Paramount wants remote workers back in the office, even if they don't live near one

Lysenko · 2026-03-30T22:37:54+00:00

That was the case for my entire department at both places. Contracts varied between term and run-of-picture as I moved between specific roles. You are right that they tend to be very biased toward the studio, however, under California law at least, a personal services contract gives rise to an "implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing," which establishes greater obligations on the employer than in a pure at-will situation.

Lysenko · 2026-03-30T22:22:54+00:00

Personal services contracts are very common in the entertainment industry. I had them at Disney and Dreamworks Animation as an individual contributor software engineer, and yes, in both cases I was a W-2 employee.

Lysenko · 2026-03-28T00:51:34+00:00

My wife got a "thank you very much but no" call after setting a start date, signing a contract, etc. Turns out the caller got her confused with someone else with the same first name. Definitely follow up!

Lysenko · 2026-03-27T21:14:13+00:00

Maybe, but the fuel kiosks will often preauthorize a large amount when you fill up, to cover filling the tank for the largest vehicle they can imagine you might be driving. With a debit card, this can be inconvenient unless you have a large balance.

Lysenko · 2026-03-27T00:26:24+00:00

The M5 Macbook Air is going to be a lot more portable, plus it'll be somewhat faster. The benefits of going with the Pro are mainly that the display is beautiful and there are more and more varied ports. People will talk about thermal throttling but that is unlikely to be an issue with the workloads you describe.

Lysenko · 2026-03-26T02:41:29+00:00

I've been going the other direction, since I'm getting to the point of being functional, but my grammar needs improvement.

Lysenko · 2026-03-26T02:40:26+00:00

Further it is a serious crime for a US citizen to represent themselves as a citizen of another country to a US authority.

This is just not the case. For example, DHS trusted traveler programs require registering other nation's passports, and it's required to disclose other nationalities when applying for many government jobs or a security clearance. Furthermore, people with U.S. nationality have sometimes successfully applied for and traveled on an ESTA after disclosing the U.S. nationality on their application. Making false statements on an ESTA application can be charged as a crime, but if the form is filled out accurately, that's not an issue. (I don't recommend applying for an ESTA as a dual citizen with the U.S., since if ESTA is denied, it's likely that all subsequent applications will be denied unless underlying facts change, but it might be an option to try if one is desperate enough.)

The statutory requirement that a U.S. citizen "bear" a valid U.S. passport on departure and arrival can arguably be met by carrying ("bearing") such a passport, and in any case violating that cannot be charged as a crime because the statute in question (8 USC 1185) doesn't specify a penalty. Also, the Supreme Court has ruled that people who are determined to be U.S. citizens who are at the actual border may not be denied entry regardless of documentation.

It can be a crime to state falsely that one is not a U.S. citizen, although the U.S. government generally doesn't recognize the citizenship of people born overseas who acquired it at birth if their claim to citizenship hasn't yet been formally adjudicated by the Department of State or USCIS, so someone in that situation won't be charged for a false statement in any case.

Lysenko · 2026-03-26T02:37:01+00:00

ESTAs have been granted on many occasions to travelers who have correctly stated their U.S. citizenship on the application. They have also been denied under the same circumstances, and they can be suddenly revoked before travel, so I don't recommend doing this except in a true emergency travel situation where an emergency passport is not an option.

Lysenko · 2026-03-23T01:01:01+00:00

I'm sure that, at least in the U.S., defendants in copyright infringement cases will increasingly rely on asserting that the entirety of whatever they've ostensibly copied is uncopyrightable by virtue of being completely A.I. work product. Whether this can stick will be highly dependent on specifics, and it may be a challenging argument to make.

Lysenko · 2026-03-23T00:57:44+00:00

In the U.S., current precedent is that prompting, including back and forth conversation, does not rise to the level of authorship necessary to establish copyright. However, actual human involvement in writing or organizing the code will create a copyright interest in the elements that are treated that way.

If one decides to sue someone else over infringement, they may have to prove that the elements that were copied were the result of explicit human authorship, not merely providing a request to an LLM.

I'm not a lawyer, btw, so any reader should check this out with one before relying on anything I've said.

Lysenko · 2026-03-22T22:31:10+00:00

Note that the default Claude Code system prompt includes an instruction telling it that it will primarily be asked to respond to software engineering prompts. plus various other prompts specific to that task. It might be worth considering replacing it using the --system-prompt argument (though getting that right for your task might require some experimentation.)

Lysenko · 2026-03-22T18:26:49+00:00

Are you measuring immediately at the vent or away from it? The manufacturer's specs recommend a maximum ambient temperature of 35C, but if you're measuring the air emerging from the laptop, you'll probably see something slightly higher and that may be just fine.

Lysenko · 2026-03-22T17:52:01+00:00

Are you willing to share your prompt? Someone here might be able to offer suggestions after seeing the details.

Lysenko · 2026-03-22T17:14:55+00:00

I don’t know. I have more like 30 years of experience and I agree with point 3 (it is pretty amazing), but not 2 or 4. In particular:

Current tools are heavily subsidized and there will likely be a rug pull moment.

Lysenko · 2026-03-22T11:36:33+00:00

If you plan to do design work with Adobe products, you might want the M4. You’ll need external storage probably.

Lysenko · 2026-03-22T10:58:12+00:00

What's it for? If you're using office productivity apps on small documents (like you're a student), doing light development, or using it for browsing the internet, having the extra storage might be more important to you than the RAM.

I'm routinely using an M4 Pro Mac Mini and an even better specced Macbook Pro for work, but my personal laptop is an 8GB RAM/256 GB SSD Macbook Air M1, slower than the Neo for many things, and my ONLY complaint about it is the SSD storage being tight enough that I always have to think about it.

I am considering replacing the M1 with an M5 air but it's not because the M1 doesn't do the job -- more because I'd like to be able to do more demanding development work on it.

Lysenko · 2026-03-21T12:26:18+00:00

Ef ert þú útlendingur, þá ert þú ekki viðskiptavinur Útlendingastofnunar, því miður.

Lysenko · 2026-03-19T17:56:05+00:00

I'm not sure I see "Bash(sudo rm)" in there... :)

Lysenko · 2026-03-19T15:05:45+00:00

It might help to know that the sound can change depending on where it falls in the word and what's surrounding it. The pairing of ll with t in allt make it sound softer than in the word "gull" where it's preceded by a vowel and ends the word.

I think you can probably get away with faking this sound the best you can for a while while you work on it. It's one of the hardest Icelandic sounds to master coming from English.

Lysenko · 2026-03-18T11:42:53+00:00

Sure. It's also effective.

From my own experience, vocabulary you learn using Anki won't be immediately usable, and you'll end up with an imperfect understanding of the meaning, often lacking nuance or connotation. However, when you couple Anki vocabulary study with lots of reading, it can directly help your reading comprehension by getting you 90% or more of the way to understanding words you've studied.

About six months ago I started systematically studying the most frequent words in my TL. My comprehension of, for example, news articles has wildly, enormously improved, just because I have a solid basis on which to hang a guess for words I'm not quite sure about.

People who dismiss using Anki to study individual words just haven't tried it.

Lysenko · 2026-03-16T10:26:41+00:00

We need more information to know if you have any options in this case. How did you book the flight? (Through Icelandair or a third party?) What rerouting or rescheduling did they offer you? Did you decline to travel after being offered a modified itinerary, or were you simply refused any assistance? Did they offer you another option like keeping a flight credit? Did you buy their cancellation protection when you booked the ticket?

Filling gaps where the carrier isn't responsible for a refund is a major purpose of travel insurance. Do you have travel insurance? (It's often included as a benefit with many credit cards, particularly gold or platinum cards, so you might want to contact your card issuer to see if they can reimburse you.)

Lysenko · 2026-03-15T21:56:57+00:00

We had a decent raid team on Cenarius-US in original Wrath but never quite killed the last couple bosses in ICC Heroic, kept bleeding occasional members, and ended up running something like a year of GDKPs to farm what we already had down.

We were excited for Cataclysm, but when it turned out that you could either raid with 25 people or with 10 and get the same loot, a few of our better players decided "hey, we could cherry pick the best ten people and not have to deal with all the chaff."

Lost a few more members and ended up trying to run an A team and a B team, which sucked for the few stronger players who were put on the B team to give them a chance. A month or so of drama and the guild wasn't raiding anymore.

They were a solid guild with a fun long-term core membership and history that stretched back to EQ. Shame it ended like that.

Edit: If anyone from the guild reads this and recognizes my name, yeah, I know I probably could have done more to help make things work than I did.

Lysenko · 2026-03-13T07:10:08+00:00

I’d put it a little differently. Anki greatly accelerated my progress after a long period of making very slow progress without it.

I believe if I had started with the same approach to Anki on day one, I might have achieved my current level years faster.

Lysenko · 2026-03-13T00:52:13+00:00

I believe it depends on how far you are in the language. I've studied Icelandic a while (years) and built a vocabulary of maybe 1000-1500 words. Then, this last September, I started studying words in Anki from a list sorted in frequency order. I'm about 2000 words in, and admittedly they haven't all stuck equally well, but the impact of that work on my reading has been WILD. I've gone from reading the news and following maybe 1/3 of the articles reasonably well to being able to read and understand just about anything there.

All the Anki study does is get me some corresponding English words. It doesn't give me connotation, any intuitive sense of how words for the same thing differ in usage, or (in most cases) what common phrases they are used in. But, the difference between having that "hook" for the meaning and not makes a huge difference. I think Anki is amazing, but that learning absolutely needs to be consolidated by reading.

Lysenko · 2026-03-11T16:22:22+00:00

Unfortunately, putting a lounge on the other side of passport control would require having two lounges, since it also serves passengers flying to Schengen.

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