thr0w__4w4y (u/thr0w__4w4y)

thr0w__4w4y commented on Meow.camera meow.camera/... · Posted by u/southwindcg

i forgot to mention these feeders just began entering the U.S. this year. there are several located in shelters and have helped many homeless cats find owners! hopefully they will continue to spread and help in communities that have stray cat problems

thr0w__4w4y · 5 months ago

I noticed all the feeders seem to be similar / same. I'm in California, I feed 3 strays in an area where the average outdoor cat's lifespan is about 4.5 years (fires, traffic, hawks, coyotes, evil people).

Right now my process is very manual but it's a labor of love. All 3 cats only show up after dark. Ring stick up camera, bowls out (clean them every day), run out on a motion alert, etc. problem is I also have racoons, opposssums and skunks. (I'm not in L.A. highrises, I'm close to the ocean).

Where can such feeders now be purchased (US customer). Thank you!

thr0w__4w4y commented on Demand for human radiologists is at an all-time high worksinprogress.news/p/wh... · Posted by u/bensouthwood

varenc · 6 months ago

> Waymo has what? 700 cars on the road ...

They have over 2000 on the road and are growing: https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/31/techcrunch-mobility-a-new-...

Of course there's 200M+ personal vehicles registered in the US.

thr0w__4w4y · 5 months ago

Yes and I would swear that 1700 of those 2000 must be in Westwood (near UCLA in Los Angeles). I was stopped for a couple minutes waiting for a friend to come out and I counted 7 Waymos driving past me in 60 seconds. Truth be told they seemed to be driving better than the meatbags around them.

thr0w__4w4y commented on The economics of all-you-can-eat buffets (2020) thehustle.co/the-economic... · Posted by u/Vagantem

schneems · 2 years ago

I would love to know about the economics of theme parks. They require huge amounts of land, a massive upfront capital investment in the rides, and require a ton of logistics to coordinate the many workers required to run a place that often isn’t open year round (thinking Carowinds or six flags, not Disney). They also have to advertise continuously and serve an extremely elastic industry (people will cut theme park visits before cutting down on grocery store visits).

Like when do operators decide to invest in a new ride and what’s the payback cycle like?

thr0w__4w4y · 2 years ago

Everything you say is correct. There is one other significant cost that isn't mentioned here: liability insurance and legal counsel. If a little kid (sorry) loses an arm, or worse (don't ask me how I know) because of a ride, there is some serious $$$ involved. I may or may not know one of the most high-powered attorneys who ever represented (past tense) amusement park companies.

And no, this isn't going anywhere. I'm not going to contact anybody for an interview or write a blog. This is everyday life in the real world. So much stuff going on that no one ever thinks about...

thr0w__4w4y commented on The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster octodon.social/@jalefkowi... · Posted by u/srijan4

thr0w__4w4y · 2 years ago

Would just like to jump in and remind folks of the Therac-25 incident just a couple years before this (1985 and 1987), and the user interface was also identified as a contributing factor.

https://www.cse.msu.edu/~cse470/Public/Handouts/Therac/Side_...

thr0w__4w4y commented on FindMyCat – Open-Source Pet Tracker findmycat.io/... · Posted by u/popey

dhritzkiv · 2 years ago

Cat collars getting stuck can be a problem regardless of a bulky item being attached (though, it will probably be exacerbated by a tracker), so a breakaway/quick-release collar is a good idea in any case.

thr0w__4w4y · 2 years ago

This is (unfortunately) very, very true. I don't have firsthand experience, thankfully, but 2x secondhand experience, and I cannot think about those two cases without getting tears in my eyes. It's not common, but uncommon things happen all the time in large populations.

thr0w__4w4y commented on Bug in macOS 14 Sonoma prevents our app from working mullvad.net/en/blog/2023/... · Posted by u/eptcyka

Sardtok · 2 years ago

Half the time I hear of Mac OS updates, it's people having their Macs bricked because they didn't wait for patches to the main release to come out. Every major release seems to have major issues. At least this doesn't render your Mac completely useless.

thr0w__4w4y · 2 years ago

Yep, been there... made that mistake ONCE. Never again. Never.

thr0w__4w4y commented on Writing a C compiler in 500 lines of Python vgel.me/posts/c500/... · Posted by u/vgel

coldtea · 3 years ago

>I wonder why =+ is so obviously a mistake

Consider

  x = -5

now how about:

  x =- 5

One makes x negative 5, the other subtracts 5 from it. And under this design of the operator the only difference is a space.

It's the same with +, just that we're not used to seeing unary plus in the wild.

thr0w__4w4y · 3 years ago

>> x =- 5

I think you mean: x -= 5, which indeed is different.

thr0w__4w4y commented on Full Time marginalia.nu/log/83_full... · Posted by u/kevincox

thr0w__4w4y · 3 years ago

I left a very good job 7 years in (digital design) to go out on my own. That was more than 2 decades ago. I could write paragraphs of the rookie mistakes (business-wise) and the financial ups & downs, but one thing has never changed...

The "temporal freedom" I have in my work (Gad Saad, if you don't know the name). I love being the master of my own day, of my own time. I don't sit in Zoom meetings or have daily standups. I can get up at 5am and work until 11am, and then go hike, play with my dog, get ice cream with my daughters, workout, etc. and then work again from 7pm until midnight or whatever.

Having (almost literally) full control over my daily schedule, week-in, week-out, year after year, is invaluable to me.

One disclosure: a few times a year I do very hard things where I have very little freedom, but they allow me to have lots of freedom the rest of the year.

Not to be a jerk, but I won't be elaborating. And I realize this life isn't for everyone!

thr0w__4w4y commented on Microsoft to lay off 11k employees reuters.com/technology/mi... · Posted by u/georgehill

heleninboodler · 3 years ago

Re: the "loaded cost", back when I worked for MSFT in the early 2000's, the rule of thumb for management was $250k per person total cost. This is when $125k was considered a pretty good SDE salary. So I'd double your $3b.

thr0w__4w4y · 3 years ago

Yes exactly. There is much more than just "benefits". Cost of office space, computer equipment, office supplies, electricity, janitorial costs, heating, security, servers, IT overhead, etc. When you take ALL these costs and spread them over the company, the loaded cost of an employee is not "mostly" salary.

thr0w__4w4y commented on IDA cybersecurity software provider Hex-Rays acquired smartfinvc.com/news/smart... · Posted by u/walterbell

grugq · 3 years ago

It used to be worse under Pierre. His personal mission in life was to make sure no one dodgy ever got a license and to hunt down every possible source of a cracked copy. My manager had purchased a license for me because it was cheap enough that he could approve it… a year later I tried to renew by emailing Pierre about it. He never replied, instead he contacted my manager to tell him that the license was being pirated and blah blah blah. Was very annoying to sort out.

thr0w__4w4y · 3 years ago

Amen. I had a 10-email back-and-forth exchange with Ilfak maybe 10 years ago - multiple times I said "I'm literally begging you to take my money, you don't seem to want it." I am self-employed, we were on the phone with each other in real time, and when I placed with order (with my home address) he said, "Oh, nice home, according to the pictures on Zillow and Google Maps". He sounded like he was trying to startle me, ha ha nice try Ilfak.