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Comment Re:What value added? (Score 4, Interesting) 89

I watch dogs (primarily overnight--most for 3-7 days but some 1 day and some >7d) via Rover. I make around $1500/month (pre-1099) and after their ~20% cut (of which most people give back to me in tips).

I WFH so the largely passive income is nice. I wouldn't have found as many people w/o a platform to do the heavy lifting for me in finding new dogs.

I am not advocating that we need to have these sorts of things in the market, but it does make for nice extra cash. YMMV.

Comment Re:You're going to see a lot of weird businesses (Score 1) 72

I grew up down the street from her house. Went to the first Chuck E Cheese's across the street often.

Civilization didn't collapse due to her house. It wasn't even the first revision of her house (IIRC got leveled in the great SF earthquake) There's a lot of people that look at the Victorian adornments of her house as a sign we had civilization. Compared to the Soviet Bloc style housing we have going in today that has surrounded it, the Winchester house now looks out of place.

All kind of sad really. Town and Country was a beautiful shopping center. The trailer park next door provided low income housing, and the Styufy dome theatres looked straight out of a moonbase. Nothing is allowed to have exposed wood beams or rounded edges anymore.

Comment I don't think he's far off. (Score 2) 129

Today I was looking at an AI Asian woman on Facebook. She had a whole page setup of her in various outfits, and I am not kidding I was having a difficult time discerning if she was real or fake. It wasn't until I went to her profile and saw all the videos was I able to tell the difference. Even here, I'm using a "She" pronoun, when it should be an "IT" pronoun, because it is not human.

No joke though, the realism and attractiveness was just.. off the scale. I'm not one of those guys into Waifu anime, hug body pillows, etc. I'm married, got kids, I'm older and I've been in tech a long time. I removed myself from my emotions for a minute to examine what was happening, and I closed the page.

If AI visually can do this to me, a guy with a 138 IQ that has been on this site forever, can usually discern if these things are real or fake, imagine what happens when these things are talking to people of lower IQ, coupled with realtime voice chat and response, programmed to understand your likes and interactions on facebook, to get you the perfect group of attractive friends, that treat you like the center of the universe.

Or worse yet, overlayed on the actual people you interact with on a daily basis. Like "Mudd's Women" from Star Trek TOS or Pike in "The Cage" Slapping on some Meta Quest glasses so everyone you meet and interact with is attractive... for only $99.99 a month.

Zuck isn't stupid, the population is. People will be throwing money at this if he gets it right.

Comment This article seems a slant towards journalism jobs (Score 4, Insightful) 141

If after 93, you couldn't see where the world was headed, you weren't paying attention.

I was 20 in 93, my first ISP was PSI-Net and prior to that it was Fidonet strung together by BBS's. People were already sharing news articles via Fidonet mirrors of NNTP servers. Granted, there was no URL share button, and they were retyping stuff word for word, but they did it. By 93 however people were starting to take scans and images as well.

Fast forward to 1995, when a lot of my friends were graduating SJSU. A few of my closest friends got degrees in print. It was interesting watching and comparing our career trajectories. When I was a young man, my family and their families were so proud of them. "Oh so and so does LAYOUT for the Mercury NEWS!" "So and so does PHOTOGRAPHY for Wave Magazine!" When attention turned to me it was, "MIS? What is that?" While I struggled at first to get my footing in MIS, they were hired right away by local newspapers or magazines, but slowly their careers petered out, and mine is still raging.

I now work for one of the largest IT departments in the world, making great money. A few of them stopped trying to find jobs in journalism, one went to work for the local equivalent of a Kinkos.

Ironically their parents carry computers in their pockets.

If you're young, like I was, and you don't want to become obsolete, don't look at jobs and say, "Oh I like the idea of this, that is what I want to do!" No.. Look at what is being used as building blocks in the world. You want to work with the building blocks, not what comes after the construction. Right now? It looks like AI is huge. GPU design is HUGE. Quantum is going to be the next building block after. Get into quantum.

Comment Re:Cannot wait... (Score 3, Informative) 159

I used to screen scrape jail registry records for county jails in my home area. Though the IDs weren't exactly sequential, doing groups of 50 would get hits for two of the local counties.

What I found was that, while the website UI wouldn't show juvenile records, you could access them directly w/the ID. Surfacing it to the county took a day or so to find the right person but they quickly closed that hole, but who knows how many records were handed out to malicious actors over the years before I found it.

Comment Re:If you want to survive a PIP (Score 3, Interesting) 196

In my experience, PIPs are NEVER intended to be a tool to help you; they're intended to help the company find reasons to fire you.

Use the 90 days to find a new job; not try and pass the arbitrary/impossible to meet requirements.

Plus, once you've been put on a PIP, do you really want to continue working for a company that was literally trying to create documentation to fire you?

No; you don't.

Comment Re:Reversal of Burden of Proof (Score 1) 211

My ex-wife stole ~$300K from me preparing for a divorce. It was up to me, the person who made the money, not the person who pfilered it, to prove she did so and it would have cost at least 1/3 of the money and the likelihood I could prove to the court it had been done, even though it was blatantly obvious what she did to be near 0.

The legal system is absolutely fucked and it needs to be changed.

Comment Re: hmmm.. (Score 2) 119

I honestly want someone from Apple to explain to me why Chinese knockoffs smart watches allow notifications to go to my phone and my watch simultaneously as well as last >10 days on a charge, yet my supposedly superior Apple Watch (at 4x the cost) lasts barely a day and doesnâ(TM)t allow for this.

The only reason I use the Apple Watch instead is because my cheap Chinese knockoff for $27 didnâ(TM)t track swimming.

Ridiculous.

Comment Re:What about Netherlands? (Score 1) 61

Your absolutely right. Population is around 132k. Comes out to about $7,620.21 per person. The only thing I think they could do here would be some science fiction, like drill down to the earths mantel and allow lava to flow and create new land mass, while the heat energy creates freshwater. Considering the crust is about 10 miles thick, ya, science fiction.

Comment Re:What about Netherlands? (Score 2) 61

Kiribati has money from years of selling off phosphate mining rights.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Kind of a neat story out that way. Nauru is probably the most famous of these, but there's dozens of islands in the area that acted as rest stops of migratory birds, and as a result deposited millions of tons of bird shit and seeds on what was essentially volcanic rock, atolls, and uplifted reefs. Seeds do what seeds do and these grew into ecologies that covered up the bird shit.

In the late 1800's early 1900's chemistry wasn't what it is today, and bird shit phosphate was used in everything from field fertilizers to gunpowder. Nauru and Kiribati were sitting on white gold, ships were constantly in and out of the area hauling away millions of tons of white phosphate powder.

If you don't replace what you've taken out, you leave a void for seawater to get in through.

What did Kiribati and Nauru do with their billions? Pissed it away. The government gave a huge portion of the money to the residents, who did things like import Mercedes Benz's. Why would you import a car on an atoll with one road? Or in Nauru's case, an Island barely 2 miles across?

Eventually the rest of the world got better at synthesizing phosphate on a large scale and no longer needed to dig up the bird shit.

Real interesting history around that time and Guano though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Comment Re: Two things (Score 2) 235

Iâ(TM)ll never get married again. Iâ(TM)m paying out a significant amount in alimony, child support, lost my house, incurred significant debt due to my ex stealing and hiding assets in preparation for divorce, lost 70K in legal fees to no positive outcome, have no cash while she will be flush with it from QRDOs.

Who the fuck thinks they should ever do this shit again? Seriously; why?

Comment This is such a weird thread (Score 3, Insightful) 91

I've been a /.'er since the beginning. This isn't even my original UID. I think that one was like 50k or so.

This site started off as somewhat libertarian anarchy. The old adage of, "We just move packets, any inspection of content is irrelevant" Granted, there is some content that is truly horrible, reprehensible, with IRL victims, but at the time of 1mbps internet connections it was deemed, "Too much overhead" for deep packet inspection.

Yet here we are close to 30 years later. 3 letter agencies routinely install their servers in ISP's to do just that. Speaking of ISP's, what ever happened to the 1000's we used to have? Seems like the choices either died out or were bought up. Internet is no longer an ala-cart option of free thought and speech, but rather the bourgeoisie hidden microphone installed on every computer, every phone, designed to listen to your every thought and whim. Even as I type this now, I have no doubt that somebody, somewhere, who is not /. is logging it as a part of the overall profile of t0qer, so they can sell that info to a marketeer.

We used to keep our thoughts and politics private. I never remember my parents, or my parents friends, or my friends parents talking about politics as much as we do now. It just seems like this thirst has been created in the collective consciousness that we have to share. Why? So a bunch of people we never met, or cared about prior to this, our facebook "friends" or our instagram "followers" can shower us with clicking a graphic of a thumb pointed up? The pavlovian response generated I guess in some ways can trace its roots back to here. It's to late for Karma, but if I had *just* commented when this article was hot, I'd be refreshing this comment to see if it got up or down votes.

I hope we can break free from this as a society.

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