alexanderchr's comments

On: 2026 tech layoffs reach 45,000 in March

[alexanderchr]

You'd calculate return on investment based on invested capital, not on expenses, so this does not follow.

On: U.S. is withdrawing from 66 international bodies

[alexanderchr]

They are not even trying to hide it anymore.

On: Salesforce regrets firing 4000 experienced staff and replacing them with AI

[alexanderchr]

Yes this reads like vacuous AI slop and and the **randomly bolded** text everywhere is a **dead giveaway**. At this point it's becoming a stronger signal than em-dashes.

On: Netherlands – Capital Growth Tax and Capital Gains Tax for Box 3

[alexanderchr]

Home ownership is and would continue be taxed in box 1, so that’s not even superficially the reason for carving out real estate.

Box 3 on real estate only come in play for home 2+, and rental properties.

On: Czech police forced to turn off facial recognition cameras at the Prague airport

[alexanderchr]

Border guard was wrong. UK used passenger records from transport companies to determine when someone left the country, not face recognition.

They do however use face recognition when you take a domestic flight from an international terminal. Then they take a photo of you just before security and compare that when you board. To me this seems like an overly complex solution to a problem that would normally by solved by having a domestic section of the terminal, but I’m sure they had their reasons.

[netsharc → alexanderchr]

And this week it's lead to people's child benefits being stopped because they were deemed to have left the country and not returned, because their names were on passenger manifests: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/oct/31/woman-flight...

God, a well functioning democractic society, the UK is not...

On: Why LLMs can't really build software

[alexanderchr]

I’d say all (useful) software is modelling some domain.

On: Instagram's new 'Friend Map' feature puts your privacy at risk

[alexanderchr]

Something like ten years ago Facebook messenger would by default add the user’s location to every message visible to the recipient. And even worse, unless you disabled this feature, it would give away the distance from you to all your contacts, even ones you had never even had a conversation with. In real time, so someone could easily use it to triangulate you. Meta is a very creepy company.

[thrown-0825 → alexanderchr]

they even exposed it via an api, i remember building poc “friend maps” that showed where everyone was without their consent.

[datahack → thrown-0825]

Oh dear, am I the only one who remembers the marauders map? I saw a bunch like you were talking about, but the Harry Potter version was exceptional.

[thrown-0825 → datahack]

lol thats a great idea

On: Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year

[alexanderchr]

Agreed that it makes no sense to restrict that kind of road to 30km/h, but to be fair most cities that have moved to 30km/h would have excluded that road. Even Amsterdam left the main throughfares at 50km/h: https://www.amsterdam.nl/30-km-u-in-de-stad/

On: Never write your own date parsing library

[alexanderchr]

Maybe I’m missing something but then what is 30 days after Christmas? 25389?

[mpyne → alexanderchr]

25389 mod 365, presumably. The very fancy mainframes probably would pick the appropriate modulus based on whether it was a leap year or not.

[cortesoft → mpyne]

What happens when you want to add more than 365 days to a date, then?

On: The U.K. closed a tax loophole for the global rich, now they're fleeing

[alexanderchr]

I believe most, if not all, European countries tax residents on worldwide employment and capital income.