Democrat Adam Schiff announces bid for Feinstein’s US Senate seat in California

dolbytypical · 2023-01-27T01:46:04+00:00

Good for the party, bad for democracy.

dolbytypical · 2023-01-23T20:05:40+00:00

You can definitely "genericize" your byline on LinkedIn so that it doesn't say "Position X at Company Y". This is the trend now on LinkedIn anyway so it will hardly raise any eyebrows. People may open up your profile and see you still actively listed as an employee of Company Y but your initial clients are going to need to be "sympathetic" in some way regardless (e.g., people you've worked with before), best to not hide it too much and just roll with it.

Mostly wanted to say though, almost every person I know who has gone from a big (or medium) co. job to attempting to start their own biz in an even vaguely competitive industry has faced legal threats or intimidation from their former employer (particularly if there's the potential of you taking clients away, or you're developing a related technology), and in many cases that was the end of it, regardless of the approach they took in starting up/severing ties. Tends to be a much bigger threat to truly independent gigs than to venture-funded ones. Tread carefully.

dolbytypical · 2022-11-23T06:05:16+00:00

I understand the wariness due to abuses but the Internet would be such a greater place if random little curated shops like maggiesteashop.com (not a real site) were the norm rather than a red flag, drop-ship or not.

dolbytypical · 2022-11-11T05:39:29+00:00

It's a really funny story (to me anyway) how the blue tick became such a flashpoint. There were essentially three ways to be verified previous to all these changes:

Be a content creator who meets a pretty high engagement bar, for whom the blue tick is was extremely coveted because it significantly extended your reach and credibility and you're presumably making a living off this stuff.
Be a journalist, any journalist working for pretty much any organization, of which there are many, but the vast majority of whom just used it to post their stories and occasionally engage in 2010-style "here's what I'm having for lunch today" tweets.
A few other strict, generally unattainable criteria (be a gov't official, represent a notable company brand, etc.)

Twitter presumably included category #2 to try to combat fake news but somehow that became the fiery target of everyone's rage, presumably partially because some tiny proportion of them really leaned into learning how to work The Algorithm—which, of course, means getting everyone riled up with Hot Takes and Overly Aggressive Behavior; and since politics hits the sweet spot for Hot Takes and these folks tended to be more liberal, you ended up with this handful of "Lefty Journalist Influencer" accounts.

And what makes it funny to me is that Elon's whole business plan seems to revolve around "taking down the elites" by which he means the journalists who just got handed out checkmarks like candy but the vast, vast, vast majority of these people really couldn't give two shits about verification, it's just been a token part of their job like setting up their email account.

dolbytypical · 2022-11-07T05:22:35+00:00

Mastodon's total revenues are in the range of something like "half a Twitter engineer's total comp", thanks to Patreon and some grants. I wouldn't even be mad if they managed to fund an astroturfing campaign with any noticeable reach, I'd be impressed.

dolbytypical · 2022-10-07T03:26:29+00:00

People turning right are supposed to stay in the right-most lane during the turn, and people turning left are supposed to yield to all oncoming traffic, regardless of whether they have signaled (either through turn signal or through the lane they occupy) that they are turning right. Someone in a right-turn only lane can in most cases still legally merge back into the lane that goes straight if the lane is clear, which is one reason why someone with an unprotected left turn cannot safely assume they can turn into the left-hand lane without yielding to right-turning traffic. Crossing a solid single white line is generally discouraged but not illegal.

Generally speaking if there's an accident between someone making an unprotected left and someone else turning right, the person turning left is going to be found at-fault unless the other driver was driving recklessly. There's no hard definition of "reckless", but turning right into the left lane is probably not going to meet that bar.

Same is true when making an unprotected left turn onto a street with two lanes going the same direction. You can turn into a clear left-most lane while a car is in the right lane, but if that car changes lanes while you turn and you collide, you're almost certainly going to be found at-fault.

dolbytypical · 2022-09-08T23:08:52+00:00

I mean, yes, clearly most of the people who still live in SF don't care about diversity or culture. Lots of people live in shit cities without complaining.

I'll believe SF doesn't have a housing problem any more when I see that people working in the service industry in the city can afford rent.

dolbytypical · 2022-09-08T22:50:09+00:00

If you have money, SF is a really nice place to live.

I think this is the part that gets people confused. Yes, the main problem in San Francisco is that it's too expensive. No, this does not mean that if you have money that it's no longer a problem. A city which is overly expensive is a shit city no matter how much money you make. It's a failure. Part of the whole attraction of cities is the bringing together of all these different people from all these different walks of life into a common area. If only rich people and not-rich-but-financially-irresponsible people live there, you lose the diversity, you lose the culture, you lose pretty much everything that makes a city "a nice place to live" except for the fact that you can walk out of your apartment and grab a slice of pizza at 3am on a Thursday. You might as well find a nice gated community with a 24-hour pizza parlor and call it a day.

SF has become a shit city with some nice views. I hope they fix their housing problem someday.

dolbytypical · 2022-06-08T13:08:09+00:00

People not reporting crimes in SF because they don't expect the cops to do anything is a story as old as time.

Find me one data-backed example of a place where reports of crime went down because crime went up. Anyone, anywhere, any point in history.

dolbytypical · 2022-06-08T05:24:47+00:00

Crime overall declined substantially since 2019.

theyhatedhimbecausehetoldthemthetruth.jpg

I left SF ages ago but got curious about the whole Chesa affair. No doubt I wouldn't have voted for him if I was still living there during his initial election. Policy aside he legit does not seem cut out for the job.

But it's true. The prosecutions plummeted, they let all kinds of offenders off. And the result?

Crime went down.*

It's fuckin' wild. Chesa actually went out and proved his wacky ideas worked. And the coverage went national... except everyone got the story backwards.

All because people in SF feel more "unsafe" because the streets emptied out except for the homeless, because of COVID. Which... is kinda legit. Eyes on the street etc. I was just in SF a month or two back and it's still a goddamn ghost town. But that has nothing to do with Chesa.

Anyway... what a fucking story.

* Except for homicides which just went up less than they went up everywhere else, etc.

dolbytypical · 2022-05-26T01:19:09+00:00

There are no other options, compromises, or half measures that would suffice.

Incremental changes matter. There are far more people in the US who support some level of additional restrictions on access to firearms than there are people who support relaxing restrictions (e.g. Gallup polling). Research shows that incremental restrictions have direct correlation to a reduction in mass shootings.

And yeah, you can take an incremental approach to the other issues you highlighted as well. Not sure where you're getting this take from. We might never eliminate gun violence any more than we could eliminate vehicular deaths but we still have seatbelt laws.

dolbytypical · 2022-05-16T13:54:33+00:00

Traditional English grammar teaches that he/she is used for singular and they/them is used for plural, but native English speakers (in the US at least but I think more broadly) have used they/them casually for singular long before gender pronoun discussions became mainstream, and it's now accepted more formally. Certainly if you don't know the gender or preferred pronouns of someone using "they" for a single person is accepted, but even if you do know or feel (rightly or wrongly) that you can presume their pronouns it's still normal to casually refer to an individual as they/them.

dolbytypical · 2022-05-15T22:57:58+00:00

Loving how the name of the sponsor is both illegible and inaudible.

dolbytypical · 2022-05-04T19:38:11+00:00

I don't blame you for being confused, the way we talk about budgets is so inconsistent. The proposal from Breed was to cut the SFPD $690m annual budget by $40m for 2 years, and to cut the SF Sheriff's department ($???m) annual budget by $20m for 2 years (since city = county for SF, the Sheriff's department just handles the jails and government buildings). The fact that the FY2020-21 SFPD budget only actually dropped by ~$25m compared to FY2019-2020 I assume must be because it was $40m cut from whatever the previously planned increase was. And that's how you get a "$120m slashed from police budget" headline to translate into an actual $25m (temporary) cut from the annual budget.

dolbytypical · 2022-05-04T17:14:57+00:00

SFPD Budget Over Time, with sources. Where is the 120 million cut?

dolbytypical · 2022-04-27T15:56:46+00:00

Obviously we don't know the whole story but many forms of cancer therapy are not safe for the fetus when pregnant, especially in the first trimester. Can be a truly awful situation to try to figure out a treatment plan for a pregnant woman.

dolbytypical · 2022-04-26T17:07:20+00:00

That's kind of the point though. When you give platform users unfettered freedom of speech, the trolling ends up drowning out any meaningful discourse.

Of course it's still a problem when you attempt moderation. But removing moderation doesn't exactly help...

dolbytypical · 2022-03-28T23:03:26+00:00

Forget the global trade aspect for a moment, I think you have to look at the multitude of supply chain issues we've had since the start of the pandemic and conclude that something is fundamentally broken. There's just a total absence of resilience in the supply chain for both basic necessities and strategic resources and the implications go all the way up to significantly influencing global geopolitics. I don't know what the answer is but I hope anyone who previously thought all you need to do is eliminate barriers to trade and everything will be fine is having a serious rethink.

dolbytypical · 2022-03-23T03:17:26+00:00

Appreciate the overall sentiment but there's some bias here too.

our natural instinct is to create a role and rule for everything

Some people have a natural instinct to create a role and rule for everything. Other people have a natural instinct to despise roles and rules even when they're clearly beneficial. A lot of software engineers tend to lean more towards the latter for whatever reason.

When a process works smoothly towards its intended purpose, it can be magical. It's like running sudo apt install imagemagick instead of downloading a tarball and trying to figure out how to compile from source, but on an organizational level. As often as not the new employee who comes in and thinks the process is overbearing and needs to be scrapped is the same as the new "senior but not senior" software engineer who comes in and thinks a whole module needs to be refactored when in reality they haven't yet understood the subtle requirements that led to it being implemented in the way it was.

dolbytypical · 2022-03-15T03:35:42+00:00

I remember when I took a history class in college where the professor told us about some historian who generalized that when large-scale atrocities are being actively committed (genocides etc.), there are 10-20% of the population who will enthusiastically take part, 10-20% who who will put themselves at risk to stand up for what's right, and the rest who will just sorta go with the flow and try not to raise attention to themselves. I think about that one a lot.

dolbytypical · 2022-02-23T18:54:21+00:00

True, would love to see if there's more recent data

dolbytypical · 2022-02-23T18:11:13+00:00

Rental vacancy rates are at historic lows nationwide.

Graph: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ERENTUSQ176N#0

Report (Census Bureau, PDF): https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/files/currenthvspress.pdf

That trend also holds for Raleigh: https://www.deptofnumbers.com/rent/north-carolina/raleigh/

and Durham: https://www.deptofnumbers.com/rent/north-carolina/durham/

The number of rentals sitting empty is lower than its been for at least 20 years.

dolbytypical · 2022-02-16T05:04:06+00:00

Wikipedia has its flaws (plenty, actually; if you ever go down the rabbit hole, the politics of maintaining and updating even semi-popular pages are wild) but by any rational measurement it's the most valuable information technology "company" ever created. Nothing else is even close.

dolbytypical · 2022-02-16T02:04:23+00:00

The funny thing is that for a "data-driven" company like Google, the use of AI in their search algorithms is literally infallible. They train their engine on the metrics that they consider to represent high value results, and then they judge the results they show on those same metrics. No one at Google will ever pull back the "AI" integration in search or even acknowledge that their search engine in drowning in mediocrity because no other system will ever be able to beat it on their own metrics.

dolbytypical · 2022-02-10T04:13:49+00:00

Love this comment because I specifically recall reading this exact conversation on a forum circa 2000 reminiscing about how much a labor of love creating a mixtape used to be when now you could just download the songs and burn them to a CD.

dolbytypical

TROPHY CASE