Recently I used Google maps to search for the nearest DHL near me so I could return a package. DHL is not that popular near me and when I specifically typed for DHL, I would get only their competitors in the search results.

There was a DHL service center near me and I had to scroll a bunch to find it. Oh, and apparently big box stores (or anyone) can pay Google to come up in the search on maps, even if unrelated.

I don’t think they have skin the in shipping game but their algorithms are over optimized that they don’t even show what your searching for, but trying to infer why you’re searching for it. That or whoever pays them more. Certainly a search risk

wow 10 months flew by since this was posted and since then the United States had a surprise privacy bill that is bipartisan that sort of addresses the issues you and I mentioned. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/04/07/congress-privacy-deal-cantwell-rodgers/

This bill was proposed around the same time the TikTok ban was announced. I speculate that law makers had a difficult time framing the arguments against TikTok when “the data of citizens have no protections so there was no easy legal grounds to forbit the likes of TikTok to harvest it”

From what I’ve heard, this bill is pretty good. I need to educate myself more on it, however.

was it ever? I participate in interview rounds at my company (several tech screens a month) and I must say a candidate’s email was not something that drew attention

you’re able to unsubscribe from all those protomtions . . . that is in settings. Personally, a once-a-month newsletter of everything that is new is helpful bc I don’t need to put in the effort tlinto keeping up

For backup and sync I use Syncthing. I can specify which folder on which devices I want to sync to which folder on the server.

I use a folder based gallery on my phone so when I move stuff around on my phone (or on my server) it gets replicated on all my devices.

I also have a policy to sync specified folders (and subfolder) with my family’s devices. No more " hey can you send me all the pics from the XYZ trip"

We take a trip. Make a subolder for that trip in a shared folder dump all our pictures there, get home and open the folder on the computer and prune together.

simply put, programming is glorified automation. There are jobs where the process that needs automating makes money.

Debian has the advantage of not using snapd like Ubuntu does. You have to not only remove snaps but also instruct the package manager not you pull in snaps as dependencies and not to favor snap packages.

I have fond memories of Ubuntu being my first distro many years ago but pushing snaps onto users to compete with flatpak is a nuisance.

you sound like a Microsoft engineer ;)

Had a distinguished collegue (from the Bell Lab days) say to me recently:

“IDEs take up a lot of RAM on my machine. Vim takes up a lot of squishy RAM in my head. I need squishy RAM to hold info relevant to problem solving, not options available in my tool chain.”

code is just text, so code editors are text editors.

What sets IDEs apart are their features, like debugger integrations, refactoring assists, etc.

I love command line ± Vim and used solely it for a large portion of my career but that was back when you had a few big enterprise languages (C/C++, Java).

With micro services being language agnostic, I find I use a larger variety of languages. And configuring and remembering an environment for rust, go, c, python etc. is just too much mental overhead. Hard to beat JetBrain’s IDEs; now-a-days I bring my Vim navigation key bindings to my IDE instead of my IDE features to Vim. And I pay a company to work out the IDE features.

for the record, I am in the boat of, use whatever brings you the greatest joy/productivity.

There is a very effective approach (34:00), that big companies like cloudflare use, to ship a product in a fast and quality way. It bears parallels to what you are describing. In essence engineers should not get hung up in the details to trying to solve everything.

1. Just build a proof of concept
2. Discard the prototype no matter what and start from scratch keeping the initial feedback in mind
3. Build something internally that you yourself will use
4. Only once something is good enough and is used internally, then release it to beta.

So that tedious process in trying to flush out all the details before seeing a product (or open source effort) working end to end, might be premature before having the full picture.

A step in the right direction but until there are more robust privacy laws in place, this will not go away.

If their gov is restricted on buying from data brokers, are other governments, foreign entities?

The inherit issue is the American’s data can be harvested and sold. Setting up legal restrictions toward certain entities will just cause those entities to “legally self identify” as another entity. Or do business with an entity that is allowed access to American’s data.