snarf21 (u/snarf21) - Readit News

snarf21 commented on Developer's block underlap.org/developers-b... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

I just take a hot bath… best ideas happen in the bathtub for me.

snarf21 · 2 days ago

I design board games and almost all of my ideas come while walking or driving. Sometimes we just need to give our brain a minimal task to occupy it and then we can more easily get into flow. This is also the same result of the Ballmer Peak / 1 Beer Buzz method. [https://xkcd.com/323/]

snarf21 commented on I forced every engineer to take sales calls and they rewrote our platform old.reddit.com/r/Entrepre... · Posted by u/bilsbie

pseudocomposer · 4 days ago

At my company, as developers, we rotate taking support tickets and working directly with customers on the issues our (very capable) support team can’t handle. We and our customers are both very happy with the results.

snarf21 · 4 days ago

Yeah, this drives value for almost all roles. No need for a separate focus group when you can ask the people who are already using and/or paying for your product.

snarf21 commented on Home Depot sued for 'secretly' using facial recognition at self-checkouts petapixel.com/2025/08/20/... · Posted by u/mikece

snarf21 · 4 days ago

So your solution is to put people who are desperate enough to steal say $500 of goods from a pharmacy into jail at a cost of $50K+? As others have said, that money is better spend helping these people out of poverty or helping them with their addictions rather than trying to "teach them a lesson".

snarf21 commented on Why are there so many rationalist cults? asteriskmag.com/issues/11... · Posted by u/glenstein

csours · 13 days ago

Humans are not chickens, but we sure do seem to love having a pecking order.

snarf21 · 13 days ago

I think it is more simple in that we love tribalism. A long time ago being part of a tribe had such huge benefits over going it alone that it was always worth any tradeoffs. We have a much better ability to go it alone now but we still love to belong to a group. Too often we pick a group based on a single shared belief and don't recognize all the baggage that comes along. Life is also too complicated today. It is difficult for someone to be knowledgeable in one topic let alone the 1000s that make up our society.

snarf21 commented on EU proposal to scan all private messages gains momentum cointelegraph.com/news/eu... · Posted by u/6d6b73

integralid · 19 days ago

Nice knee jerk reaction here (not just you, replies to me in general). We take down malicious domains and servers all the time. What's so special about group chats? As long as there is a proof it's used purely for criminal things and it's technically possible there is no excuse not to take them down.

The same applies in the physical world. Police has no right to enter your house. Except when they have a warrant, because you are already known to be guilty.

>The criminals will just move to another operating scheme.

Great! This is not an excuse to do nothing. They would use e2e if they were smart anyway. But they don't, because they like telegram and e2e is annoying to use (no channel history etc).

snarf21 · 18 days ago

I would argue that difference is that entering my group chat is the same as entering my house to install a listening device. If there is a warrant to tap someone's phone, that is based on probable cause not blanket surveillance. We don't shut down a bar just because some criminals hang out there.

Also, warrants are when there is evidence to suggest guilt. You are not known to be guilty. That is the point of the warrant, to collect more evidence to prove guilt.

snarf21 commented on EU proposal to scan all private messages gains momentum cointelegraph.com/news/eu... · Posted by u/6d6b73

integralid · 19 days ago

I'm against any kind of censorship, chat scanning and privacy violations. Nevertheless:

>Telegram founder Pavel Durov warned that France risks societal collapse if it continues down a path of political censorship and regulatory overreach. Durov was arrested in France in August 2024 after being accused of failing to moderate his app to reduce criminality

Telegram is the messenger of choice for cybercriminals (not signal, interestingly). Most stealers and many other malware families use telegram to exfiltrate data and stolen credentials. It's also used as public announcement channels for criminal groups. Telegram ignores all reports about known malicious chats, despite it being easily provable, not to mention it's not e2e encrypted.

At this point this is not resisting censorship but knowingly profiting from crime. Continuing the analogy, it's like post office was sending mails for terrorists, despite police staying in the hallway and begging them to stop that.

(my job is related to anti-malware and cybercrime prevention)

snarf21 · 19 days ago

So there was no crime before Telegram? These kinds of things won't be used to stop malware or cybercrime anyway. They'll be used even more by those in power to subvert. The criminals will just move to another operating scheme.

snarf21 commented on US reportedly forcing TSMC to buy 49% stake in Intel to secure tariff relief notebookcheck.net/Despera... · Posted by u/voxadam

duxup · 20 days ago

So far indications are many companies are eating the tariffs, for now.

Even making them visible has drawn the ire of Trump a few times already.

But I generally agree that it can't go on forever / not how it works historically.

snarf21 · 20 days ago

A lot of them are "eating" them in the margins of the unreasonable "inflation" increases they used to see how much the public was willing to pay for their products. (Normally, this would be okay in a functioning capitalist market except we've let way to many companies gain a monopolistic position with no real market competition to force a reasonable middle ground between profit and elastic demand.)

snarf21 commented on The US military’s on-base slot machines wired.com/story/us-milita... · Posted by u/impish9208

westpfelia · 21 days ago

They can make all the arguments they want about what "good" this money does. But all I see is its taking people who might be interested in leaving the military after 4 years, and sucking them back in due to debt, or not earning as much money as they thought they could.

Its a underhanded forced recruitment tool.

snarf21 · 21 days ago

There is part of this that is about a lack of financial education in our country. The interesting thing is that if you give a lot of disposal income to young people without a lot of life responsibilities, they will spend it like water. I know lots and lots of soldiers who come back from being deployed and promptly spend all their bonuses on a new truck, a new motorcycle and a new boat. 6 months later, that money is all gone and all of a sudden they can barely afford the payments and start selling things off at a huge loss.

snarf21 commented on Slow michaelnotebook.com/slow/... · Posted by u/calvinfo

saulpw · 25 days ago

Proud of your work, not proud of yourself. The latter is quite a reliable source of unhappiness, I've found.

snarf21 · 24 days ago

In the full quote, he is talking about fitness and being able to lift things and being proud of your abilities to do so. I'm not saying it works for everyone but it is nice to have a "thing" that you can hang your hat on. The whole interview is quite interesting and worth a read.

snarf21 commented on Live coding interviews measure stress, not coding skills hadid.dev/posts/living-co... · Posted by u/mustaphah

hcfman · 24 days ago

Very well written and so true. It's not even normal stress, which is fine, it's high stakes stress, plus sometime working under the duress of being insulted.

I once went to a job interview with Google. I built one of the first local (Global to the Netherlands) search engines of the Netherlands, but the guy in the cowboy hat at Google asked me to write a binary search with a marker and a whiteboard. I never write with my hand, I always use keyboards. Plus I'm being insulted to write a binary search when I designed and build a search index and retrieval engine.

[I did the binary search but was not happy with the whole process that did not want to even look at what you had actually done before, because that would take away the baseline they wanted].

I guess they must have been looking for cowboys. Tip for interviews, take your cowboy hat, just in case..

snarf21 · 24 days ago

Unfortunately, this worked as intended. These companies want people who are desperate to work there and will do anything to get in the door. Both parties were successful in this case in determining that there wasn't a good fit.