That's a weird/negative take on things. My actual point is that people are social creatures and we're generally far better about communicating what we need in a personal conversation at work, vs having to write it out in an email or typing it up in a Teams chat....

The fully remote team of infrastructure engineers I interact with regularly at my workplace is a great example. When I first started working for this company, they would pop in the office at least once a week for various tasks or a meeting. It was really productive to catch one of them at one of these times and let them know about some upcoming change that we might need them to prepare things for, or ?

With them working remote? Now, it's far more rigid. They tend to set themselves away/unavailable in their chat client and only respond to email after a full day or two. Usually, when they do respond, they're asking for more clarification or another piece of info. They spend a lot of time in meetings with their their boss or vendors, so we're cut off from direct communications with them most of the time. They think, "What's the problem? Just tell my boss what you need and he'll let us know." That's a problem because their boss is busy with so many other things, he's not likely to communicate the concern or request on to them either accurately or quickly. Quite often, they'll give the other teams push-back, questioning why we need what we're asking for. And this just wasn't an issue when you could have a few minute "face to face" conversation about it and establish what was going on.

All in all? I think I'm equally productive in the office or working from home -- but there are certain things I get done more efficiently in the office while others, not so much.

Actually? This was in the midwest -- and in a part of town where yes, I'd be worried myself about banging on someone's door at midnight, expecting they might have a gun.

So apparently you just give people too much credit for having some sense!

I won't return in coin by calling you an idiot, because I don't think you are one. What I think you are is too *ignorant* to realize you're talking about evolution. "Survival of the fittest" is a phrase coined by Herbert Spencer in 1864 to refer to natural selection, a concept that's in the actual *title* of Darwin's book.

Now that I realize how they use terminology, suddenly Amazon's search results make sense. If I really want a Bluetooth keyboard and not some wireless USB keyboard, I should search for FireWire keyboard, and if I really want a wireless USB keyboard, I should search for PS/2 keyboard.

It's hard to know whether this is something harmless or a sign of a serious design flaw in Discord without more information.

If this company is just assuming that Dumbledore32168 is the same user on server A and server B, then either:

• users chose to use the same name on every server with the expectation that people from other servers would recognize them, in which case there's really no problem at all, or
• some servers don't allow you to set your username, in which case that's a real problem, and a good reason to use something other than Discord,

and I have no idea which of these is the case.

If, however, they are doing something more clever and matching people even when they have different usernames, then this suggests a *major* design flaw.

It should not be possible for anyone other than the actual owner of the server to obtain any identifier for a user that is shared across multiple servers. Other people should be able to see your local (per-server) username, period. There are reasons for a signed-in user to pass uniquely identifying values *to* the server, and there are legitimate reasons for the server to store that mapping, but there are no reasons for there to be any web-facing API for converting from a username back to that identifier, period, under any circumstances. Even things like private messaging should be sending the local username or a local user identifier, not any sort of global identifier.

And even during the sign-in/sign-up process, the identifier sent from the authentication server to the content server need not be shared across servers. There's nothing inherently preventing discord from providing a different per-user unique identifier to each server, and if privacy were a serious consideration in the design, they would be doing this. So again, if they are successfully tracking users across servers when usernames don't match, then Discord's entire security architecture needs a major overhaul, because that would mean that Discord as a platform is severely flawed architecturally, and that privacy was not a serious consideration in its design.

So could someone from Discord please clarify what is happening here?

The problem I see with these types of services are that they undermine the concept of a reasonable expectation of anonymity. We all know that the owners of a given web site/service will have the ability to pull up and view everything we ever said or did on the platform. But that's generally not a concern, unless someone is intent on doing blatantly illegal things on the service. (All things considered, I lean towards the assumption that a person so interested in a social media communications tool that they'd make it their life's work to build/run one is NOT the type who'd disrespect my ability to speak freely under a pseudonym/handle and stay generally anonymous.)

If they let others violate the terms of service with data-scraping bots and so on? Their platform becomes a hostile environment.

A lot of people have reasons to compartmentalize their lives and not let just anyone know about everything they say/do/believe in.

Just last week, I was at a flea market with a friend of mine. We both put together a single booth so we could try to sell some things. My friend knew the guy who ran the whole thing, but only discovered via a neighbor that he lived right down the block from her. She tried to say something to him about that while they were talking about their pets and other small talk. He immediately started walking away, ignoring her as he went to talk to someone else. We both found that odd but assumed he got distracted or something. After it was ending and we were packing things up, he came back by to apologize but said he really didn't want anyone there to figure out where he lived. He had too many problems in the past with vendors who didn't know boundaries and would come knocking on his door at midnight to try to sign up for a vendor space, or to try to demand he exchange an item he sold them at one, etc.

I was happy to see that, because that was always my conclusion. I've worked entirely remote, entirely at an office, and in hybrid arrangements. Hybrid just makes the most sense to me -- and it's something I did at one employer years before COVID.

I think if people are honest? They like at least 1-3 days a week they can work from home, vs coming in all the time; not only to eliminate the commute, but to be able to handle little things at home that need to get done. (EG. Amazon is dropping off an expensive box so you want to be home to bring it in the house ASAP, vs it sitting on the doorstep all day while you're at the office. Or maybe it gives you a few minutes to throw a load of laundry in the washer and dryer?)

But I wasn't a fan of complete remote work because you feel a little detached from the company you work for. You don't really get the in-person socialization that solidifies connections with your co-workers. Plus, I think a lot of people (myself included) get tired of spending THAT much time in the "same 4 walls" of their residence. I may not like spending money on gas and getting stuck in traffic on a commute. But having to do one occasionally DOES get me out of the house to observe more of what's going on around me. Like this morning, I drove in and discovered they're putting new lights up on the bridge that leads into town.

Where is the limit? The commute in a recent job was in the region 25-30 minutes each way and the advantages of being on site outweighed the disadvantages by a distance. Then they closed those offices and moved ("consolidated") further away, the distances involved was not that different but at that point driving to work became intolerable.

These actually likely served a purpose. If some other company made an exact copy of their mask, they could go to court and immediately prove that it was a copy. It's the chip design equivalent of the "Stolen from Apple" art hidden inside the Mac ROM code so that if someone tried to sell a clone similar to what happened with the Franklin Ace, they would potentially have an easy way to prove in court that the code was copied.

Limits on transferring tickets creates the potential for people to be stuck with tickets and forced to go back to TicketMaster to resell them, where they make additional profit, which gives them a perverse incentive to allow bots to buy tickets, because they get to profit on the same sale more than once, raising the price each time the tickets get resold.

Without those limitations, you'd be able to legitimately resell tickets anywhere, and companies wouldn't be afraid of allowing resale. As a result, almost nobody would go through TicketMaster and pay their high fees, so TM would have more incentive to truly fix the problem.

Combine that with an exception to the transferability mandate if and only if the seller offers a 100% refund policy (with no fees), with tickets becoming transferrable after refunds become unavailable.

If you pass a law written like that, TM will have a strong incentive to lock things down a lot — specifically, they could:

• Require all tickets to be transferred to an app on one or more specific people's phones.
• For people who don't have smartphones, allow them to pick up physical tickets in person with a photo ID, but only within one week of the event.
• Allow people to return tickets up to a week before the show for a refund.
• Allow people to transfer tickets within the last week, either by converting an electronic ticket to a physical ticket in person or through their app.

That sort of policy should (I think) make scalping largely impractical, because most scalpers aren't going to want to risk buying tickets months ahead of time if they can't sell them anywhere until a few days before the show.

Well, no *one* of us in a position to save the coral reefs. Not even world leaders can do it. But we *all* are in a position to do a little bit, and collectively all those little bits add up to matter.

Sure if you're the only person trying to reduce is carbon footprint you will make no difference. But if enough people do it, then that captures the attention of industry and politicians and shifts the Overton window. Clearly we can't save everything, but there's still a lot on the table and marginal improvements matter. All-or-nothing thinking is a big part of denialist thinking; if you can't fix everything then there's no point in fixing anything and therefore people say there's a problem are alarmists predicting a catastrophe we couldn't do anything about even if it weren't happening.

As to the loss of coral reefs not being the worst outcome of climate change, that's probably true, but we really can't anticiapte the impact. About a quarter of all marine life depends on coral reefs for some part of their life cycle. Losing all of it would likely be catastrophic in ways we can't imagine yet, but the flip side is that saving *some* of it is likely to be quite a worthwhile goal.

Well, you bringing *evolution* into the argument shows that your views are so far off base theyr'e not even wrong.

What you're saying is that you consider living in a manner consistent with being above the poverty line to be a luxury, and people should be taxed on it. And that attitude justifies, at least in your mind, raising taxes on the middle class — even the lower middle class who often struggle to get by.

And because your tax proposal applies only to things that normal people buy, while mostly ignoring true luxuries, such as yachts bought overseas, and completely ignoring securities, butlers, maids, personal drivers, personal pilots, and other things that the wealthy tend to spend their money on, it shifting most of the tax burden from the wealthy to the middle class, which is what pretty much every economist who has ever looked at this plan has concluded it will do, but you're okay with that, because apparently in your mind, not being dirt poor is a luxury that should only be allowed for those who can afford it.

Start by passing a law that makes it unlawful to make anything non-transferrable, whether it is a concert ticket or a software license. That one law would do more to fix this problem than anything else.

Sure, the planet does not care, but we're not asking what the *planet* should do, are we?