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Turns out most people don’t have a friends and family group that can generate exciting content at a rate that most people want. The platforms oblige this with “reshares” and “you may also like” content, and eventually everyone’s like “who gives a s*t about aunt Millie’s cupcake recipe, check out this dude trying to skateboard off of the Eiffel Tower!”

A rate people want, or advertisers?

I'm sure I could (indeed, I do) get pertinent updates from actual friends and family with <10 minutes of checking messages, voicemails, and emails per day. I wouldn't mind increasing that to 15 minutes if it meant I got a few less relevant but still interesting updates about their lives.

But that's way, way under the daily minutes spent by most people on TikTok. And if I wanted/my addiction demanded another hit of that "Oh, neat!" buzz when I'd just put my phone down 10 minutes ago, there's little chance that anyone in my small circle would have posted a single thing in the interval.

I don't spend nearly enough time in my group chats to justify Facebook's valuation. And there are no ads (yet, I'm sure they're working on it) in those chats.


They probably could. If all your friends and family posted 10 times a day. But people prefer to consume I guess.

Do your friends and family each have 10 things that happen to them every single day that is worth posting to a social network feed?

Not to a public feed but certainly to a friends feed. Are there 10 things worth saying a day?

I’m really struggling to understand how this is different than malware we’ve had forever. Can someone explain what’s novel about this?

That its not being treated like malware.

In the sense that people are voluntarily installing and running this malware on their computers, rather than being tricked into running it? Is that the only difference?

They are still tricked into running it, since it's normally not an advertised "feature" of any app that uses such SDKs.

I think it is funny that the mobile OS is trying to be as secure as possible, but then they allow this to run on top

TIL

> Meshtastic is a project that enables you to use inexpensive LoRa radios as a long range off-grid communication platform in areas without existing or reliable communications infrastructure. This project is 100% community driven and open source!

https://meshtastic.org/docs/introduction/


Yeah I’m listening to a legal analyst on Bloomberg radio and there’s a lot of detail that’s getting lost under the headline. It’s not yet even clear yet that Google would need to divest from anything in order to address this.

Bloomberg Radio April 17 2025: https://www.youtube.com/live/iEpJwprxDdk?si=9WaFIJENUwyIJvpk


So your argument is that the U.S. is currently like wartime Britain, and that science funding specifically must be sacrificed despite the fact that is has created an economic boon that would help to pay down the debt: We just desperately need the money now for else the country could cease to exist, and we’ll sort out how to restore a science driven economy once the crisis is over?

Your description seems directionally correct, but I don’t understand this part:

> You are making an investment … just like any other investor, albeit with a lot less favorable terms. The best part is..guess what? If your circumstances change and you want to move on to a different job, you are now getting to choose between staying with the company until it has a liquidation event..or you have to effectively invest in it. Pretty shitty deal!

Why would you have to stay with the company after you vest? Is there some kind of clause that strips you of your share ownership or forces you to sell if you leave the company?


> Why would you have to stay with the company after you vest?

I'm assuming they are referring to someone that _did not_ exercise their options and is leaving.

[you might already know the following based on the rest of your comment, but thought i'd add it]

With options, vesting is only half of the story; you need to exercise the options which converts them to shares. ISO options (what you get as an employee) have a PTEP (Post-Termination Exercise Period) that gives you 90 days from voluntary leave (maybe varies?) to decide whether or not you'll exercise. If you don't exercise, you forfeit them.

I believe the longer PTEPs that you hear about (5-10 years) do some ISO->NSO conversion which changes the tax situation, but at least gives you flexibility & wait for some liquidity event before committing the cash.


That must be correct. The phrase “You are making an investment… “ followed by a discussion of whether or not you should invest threw me off.

I’ve read that cocoa processing involves drying the pods in the open air. Heavy metals in dust from nearby mines covers the surface of the pods, which are later ground up along with the cocoa.

The solution here seems simple enough: Don’t dry the pods in the open air. But the farmers don’t have a lot of extra money lying around that they can use to address this, and the market is (currently at least) still buying.


Oof. Folks had this same sort of outlook on lead contamination here in Missouri. Here's the problem: the farmers also live downwind of the lead pollution. They didn't poison the air. But now they're being expected to handle it.

In this attack, the compiler is not a reproducible artifact? Or does backdooring use another technique?

Their point is that you'd need something like https://bootstrappable.org/ (which does exist).

> “We don’t have time to [write automated] test[s],” stated the principal engineer… This was in response to my candid observation that test coverage was low, existing tests didn’t always run locally for mysterious reasons, integration tests were non-existent, and pull requests could merge without passing the few tests that did exist.

Given the state of the existing automated tests, perhaps the Principal Engineer is correct… Why would the new automated tests be any better?


Yeah, automated tests are great when they are good. But when they are bad, they can be worse than no tests at all.

Multiple times in my career I've taken ownership of a codebase written by someone else. Some of the most pleasant ones had very little test coverage, but the code quality was high enough to make the lack of tests not really matter. On the other hand, some code is so bad covering it with tests adds nothing of value; it's just one more thing I have to analyze and decide what to do with.

I agree with most of the author's points in general, but I think that most programmers who are capable of writing good tests are also capable of recognizing situations when it's not worth the trouble.


> Have been told that I have to “drop the sarcastic tone” if I want to be “taken seriously” as a “““reporter””” but the jokes on them because that criticism implies that I’ve crossed the threshold into being a “journalist” rather than a “guy with a substack”

https://substack.com/@meghanboilard/note/c-102976235?


There are several comments here using the same logic, which I find to be rather...odd:

>It's a blog post not a news article or scholarly report. - The topic is a business run by people who ostensibly make decisions based on their faith to justify actions which cause various harm to others. Taking a critical view of those actions and the motivations is reasonable.

and the author shares the same view....

I am being asked to take a critical look at Hobby Lobby, the reasons are outlined in the linked Substack. However, if I have any questions or criticisms of the Substack article, please note that it is not a professional work it is just a guy with a microphone.

If I can't trust the source material, how can I trust the claims?


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