_lacroix

Yes but what do you expect from the people who brought the world Google+? Google prints money in so many ways they should just stop trying to get into the social media game at this point. Stick to search, ads, email, cloud services, hardware, etc etc etc...

Yes! They're the computer equivalent of buying a water filter for your kitchen sink or a dimmer switch for your bedroom. No point in redoing the plumbing or rewiring the entire house but you can throw one tiny cheap appliance in there and solve a single discrete problem pretty quickly.

Hah, what a strange dystopia we live in where it's impossible to stop your LIGHTBULBS from tracking you via the internet!! I'm a total curmudgeon about smart home stuff, I don't want any of it beyond a TV in my house if I can help it. It freaks me out seeing people with no technical knowledge outfit their entire home with Nest/Ring/Google Home/Echo/Phillips Hue and even smart refrigerators, while they know virtually nothing about how much privacy they've just relinquished to these companies and they don't have the technical skills to even attempt to mitigate it. I feel like a paranoid doctor who's starting to notice the damage done by cigarettes while the general public is still blissfully puffing away...

You can set up DNS over https with pi-hole btw, I did that for mine. It's definitely not the only way to achieve this kind of ad blocking but if you're like me and have several old raspberry pi's laying around from abandoned projects then it's a nice way to put one to good use.

Yes!! I was so grossed out by all the logs from my Smart TV. I'm embarrassed to say that I worked in ad tech (as an engineer) for years but I still didn't fully comprehend how pervasive that kind of tracking is in literally every environment.

Setting up a pi-hole DNS server for my wifi network was one of the best decisions I've ever made. Horrifying to see what percentage of traffic is on the ad server blacklist though...

Obviously this isn't an ideal solution but I wonder if this might be an opportunity for the people with means to pay for a babysitter (but not necessarily a private teacher) to hire some of the 2020 college grads who aren't going to find a job any time soon as daily tutors/online school facilitators for their kids? There are going to be tons of educated young adults out of work in the coming year and given their lack of experience they'll be less expensive than hiring an actual teacher, but they may be able to provide enough feedback and structure to give the kids a better quality online education. I don't have kids though so I don't really have a dog in this fight, just an idea. I used to enjoy babysitting back in the day and I would have loved an "academic babysitting" job like this when I first graduated.

I used to work in a client facing role for enterprise software before I got into programming. The ability to stay cool and override nerves with sheer adrenaline that I developed by attending high pressure client meetings is 1000x more helpful to me in technical interviews than any leetcode practice problems. If you have the basic technical knowledge and problem solving skills then 99% of the interview is just staying calm enough to use them properly without coming off like a nervous mess. Much easier said than done, I know.

What do you mean? They should be judged on whether or not they have something that they should not necessarily be judged for NOT having? That doesn't make any sense. But yes I'm in favor of take home challenges as well. I know a lot of people hate them but it's the best way to get an idea of how someone will work under normal constraints (i.e. not during a timed hackerrank exercise).

Also, a principal engineer is more likely to be older and have a family and other commitments outside of work. They're therefore less likely to be able to spend all their free time working on side projects or contributing to open source. If you have a robust github profile with lots of contributions that's great, especially for a junior, but I dislike this expectation that candidates should be judged on whether or not they spend their free time coding outside of work. When I get home I want to log off and spend time with my friends and family, get outdoors, exercise, cook, read, participate in other hobbies etc etc. Not all of us are 22-year-old startup kids whose lifestyle consists of work-party-code 24/7 - and that's okay (no shade to those kids, I used to be one but I'm old and boring now...and a much better engineer). Nobody judges lawyers on how many case briefs they read in their free time or asks doctors to spend the weekends treating their friends and family for minor ailments. It's silly.

How does anybody tolerate that kind of work environment? Maybe I'm weak but no amount of money could compensate for that kind of stress and misery IMO. I work for a well-known company that's below FAANG tier but is basically the anti-Netflix. It's just so freaking NICE that I never want to leave even though my salary is slightly below market. I never feel guilty taking time off, employees are encouraged to take sick days which are unlimited and don't count towards PTO, people are out of the office at 6 on the dot, benefits are some of the most generous I've ever seen, and almost everyone is just straight up kind and supportive to one another. Even for things like on call schedules it's understood that it's universally unpleasant but everyone handles it with a positive "we're all in this together" attitude. It sounds corny but these things really do make a great workplace. There are a few people who seem to be institutional dead weight because it's not easy to get fired, but dealing with a few underperformers is a small price to pay to feel happy and relaxed at work every day and live life without perpetual fear of the hammer. Thanks for this reminder that the money is always greener on the other side!

Do you find that you tend to get sucked into to ANYTHING in your life? Content, substances, activities? I find that I have a very addictive personality across the board - once something feels good it's very hard to stop even when I consciously want to or it's making me feel bad. This happens to me with social media, TV, alcohol, drugs, and occasionally even reading or a new hobby I'm really into. Rather than the ability to delay gratification, I'd imagine social media consumption is correlated to whatever it is about the brain's dopamine pathways that leads some people to get addicted to things more easily than others.

At this point I consider both reading and TV, and especially movies because they don't encourage bingeing, more worthwhile than internet use of any kind - mainly because they require sustained concentration and don't encourage the tab-jumping, notification-checking, infinite-scrolling content addiction that I feel myself falling into when I'm on the internet. There's something to be said for sustained focus on one piece of content, even if that content is Love Island.

Very true. Based on personal experience I'm convinced that the female/female divorce rate is so much higher not because women have worse relationships with other women but because women have a tendency to rush into "serious" relationships that ultimately don't last. This would certainly lead to a different dynamic than you see on Grindr. The lesbian dating style is very much:

1. meet girl you like

2. almost immediately become exclusive

3. date "seriously" for several months, effectively skipping the early phase of the relationship where straight couples tend to play mind games or continue casually dating other people

4. break up

5. repeat

My gay male friends tend to casually sleep around a TON until eventually settling into a very serious long-term relationship, while straight couples are somewhere in the middle and have a much longer casual dating phase before making relationships official (at which point the relationship is more likely to last). When you take men out of the dating equation, the vast majority of women become serial daters who hop from one semi-serious semi-long-term relationship to another. It makes sense that a number of those couples would get married and then quickly get divorced before an equivalent straight or gay male couple would even get married in the first place.

It's actually quite interesting to observe these dynamics IRL; makes me feel a bit like a dating anthropologist.