• 10 Posts
  • 61 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • Yeah, the last 5 jobs (of 6 jobs) I’ve had I’ve applied with a markdown file or just a link to the rendered webpage in an email, IIRC.

    In my head at least, it helps me filter for companies/managers that appreciate a hacker mentality. I also suspect it might help the applicant tracking systems parse my shit more correctly since it’s just plaintext. (Though the opposite could also be true since I assume the vast majority of submissions would be PDF.)


  • I wrote my CV in markdown for my website. I just submit the markdown file as the resume. For the few jobs I’ve applied to that have required a PDF, I just copied the text from my webpage (to get rich text formatting) into LibreOffice and exported as a PDF.

    Though, I might not not be the best example to follow, I’ve been unemployed for almost 6 months.


  • I’m in the process writing my own version of webscript.io, an old service that died back in 2017. It was a dead simple service that would run a Lua script for each HTTP request that came in to a URL. It sounds pretty trivial, but it was remarkably useful for hacking together little scripts for things like watching webpages for changes, little custom APIs for DIY IoT devices, translating from one API to another, and other simple stuff like that.

    I’ve got enough of it built that I’ve been able to make a few actually useful things with it already. A few different job posting website scrapers were the first thing I made. I also made a little script that queries a live traffic api and sends my wife an estimated drive time for her commute home. The plan with that one is to watch the drive time as it’s getting closer to the end of the day and if it starts spiking earlier/worse than normal, it can email her letting her know she should leave early if she can.





  • So what you meant was: this isn’t enough evidence to change my mind.

    No.

    One thing getting more upvotes than another isn’t somehow evidence that reddit is manipulating anything. There’s no immutible law that the original source of something should naturally get more upvotes than anything else. I find that the opposite is most often the case, even when the re-blogged story is crap.


  • That is not a repost, this is an other article from ProPublica

    Ah, I just assume that was a slightly different title for the same article. Maybe a mod made the same assumption.

    Are you joking with me? They are using a paraphrased title.

    Well, the first part is. But, I don’t know what “munching” means. The second part of the Ars title actually says what it’s about. Don’t get me wrong, I can probably make a guess. But when you’re scrolling social media, I don’t think anyone is stopping to think about what a title really means. If it’s not obvious at first glace most people are just scrolling by. The Ars title, at least to me, skims as “AI bad” since those are the words anchoring each end of the title, that’s probably enough all by itself to get some people to upvote.

    I am really curious, what sort of evidence you want/expect to see?

    Literally anything vaguely conclusive. I’m not saying you should go find more evidence for me or anything. I’m just trying to explain why I don’t find your evidence here convincing.

    I suspect that Reddit has more than enough money to be competently shitty. So, if they are doing what you suggest, unless they fuck up or decide they don’t care, you might not be able to find solid evidence.


  • I don’t think that shows what you say it does.

    First, deleting a repost is clearly not evidence of any kind of bias.

    Second, maybe Ars is just more popular/trusted? Maybe it’s more upvoted because the Ars title is more meaningful, it’s super well known that people mostly only read the title.

    I’m not saying reddit isn’t manipulating things, I’d be shocked if they weren’t. But this isn’t really evidence that they are.






  • At work we have a contractual design deliverable that was due yesterday, I still can’t get anybody to tell me what I’m supposed to be designing/building. I’ve got the contract, but its so vague that it’s more unhelpful than it is helpful and there’s apparently been 9 months of conversations with the customer, none of which have included engineering, nor has anything from them been written down. So we’re designing something just based on rumors.

    So we’re in crunch mode, but also we don’t know what we’re trying to accomplish… 😩





  • I’ll start off with a proviso, I haven’t s much touched my Librem 5 in at least a year (maybe even 2?), so if they’ve had some massive turn around in that time I don’t know about it. All of this post is just what I think I remember, if you want actual facts go dig around in the wayback machine or something.

    The promise of the L5 was super grandiose. They were going to create this mobile device that could completely replace your android device. It was going to launch with a custom matrix client that would let you make voice and video calls, which no other matrix client at the time could do. It was gonna be great and it was going to be delivered in a year.

    Now clearly that was never going to go off without a hitch. I don’t blame them for being late nor for not delivering all their promises right at launch. But when things started getting delayed they seemed to be doing everything in their power to not communicate with backers. And anytime they would say something, they would say “well we didn’t hit that deadline, but we promise we’re totally super duper close now”. And then they’d blow through that deadline without a word too.

    I did eventually get my phone, obviously, but it wasn’t anything like a usable device. The battery that it came with was smaller than advertised and it didn’t have any power management so you got a few hours of battery life. The cameras just didn’t exist as far as the software was concerned. The privacy switches would randomly kill power to the modem when you lightly brushed against them without the switch moving out of the ‘on’ position. Which was super annoying since you had to reboot the phone any time you wanted to turn the modem back on. And rebooting took ages.

    Even at this point I was still rooting for them to succeed. I really want a proper Linux phone and have since 2008.

    But ever since then, I really haven’t seen much of anything change with the software, at least for as long as I was paying attention to it. One of the cameras got support added by a community member at some point, but the pictures it was taking were so bad it looked like some 1999 digital camera taking pictures in a dimly lit room even in full sunlight. There was no way to know if an application in their store was going to work or not, most didn’t, mostly because they were meant for a larger screen & a mouse.

    I pulled it out a few times on and off over the years, but the last time I did, I couldn’t even figure out how to get it to update. So, I haven’t really even touched it since then. (I’ve got it out connected to power to see what it’s like now. Though, I’m not sure it’s charging, is flashing green (with an occasional flicker of red) a good thing?)

    Since receiving it, the only communication I’ve gotten from Purism has been “Investment Opportunities”. I’m not sure why I’d invest in a company that still hasn’t delivered what it promised me over 5 years ago.

    I absolutely want them to succeed, and I hope they prove my pessimism wrong, but at this point I absolutely would not put my money on that happening.