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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: October 11th, 2024

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  • It really depends on the business.

    I worked for two smaller businesses (team of ≤ 10 software developers). One was mismanaged, ran by very unpleasant people, and abusive towards employees, resulting in a huge turnover and a “dead sea effect”. The other company got government grants because the owner’s relative was a politician, and had ridiculous surveillance software on developers’ machines.

    Ironically, the most “human” and enjoyable work I did was working on internal legacy software and code rewrites for a huge corporation before and during their move towards agile and modern “conveyorized” approach to software.





  • From some philosophical standpoints (determinism, for example), a person is their mind, a brain; so reproducing or simulating the brain to a very high degree would result in reproducing that person. Whether that is true or not is philosophical, and is similar to the Star Trek teleporter discussion.

    In Alastair Reynolds’ Revelation Space universe, the classification is pretty sensible: there are three levels of simulation.

    Alpha level is a nanotech scan-copy of a real brain which kills the subject, but the resulting persona is considered intelligent, a human, with rights and all. IIRC there were only 60 people who did that.

    Beta level is a model built upon all available information about the person, all audio, video, text, etc. This is pretty much what we might now call a trained AI, but it is not considered intelligent.

    And gamma level is a fully artificial persona, usually used for chatbots and what we would use LLMs for now.




  • IMO tech terms evolve a bit faster and are more accepted with their new spelling and meaning. Older words are less prone to such adjustments, but “alot” puzzles me as well.

    Here are a few more to add to the confusion:

    • From your own post, we now type “website” not “web site”
    • We use email now, not e-mail, and definitely not “electronic mail”
    • “Blog” is shortened “web log”
    • Is it “username” or “user name”? They could mean different things, but might not
    • It’s always “password”, not “pass word”. Same with “passphrase”.
    • Is it “filename” or “file name”? In software, this becomes even more confusing since “filename” could imply a full path to the file, or just the name (sometimes without extension)

  • Mailbox.org

    Mailbox Standard compared to ProtonMail Plus:

    • Cheaper (€30/yr vs ~€50/yr; if you don’t need custom domains, €1/mo)
    • More aliases (25 on mailbox, 50 on own domain. Proton has 10 TOTAL - why custom domain aliases are counted against Proton ones does not make sense to me.)
    • Support for any number of custom domains AFAICT (Proton Plus supports only one)
    • Trial account is not allowed to send emails, so fewer issues with services blacklisting proton.me and protonmail.com for spam (hasn’t happened to me, but I have heard of some cases)
    • Can use a regular email client (security tradeoff for E2EE messages - but there already were plenty of discussions on whether E2EE has benefits, especially sending mail to other services)