I have had to do a decent amount of hiring over the years for my own corner the corporate meat grinder. I personally don’t care about a gap unless the gap is too big. A big gap allows for a lot of rust to build, so it becomes a bit of a calculation of how much rust needs to get knocked off and if it’s fine for this position if it takes longer to get productive. If they’re still pretty sharp then the gap is no issue, and if they’re really rusty then that can be a problem depending.

I interviewed a guy not long ago with a 3-year gap. No fault of his own, the economy sucks, so I didn’t hold it against him. But despite knowing there was a technical interview coming up and knowing what skills we were looking for, the dude didn’t put any effort into studying before my interview and he bombed pretty darn hard. Which is a shame because on paper he would’ve been an amazing candidate otherwise.

Anyways all of that is to say that sometimes a gap brings other stuff too, so a gap to me is a sign to look for that other stuff.

Who said this is even tracked, let alone enforced? Drawing the conclusion that it’s enforced seems like a bit of a leap.

That said, if my boss said that to me it would probably sit poorly with me in the moment purely because I just want to focus on my job and GTFO, I don’t particularly want to pine for outside when I’m stuck anyways. It’s corny and not particularly inspiring, but nothing wrong with it on its face. If somebody was clocking such things that’s a huge “find another corporate wage slave camp to sink your labor into” flag.

The gas prices out here are bonkers. I changed my commute to VTA light rail + Caltrain and a lot of walking just to avoid filling up so much. Definitively makes the commute worse compared to driving, public transit is messy and inefficient here, but gas prices are close to double what they were pre-war (at cheap stations like Rotten Robbie at least).

In America’s general election you get two choices for president, the bad choice and the worse choice. That’s the undisputable reality. As South Park once elegantly put it, choose between the giant douche and the turd sandwich. Now, often times which candidate is which is a matter of perspective, but sometimes it’s pretty clear to see who the worse choice is.

For instance, so many people got on a high horse against Kamala for supporting Israel, and they weren’t wholly wrong, but her opponent was very well known for being an admirer of Netanyahu and never took a stance against the genocide either. So considering both parties seemed likely to let Israel keep on keeping on it was a very strange thing to get hung up on electorally; there was little to no chance that we’d have an election outcome would have ended well for Palestine regardless, and having lived through Trump’s first term and his attempted coup there was plenty of evidence to suggest that he would be the worse choice.

Now, many people used the argument that politics and ethics are completely inseparable, saw that both candidates would be bad for Palestine, then refused to vote on moral grounds, thereby doing their part in condemning America to its current circumstances of grappling with human rights crises at home. Thousands brutalized by ICE and CBP, shipped to torture centers for crimes the didn’t commit (e.g. El Salvador) children separated from parents (again) and effectively orphaned (again)… Much of this very much predictable given his first term. I’m not seeing this supposed moral high ground.

The act of voting is indeed a political act, and not a moral one. One’s politics and ethics may intertwine, but at the end of the day you only get two choices and chances are that in order to avoid the greater evil you need to ensure the lesser evil prevails. It shouldn’t work this way but sadly it does.

… and my kids

“Hey Kiddos! So I have some good news and some bad news…”

I hate when the information I’m trying to get is trapped in a video. It’s not often that I can’t find text alternatives, but it happens on occasion. Being trapped watching a video whose purpose is only partly to deliver information (the other part to game the algo and appease sponsors), when I could have found the info I needed in 30 seconds if it was text – that’s my idea of torture.

One of the very few legitimately game-changing aspects of AI in my life is video summaries.

By looking at voter registration and data broker information you can connect that information, sure. On an individual basis it’s easy. But it’s a different matter to collect that data on all convicted criminals in the country within a given time period. The larger the time period the harder that gets, especially considering that people with older offenses and no recurring offense can petition the court to have their records sealed, making an accurate count harder.

And, speaking as someone who’s been on the wrong side of law enforcement a few times in my youth, political affiliation or leanings would not be part of the record unless it was relevant (e.g. politically motivated crime). At least, if it wasn’t part of my arrest or court records, then it can’t be true in all localities.

Short answer with no context: Bill Clinton touched me appropriately.

Back story for those interested:

In 2012 I worked for the Obama re-election campaign as a Field Organizer, and typically the job was just leading and organizing volunteers in activities like phone banking and voter registration and such. I was in a swing county in a swing state, so the campaign made a stop in our area. Obama and Biden were supposed to swing through along with Bill Clinton and others. Biden was even supposed to come to our office so we all had to get vetted by the Secret Service. But the candidates canceled thanks to Hurricane Sandy forcing them back to Washington. The rally continued on, though, with mostly just Bill Clinton and some local politicians.

On the day of, I gather up my group of volunteers and we head to the rally venue. I was originally assigned to pass out water bottles to people waiting in line, but then we learned we didn’t have enough barriers around the tents where the candidates and Bill were (supposed to be) hanging out and I volunteered to be a human barrier to fill the gap. The job turned out to be kinda fun, a skateboarder tried to get past me and into the tent area because he was trying to cut through to get to another building and when I stuck my arm out to stop him I accidentally clotheslined him. He looked at me super pissed, then noticed the Secret Service right behind me and left with a quickness.

Anyways, Bill gets on stage, says his thing, then comes to the fence like to shake hands. Well, I was also a part of the fence and the people swarming me started to overwhelm me. Until two Secret Service agents swoop in and push the throng back, that is. As Bill passed by he pats me on the back and heads to his tent.

And that was the time I was touched by Bill Clinton in an appropriate manner.

Were the Teletubbie as creepy to be around IRL (in full costume and character) as they were to watch? I was a bit old for the Teletubbies target audience range when it was out but I was still a kid and they gave me the heebie-jeebies.

If the online ad industry was just about serving ads you could say that I guess. Early Internet ads were usually placed pretty intrusively on websites, and very soon went from annoyance to security risk as ads became a disturbingly common vehicle for malware delivery. Today malware via ads is far less common but an ad isn’t just an ad – now ads are powered by, and an agent of, a surveillance network.

If an ad could just be an ad it would actually be safe to roll without an ad blocker; I would infact do so as well unless a site was really egregious with their ad placement, I want to support websites doing good work. The Internet ad industry forced us into blocking their ads. My adblock never turns off, even for sites I’d very much like to support, because ads are just a pile of malicious code. Ad blockers would have stayed niche techy things if the ad industry wasn’t scummy as hell.

So anyways, I feel I got a little rant-y. My point is that the ad industry themselves fed the demand for ad blockers. Ads themselves and website placement didn’t get egregious because of ad blockers, ad blockers became common because ads and ad placement got egregious.

As others have mentioned, video downloaders works. Personally, I would either use a VPN or proxy. I don’t have this problem in my state but when I traveled through Oklahoma I just used a VPN and it worked just fine.

The problem with downloading porn, I learned many moons ago before “tube” websites made it so accessible, is that unless you constantly hunt for new stuff it’s a waste of space as porn doesn’t have a ton of rewatch value (for me at least). So you amass a collection and then the collection gets boring after some watches/views.

If you happen to use a DNS-based ad blocking/security service such as NextDNS, ControlD, or whatever you can also often just have your DNS queries route out of another region. Doing that can get you around some regional stuff because you’ll get service URL’s and IP’s back from DNS for that other region, so you can skip the VPN and still get what you’re looking for. But that’s most useful for things like getting UK shows in your Netflix TV app. For your use case I would just VPN.

That said, if you’re set on downloading your porn, yt-dlp is the gold standard for ripping video off of the Internet. I haven’t tried it myself, but a cursory search seems to confirm that it’ll work with sites like PornHub (it’s apparently hit or miss depending on the site). You might still need a VPN for the content to not be blocked though.

I’m obviously not OP but the first thing that comes to mind are attacks like the one that targeted xz. Open source developers are generally overloaded between demands from the community and their regular lives, and they also lack the means and ability to check the background of everyone contributing code or vying for maintainer status. This creates the risk that somebody with bad intentions works their way into a position of some power over the code that gets merged. Bigger projects with strict governance and an active community of contributors (or funding for dedicated developers to maintain control and check outside contributions) have much smaller risk in this regard.

Likewise married into a Latino family. They acknowledge that “Latine” is a thing, but not a single one of them has heard another Latino use it in real conversation, let alone use it themselves. And they all roll their eyes extra hard, young and old, at “LatinX”. The family that speaks English all poke fun at it by pronouncing it “Latinks”.

I’m sure that some population of Latinos somewhere in the world cares about such things, but white people on the whole seem to be care a whole heck of a lot more.

Most of such scanning would typically happen at the time of upload before it gets encrypted.

They have their own index on top of using Google’s. As such they do some of their own ranking like promoting the “small web” and surfacing more Internet blogs, for example. You can also customize results rankings by domain – for example, when I search for an image I’ve personalized it to block social media results, Pinterest, and AI-generated images (they tag AI images and they’re reasonably good at it).

The end really is that I can have confidence that my results will be relevant from the first result – no sponsored content, no ads, no unwanted AI slop (you need to purposely invoke AI summaries, for instance, by ending your query with a question mark), and no domains that I find give low quality results. There are even more customizations you can do and I could wax poetic about Kagi, but at the end of the day a good search engine helps you find useful information and gets out of your way, and I haven’t seen a search engine do that better than Kagi yet.

Google Authenticator is merely a generic TOTP token storage app. The person you’re replying to was pointing out that Google Authenticator, specifically, isn’t necessary. There are alternatives, and unless you’re using a company-owned device that restricts the apps you can use there is no way for work to dictate which app you use for TOTP tokens.

Duo, Okta Verify, and other 2FA apps that use push notifications and such, are a different beast altogether.

I don’t think it’s a normal expectation for services with variable labor and materials to have a flat price associated. Certainly not for businesses buying said services. But there isn’t a single “charge per seat” software company that has a valid excuse for obfuscating pricing. Every software company I’ve worked with (and I’ve worked with hundreds over my career buying software for corps) has a “list price” for their product even if they hide it.

Jimmy Kimmel made a comment about how the MAGA gang was spinning the shooting of Charlie Kirk as a politically-motivated assassination by “Democrats”, when the shooter themselves was part of said MAGA gang and was not, in actual fact, a Democrat.

In response, the FCC threatened ABC and encouraged TV broadcast stations to exclude their programming, and so ABC indefinitely suspended Jimmy Kimmel’s show in response.

That just about sums it up briefly.

Holy shit I would take this over an open floor plan any day. I dream of having my own quasi-isolated space.

They work just fine with real-debrid.