tristor

So the short version of this is:

1. Checkbox compliance

2. Insurance

3. Access controls

4. Good luck

That's not cybersecurity, that's hopium in vain.

I'm unsure on current models, but historically the best bet (and what I did last in 2023) was to purchase a TV from Costco, as Costco used to (and probably still does) mandate that SKUs they sell must be able to be operated in a non-connected state. I bought a 70" Sony 4K TV in 2023 and /only/ the Costco version provided this option, but on first power on you could select "Basic Display" or "Connected Experience", and after that unless you explicitly changed it that was set. It's never asked to connect to a network or done anything I can detect as nefarious since, and is used only via an HDMI connected appliance I use for streaming.

As one of the first customers of ProtonMail, this makes me really disappointed. Yen has clearly gone off the rails. This is a complete betrayal of the core principles he founded Proton on.

> There is no such thing as "failing" an IRS audit.

I consider being audited and the IRS finding corrections to prior returns as a "failure". Once I started doing things myself, I was audited and no corrections found (e.g. a "success"). In the case where I "failed" the audit, it had to do with how expenses were being handled by the accountant. At the time I was a contractor working on a 1099 and was tracking and submitting some business expenses for reimbursement, and some expenses were tracked and taken against my taxes but not reimbursed. What was filed did not align exactly with what was reimbursed, which caused an overstatement of deductions, causing me to owe back taxes. I am not making any claim that they committed fraud, as that's a crime which requires intent, I think they were just incompetent.

> The statement that the one time you used an accountant you got audited implies that you are confusing causation with correlation.

I actually didn't say that, I said the only time I got audited and failed was when I used an accountant, however I realize my style of writing made that unclear. During the time where I received income via a 1099 (and for part of that also had to file from a K-1 briefly for an LLC), I was audited three times in total. Only one time did I "fail", and it was the only time where I had professional assistance. In fact, I found the process of being audited surprisingly kind, the IRS folks involved were very professional and weren't mean about it at all. After my first experience being audited, even though I got the nasty surprise of owing back taxes, I was a lot less fearful of that process. That said, I have never had any understanding of how someone is chosen to be audited, but I have not been selected for an audit since moving to a W-2 for all of my income, which has been quite some time now. The experience of being audited did get me into the habit of storing all my tax related records carefully organized by year long-term, however, which I think is probably a good habit for everyone.

> You disparaging an entire industry without saying what type of tax preparer you used.

My intent isn't to disparage anyone, it's to share my own personal experience. I hired a CPA licensed in the state of Missouri (where I resided at the time) when I previously had a professional handle my taxes.

I have never wanted a touch screen on my laptop. I still don't. Who is this for?

I'm also 0 for 4 on tax preparers / tax accountants, so I concur with you its best to just do it yourself, which is what I now do. Only time I ever got audited (and failed) was when I had employed an accountant, since then I've never had a problem including passing audits. The tax code isn't /that/ complicated for most people's situation, and it's well worth understanding it.

I'm certainly working more now, but in a lot of ways it's to try to stay on top of the sheer amount of bullshit that's being generated within the organization and ensuring that we actually deliver what we promised to our customers. As the famous proverb says "A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes." and AI is basically a lying-machine.

The amount of critical strategic decisions about everything from product/technical architecture, to roadmap, to UX, that people are basically slopping together at this point in time is shocking. By using AI tools, they are completely divorcing any form of thinking from the decision process, and regressing to an uninspired average which is often not fit for purpose. Fighting the absolute torrent of slop is beyond a full-time job, and unfortunately it's a losing battle. I am not concerned with losing my job because of AI being too good at what I do, I'm concerned with losing my job because AI cripples the economy by producing too much bullshit.

> How about they just don't treat their workers in the Global South as lesser than ones in rich countries, for starters?

When you say "lesser", isn't this just a question of regional pay disparity? Are you saying companies should be obligated to pay the same compensation in every region? Do you know how badly that would destroy the economies in the Global South?

Wow, the maximum salary in the range posted there is 6 Lakhs per year (LPA), which is roughly equivalent to $528 USD a month. So the HIGHEST paid developer is making only $528 USD a month. That's insane. The average salary in Bangalore for a software dev is around 12 LPA, and is often as much as 30 LPA. They're topping out at half of the average. Many Western companies pay >100LPA (equiv to $100k/yr USD) in Bangalore. For reference, eMudhra is headquartered in Bangalore. This isn't just low by international standards, this is very low pay by local standards.

True, but the founder's two sons are at the top of the company, so mission was accomplished regardless.

Really though, this is no different than people relying on accountancy firms in the rest of the world for "trust" and "security" as technology concepts. Accountancy firms have no business consulting on technology topics, and yet that is a major part of their business all over the world, because we've allowed "security" and "compliance" to become muddled concepts.

> I don't think people would choose to fix toilets to survive if they didn't have to

If I hadn't gone into tech, I might have been a plumber. Plumbing is a deeply interesting topic, and it involves a lot of physics and fluid dynamics. Acting like a plumber is a desperate idiot with a wrench is not an accurate take, and is really rude. Also, Master Plumbers who operate their own businesses generally make >$150k/yr.

> I think it's probably a pretty prosocial thing to do, unless I'm missing something

Agreed. I'm in South Texas where we have Aedes mosquitoes that are an invasive species and spread Malaria, Dengue, Zika, and other infections which kill people. I consider disrupting their lifecycle to be an unvarnished good. I carry mosquito dunks in my pocket when I go on walks and toss them into any puddles, drains, storm sewers, and ponds I encounter, and it seems to have helped a lot anecdotally. I care a lot about nature/ecology, but also fuck mosquitoes.

Yes, it's safe to do with lithium ion batteries as long as you use the right potting compound (potting compound isn't just one thing). There are compound specifically designed for battery encapsulation that assist with thermal management and preventing ruptures. As the person you're replying to has already stated, using potting compound to fill in cavities and discourage tampering on electronics is a standard practice.

Depending on your design requirements you can also use different battery chemistries or cell constructions to minimize the need for mechanical venting.

The attack was sophisticated, but Ledger appears to have taken almost zero precautions against hardware attacks, which made this attack simpler and cheaper to pull off. There are very few precautions that would have completely eliminated the possibility of this attack, but it would have been straightforward to make it more expensive, primarily by investing in tamper proofing and tamper evident design. There are several other comments in this thread that go into fair detail about some examples of these techniques.

The lack of security on these devices is shocking as someone who has worked in the hardware security space, but I guess it shouldn't be surprising that this like everything else involving crypto is some sort of elaborate scam done by non-experts and bad actors.

I hate Amazon and I still shop there. It's not about price, I will pay more for a product to buy it directly and not via Amazon /if/ I can find an original. The issue for me is threefold:

1. Discoverability: Many products are so rapidly and thoroughly cloned that it is difficult to impossible to identify the original maker, find their site, and purchase through them. The insane proliferation of counterfeits, clones, and sometimes outright scam products means that Amazon at least gives me an opportunity to buy a clone/counterfeit and return it if its not meeting my expectations. Sometimes the original is notably higher quality but no longer produced/sold, as well. Recently I wanted to buy a Polar Magnetic Pen as a gift. The website is up and the shopping cart works, but checkout is disabled. They're out of stock everywhere. There's hundreds of random worded Chinese clones on Amazon that are 25% of the price and 30% of the quality, so I bought a clone and risked it.

2. Logistical Certainty: I work a lot and have little free time after basic households tasks, other than the weekends. So if I want to do a project or something, I plan it for a following weekend and order things. If I can't order on a Tuesday or Wednesday and /know/ that I will get it by Friday, it's basically pointless. Sometimes I'll just roll the dice, but generally I prefer logistical certainty. I actually have gone back to buying at brick and mortar stores if possible to really cement this (I use Best Buy now a lot more than in the past, although selection is poor). There's a few other online retailers I strictly prefer to Amazon that can also deliver this like B&H Photo.

3. Breadth of Catalog / Access: There's basically nothing I can't acquire via Amazon. If I need, let's say 6 things, to do some sort of hobby project my options are generally either: A) go to 2-4 different stores, either physically and waste a day of my life or online and hope the shipments all arrive in time or B) order on Amazon everything at once delivered as one.

These things are way more important than price. I still hate Amazon PRIMARILY because of commingling of SKUs meaning there's no real quality indicators and I cannot do anything as a consumer to ensure I receive legitimate, actual, quality products. If they hadn't fucked that up, I'd probably still like Amazon despite everything else. I used to love Amazon back in the day, now I hate it, because of how often I've received counterfeits and fraudulent products and the proliferation of Chinese dropshipper fly-by-nights.

Now I just want Flickr to support uploading JXL since I do JXL export as my primary long-term storage format for final images. Would be great if Canon also added JXL support to their photo printer software.

> "f/8 and be there"

This is why I love keeping an Olympus PEN-F w/ the Olympus BCL-15 f/8, which is a "body cap lens". It literally slides into my pocket even in tight jeans and gives me all you can expect out of a solid m4/3 camera with fixed aperture. It's not super-sharp, but so what, it's there and it captures interesting images. I really make an effort to only use my phone camera for taking pictures of receipts to submit to Concur, but I totally get the temptation, for those momentary snapshots a phone camera is so good these days, but since you like m4/3, thought you should know that things like the BCL exist.

A micro four thirds camera is objectively inferior to film, because it doesn't have the same visual/perceptual resolution. That said, IBIS and high dynamic range sensors are amazing technology that we're all thankful for. Also, you can handhold 600mm lenses on full frame cameras also, Nikon for instance has telephoto primes that use phresnel lens elements and are definitely handholdable. I shoot the 600mm f/6.3, 500mm PF f/5.6, 400mm f/4.5, and 300mm PF f/4 all handheld, and while the 600 is on the tail end of what is handholdable and you give up some light for reducing the size/weight (mostly through a smaller objective), it's entirely doable. So your example would have been better looking at full frame mirrorless. Sure, m4/3 lenses are significantly lighter/smaller, but they're also not remotely comparable to film.

>Also I cannot understand the nostalgia for film. By any objective metric it performs much worse than digital sensors.

1. The nostalgia comes from a few things, one of which is the nostalgia for the time and place where film was common, rather than for the film itself, the film becomes a hallmark or totem.

2. Kind of, but also not really. Besides the fact that there are many formats of film, it's possible to get >800 lp/mm of resolution in some films, and the best color films were in excess of 150 lp/mm. Even thinking about lp/mm obscures what film does, because with any analog format (this isn't just limited to photography), falloff outside of the resolving power of the medium is done on gradual curves, as film doesn't have "pixels". To a close approximation, it's only within the last 3-4 years that digital cameras have achieved equivalent resolution to color films, and they /still/ don't achieve equivalent resolution to fine art black and white films at full frame (35mm) size. Additionally, film and digital are fundamentally different not just in capture, but in expression. Digital images are emissive, while printed images are reflective, that is when you look at an image on your screen that image has uniform brightness defined by the backlight of the display and limited in color reproduction by its CRI and gamut, when you look at a printed image the brightness and color reproduction is limited by the print process and the room lighting, looking at a printed image under studio lighting, gallery lighting, or in sunlight has a higher perceptual quality than any digital image on any screen. Does that mean film is better than digital? No, not at all. You can print digital images too, and they will look better printed at high quality than they do on your screen when under good lighting conditions.

I primarily shoot digital these days, although I do occasionally use a 4x5 or medium format film camera. Having tried digital backs for medium format, I can strongly say that once you get outside of full frame, digital still has a long way to go to match the quality of film.

> It even seems true of roles like product manager.

Yes, but there are valid reasons for this. Speaking as someone who is currently in Product, let me point out that a lot of larger efforts in large organizations are inherently risky. This is probably measurable, but generally nobody invests in doing so, rather than that we model it with approximations. When an executive decides on a strategy which has a large effort as a downstream outcome, there is some risk possible that it becomes impossible, or that it is possible but at 2x, 3x, 5x, 10x the cost/time which erodes its value. Success doesn't look like hitting an arbitrary timeline or budget, success looks like getting to an outcome that aligns with the objectives/goals of the strategy, in a timeline that doesn't torpedo the strategy, and in a way which results in an economic ROI.

I am generally considered pretty good in my current organization. I have been lauded often. I don't think any of the major initiatives I've worked on have been "on time", but in almost every case it was due to cross-organizational dependencies dragging things out, which is an inherent risk accounted for when doing anything large in a large organization. But every single one of those initiatives has resulted in a positive ROI in a manner timely enough to support the strategy.

From the perspective of the organization, that's a win. And a win is rewarded.

I imagine similar things can be seen at executive levels. Nobody is asking detailed execution questions about your strategy to determine if its a win or a loss, they're looking at the aggregate outcome. Did your strategy result in improved profitability or reduction of cost or increase in share price, or not? CEOs seem to fail upward even on those metrics, but other executive roles seem to be more accountable.

I cut back drinking considerably because of how it affects my sleep. That, by itself, is the biggest thing for me. Even just one drink over a weekend lunch/brunch can disrupt my sleep later that night.

That said, when I look at the wider trend it seems obvious that "it's the economy, stupid" as are so many other wider trends. It's now commonplace in my city (one of the lowest CoL in the US) for a typical bar to charge $18-$22 for a cocktail and $9-$12 for a beer. Consider that the minimum wage here is still $7.25/hr and the average wage in the city is just $26.44/hr, and with the rise in cost of everything shrinking discretionary spending budgets, it's a big ask to expect someone to spend close to an hours labor for every single drink of an evening. There's obviously generational aspects as well, but how much of that is sociocultural vs economic? Gen Z is broke as a joke, they're not spending on booze when they can barely make rent and utilities.

I don't particularly like hosting, although I will do so, but I do enjoy gatherings of friends and interesting people over good food and good wine. What my wife and I did was join a dinner club. There are all variety of dinner clubs in almost every major city in the world. We are in our 40s and are the youngest members, because it seems most of the folks who join dinner clubs are older retirees that no longer have large families at home to host dinners with/for, but nonetheless we've found it rewarding.

Given that, though, I do see a bit of a generational divide. It definitely seems like the social circles of people in my generation and younger are larger, but not as deep. I have very good friends who have all moved to different places across the country, I fly to visit them, but the last time all of us were together was at someone's wedding. Contrast this with older generations who often have nearby lifelong friends and close by family, that provides them a smaller but deeper social circle with more opportunities for in-person interaction.

Dinner clubs are great, but not a replacement for the fact my closest friends are spread out all over the country. I don't really have a solve for that. If I were rich, I'd convince everyone to take remote jobs so we could build a "compound" with a bunch of houses all together and be near each other, but the economic realities don't make that possible for any of us.

> But by this same line, that the government's actions should be measured and limited. Prison should not be cruel, nor should the punishments be unusual.

Fully agreed, which is why I make the point that air conditioning isn't a question, of course a prison in Texas should have air conditioning. The 8th Amendment makes this pretty clear, that cruel and unusual punishments are disallowed, as they should be. The punishment is and should be the prison sentence itself.

> At the same time prison shouldn't be deadly. 85F versus 110F is the difference between uncomfortable and death.

Fully agreed. There absolutely should be air conditioning in prisons in Texas. We need to preserve prisoners lives and health using all reasonable means so that they can receive their just punishment via their sentence.

Of note, however, there are /schools/ in Texas that lack working air conditioning due to mismanagement and underfunding, which I find a far more egregious and wrong circumstance.

> The problem is this doesn't really seem to have any relation to the punishment. In the US we love to think that beating someone to a pulp has a strong effect on their future actions that lead to the beating but redactivism rates do not show any strong correlations here at all. Things like education, living conditions, and wealth are far more correlated.

Agreed, punishment does not help with recidivism rates. You're making a rehabilitation argument. That argument might even be reasonable. That is not why prison in the US exists or how they are operated. They are a form of punishment, that is their purpose in our society.

As someone in Texas, who also donates large sums of money every year to the Innocence Project, I kind of understand their position even though I think they have written it poorly. I want anyone wrongfully convicted freed and compensated, and I want our justice system to be better at ascertaining guilt rather than using plea deals improperly to imprison people wrongly. I also want our prisons to be places where we take every reasonable action to preserve the lives of the prisoners, including for sure having air-conditioning.

But I also fully understand the point of prison is /punishment/, which is why it's such a severe injustice when someone is punished when they have not committed the crime. Prison is not supposed to be pleasant and comfortable, and we should take every action to preserver prisoner's lives specifically in order to ensure that they can serve their complete sentences, upon the assumption of fair adjudication. Without clear, just, punishment within society, we will revert to vigilantism and chaos.

The core ethical/moral complexity here to me is not about treatment of prisoners, its about how people become prisoners in the first place in the state of Texas. In Texas we have a long history of racist practices in policing, in the courts, and the use of coercive plea deal structures that have resulted in many people being wrongfully convicted. As long as that situation stands, it would be clearer to argue that nobody should be imprisoned at all, but that's also not a reasonable argument. As long people are being imprisoned, we should ensure they are rightfully convicted and understand that prison is a punishment, and that we should preserve prisoner's lives and health so that they can experience whatever just punishment has been meted out by society for the harm they have caused through their choices and actions.

I very much want this, but I also do not trust Qualcomm /at all/. Would love to see a performant alternative to current-gen M series which runs Linux. Can you imagine a true ultrabook style laptop w/ great battery life, minimal heat output, and excellent performance in a compact form fanless form factor running Linux? Would be amazing. But Qualcomm has a long track record of bait n switch w/ Linux community and relying on proprietary blobs, no documentation, and aggressively enforcing IP in ways which are detrimental.

Something I am not seeing much discussion about in the article or in the rest of the comments: UX is more than UI. You can have very stable UI and still have significant, targeted UX improvements needed.

Something I find sorely lacking in most modern desktop systems, Linux included, is the performance I expect given the power of the hardware available. Barring that performance increase, better perceived performance through subtle UI changes that elide over waiting moments is nearly as good.

Linux leaves a lot to be desired here. It's easy to bash Windows or Mac, but the performance issues on these systems are often difficult to perceive during normal usage while in Linux it is front and center and harder to understand because Linux is a box of parts.

A lot of it has to do with how long it takes to find the right candidate. As someone who has been involved in a lot of hiring over the last 20 years, I can say there's been a huge shift within the last couple of years and open reqs get 10-25x the number of applicants, which instead of increasing choice in a positive way has just resulted in the average applicant quality decreasing. That means recruiters and hiring managers spend a LOT more time vetting and also invest in parallel candidates to try to hedge, because so many candidates applying are legitimately unqualified.

It may sound like I'm blaming candidates, and sometimes it might be fair to, but this is also a problem caused by companies not investing in training and hiring junior level employees, which means that people who are unqualified feel forced to apply for more senior roles, as those are the only roles hiring. It's honestly shocking how many candidates I've interviewed in my career who don't even meet the basic bar for the role they've applied for, and are essentially just hoping to get lucky and snag a high-paying tech job even if it ultimately results in them being terminated, they can collect a check for 3-9 months without delivering.

Mass applications, AI cheating, fraudulent representation (e.g. saying you are person X but are actually interviewing on behalf of person X who you are not), lying on resumes and in screeners, and even nation state attacks on hiring (see North Korea trying to farm tech jobs for money to get around sanctions), it's not great on the hiring side either.

If this was in the US, it's all security theater. Basically if you get flagged, they swab everything in your bag to find what's getting flagged, and if it's legitimate they pass you through, or they keep swabbing you if its just your hands/arms because they also inspect your bag. It's kind of dumb, but also kind of makes sense.

For extra fun times, baby wipes / wet wipes get flagged as explosives in the US when they use the sniffer devices.