yesiamyourdad (u/yesiamyourdad)

yesiamyourdad commented on Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges news.bloomberglaw.com/ban... · Posted by u/nreece

jmyeet · 4 days ago

At this point I trust the Chinese government way more than almost every US tech giant.

I don't own a "smart" speaker. I've never liked the idea of having an always-on cloud-connected microphone in my house. Like, it's just asking for trouble. I don't necessarily assign malicious intent here. It's just a recipe for disaster.

But if you made me choose between an Amazon or Meta "smart" speaker and a Huawei speaker, I'm choosing Huawei.

As for robot vacuums, I don't see a reason they need to have a microphone. I wouldn't want one that did. I think I'd also prefer they had a LIDAR rather than a camera too but I can see that cameras can do things that LIDAR can't.

Anyway, I find these deep distrust of the Chinese government to be very... selective, given what our own governments are doing and I'm sorry but our tech giants are out of control.

yesiamyourdad · 4 days ago

This reminds me of the line from "Jackie Brown": "You can't trust Melanie. But you can trust Melanie to be Melanie".

I owned an early Roomba an it would just bump into things and "bounce" off. There was some sort of rudimentary fencing devices you could use to keep it in an area. I guess they decided cameras and things work better but I feel like the original worked well enough. You still had to vacuum but especially with pets it kept the disorder under control.

yesiamyourdad commented on "Ensuring Accountability for All Agencies" – Executive Order whitehouse.gov/presidenti... · Posted by u/martialg

jaybrendansmith · 10 months ago

As Americans that believe in the Republic, what exactly are we supposed to do about this? Should we continue to implore congress to take action against this lawless behavior?

yesiamyourdad · 10 months ago

I think that the most effective way to get change would be if the economy tanked, that's the one thing the electorate seems to be motivated by. A general strike would be one way to do that, but I doubt that one could be organized on any meaningful scale. I'd love to be wrong about that.

I'm trying to restrict my spending as much as possible. No new car, no vacation (or at least nothing big), limiting eating out, etc. I'm cutting back on as many unnecessary expenses as I can, and being mindful of what businesses I do spend my money on.

yesiamyourdad commented on "Ensuring Accountability for All Agencies" – Executive Order whitehouse.gov/presidenti... · Posted by u/martialg

greyface- · 10 months ago

This is obviously alarming, and if used to disregard the Judiciary's interpretation of law, unconstitutional. But I'm puzzled by the exemption of the Federal Reserve and FOMC. He's previously beefed with them, and would presumably find the additional leverage useful. Why explicitly exclude them?

yesiamyourdad · 10 months ago

They're not fully exempted, the order does apply to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System in connection with its conduct and authorities directly related to its supervision and regulation of financial institutions.

In other words, when it comes to banking regulation, the President has the final say.

yesiamyourdad commented on "Ensuring Accountability for All Agencies" – Executive Order whitehouse.gov/presidenti... · Posted by u/martialg

wilg · 10 months ago

They put out a whole playbook called Project 2025, developed by a bunch of insane people at the Heritage Foundation. Trump lied and said he didn't know anything about it. Now they're doing it.

yesiamyourdad · 10 months ago

Not only did they put out a playbook, they actively recruited and screened people to take government positions. I read a post on Reddit from someone who went through the training. The whole idea was to find ideological supporters. Trump's problem in 2016 was that he wasn't prepared and relied a lot on existing government supporters and established GOP figures, who weren't completely loyal. This time, they were prepared. That's the reason why he's been able to move so quickly in the first month.

yesiamyourdad commented on Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI? · Posted by u/ramesh31

yesiamyourdad · a year ago

About 20 years ago, I used to do interviews that were "write a program to add two numbers together" (I think specifically I asked for a web application). It's trivial, right? There's actually a lot going on. They have to parse input, and sometimes you get strange things like "well if I make it use doubles then I'll cover all scenarios". You have opportunities to talk about error handling (bad characters in the input, int overflow, etc). You can talk about refactoring (now make it handle -,* & /). You can ask them about writing tests. Ask about how they'd handle arbitrarily large numbers. There's a bunch of ways you could take the conversation and really just talk about average developer activites.

What I liked about that process is that it relied less on their ability to suss out a solution to some problem they'll never have to solve on the job and focused more on average activities. Sometimes I'd get a candidate who would go "wait, is this a trap?" and start asking a lot of questions - good! Now I got to see them refine requirements.

Having them review a PR is a good exercise too, you can see how they are at feedback.

yesiamyourdad commented on Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI? · Posted by u/ramesh31

sergioisidoro · a year ago

I've let people use GPT in coding interviews, provided that they show me how they use it. At the end I'm interested in knowing how a person solves a problem, and thinks about it. Do they just accept whatever crap the gpt gives them, can they take a critical approach to it, etc.

So far, everyone that elected to use GPT did much worse. They did not know what to ask, how to ask, and did not "collaborate" with the AI. So far my opinion is if you have a good interview process, you can clearly see who are the good candidates with or without ai.

yesiamyourdad · a year ago

That's an interesting point about watching how they work with AI. The people I know who are most successful actually engage in back & forth.

yesiamyourdad commented on Hacking Subaru: Tracking and controlling cars via the admin panel samcurry.net/hacking-suba... · Posted by u/ramimac

_joel · a year ago

That seems like a culture issue rather than an appsec issue?

yesiamyourdad · a year ago

"no matter what they tell you, it's always a people problem." - Gerald Weinberg

yesiamyourdad commented on Hacking Subaru: Tracking and controlling cars via the admin panel samcurry.net/hacking-suba... · Posted by u/ramimac

duxup · a year ago

I love my Subaru as far as reliability, all wheel drive performance in snow and ice, and such.

But OMG it's consumer tech was dated when I bough it, and it's just full of inexplicable issues and caveats and such. Even just the limitations and the UX issues are so obvious that it sends a message that if they tried to fix them they would introduce just as many new issues. I'm at the point where despite the car being good, I'm not interested in a new one from Subaru.

I just want carplay or android auto whatever similar services a given mobile OS provides to do similar things. That's it, every time it's something else (even when offering car play) from a car maker it is so bad and so naively built that it makes me less confidant in that company.

I know, they want my data and all and that's the motivation, but man it's just such a downer with every system.... and here I am with a good car in most respects and I'm not planning on buying from them again.

yesiamyourdad · a year ago

I loved mine until the transmission blew out at 96,000 miles. Could be a one-off, but then a friend bought a used one with 108,000 miles, and the dealer proudly noted that it had a new transmission just installed. I think that vaunted reliability is gone.

That aside, the one thing I haven't liked is the electronics. Many times it gets out of sync with the phone and simply can't connect, the only fix is to shut the car off, open the door so the stereo shuts off, then restart the car. The FM radio also quit working at one point, which I didn't really care about, but the dealer applied a software update and it started working again. That's just the visible stuff though, so much of the car is software controlled now, I think you have to start taking any software issues as a warning about the overall car.

yesiamyourdad commented on AT&T follows Amazon in demanding employees spend 5 days a week in office fortune.com/2024/12/18/at... · Posted by u/belter

jdbxhdd · a year ago

They simply can afford to pay more high performers. And since they have sustainable growth, there is no reason to switch course of action.

Compare this to consulting which is known for squeezing their employees to the max. They simply pay enough that there is a steady stream of new highly qualified and highly capable candidates.

yesiamyourdad · a year ago

These are two wildly different companies. AMZN still has some upside and pays a lot in equity. The only reason to own T is for the dividend while your capital sublimates.

That said AMZN is a lot more like the old model, they never really subscribed to the Microsoft & Silicon Valley ways of doing things.

yesiamyourdad commented on A change of heart regarding employee metrics rachelbythebay.com/w/2024... · Posted by u/zdw

bigiain · a year ago

> Helping a colleague doesn't show up on the dashboards? Fuck that. Digging into what looks like a security vulnerability isn't on the sprint board? Fuck that.

Managers who are the sort of people who don't value helping your colleagues or being curious/concerned enough about potential security problems, are most likely the sort of people who won't pick up on any of that being a valuable use of your time during one on ones or in standups either.

I think fundamentally you agree 100% with Rachel, shit managers are shit and nobody owes them tooling to make their job of being a shit manager easier.

If you want all the employee loyalty and long tenure institutional knowledge of a micro managed call centre, sure - implement checkin and LOC dashboards, or Jira ticket "velocity" charts. Watch all your talented people leave and don';t be surprised when everybody is only there because they're desperate or comfortable. Your entire dev team will eventually be only working-visa-prisoners, talentless-seatwarmers, or people who've dialled the give-a-shit down so low it doesn't bother them just picking up their pay checks.

yesiamyourdad · a year ago

Yet the author wrote tools to do that. Part of what I thought from looking at these dashboards is that the author by their own admission[1] arbitrarily doubly prioritized customer communications over internal discussion and gave credit for doing things in the ticketing system when presumably none of the actual work takes place in the ticketing system.

I know those events were over a decade ago and I appreciate the author's willingness to reexamine their beliefs, but that's what's meant by second-order thinking. What I got from reading a few of their writings is that this is a person I probably would avoid interacting with.

[1] https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2011/11/16/onfire/