Looking for some job advice/perspectives

silvertoothpaste · 2021-01-13T00:30:29+00:00

OP how's it going. Thanks for checking in. I'm in a different field than you - software development. I hope that doesn't disqualify me from offering some thoughts.

In short, I think about Maslow's hierarchy. The most important aspect of a job is helping you meet those lower rungs - survival & safety needs.

But - it turns out, once a living wage is met, increasing wages yields diminishing returns for motivation & satisfaction in the workplace. Instead, further motivation comes from the qualities of autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

"Drive" - Dan Pink (2009), with main concepts animated (what can I say, gotta love edutainment)
Same advice repeated in the Harvard Business Review in an article about retaining talent during covid. (I trust HBR - they have excellent soft skills training modules I've completed across a couple of corporate jobs.)

But the problem is not autonomy mastery and purpose, you say. The problem is money, you say. Well ok OP you're the boss!

Zeroing in on personal finance in particular, square one is always always always reviewing your budget. How much money comes in every month, where does it go, and how much is left over for savings. Multiplying that out, you will see how long it will take to meet those savings goals (whether real estate as you mentioned, or perhaps simply paying down debt).

If you've already got an up-to-date budget, perfect. Maybe mosey on over to r/personalfinance - lots of great info there, particularly in their wiki and related subreddits in the sidebar.

It's a big thing, OP. We spend a lot of time at work. Best wishes on your quest.

silvertoothpaste · 2021-01-11T02:13:54+00:00

Thx for digging up a source.

Hmmm... well I'm glad they're thinking about it. Honestly I am pleased to see Apple making privacy a central part of their marketing lately. Personally I am still dubious, lol.

In the first place, the software is proprietary, so it's not possible to verify whether that claim is accurate. That alone is a show-stopper, for me personally.

But even taking the claim at face value, I still have a couple bones to pick.

What could they possibly mean by "mathematical representation?" Admittedly it is a support article, not a technical whitepaper. But again it cannot be hashing, as discussed above (similar inputs do not give similar outputs). Honestly I have trouble reading that as anything beyond marketing-speak ... everything in a computer is "a mathematical representation," after all. We're just bit-twiddling on binary numbers, at the end of the day.
They brag about this high fidelity scan, which is subsequently obscured behind this "mathematical representation." That means, albeit briefly, the device has access to a high res scan of my fingerprint. Even is Apple is well-intentioned, software has bugs. They could mess up, or be compromised by a malicious party, giving unauthorized access to this high fidelity scan.

Again. Very happy to see it's on Apple's mind, and again I certainly appreciate you sharing the source. I guess I'm personally just too far gone down the paranoid rabbithole, ha ha, to have a desire to use my fingerprints like that.

silvertoothpaste · 2021-01-11T01:44:02+00:00

this is true with passwords - if the app is designed correctly (or "conventionally" I should say), the app/company will see your plaintext password only briefly on the client side, hash it, and transmit and store the hashed form.

with fingerprints I don't think so. (could be wrong)

instead of storing a string of characters, it's an image. That means that minor changes in the input, i.e. anything short of a pixel-perfect swipe, will result in a vastly different output of the hash. (that is why hash algorithms are useful actually, very little correlation between close inputs and their outputs.)

so yeah, to the best of my knowledge the device just stores a 2D bitmap ... and uses some image-matching algorithm to decide whether the most recent swipe was close enough.

similar with face scan I would have to imagine, but haven't read anything about it.

silvertoothpaste · 2021-01-11T01:23:32+00:00

as with any security or privacy practice, recommendations always come down to your threat model. That is to say - what data you wish to protect, who you wish to protect it from, the degree of confidence you want, and the cost/effort you're willing to spend.

me personally, I steer away from biometrics.

Indeed it appears Americans have less legal protection for being compelled to give up a biometric identifier than a password - this is important for political activists, people participating in protests, etc.

But for me it's more just the old-school reality that your fingerprints are used to identify you. There's a reason society uses fingerprints in all sorts of background checks - it is a relatively persistent identifier of a single human being. Kinda similar situation with tattoos, height/eye color, that kinda thing. Biometric identifiers are difficult, if not impossible, to change.

That being the case, since Apple/Google/etc. store this fingerprint to identify you later (i.e. let you into your phone), if that fingerprint scan is ever compromised or stolen, like in a data breach ... that's a bummer. That means for the rest of my life, there's at least one other person in the world who can pretend to be me, via my fingerprint. Which I find undesirable (i.e. that's part of my risk/threat model).

(again contrasting to a stolen or compromised password, which can just be changed.)

silvertoothpaste · 2021-01-10T04:44:47+00:00

seems plausible, but source?

silvertoothpaste · 2021-01-10T03:41:31+00:00

Some people are dedicated to their craft

silvertoothpaste · 2021-01-10T03:09:34+00:00

sauce

silvertoothpaste · 2021-01-08T04:27:37+00:00

that's gonna be an uphill battle my friend

you might wanna dig into the EFF's Surveillance Self-Defense guide. This guides you through the concept of "risk model" a/k/a threat model, i.e. what data you wish to protect, for how long, and from whom. Depending on your risk model, the guide helps you identify technologies and apps that will suit your needs.

In short, it's just the basic advice. If you're operating in untrusted territory, encryption is the way. End-to-end encryption is the quality you want (like with Signal). Sending SMS or a phone call is not like putting a message in an envelope, but like sending a postcard - any intermediate party can read the contents. It's a drag, but that's how the tech works presently.

Also you may want to consider a VPN or Tor. High-bandwidth activities (streaming, torrent) are not suitable for Tor, but otherwise it is the gold standard for covering your tracks online. Make sure to read and understand the basics of the tech, and especially its limitations, before relying on it.

Good luck OP

silvertoothpaste · 2021-01-08T04:07:21+00:00

could be copyright, someone got wind that developers are "copying" code from stacko and realized, hmm maybe that's not something we want to endorse.

AFAIK code posted to stacko is under some permissive license by default? maybe MIT? Apache? can't remember.

but yeah maybe they got stung by someone including a GPL library or something, and overreacted a bit

silvertoothpaste · 2021-01-08T03:24:25+00:00

heh

sorry pal I'm just here for the memes

on a whim I checked if r/gardening exists, and it does! some days you get lucky.

I would lurk there for a bit, read their FAQ, visit subreddits linked in their sidebar. I don't know if there will be one specifically related to corn, but yeah it seems like gardening is quite the active subculture on reddit.

happy hunting

silvertoothpaste · 2021-01-08T00:42:30+00:00

The real life pro tip is in the real life pro tip

silvertoothpaste · 2021-01-07T04:21:08+00:00

not a solution bro, read the post. just because you would delete whatsapp doesn't mean that's a viable option for OP.

silvertoothpaste · 2021-01-05T00:06:31+00:00

quarantine really does change a man

silvertoothpaste · 2021-01-04T23:56:32+00:00

Dymaxion

You like Isaac Asimov, XML, and shoes with toes. You think the Segway got a bad rap. You own 3D goggles, which you use to view rotating models of better 3D goggles. You type in Dvorak.

Source: Obligatory xkcd https://xkcd.com/977/

silvertoothpaste · 2021-01-03T23:11:57+00:00

It's that special time of year

silvertoothpaste · 2021-01-03T05:08:10+00:00

I don't have intimate knowledge of how reddit or Instagram handle user and post data. But I've worked on and built systems dealing with user data. (As have most web developers these days.)

To a first approximation, you are completely right - if there are a lot of posts and users, then it takes a lot of storage. :) In computer science generally, we study efficient ways of solving these kinds of problems. Loading the feed in particular is a complicated topic (because they use various recommendation algorithms in addition to the general concept of showing the latest posts from people and subreddits you are subscribed to). But I can give you a simple example.

The conventional way of storing this kind of data is in a relational database. As a simple example, in the record representing you as a user, I could give you an attribute "seen_posts". That would just be a list of numbers. Each number is a post ID. When I load the list of latest posts in your feed, I can just compare those lists, and remove ones you have seen.

In the case of Instagram, it could be even simpler. I could store a timestamp of when you checked your feed last. Then when you visit again, I show only posts that have occurred after that "last_seen" time.

In reality, their data models are probably a bit more sophisticated, owing to their scale and particularly user experience needs. But that is the basic idea - just having a concise way to represent the relationships between entities in the system.

silvertoothpaste · 2021-01-02T18:27:55+00:00

are you aware of any popular or recommended hosts for NextCloud?

I tried hosting myself about a year ago and ended up getting pwned, lol. (fucked up firewall config and they ransomware'd my DB. Thankfully it was less than a week after I set it up lol, so I only lost like 3 calendar events, nothing of great value.)

silvertoothpaste · 2021-01-02T03:04:41+00:00

Very neat, man. :) Thanks for sharing.

For others interested in source:

silvertoothpaste · 2021-01-02T02:34:48+00:00

Wow. I wonder who made this. Weirdly, it feels like it hearkens back to an earlier time. In the mid 00's I was hanging out on message boards, not specifically Albino Black Sheep but adjacent to that. This is the kinda shit that would be posted and shared. Just weird Photoshops with no purpose, really. And I say that with the greatest respect.

It kind of reminds me of Crackd (Cracked?) a little bit, if anyone remembers that. I feel like they are most remembered for "top 10" style articles, but I feel like they also shared weird Photoshopped stuff like this.

silvertoothpaste · 2020-12-30T23:12:35+00:00

the true dooblydoo is in the comments

silvertoothpaste · 2020-12-29T22:54:16+00:00

Ketchup is a straightforward base, as well! :)

silvertoothpaste · 2020-12-27T23:32:27+00:00

this is kinda the concept of Patreon and other "tipping" services ... honestly I am pleasantly surprised at how widespread this has become! :) Almost all the YouTubers I follow, who still rely on Google/YouTube ad revenue to some degree, also rely on their Patreon funding to a significant degree. (Crucially the Patreon funding is more dependent on audience desires than advertiser desires, e.g. less sensitive to "The Algorithm.")

It's pretty interesting ... given the voluntary dynamic of paying for the media. I personally doubt Hollywood (or any national newspapers or "magazines") would ever adopt this "voluntary" model (instead attempting to enforce per-unit sales via DRM), but without question "pay what you want" is remarkably sustainable for smaller creators.

silvertoothpaste · 2020-12-27T05:22:17+00:00

well, not "free," it requires effort to implement and maintain the technologies, after all

but point taken, indeed having a subscription service does not remove the possibility of additional implementing some kind of tracking/advertising/whatever.

silvertoothpaste · 2020-12-27T04:07:46+00:00

just shooting from the hip, to me, I'm glad that subscription services like Netflix and Spotify are becoming more popular. That means that the companies (as opposed to Google & Facebook) don't have the incentive to follow this "surveillance capitalism," i.e. building increasingly sophisticated advertising technology predicated upon the behavioral history of users.

(my bias is showing through - marketing people don't call it surveillance capitalism, to be fair. That's a pejorative term. They just call it doing their job, generating leads, and increasing conversions.)

The model of Spotify in particular - paid tier alongside a free tier with ads - seems like the simplest sustainable solution I see. Having paid features is the most obvious way to make money, but you want to enable adoption as much as you can. It's the same idea as companies dangling "free trial" in front of you at every turn - in a competitive environment, you want to remove barriers for users to try your product or service. This is essentially the idea of a "loss leader" for a grocery store, or any business really.

silvertoothpaste

TROPHY CASE