you'd expect any capability fingerprinting (some combo of UA, extensions, CPU/GPU specs, IP etc) to give an identical result between profiles, so it does seem there's some per-profile difference. But I can't think of any browser API that exposes something like an ID...

richthegeek commented on Web fingerprinting is worse than I thought bitestring.com/posts/2023... · Posted by u/Bright_Machine

beeforpork · 2 years ago

When I switched off fingerprinting in this browser, the font size here on Hacker News changed. I suppose it just uses the user agent to set a certain font size, or does Hacker News track based on fingerprinting?

richthegeek · 2 years ago

The CSS for HN is very terse, and aside from a mobile-specific set of rules it doesn't really do any variation.

Is it possible you had set the zoom level previously, which the browser remembers between sessions, and turning off the tracking reset the zoom to 100%? Do you have any extensions like Greasemonkey or Stylus for per-site customisation?

richthegeek commented on How to hire engineering talent without the BS jes.al/2023/03/how-to-hir... · Posted by u/jesalg

KerryJones · 3 years ago

I really wish I had the reference, but I did the "paid trial" for a week for out interviewing process (startup, 40m evaluation) based on an article that said that standard tech interviews gave you an 18% predictability and that paid trials gave you about 72% (it was only one study).

I can tell you that at our company we definitely dodged candidates here and I was very happy with everyone we hired (but you could call that bias, as I was the hiring manager -- but I also worked withe veryone I hired)

richthegeek · 3 years ago

I can imagine that works fine for fresh-out-of-university candidates but I can't imagine a time in my career where I could (and would want to) take 5 days PTO for a job interview.

FAANG-like hiring has the question "What info do you get from the 5th interview that you didn't already have after the 2nd?" - for the paid trial, what info do you get by Friday that you didn't have by the end of Monday?

richthegeek commented on Ongoing Incident in Google Cloud status.cloud.google.com/i... · Posted by u/sd2k

pclmulqdq · 3 years ago

The pattern for past large google outages has been:

1. Some networking-related service has global, non-standard (compared to the rest of the company) configuration

2. The relevant VP is aware and has decided not to change it because that change is quoted as impossible

3. Some change elsewhere happens that assumes standard configuration

4. The networking service breaks and causes a global outage

5. VP is told to fix it

6. Fix rolls out in weeks, because it wasn't as hard as they said before

richthegeek · 3 years ago

Often "impossible" is based on constraints like "0 downtime" "100% planned rollout, rollback scenarios" etc.

These constraints get thrown to the wind when the downtime is already happening.