scintill76

If I can hijack the thread a bit for a related question -- does anyone know of an easy selfhosted non-macOS server that will periodically pull full backups from iOS devices over Wifi (with the user's authorization on-device)? I think there's a lot of FOSS ground work for doing it on Linux, but hard to find good information about how to put it all together into a reliable automated solution, and sadly I don't really have the energy right now or dozens of hours to put into it.

I might even pay ~$100. I want it on Linux, but if it's under my control and reliable, maybe I could do Windows or macOS. Maybe I should just install iTunes on Windows in a VM...

> Almost all fluoride from the drinking water does not have any effect on tooth enamel, because it has contact with it only for a few seconds

The contact via toothpaste or mouth wash isn’t all that much longer, so why would they be effective if fluoridated water isn’t? People intentionally wash out toothpaste and mouthwash after this short contact.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present the party of government efficiency, spending our money to scrub “Enola Gay” from the web.

It's your copy of the message. I'm not a lawyer, but I think if a copyright owner gives you a copy of their work, the law doesn't entitle them to take it back or rewrite it. A license agreement might, but nobody writes or signs those to cover text messages.

> BTW, I keep reading and hearing derogative terms like "script kiddies" and "20 year olds". What's happened to diversity and inclusion? So, they have to be of a certain age? What's the magical age? And, do they have to come from the same place that created the problems as well? This isn't sensible at all.

I don't support DOGE, but I have also wondered if all the roasting them for being young is fair. For now I landed on yes, it's a fair criticism -- these people are too young to be put in control of massive agencies that have been running for decades. If you believe they can make the right choice because it's so obvious, it seems like we may as well just fire everyone, and then we can save the time and expense of even having DOGE. It is not logical IMO to say that some discretion is needed but also unelected 20-year-olds have enough discretion.

Re "script kiddies": the term is a bit rude maybe. But given it means an unskilled programmer who is only barely able to use programs written by others, then yes, it is fair to criticize these DOGE people, whose primary qualification was supposedly being really smart programmers, if they don't appear to meet the mark. (I'm not taking a position on whether it's factual that they are unskilled, but simply whether a "script kiddie" belongs at a helm of the government.)

Regarding DEI, it does seem like DOGE might be more diverse than some people portray it, and not everyone is a 20-year-old. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/02/27/us/politics/d...

Regarding what's the right age, I think of Constitutional age limits and Congressional confirmations -- those are the ways we normally have to make sure people are old enough to work in the government. But the side that's been harping about "unelected bureaucrats" is now making the most powerful bureaucrats ever, not subject to election, legal qualifications, or Congressional oversight. Hmm.

> do they have to come from the same place that created the problems as well? This isn't sensible at all.

Well, no, but I have the impression the place they are coming from is "likes right-wing tech leaders like Elon Musk and has worked for them before." I'm not going to dig into investigating or presenting that now, but if it's true, then it's not sensible either. Even under a more charitable characterization of who they are, I don't think engineers, PMs, or MBAs are going to rapidly fix agencies that have been operating in a different sphere and scale. If they went at a more careful pace than DOGE has been doing, I might have more trust they would solve problems.

> suspected dead government workers

Suspected by Elon Musk, with no factual basis presented. Here's some real facts:

> ...22 of the 24 agencies covered by the Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990 (CFO Act) had some data on instances of time and attendance misconduct—including potential fraud—from fiscal years 2015 through 2019... Most (19 of 24) agency Inspectors General (IG) reported that they substantiated five or fewer allegations of time and attendance misconduct or fraud over the 5-year period. In total, these IGs substantiated 100 allegations, ranging from zero substantiated allegations at six agencies to more than 10 at four agencies.

No mention of fake dead workers.

https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-20-640.pdf

Do they think there is somebody out there making millions on fake federal paychecks? They should go find and prosecute them! Hopefully such a criminal is not smart enough to monitor the email accounts and respond, or DOGE's brilliant plan will be foiled.

These quotes support the existence of the emails, which people here aren't disputing. They say nothing about whether the only layoffs were those who didn't respond, which was implied by your original statement that "the people let go were unable or unwilling to send an email listing 5 things they accomplished in the last week."

I was incorrect, and you are right about the order of events in this case, although I don't believe TFA says these 18F employees didn't reply to the email. I noted in an edit that I accidentally pulled a quote from a different article. I believe the gist of what I and others are saying here is still true.

Some other points:

* The second email came "late Friday" and the layoffs happened hours later at 1 am on Saturday, so it's not reasonable to count the second email as a warning or genuine attempt to find the "good" employees. I'm guessing it was just blasted out and happened to land in their inboxes before the firing notice did.

* Based on https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/01/general-services-ad... it appears the entire 18F unit was cut, so this doesn't seem targeted or predicated on email responses. Also, I'm not a leader, but if 100% of my organization didn't comply with an order, cutting them all is probably a much less effective decision than trying to meet them half-way. I guess if they've truly been doing nothing for years, there would be no loss, but that seems unlikely to be true in most cases including 18F's.

* Your initial comment appeared to be speaking generally on DOGE cuts, so it is fair for us to be responding accordingly. 18F seems to have been pretty small, but part of the reason this story is interesting is everything else DOGE is doing. As we've said, plenty of cuts happened before and independent of any email. Personally I'm doubtful that responding does much, but I'd be interested in any reporting on employee's experiences or what DOGE is saying about responses and how it affects their decisions.

Like I said above, I don't think TFA mentioned 18F's responses and there's not really a good reason to assume that the layoffs were due to no response.

Well, why don’t you write your interpretation, and explain how that quote from TFA means that the email came before any layoffs.

TFA: “After thousands of government layoffs, the Office of Personnel Management on Saturday directed federal workers to email a list of roughly five accomplishments”

This email came AFTER thousands of layoffs!

You have implied every laid-off employee was given a chance to reply to the email and didn’t, which is contrary to TFA.

I had to Wikipedia the memorandum to even know what it was, but wasn't Obama president in 2014 when Russia first breached it? Asking honestly, was that not a crucial failure but Biden's response (or lack of one) in 2022 was crucial?

> the bureaucracy will struggle, writhe, and set fire to everything around it before it can be put down

Convenient way to blame "the bureaucracy" for every problem that DOGE creates. Are you open to the possibility that DOGE will cause more problems than it fixes?

Bringing up Palantir is funny to me. I don’t know enough gossip on Musk and Thiel’s relationship, but if I did I would bet it would solely determine the outcome of a hypothetical DOGE investigation into Palantir contracts. It seems from a sibling comment I’m not alone. If we’re right, DOGE isn’t going to eliminate government waste and corruption, just move it around.

We’re not gaslit into thinking everything was fine with government spending, we’re angry that this is how they’re going to “fix” it.

I’ve watched 2 Angela Collier videos on him albeit in the background — you’d probably have to watch the whole thing to truly understand the “bad rep” and I can’t speak to how widespread the bad rep is.

My memory is, misogyny, cringey stories that were surely greatly exaggerated and just happen to make Feynman the smartest guy in every room, kind of a jerk in general, divorce due to claimed domestic violence, never did the work of writing a book personally but has the reputation of being a prolific author, his pop appeal makes people elevate him to the very top minds of physics when the work of others was much more impactful.

> you can't blame him for not wanting to wait 2 years

I do blame him. What harm of 2 years of status quo could be greater than the risks of completely breaking safety organizations?

> Elon who has to get rid of underperformers without credible data

No, this is not a valid solution to the problem, if there even are significant performance problems. “We don’t know exactly who the problematic people are, so let’s just fire every probationary employee, you know the ones who haven’t even been around long enough to be chronic underperformers?”

It’s either a very foolish attempt to solve the problem, and/or he actually just wants to destroy government.

> the real blame for this is with the previous administrators who neglected this problem for years

Trump was in charge 5-9 years ago, does he get some blame too?

I believe fish shell solves this by inserting a visible "⏎" character at the end of the line and moving to the beginning of the next line for the prompt.

I’m not a lawyer, but I think he was sentenced already to serve no time. Unless prosecuted for something else, I think he’s in no danger of prison even if Dems come into power soon.

> I started using Linux because I liked stability.

> I believe that part of the problem is that it is written in C,

You know the Linux kernel, and probably most of your userspace, are also written in C? Why do you say systemd is a disaster solely based on its use of the C language but seem to be believe the rest of "Linux" is stable despite also using C?

I mean, there could be some argument here about everything systemd does actually being harder than a kernel's job... but you didn't say that.

I'm on the C-hate bandwagon as much as anyone else, but it doesn't make sense. I have mixed feelings about systemd though.

I assume spies in a warzone are often captured/killed without court-admissible evidence. The existence of facial recognition SW probably doesn't change that.

I understand some economists theorize that small steady inflation is necessary for a healthy economy. If that’s true, Congress shouldn’t be contravening it for their own sake against the greater good of everyone else in the country. Anyway, like sibling commenter says, their other sources of income probably dwarf government pay.

Having no other information, the fact he went out of his way to associate it with Biden makes it seem actually politically driven by Trump/Republicans.

It must be so that you’ll pass by other people and might have serendipitous conversations that lead to increased knowledge and synergy. /s Also among the claimed benefits of working in office.

I don’t think this captures it all. The “observation” was also about whether they would change the world. They strongly implied they wouldn’t, then did anyway.

I agree it's not specific to MS. But MS was probably inducing much more demand and thereby making them eat more fees than they planned to. (I don't have any inside information though.) Adding a premium would make it a little less attractive to MSers.

I believe in some cases there was no premium at all, not even shipping, so widespread manufactured spending was losing the Mint much more money than they were prepared for when they started the program.

I don’t know Rust, but I would think/hope you could wrap those control flow calls in some way, so those particular null pointer accesses do what you want, but other accidental ones are caught and safely handled (e.g. resetting the system to a safe state.)

Funny, the sequence I learned somehow is Alt-Space, down arrow, Enter (this selects Move), tap any arrow key. Now the window follows your cursor until you click. I'll try X next time.

If you're saying C++ won't automatically save you from design mistakes, then I agree. This is a poorly-specified function. The caller can't know exactly how they need to handle the returned pointer.

Potential solutions:

* Return std::string and eat the cost of sometimes copying interned strings

* std::string with your own allocator could probably deal with the two cases fairly cheaply and transparently to the caller

* overload an operator<< or similar and put your conversion result directly into a stream, rather than a buffer that then goes into a stream

* put your generated values in a container that can keep pointers into it valid under all the operations you do on it (I think STL sets would work), keep them there for the rest of the lifetime of the program, and return your pointers to them (or to the interned constant strings)

I think many of these could be termed RAII, so I lean toward the idea in this subthread that RAII and other C++ idioms will help you stay safe, if you use them.

P.S. The function is also not safe if called by multiple threads concurrently. Maybe thread-local storage could be an easy fix for that part, but the other solutions should fix it too. [But if you have any shared storage that caches the generated values such as the last solution, it needs to be protected from concurrency.]

With TPS they are permitted to remain, so calling them "illegally in the country" is incorrect.

Perhaps you genuinely want to clarify that these "legal migrants" (per grandparent post) are not permanent residents, but it's not a very meaningful distinction here[1], so your post comes off as trying to blur the lines in order to benefit right-wing talking points wherein they are termed "illegal" in order to dismiss their rights and evoke xenophobia.

[1] The grandparent post was decrying those who would deport them despite their current permission to stay. The fact that their status could/will change in 2026 (the current Haitian TPS deadline) isn't relevant to whether they deserve deportation today.

I’m amazed this problem isn’t fixed in every CMS, or at least publishing team processes, by now (the problem is that the link slug is generated from the first title and doesn’t update when the title is updated.)