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The best way to get rid of junk is not to put it outside your house with “free” on it. It’s to put “$10” on it. Someone will steal it.

Not in my experience. I put a free item on Craigslist once and it was like a feeding frenzy. The first person who emailed me got it, but between their email and them getting to my house to pick it up, I got at least 40 other emails. It was very overwhelming.

Yea, I did the same thing on Craigslist exactly one time before learning my lesson, and got the same feeding frenzy. Now if I want to give something away, I just set it out by the curb with a “free, first come, first serve” note on it, and it’s gone in under 30 minutes.

Ah no. Gumtree free means 10 messages in the next 30 minutes. 1c or higher = ghost town.

I experienced the opposite a few years back.

My wife and I were moving city and needed rid of some perfectly functional appliances and furniture.

We listed it all for free because we needed it gone quick and the cost of taking it with us was too high.

When by the next day we'd had one enquiry from someone who didn't turn up, we changed tactic and switched everything to £1.

Within a day the entire lot was gone, people turning up with copper coins from their piggy bank which we told them to keep.

One fond memory of that was a student looking guy who came to the door for the dining table, I opened the door and greeted him, extending my hand for a hand shake, and he looked confused for a couple of seconds, didn't say a word, then reached in his pocket for the money and held it out. Never had anyone misunderstand an invitation for a handshake before or since.


had a similar experience getting rid of furnitures the owner told me i could dispose of: free brings no eyeballs on it, €10 and people were begging if i could do at €8 :)

Haha, my wife says she gets similar when trying to give things away on apps like Vinted etc. List it free and nothing, put it up there for a few quid and people will do their best to get a "deal".

I wonder if it's a UX thing in these apps that the "free" stuff isn't surfacing but low-priced things are. Perhaps there's just too much free stuff to stand out.


We get the opposite on FB marketplace. £0 gets you a load of weirdos, scammers and unreliables, £5 gets you mostly normal people who will pick it up when they say they will.


Remember Snowden outlined the Google<>US government interface:

The US agency would type in the gmail address of the subject (ie the primary key/identifier) and somewhere between the agency and Google a decision would be automatically made as to whether the owner of the account was a US person* or not.

If yes - FISA warrant was required

If no - the US agency user would have immediate access to the entire google account (think Google Take Out).

In other words, if you were not a US person there was no duty to protect data.

* = US Person is either a US citizen located anywhere in the world or anyone of any nationality who is physically in the US (current interpretation includes visa holders, visitors and even undocumented but that's shifting)


Is there a tech scene in Exeter? I have long lived in San Francisco having moved from UK in 2006 but I spent a lot of time down in Devon where my parents now live.


There is a tech scene in Exeter for sure, check out these:

- https://techexeter.uk - they've been running events for many years now, 1500 members and monthly meetups.

- https://bsidesexeter.co.uk - Infosec events - some members formerly of the local DEFCON group (those events were fun).

- Shameless plug https://novaparty.org - Annual demoscene event (this year will be 13-15th June) run in collaboration with Tech Exeter.


Would Exeter be a good location, in comparison to the home counties, to set up a startup where most employees WFH 90% of the time?

I really like the area, and my preferred locations in Oxon & Cambs are getting incredibly expensive in terms of real estate, which doesn't make sense in case of WFH.


I wouldn’t call it a scene, but there’s a small handful of people and the occasional meet-up or event. I’m near Exeter after working in London for ~10 years.

Hi to anyone else who’s down in Devon :)

(Hit me up via my profile if you’d like to grab a coffee)


Heh, not sure. I moved to the US in 2008. I think you and I talked about this when you were at WordCamp Boston when you were doing stuff with WPEngine.

I think at least one of the W3C staff is in Devon.


wow you have a much better memory than I do, I don't even remember anything about the event (tbf for several years I used to attend a WordCamp somewhere practically every other week!)


Yeah, you’ve been to approximately 9000 of them and I’ve been to less than five.


Richard bartle and the original MUD came out of Exeter uni AI program. Until this week he was a game design prof there too. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartle_taxonomy_of_player_type...


Not really, there’s a bit of one in Bristol, but from what I see of job postings down there, salaries aren’t that high, comparable to much of the rest of the U.K. outside of London

The MetOffice has their software stuff down in Exeter but it’s <£45k for people with experience in scientific computing and HPC


Planes typically land with little fuel left (obviously enough for emergencies etc but they are practically empty, it's safer and more efficient)


In normal operation, an aeroplane lands with enough fuel for one go-around and re-attempt at landing at the chosen airport, plus enough for diversion to their alternate, plus an additional 30 minutes of flight.

If an aircraft is anticipated to land with fuel for 30 minutes or less they must make a mayday call, and there's an incident report to fill in.

Yes they want to land with as little fuel as possible, but regulations require them to carry more because we know what happens when you let airlines carry less.


That's not really accurate. Commercial airliners typically land with significant reserve fuel remaining on board. If a post crash fire ignites and isn't rapidly put out then that reserve fuel will be plenty to destroy the aircraft and kill everyone who doesn't evacuate quickly.

https://simpleflying.com/minimum-fuel-requirements-definitio...


Less than a full load certainly, but I wouldn't say "little fuel". 30 minutes fuel remaining is an automatic mayday call.


Success here is the sum of an equation that combines publishing and distribution.

The early days of blogging, the distribution came from RSS feed readers. The minute those fell out of fashion, the distribution loop of self-publishing disappeared.

Medium was clever because it kind of created that built-in but it never took off.

The distribution loop has always been social media which is now drowned out with other noise (you don't need me to explain that dire state of social media).

The nth conclusion becomes newsletters because email remains the lowest common denominator of distribution (other than maybe text message but that isn't appropriate here).

I am a founder of a publishing platform (WP Engine) and my entire SWE background is content management. But I'm the first to admit that distribution is everything.

I think maintaining a personal blog or site is important to be able to have a source of record of important stuff you write. But it's a backup. It's not a destination for distribution.


That's an interesting point. I'm a developer first so distribution is quite alien to me.

What would be your tips for improving distribution for a personal technical blog?


Stands like this have to be paired with an external keyboard.

Raising the monitor so that the top is as close to eye level as possible (while maintaining a straight back) is better orthopedicly.

It's impossible to achieve this and a good keyboard posture, so you must introduce an external keyboard.

Without an external keyboard, there is no value in using a stand, you might as well just keep the laptop in a neutral position.


I use my glasses case to raise the back of the computer. It adds a gap between table and computer. The rubber nobben on the underside of the laptop prevent the glasses case from slipping. This raises the notebook to a nice angle and the keyboard is still usable for me.


Shouldn’t the monitor be centered at eye level? Or is it worse to look a little bit up than down?


I have had office desks professional adjusted by an occupational safety orthopedic person and that has always been the advice I was told.

Another piece of advice was that on a standing desk your forearms should not be parallel to the ground but slightly below your elbow.


Fakespot is not infallible but a useful addition to any Amazon research process.

They try to hide it from the front page (a bit of a dark pattern) but you don't need to download the plugin to use it, just visit https://www.fakespot.com/analyzer


Bookmarklet:

  javascript:void(open('https://www.fakespot.com/analyze?url='+encodeURIComponent(location.href)))


Yeah, I was really annoyed when it to me quite a while to find that URL after they changed the layout of the site. I only shop on Amazon when I absolutely have to, and have an extension just sitting there being regularly updated with who knows what code really didn't appeal.


It’s fascinating that Amazon Web Services have so many overlapping and competing services to achieve the same objective. Efficiency/small footprint was never their approach :D

For example, look how many different types of database they offer (many achieve the same objective but different instantiation)

https://aws.amazon.com/products/?aws-products-all.sort-by=it...


Soon AWS is going to need an LLM just to recommend what service a customer should use.


Let me tell you about Amazon Q


To quote, “right tool for right job”.


They are not competing those are offerings. "AWS has many offerings" is a completly different thing than saying they compete against each other.


Definitely on T Mobile, then


JD Vance is a protege of Peter Thiel and Peter Thiel his heavily involved behind the scenes in the Donald Trump campaign and presumably administration...

Which is how you have Hulk Hogan involved in Trump rallies.

It all goes back to Gawker...


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