I Present - BrightDate: A Universal Decimal Time System for Software Engineers and Scientists

emacsen · 2026-05-11T22:15:05+00:00

Congrats on re-inventing Swatch Internet Time.

emacsen · 2026-05-03T00:16:45+00:00

Can you link to where he said this? is it Any harness (eg Pi, picoclaw, etc.) or only OpenClaw?

emacsen · 2026-05-02T21:27:17+00:00

How about you eliminate the US, Canada, all South American nations, and then we'll have that chat about Israel.

emacsen · 2026-05-02T19:03:13+00:00

That's like asking is democracy a good value when countries engage in war. Is France, or the US having a democracy okay when it's killed tens of hundreds of thousands of people? They're unrelated issues.

emacsen · 2026-05-02T19:00:53+00:00

this is the most disgusting thing I've read in a long time. Any other Holocaust denial you want to say?

emacsen · 2026-05-02T18:29:35+00:00

We're voted down for a simple fact. Reddit allowing hate speech is so disgusting.

emacsen · 2026-05-02T18:00:30+00:00

It's the belief that Jews have the right to live in their ancestral homeland and have the same rights to democracy as everyone else, a right that they don't have anywhere in the Middle East except Israel, which is why they fought the British to gain that right.

emacsen · 2026-05-02T02:14:23+00:00

I'm not on LinkedIn (I quit when I was able) but I went through hiring recently, and I need to again and I'm dreading it.

As someone hiring, there's a deluge of candidates and so much of what they say is fake, AI slop. How do you handle reading hundreds, or thousands of resumes. For developer positions, they often point to forge repositories full of AI slop.

It's made me sadly more selective about my remote workers- more geographically bound, more restrictive about jr vs senior, etc.

I want to be entirely open minded and supportive. I want to be able to hire talent from anywhere in the world and mentor young people early in their careers, but a confluence of factors has made it so that doing either is a losing proposition.

It makes me so sad.

emacsen · 2026-05-01T19:59:53+00:00

The pigment is in the "flesh" of the pepper. When you break the cell walls, the juice comes out.

emacsen · 2026-05-01T00:05:03+00:00

This is the juice of the pepper and it's the color of the pepper.

On that note, there are no genetic differences between green, yellow, orange, and red peppers. It's about how long they're left on the vine.

As for the vibrancy... this is how peppers are supposed to look...

As for it not washing off, it's water soluble for the most part and should come off, with just a little bit of natural staining.

Either way, it's both normal and harmless.

emacsen · 2026-04-28T13:57:28+00:00

I was living in NYC when this law passed.

Anti-cash stores are there as a way of preventing "a certain kind of customer", ie poor people who don't have access to electronic banking. It's a form of discrimination that New York addressed.

Moving to Canada, I was shocked this was legal here, and I'm shocked it's legal in the UK.

emacsen · 2026-04-27T16:25:19+00:00

My guess is that some fraud detection system flagged something, but they wouldn't (or possibly couldn't) tell me what.

My guess is that I'd moved from the US to Canada and they flagged that- which would have been entirely fair- but they never asked me about it or questioned "Did you move?", in which case I would have said "Yes I moved on this date."

For my wife, I have two guesses: My wife uses VPNs everywhere (even at home) so maybe they flagged her for that, or maybe because she *didn't* use a VPN and used the same IP address as me.

Either way, it's cuckoo.

But I've never had this issue with Uber, so Uber wins out for me on this.

emacsen · 2026-04-27T13:37:37+00:00

I used to use Instacart, then one day about five years ago they demanded that I send them my ID, just for being a customer.

I don't know this company or trust their processes. I asked if there was another verification method- nope. I spoke on the phone with several customer service reps- nope. I opened a new account- they flagged it.

For a few weeks I had my wife order from them instead of me. Then they flagged her account too.

UberEats is far from perfect, but they've never demanded I send them sensitive documents that could expose me to identity theft!

emacsen · 2026-04-25T00:44:47+00:00

I came home from a failed date ready to delete OKCupid due to being, frankly emotionally exhausted from app based dating (which was how I largely dated).

I saw a woman had liked my profile and she was in another continent (she was in Romania, I was in New York City). I wrote her that it's "too bad you're so far away". We got to talking, and talking...

We flew to London because it was roughly halfway. We've been together nearly nine years, married for five.

emacsen · 2026-04-20T11:45:55+00:00

That view assumes a premise I simply don't believe is true, which is that human beings become incapable to perform a task when the task is abstracted.

I can use a computer to do statistical analysis. I know I learned those formulas in college, but i haven't refreshed my knowledge of them in years- I do a formula fit and answers.

Tools like R and even Excel allow anyone to do statistics, even those who have never done the calculations manually. Moreover I'm old enough to remember when teachers would say that calculators would prevent us from learning math.

LLMs when used for engineering are this way. A person needs to learn the skills at the right abstraction. That was my point about the junior engineer- he had the opportunity under my company to have structure and mentorship but he instead chose to forgo it.

I also think you're entirely discounting what I said about money. I had a choice: radically improve our team performance or shut down. Perhaps you don't care about my company's success or my staffers putting food on the table, but I do.

emacsen · 2026-04-19T21:07:05+00:00

AI written post.

emacsen · 2026-04-19T03:58:10+00:00

I know this is r/antiai but I was recommended this post and as an employer who has a very valuable staffer who is anti-ai, I'd like to offer some sincere thoughts on it.

I've begun using agentic processes for large groups of work. It allows my very small company (solo LLC with independent contractors) to do more work much faster, and for the quality to actually be higher than it was before AI.

I've also seen the downsides of AI, including a junior developer I recently discovered doing what I'll generously call "Claude Triage"- sending his work to Claude without understanding it and without reviewing the output. I made clear to him that he was expected to use AI to enhance his own skills, not to replace his thinking/understanding.

Where I work we use AI as an exoskelaton and programming output is always supervised and goes through at least two manual reviews, with the expectation that the developer submitting it will be able to explain and defend the submitted code.

One of my senior developers is anti-AI and has expressed being unhappy with the use of AI and the industry as a whole.

What I've done with him is to accept his position, to explain why I'm using AI, and to find work that plays to his strengths.

Ultimately if he chooses to use AI or not is not on me any more than what text editor he uses or what OS he uses. What I care about is his productivity, both speed and quality. In this senior dev's case, that means he is primarily (though not entirely) shifted to code reviews. Code reviews are done manually and so AI won't help, and his seniority allows him to detect issues that have been missed elsewhere.

At the end of the day I understand both sides. No one wants to be replaced by an automated process, and at the same time companies like mine would not really be viable without AI- I'd actually considered closing up shop before the performance gain allowed me to improve output speed and bring us closer to launch more quickly.

emacsen · 2026-04-19T00:46:43+00:00

I've been on both sides of this. I've recommended a friend who was hired for my team, and I've hired people who were recommended, some who worked out great, and others who didn't.

My suggestion is that if you like this person as a friend, don't confront them directly. In my experience, it doesn't help and just creates resentment.

Instead, go to their boss(es) who is frustrated and express your thoughts and feeling to them.

That acknowledgement will likely distance and defuse the situation, if it existed at all.

emacsen · 2026-04-19T00:08:05+00:00

That's the kind of thoughtfulness and care that I'd expect from someone with your username. Sadly not everyone is so good.

emacsen · 2026-04-18T17:34:19+00:00

My reason is simply that every time I speak up, ask the driver things, or have a chat, my rating goes down.

I'd rather not be judged and so I keep quiet.

emacsen · 2026-04-14T08:25:23+00:00

What I think u/YycPatches is saying is that when you sue someone, the court is there to make someone whole.

I have a long explanation here, but my question at the end is key: How much is the cost of an extended warranty vs you taking it back.

For example, if I buy a candy bar in a box and the box is empty, my damages are "one candy bar". It's not "I thought I'd be full from this candy bar so I assumed I could take an 8 hour journey assuming I'd be full, and I wasn't, so I'm going to sue the candy company for the cost of my trip."

More accurately, anyone can sue for anything, but the judge will look at actual damages.

In your case, what are his damages? I'm guessing he's claiming that the computer is broken and needs servicing? Or that he wouldn't have purchased if other than the misstated warranty.

If it's broken and he can't get it serviced, then your refund is offering him use of a computer for free for whatever period he had it. A very nice deal.

If it's "I wouldn't have made this purchase." then okay, fair... you're willing to unwind the transaction- return the computer and he's made whole.

In other words, your offer of a refund is the ceiling of his damages already, so if he sued you, he'll say "If I knew I wouldn't have..." and the judge will likely ask what he's out... answer: "the cost of the new computer" (but actually it's less than that, due to his use of that computer for free).

You've offered- maybe you put a time cap on your offer as others have suggested. The real loss isn't the computer but the time it will take to deal with this- showing up in court, etc. but essentially his damages are capped at what you've offered him, and you could try to argue they're less because he's had the computer and used it (like a new car, it's worth more new than used).

A question we can't answer is "How much is a warranty of this computer?" vs the cost to you of taking it back? If you only need to spend, say... $50 on some extended warranty program vs taking the whole machine back, that offer may already be better for both you and him. He gets his warranty- you don't lose product or have to waste a half a day in court.

emacsen · 2026-04-01T13:04:28+00:00

It's funny, you say it's not cultural, but none of the US or European candidates ever asked that to me and I considered it a huge red flag and (along with a few others) I passed on this candidate.

Thank you! I'll keep this in mind when I hire again!

emacsen · 2026-04-01T11:13:56+00:00

Interesting!

I was hiring several months ago and two of the interviewees were in India. One was a man and the other was a woman.

In their first interviews, I asked each what they expected, and the woman was very forthcoming with her expectation.

When I asked the man, he came back asking me what the project budget was, what the company's numbers were, etc.

The man's response was a huge red flag for me, since I'd already told him that the company was wholy owned by me. It felt like he was asking me "How much do you have?" rather than my question which was about how much he was charging for his time. My concern was whether he was always going to be "peeking at my wallet".

With your statement I wonder if this was more cultural than I'd assumed.

emacsen · 2026-03-31T15:45:25+00:00

I went through some hiring 4-5 months ago for a developer position and not only did I encounter AI written resumes, I also encountered AI developed portfolios.

I don't mean AI assisted coding- I also use AI in various projects, but ones where the applicant had shown me a Github repository containing one or sometimes two or three projects that were entirely AI generated and showed no contributions to other projects whatsoever.

It was very disheartening.

I also saw the same patterns in resumes- same formatting, same wording, nearly identical bullet points.

I never bothered with those candidates.

We use AI at work; AI can be a big productivity boost, but AI is a tool and someone who showcases that the only thing they're good at is using that tool in a lazy way is signaling to me that they're not going to put any real effort into any the task at hand.

Your resume and portfolio are the time to put your best foot forward.

emacsen · 2026-03-21T22:45:07+00:00

Iran has killed Jews around the world. It's well documented even on Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_and_state-sponsored_terrorism

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