what’s wrong with just texting

If you have friends in another country, it might cost a quarter every time you send a message.

In regions of the world (e.g. Europe, and a lot of Asia) where some countries are the size of a large city (or perhaps the entire country is one city), that’s a problem. You’d be sending international texts all day every day.

There really isn’t. For example web browsers can execute assembly now and a good “web developer” (I’d call them a software engineer) will use assembly where appropriate.

That defence might help if you find yourself standing in front of a jury… but porn is legal so that’s never going to happen.

But for blackmail? Presumption of innocence won’t help you in the slightest.

some future government that decided to go after, say, LGBT people

That’s pretty hypothetical. Sure it’s possible… but porn companies having the data is almost guaranteed to be bad news.

Some porn companies will sell the data to the highest bidder. And one of those bidders is going to be organise crime networks that will send an email threatening to share your viewing habits with your kids or your grandma - $1,000 and they’ll delete the data - they promise. And then they’ll be back six months later asking for $100k.

And the ones that won’t sell it? They’ll probably be targeted and compromised, with the same eventual outcome.

Reddit used to be open source and the source is still on github as a read only archive.

AFAIK back then edit history was only kept briefly. Enough to roll back an accidental edit (if you have admin privileges anyway) but not far enough back to view old versions of posts.

Of course, they would have backups, and maybe the code has changed, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it hasn’t changed and those backups are impractical (slow/expensive) to access.

Keeping old revisions is a common practice but it’s also expensive and in reddit’s case totally unnecessary.

Reddit doesn’t own that data. The community owns it.

Maybe there’s something in the terms of service but that shouldn’t hold water because nobody has ever read that document.

Grammarly is a lot more than a spell checker. Here are some screenshots from their marketing page that specifically recommends using their product as a student.

The 2012 Mac mini didn’t have a discrete GPU iirc, just the built in HD 4000

I just looked it up - your memory is correct. Only the 2011 models had a discrete GPU (and only on certain models).

But the HD 4000 is still a GPU and it will be faster than the CPU at certain tasks such as video processing in Plex (I’m guessing that’s what OP cares about?)

I’m betting they are following the letter of the law perfectly

Have you read the law, or is that just a blind bet? Spoiler, here’s a quote from the legislation (Article 5, item 4):

The gatekeeper shall allow business users, free of charge, to communicate and promote offers, including under different conditions, to end users acquired via its core platform service or through other channels, and to conclude contracts with those end users, regardless of whether, for that purpose, they use the core platform services of the gatekeeper.

I bolded the most obvious point - Apple is charging a core technology fee (50 cents per user per year) even though the letter of the law is “free of charge”.

More broadly, there’s a fundamental problem that apps distributed are required to be submitted to Apple for approval even if they’re distributed out side the store. Apple says they will check less things, but obviously they are still checking some things and will still reject some apps. Developers are also required to a “core platform service” operated by Apple in order to do that submission and pay those fees. Apple can’t require that, as I read the legislation they have to allow developers to distribute apps without using or agreeing to any terms with Apple.

The legislation does allow Apple to block apps that are malware/etc - but the company is going far beyond that.

They likely had their lawyers pour over things to make sure they are exploiting every possible loophole.

I don’t think that’s what has happened. Apple has one of the best legal teams int he world, there’s no way they missed that “free of charge” requirement. I think they had their lawyers poor over things to find some way to avoid complying with the law in a way that will require years of ongoing investigations and lawsuits between Apple and the EU. Meanwhile the status quo continues and all apps go through the App Store.

If you legit have an offer from a different company take it.

No way. You might walk through the door at the other company, realise it’s a horrible place to work, and hand in your resignation at lunch time.

Take the pay rise. If they fire you a month later, you’ll at least get a big severance package to cover your living expenses while you look for a new job. If you quit, then quit again, you’re going to be delivering pizza’s or something while you look for a decent paying job.

It’s not about having FANG in your job history. It’s about switching companies three times in three years.

Where I work, we tend to lose money on new hires for an average of the first six months. That’s time where not only the new engineer isn’t very productive, but other engineers on the same team aren’t very productive. They’re sinking time into difficult conversations like “yeah you need to go back and redo the last two weeks of work — it’s perfectly good code, but you used library X, and we decided four years ago to is use library Y because X has this rare edge case issue when combined with library Z which we also use…”.

If someone only works with us for a year… we haven’t made enough of a profit to cover the losses in the first half of their employment with us. If you want to work for us, we’re not going to force you into a multi-year contract but we do want to be as confident as possible that you’re going to stay here long term.

I wouldn’t turn someone down for changing jobs three times in three years… but I would definitely ask what happened. And they better answer with something that will happen at my company.

I’m trying to imagine a scenario where having needed to hire 500 people, personally

It takes, what, 10 minutes to read a resume? 30 minutes interview someone? Lets round that up to one hour to cover discussing two promising candidates with a colleague… it’s still only 500 hours of work. Or 12 weeks. Obviously you also need to read all the resumes and do interviews with people who were turned down but over an entire career working in HR for a large company… 500 people isn’t that many at all.

I’m hoping for something like:

• 2024: Elon is found guilty of failing to uphold the obligations imposed on Twitter back in their 2011 lawsuit around misuse of information; Former Twitter staff are found to have heroically attempted to follow the law but were fired for doing so; Elon is ordered to sell X
• 2025: Mastodon buys it for five million dollars; Elon is forced to sell all his shares in Tesla/SpaceX to pay a $200b fine to the FTC (his net worth is $201b, so he’d still be filthy rich - important to make the fine actually payable so he can’t declare bankruptcy);
• late 2025: Mastodon rebrands X to Twitter which becomes just another Fediverse instance. One that is popular among high profile celebrities who can pay a fee to have their identity verified. One where posting discriminatory content gets you banned, permanently. Anyone who retweets your post is also banned for a month.
• 2026: FTC sets gets to use all $200 billion on their own budget in order to hire more staff and do their job properly going forward
• 2027 into the foreseeable future: every company in America suddenly starts pro-actively obeying FTC regulations instead of waiting for enforcement actions that almost never happen due to a lack of funding.

… sure … but you don’t prepare a kid for racism with a sheltered upbringing in a pretend world where discrimination doesn’t exist. You point out bad behaviour and tell them why it’s not OK.

My son is three years old, he has two close friends - one is an ethnic minority (you could live an entire year in my city without even walking past a single person of their ethnic background on the street). His other close friend is a girl. My kid is already witnessing (but not understanding) discrimination against both of his two closest friends in the playground and we’re doing what we can to help him navigate that. Things like “I don’t like him he looks funny” and “she’s a girl, she can’t ride a bicycle”.

Large Language Model training is exactly the same - you need to include discrimination in your training set. That’s a necessary step to train a model that doesn’t discriminate. Reddit has worse discrimination than some other place and that’s a good thing.

The worst behaviour is easier to recognise and can help you learn to recognise more subtle discrimination such as “I don’t want to play with that kid” which is not an obviously discriminatory statement, but definitely could be discrimination (and you should probably investigate before agreeing with the person).

Since you’re a Mac person, I think you should put MacOS on it. iCloud. Time Machine. AirDrop. Bonjour (zeroconf networking). HomeKit. Etc etc. Those are totally worth having and they are all free except iCloud (which is the the best family photo storage/sync/backup platform and totally worth paying for in my opinion).

For software that needs Linux or just runs better on Linux, use Docker. But you will probably need more RAM, because Docker on a Mac runs a Linux Virtual Machine. You’ll essentially be running MacOS and Linux side by side — I personally allocate half my RAM to Docker on my Mac… wether or not 4GB for each OS is enough obviously depends what software you run but it’s likely to be cutting it pretty tight).

You can use OpenCore Legacy Patcher to run a modern version of MacOS on old hardware (Apple sets hardware support cut offs based on the minimum specs that hardware was sold in, and your Mac Mini has a faster CPU than the minimum, you’ve upgraded the storage, and you can upgrade the RAM).

But the biggest reason to go with MacOS is you own a Mac Studio which is far better than your Mac Mini for all the same tasks. One day, you’re going to upgrade your main computer and downgrade the Mac Studio to all the tasks your Mac Mini was doing. And booting Linux on the Mac Studio isn’t likely to be a good option in the foreseeable future. Linux running inside Docker on a MacOS host though? That works wonderfully. Even with x86 software on an ARM Mac.

I run x86 Linux on my Arm Mac in Docker by the way. It’s not as fast as ARM Linux software on the same hardware… but it is way faster than x86 software on 2012 x86 hardware. Which is to say, could be better but totally good enough.

isn’t this kind of like Netflix offering shares to the subscribers who stream the most

Not really, because a Netflix subscriber is purely a consumer of content. Someone who posts on Reddit is contributing real value which can be profited from.

A better comparison is the difference between a “Bank” and a “Credit Union”. A bank has customers and shareholders. The shareholders profit by selling services to customers. With a Credit Union your customers are your shareholders.

Credit Unions don’t sell services… they use the account holders money to pay for services which provided to account holders. They also use the account holder’s money to invest and earn profits. Those profits are returned (in full, minus operational costs) to the account holders in the form of interest rates based on the amount of money in each account (banks do that too, but credit unions usually have better interest rates). PS: if you have an account with a bank, you should probably consider closing it and find a good Credit Union… especially in the modern world where transactions are online and you don’t have as much need for cash/etc (banks tend to have more branches).

It seems like Reddit is planning to be somewhere in between. With shareholders, and customers, and “customers who are also shareholders”. Maybe it’s something the we should consider over here in the fediverse… because I certainly don’t trust reddit’s leadership to do anything good with the content I provided for them (which is why I deleted it…)

very generous severance packages

Zuckerberg has done that - 16 weeks severance for every year you’ve worked there. If you’re a ten year employee, your severance package is three years pay.

Even if you were only hired a year ago, you’re going to have months at full pay to find another job.

prohibitions on raising workload on other employees

Pretty sure Facebook is one of those workplaces where you just work “all day”. It’s not really possible to increase someone’s workload. And with a severance package as generous as the one they’re doing, I can’t imagine why anyone would fire someone who is actually needed.

You can’t fire someone just because they made a mistake. Especially this kind of mistake - it’s easy to look back in hindsight but back then, looking into the future, it was impossible to know how covid would affect the economy.

I also think Mark is wrong. This isn’t just about covid - it’s also about climate change, and Russia’s war. Two more things that in hindsight have had very clear consequences but where it’s nearly impossible to predict he future.

We know climate change is bad, we know pandemics are bad, we certainly know war is bad… but how bad will they be? You can only work with rough estimates.

Please tell me the country where declining to offer that candidate a job would be illegal.

Australia. It’s not clearly illegal but it’s dangerous territory. Candidates have a general right to be treated as equals and you need to reject someone for reasons that are relevant to the job position.

Something that can easily be changed, like a shirt, might not be OK. ANZ bank (a massive bank with several hundred billion dollars in assets they manage), for example, requires customer facing staff to wear a branded uniform but back at the office? You can wear whatever you want. When they changed their dress code years ago to no-longer require a suit/tie the CEO deliberately wore ugly clothes for a while to set an example.

Obviously no candidates are expected to turn up to an interview in their uniform - they don’t have a uniform yet. And if someone can wear a Marilyn Manson shirt in the office, then why not also at the interview?

The bank I’m with is even more relaxed - even customer facing staff can wear anything they want. Sure, if it’s offensive they’ll be told to wear something else, but that’s a conversation I’d be having with the candidate rather than a reason to reject their application. I might reject them if I don’t like their response.

I dunno what country you’re in, but in my country you are required by law to have a valid reason to reject a job candidate. That reason can be pretty simple, such as “your application was not as strong as other candidates” but you need to be able to back that claim up if you’re challenged (and you can be challenged on it).

The recommended approach is to have a list of selection criteria, and carefully consider each one then write it down and keep a record of the decision for a while, incase you end up on the wrong end of a discrimination lawsuit. Candidates have the right to ask why they were unsuccessful (and they should ask - to find out what they can do better to improve their chances next time. As a hiring manager I would note down anyone who asks and consider offering them a job in the future, bypassing the normal recruitment process).

I rank each criteria from one to ten, then disregard the worst scoring candidates until I have a short list that I can compare directly (at that point, I wouldn’t worry too much about numbers. You are allowed to say “you were a great candidate, but we had multiple great candidates and had to pick one. Sorry”.

If your selection criteria includes “they need to wear nice clothes” then you’re treading on very dangerous territory and could be breaking the law. The damages here are commonly six months pay at the salary of the position they applied for, and can also include a court order for you not to be involved in the hiring process going forward.

It’s perfectly reasonable to require someone to dress well if they have a customer facing role… but that requirement should be implemented at work and not during the job interview. I’m well aware that a lot of hiring managers rely heavily on these things to make their decision but they should not be doing that. It’s not as bad as picking someone because they’re a straight white male candidate (which is also very common), but it’s still a bad policy.

McDonalds isn’t going anywhere, no matter how bad their hiring practices get.

I disagree. Screwing up your hiring process is a Darwin Award level mistake for a company. McDonalds is very very good at hiring people and a big part of that is their willingness to hire people who aren’t good enough and then giving those people the training they need to succeed at work.

Choosing not to hire someone because they like baseball is insane and there’s no way that would fly at McDonalds.