mwill

Funnily enough, if you go to the FAQ, under the heading "Can I opt out of having my information on The Work Number?" it straight up starts with "No.", full stop and all.

These conservative groups aren't pressuring Steam and Itch directly, they're targeting payment processors.

I don't think it's realistically viable to compete with Steam (or Itch) without access to Mastercard and Visa.

(For anyone thinking crypto: we have a different idea of what it means to be either "realistically viable" or to "compete with Steam")

I see multiple comments arguing that using a CAD package is only easier and faster if you already know how to use a CAD package, and this is a 'better' UI for people who don't have those skills....but in that scenario, are you not then just trading the fixed upfront time investment to learn the basics of CAD, for ongoing inefficiency and difficulty every time you want to model something?

For a user of a UI like this, there comes a point where their time would have been better spent learning a CAD package.

Another layer is if you are modelling something that has to be machined or built in real life, you have to be keeping an eye on how it will physically exist throughout the entire process, stock it will be machined from or materials it will be built with. Thinking in terms of CAD workflows help with this greatly in my experience. The operations shown in the demo are not only easier to perform in a CAD package than describe in English to an LLM, but also the easiest part of it (except maybe if you are designing strictly for 3D printing)

I don't think it's meant to be a literal bento, the page shows photos with bolts and markers.

The judge could take it into account as a sign of contrition, and you save on legal fees?

Can't comment on the bluesky aspect, but you've touched on my frustration with ActivityPub. When people were migrating to Mastodon, I took a look at making a single-user instance that would suit my personal needs and gracefully interact with the wider ecosystem and found that in my case the capabilities of ActivityPub are irrelevant, you are tied to the Mastodon teams choices.

Felt very much like in practice it just gives you tools to make mostly-insular federated apps, rather than letting different apps interact.

Which is incredibly annoying, as it used to scroll you to the latest tweets, I have years of muscle memory for hitting the home button

Off topic, but I clicked around /g/, which I haven't done in probably more than a decade, and a thread caught my eye about learning to code. The replies were overwhelmingly of the position that it is useless, and you will be replaced by AI before you can get a job if you start learning now.

I think that's nonsense, and 4chan is bent towards pessimism but it's still surprising to me.

This would have false positives for some accessibility software, I believe

It makes no sense when you frame it that way of course haha, but it's only possible to look at it that way now that we've been working for them for several years.

When I started raising prices, taking a medium/large sized job from them was an huge risk. If I hadn't started hiking the prices when I did, We probably would have folded later that year when we did a much larger job for them, if I hadn't been stockpiling the extra cash from their smaller jobs.

It was an enormous existential risk early on when I had less capital to play with, now in a weird way I can look at it how you say: The company is loaning itself 50% to make 100% later.

That said, fair's fair so I'd still honor the offer if they asked: I don't/can't quote other clients that much, so if they wanted to pay on reasonable terms I would charge them reasonable prices.

Yeah thankfully we can swing it, but we've actually turned down some work for other clients here and there because I've done the math and figured there was too much overlap/risk with this particular clients jobs.

I'm pretty confident on their soundness, they're publicly traded and I check up on clients lodgings when I can, to manage my exposure, they claim to be sitting on $400M in cash and $200M in minerals as of a few months ago.

Option 2 seems plausible, a couple years ago they had a bit of internal politics that we were caught in the middle of, the end result was changing the engineering requirements going forward over purely cosmetic issues, doubling the price of materials. One particular job we did in 2019 for $30k, was $150k in 2022, for the same exact end result for the workers, at the same site, right next to the previous one. The site manager complained, and I said if he got it in writing that they wanted to use the old engineering and disregard the cosmetics, it'd be $30k and take 2 days less, and he said they needed it done ASAP, it'd be faster to convince capex to pay the $150k than it would be to start another round of discussions on the engineering.

Relating to cash flow and payment terms, my company (outside of tech) has a particularly large client (rev >$2B AUD, 10k employees worldwide) that has us on 45 days EOM, but accounts team won't accept an invoice without a ref#, which are given by the "receipting team" after site confirms work is completed

The mysterious "receipting team" is not in the main office, and has no phone number or even names listed, emails are never directly replied to, instead site contacts will call to relay questions/answers from them, ref# come from an automated do-not-reply email. They will quite often be "backlogged" and fail to send a ref# before the the end of the month, and suddenly will be cleared up on the 1st of the month.

We've had jobs that finished in the first week of a month, been ignored for 25 days, received a ref# with an apology for the delay on the 1st of the following month, get paid 45 days end of that month. So up to 100 days from completing work to getting paid. All our accounts are POS, 7 days EOM, or 30 days EOM, and must be paid on time or we lose supply. So to do a job with $100k of materials and wages for them, we have to have $100k spare cash for up to 60-100 days

It's not a cashflow problem, they're sitting on reserves and we're a blip on their radar, less than 1/10th of a percent of their outgoings

So we quote them outrageously high, and they never blink. I've told them some jobs would be up to 50% less if they paid quicker, and they've outright said they'd rather hold the cash and pay more. For a sense of scale we've invoiced them about $500k a year for the last few years, they've told me to clear out a couple weeks for two jobs that are nearly that much each, in February and April this year. I can't figure out who's getting the bad deal, them or me, I keep assuming they must have some massive upside I'm not seeing ¯\_(ツ)_/¯