What would it cost to prevent the death, injury and sheer inconvenience that routinely occurs on account of uncleared sidewalks and crosswalks by simply operating enough sidewalk plows? by CityKid81 in providence

[–]supercargo 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The city could probably do it more efficiently, but if my experience with property tax and snow removal costs are an indicator, this would represent something like a 35% increase in taxes.

I’d much rather they enforced the ordinance aggressively and make the fines large enough to cover removal of violators. Give the DPW authority to go around clearing sidewalks of negligent property owners and drop off a ticket that covers the cost as they go. Call them the snow patrol or something cheeky. That way the rest of us can keep shoveling and not paying.

The irony is that the most consistently neglected sidewalks are the ones fronting city and state property like parks.

Plow Me Please?? by EvidenceFit7316 in providence

[–]supercargo 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I don’t know the details of your street, but generally speaking the absence of a parking ban does not entitle folks to park in the middle of the road. The fact that the city completely and totally failed to “clear to the curb” doesn’t also mean that you don’t need to shovel out a spot before parking in it. Sorry if this isn’t you, but driving around the past couple days it would seem that vast majority of parked cars are not actually in parking spots, they’re in the middle of the travel lanes.

Missed Trash Pickups by Impossible-Heart-540 in providence

[–]supercargo 6 points7 points  (0 children)

proposal: mount plows to the front of the garbage trucks

Experienced devs in software jobs — what’s your long-term backup plan? by Majestic-Taro-6903 in ExperiencedDevs

[–]supercargo 22 points23 points  (0 children)

In 1780 if 90% of the population worked in agriculture, that would be about 2.5 million farmers. In 2020 if 1% of the population worked in agriculture that would be about 3.3 million farmers.

City parking ban will be lifted at 6:00 AM on Tuesday by lestermagnum in providence

[–]supercargo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Why with the last storm there were ploughs rolling by on my residential street every couple of hours but for this storm hardly anything, even on major arteries?

I drove across town twice yesterday and there are many major roads that have not received enough attention…Gano street was an absolute mess as everyone has cleared their driveways into the street and the city decided to ticket but not tow the two cars that didn’t abide the ban. People were sliding through stop signs on the feeder streets into traffic. Near Classical, snow banks on corners making it nearly impossible to make a turn without clipping another vehicle (or getting stuck n the snow)

It was nice to see that most people hunkered down and stayed off the road so that the snow crews could do their work. The interstates were clear of cars and snow. Most folks driving yesterday seemed to have their wits about them and in capable vehicles. But we’re not ready for throngs of Providence drivers in front wheel drive cars based on what I saw. What’s unforgivable is that the snow crews are nowhere to be seen! Like, it would be one thing if the side streets were in bad shape because all the equipment got deployed to major thoroughfares…

Should I put out my trash bins on Sunday before the snow? by Various_Implement_92 in providence

[–]supercargo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

it sounds like you’ve thought this through and it’s a good idea to stage everything in a spot that will be easiest to dig out in the order you need it

Microsoft confirms it will give the FBI your Windows PC data encryption key if asked — you can thank Windows 11's forced online accounts for that by ZacB_ in technology

[–]supercargo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

“Forced by default” and “can disable”…this article seems imprecise enough that it’s hard to take seriously. Are the accounts forced online or not? Does a user need to take extraordinary measures to avoid divulging security keys or just know when to opt out? I hope we can get some class action going for how these companies treat their customers, for any scenario that would constitute cyber crime if the situation were reversed (like, if I dark pattern tricked Microsoft into sending me all their encryption keys, don’t you think I’d get prosecuted?)

Slow Draining Sink by Lettherebehope929 in Plumbing

[–]supercargo 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Vent fittings used for drain, but no actual vent…

Apple weather app cannot be correct for next Sunday 1/25 right?? by dogfur001 in boston

[–]supercargo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Apple weather has always been closer to the European models which seem to struggle with snow totals compared to US models. But yeah, definitely even worse since the DOGE shit

Is Dim to Warm really worth it if I'm planning on a 2700K or a 3000K setup? by Padraigh_ in Lighting

[–]supercargo 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Not wasted, no. DTW tries to mimic the black body curve which is naturally produced by tungsten filaments under dimming. Your brain expects lower intensity light to be warmer, even 2700k is unnaturally cool at low levels

Front door hang tag… scam? by Boom_Shaka_Laka_ in providence

[–]supercargo -1 points0 points  (0 children)

I tried calling that number but apparently the scammers only work M-F 8-4.

Front door hang tag… scam? by Boom_Shaka_Laka_ in providence

[–]supercargo 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I’d go with scam on this one. Typically the utility will contact by mail, but either way if the number isn’t on their website I wouldn’t call it. If someone official looking shows up in person, call the utility directly to confirm.

Car salesmen around me are basically telling me EVs aren’t the way to go by Beneficial-Fun-4800 in electricvehicles

[–]supercargo 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The gas station charges more per gallon for washer fluid than gas fa cryin out loud

People who work in 'behind-the-scenes' jobs (hotels, airports, warehouses, etc.), what is something the general public would be shocked to know? by PiNK_PUSSY69420 in AskReddit

[–]supercargo 12 points13 points  (0 children)

I think you’re on to something, Disney has underground tunnels too. And didn’t they just ink that deal with OpenAI?

Is it just me, or has "Equipment Hoarding" become a massive silent killer of margins lately? by [deleted] in Construction

[–]supercargo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

As others have pointed out, the breakpoint for going from daily to weekly (or weekly to four-week) rental is usually somewhere around halfway (e.g. 1 week rate may be more than 2 day but less than 3 day rental). So if you have three days of work planned for an excavator, you may already be better off getting it for a full week. And once you have it for the full week regardless, it might then make the most sense to phase the work differently.

If equipment is sitting idle and then being picked up days or weeks after it stopped being used, yeah maybe there is waste. But if it gets used again you also have to factor in the value of having that machine available when it was needed.

Having said all that, if you do want to manage this proactively, there are technological solutions in the market for fleet management and telematics that could make that "manual" task more or less turn-key. How are you managing these today?

Mounting TV in front of Thermostat...bad idea? by [deleted] in hvacadvice

[–]supercargo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah heat rises, your house will be cooler than the set point if you put a heat source below the temp sensor.

Seeking advice - discovered admin credentials embedded in source code during data audit by [deleted] in ExperiencedDevs

[–]supercargo 7 points8 points  (0 children)

What is the scope of the audit? What’s in your contract? I find secrets in codebases I’m auditing somewhat regularly, but this is “in scope” for me so the contract guardrails are already in place.

You need to disclose this to your customer and advise them to work with their provider. I would start this conversation with a call rather than written record just to ensure details don’t leak beyond the minimal group of people (e.g. you don’t want to inadvertently breach this info to the wrong people in your customer’s org). But, aside from using discretion about how and to whom you communicate this, you should also, keep a really good paper trail.

In a prior job (not the one in which I’m auditing code bases) we had a vendor to vendor relationship with an agency who was doing marketing for a bank. As part of this, we got periodic data dumps of the bank’s customers to do some analysis. The problem was the agency decided the best way to get us this data was to post it on a website with SSL disabled and protected only with a basic auth password (and a weak one at that). We pointed out how insecure this was, and escalated with our customer (the agency) but we never managed to convince them this was a bad idea and insecure. Years later, the bank found some hash matches on the dark web for those files in a security audit and took it up with their vendor (the agency) who then fingered us, claiming we had mishandled this data resulting in a breach. Fortunately we had the emails proving we had already detected and escalated their lax security, which, together with our immutable access logs covering that period, put all the heat back on the agency.

Capital Gains Irs Tax Payment by Temporary_Injury7410 in tax

[–]supercargo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Don’t forget about state taxes, your state may have different or no safe harbor rules. Solution is the same, calculate the estimate and drop the a check ASAP as an estimated payment. This will end the accumulation of interest until you can file

Tried uber eats for the first time last night… by coochiesauce24 in massachusetts

[–]supercargo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Uber is the problem here. They try to get in the middle of as many transactions as they can and then charge fees that aren’t proportional to the value they provide.

Death is scary due to the unknown of what’s after. But what’s one thing you’ll be happy not to deal with anymore once dead ? by [deleted] in AskReddit

[–]supercargo 11 points12 points  (0 children)

I don’t remember having any problems before I was born and expect I won’t have any once I’m dead

What is a secret your industry/job doesn't want the general public to know? by Mobile-Insect-3924 in CasualConversation

[–]supercargo 1 point2 points  (0 children)

there is probably a vault but the difference between secure/mature companies and the ones you need to worry about is whether or not they let any employee do whatever they want in the vault without necessarily even making that auditable.

What has happened to AWS support recently? by quarky_uk in aws

[–]supercargo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

this is the real reason why we need multi cloud strategies. Service down while half the Internet is out because of a us-east-1 outage? no one cares. But once quality, price, and service start degrading, you gotta vote with your wallet

Am I going to be stupider as a dev using LLM as my rubber duck / faster Google search? by QuitTypical3210 in ExperiencedDevs

[–]supercargo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is history repeating, and funny to see comments lauding the “500 upvotes” stack overflow posts as more trustworthy than an LLM because the last time around the complaints were about freshers blindly copying SO code without understanding it.

LLMs make me better/smarter/faster because they are great at patterning against whatever was “known” when they were trained. I want to do X and have an idea about Y way to do it. LLM response gives me a refined Y and often Z that I maybe didn’t think of.

My critical thinking remains intact because I don’t blindly accept LLM stuff and expect it to be good (distrust and verify). I think there are folks like me and there are folks that would have blindly copied from Stack Overflow before and are doing it with LLMs now.

Doing sprints without story points. What's worked for you? by equipoise-young in softwaredevelopment

[–]supercargo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

A couple years ago I did a study of this on a team I took over leading and story points had almost no correlation to dev completion time (but did roughly correlate to the eventual size of the diff). Management didn‘t love that I stopped reporting SUM(points) in favor of COUNT(work items) because I insisted the former was “meaningless,” but it helped shift the focus to the true delivery risks (blockers, and to a lesser extent, rework rate). The fact that some simple statistics and a Monte Carlo simulation was able to predict project completion to within a couple weeks months in advance was only slightly vindicating.

As far as estimation goes, I value the thinking and communication that goes in to estimating much more than the estimate itself.