jackson's recent activity

  1. Comment on What possession(s) do you have that continue to delight you every time? in ~talk

    jackson
    Link Parent
    I have personally had bad experiences at the off-brand repair shops, I've had phones returned with missing screws, "ghost touches," yellowed bezels (when some iphones had white bezels). Not worth...

    I have personally had bad experiences at the off-brand repair shops, I've had phones returned with missing screws, "ghost touches," yellowed bezels (when some iphones had white bezels). Not worth the savings imo.

    It may be better now that Apple is being forced to support better repairability, but I would recommend sticking with the "apple authorized" stores since they have to use legit parts.

    1 vote

  2. Comment on Anyone interested in trying out Kagi? in ~tech

  3. Comment on Anyone interested in trying out Kagi? in ~tech

  4. Comment on Anyone interested in trying out Kagi? in ~tech

  5. Comment on Australian Parliament bans social media for under-16s with world-first law in ~tech

    jackson
    Link Parent
    I think the real worst case would be sites enforcing mandatory ID verification for everyone connecting from an Australian IP. Could be circumvented with a VPN though.

    I think the real worst case would be sites enforcing mandatory ID verification for everyone connecting from an Australian IP. Could be circumvented with a VPN though.

    11 votes

  6. Comment on Bomb threats made against US President-Elect Donald Trump cabinet nominees in ~society

    jackson
    Link Parent
    I think we’re agreed, but “don’t give them another excuse” is exactly the kind of thing I’m seeing from centrists re: trans rights so I wanted to nip that one right in the bud. That kind of...

    I think we’re agreed, but “don’t give them another excuse” is exactly the kind of thing I’m seeing from centrists re: trans rights so I wanted to nip that one right in the bud. That kind of thinking is a losing battle.

    2 votes

  7. Comment on Bomb threats made against US President-Elect Donald Trump cabinet nominees in ~society

    jackson
    Link Parent
    No need for justification when you can just make it up (see also: everything the right has said about trans people).

    No need for justification when you can just make it up (see also: everything the right has said about trans people).

    7 votes

  8. Comment on Thousands of Americans see their savings vanish in Synapse fintech crisis in ~finance

    jackson
    Link Parent
    I don't think 401k can be FDIC insured- it's a security, not a bank account. It may be SIPC insured though (and may even have supplemental insurance on top of that). SIPC won't help you if the...

    I don't think 401k can be FDIC insured- it's a security, not a bank account. It may be SIPC insured though (and may even have supplemental insurance on top of that). SIPC won't help you if the market crashes, but it is supposed to protect against a failing brokerage.

    11 votes

  9. Comment on How has your industry changed in the past decade? in ~life

    jackson
    Link Parent
    Can you share more about how you effectively use genAI? I've tried time and again to use it and without fail it's incorrect to the point of being a waste of my time. In fairness, I can't use...

    Can you share more about how you effectively use genAI? I've tried time and again to use it and without fail it's incorrect to the point of being a waste of my time. In fairness, I can't use ChatGPT specifically due to corporate policy, but can use other state-of-the-art models.

    I think part of my problem is with the code I work on: the context is just too large, with too many internal libraries. But even asking questions about well-known libraries in widely-used languages (the interaction of GSON and Lombok being my latest attempt) has yielded results that are useless at best, and often have made the problem worse.

    10 votes

  10. Comment on How the heck do you go about moving cross country? in ~life

    jackson
    Link Parent
    Much better to 'strike out' in this manner and lose a few hundred bucks than to commit to an apartment that you don't actually like and be out thousands over the course of a year in my opinion....

    but then I worry about 'striking out' per se and being out more than a few hundred bucks

    Much better to 'strike out' in this manner and lose a few hundred bucks than to commit to an apartment that you don't actually like and be out thousands over the course of a year in my opinion. Even if you don't find a particular building you like, you'll get a feel for some neighborhoods, some of the landlords in town (the majority of apartments these days are owned by corporate landlords; if you visit one of their buildings and it's obviously not cared for well, the others are probably not worth your time either), and the city as a whole.

    I imagine you'll have a little trouble applying to apartments over your lack of employment. Depending on their policies, showing you have at least 6 months' rent in a bank account may be enough, but definitely ask before applying so you're not wasting time money on applications. Some cities require that their screening criteria is publicly available on their website which could also save you some time here.

    6 votes

  11. Comment on Help with Email & Changing Name Servers/Webhost? in ~comp

    jackson
    Link
    You should be able to cutover with minimal-to-no downtime (email is generally pretty smart; if the domain is unavailable, remote clients will retry a couple times before giving up). MX records are...

    You should be able to cutover with minimal-to-no downtime (email is generally pretty smart; if the domain is unavailable, remote clients will retry a couple times before giving up). MX records are especially important here as they tell email servers where emails should go (TXT are also important as some of these are used to verify you are who you say you are when sending emails). Assuming you copy everything from the old DNS manager to the new one exactly, there should be no need to reconfigure anything on Google Workspace.

    Once you have all the DNS records copied over from Wordpress to BlueHost, updating the nameservers to point at BlueHost should keep everything working consistently. Do double-check your configuration after updating the nameservers (then again after a few hours, it can take time to propagate across the internet).

    This tool from Google Admin Toolbox is very useful for checking DNS configurations, it's essentially a web version of the dig command-line tool. If you put the domain in there, you should be able to validate that the MX records match what you expect, then check the NS records to make sure they point at BlueHost. If the NS records still point at Wordpress that probably just means it's still propagating and you should check back later.

    In the future, I'd suggest using a third-party service to manage your domains like Dynadot, Porkbun, or Cloudflare (no special love for any of the three, but I've used them all before. They all offer the same basic set of features). IMO it's just a good way to hedge your bets in case you want to quickly change from a bad webhost.

    8 votes

  12. Comment on Elections: ultimately, it’s going to be okay in ~society

    jackson
    Link Parent
    For real. "Build The Wall" was silly from the start, and mostly came down to a waste of money as I understand it. Also some stricter immigration policy, but that's par for the course for...

    For real. "Build The Wall" was silly from the start, and mostly came down to a waste of money as I understand it. Also some stricter immigration policy, but that's par for the course for conservatives.

    "Mass Deportations Now" scares me in a way that's hard to articulate. There is no humane way to execute that plan, even if not carried out to its fullest extent.

    I'll drop this here as well: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/deportations

    16 votes

  13. Comment on US office Commercial Mortgage-Backed Securities delinquency rate spikes to 9.4%, highest since worst months after the financial crisis in ~finance

    jackson
    Link Parent
    Office space conversions are quite hard, they just aren't built to be lived in. They typically have a "core" with all the bathrooms, elevators, etc., non-operable windows, and floor-wide HVAC...

    Office space conversions are quite hard, they just aren't built to be lived in. They typically have a "core" with all the bathrooms, elevators, etc., non-operable windows, and floor-wide HVAC systems (rather than per-unit).

    Some more details here: https://business.cornell.edu/hub/2023/07/06/adaptive-reuse-converting-empty-office-space-housing-viable/

    Video exploring one such project that's gone poorly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6ADuQOXMmA

    19 votes

  14. Comment on Advice Needed: Simple and Reliable notifications in ~comp

    jackson
    Link Parent
    Discord webhooks are great for near-zero effort notifications. One thing to keep in mind is that (depending on configuration) Discord will throttle notifications to your phone to keep it from...

    Discord webhooks are great for near-zero effort notifications. One thing to keep in mind is that (depending on configuration) Discord will throttle notifications to your phone to keep it from driving you insane. I think that only applies to "all messages in the channel" notifications; @mentions are typically all delivered in my experience.

    4 votes

  15. Comment on The Electoral College is bad in ~society

    jackson
    Link Parent
    It's more of a historic thing: EC votes are assigned based on population, not vote counts. Since enslaved people were counted in population ("the three-fifths compromise") but were unable to vote,...

    but I find the racism angle a little suspect

    It's more of a historic thing: EC votes are assigned based on population, not vote counts. Since enslaved people were counted in population ("the three-fifths compromise") but were unable to vote, slave states had an advantage in elections.

    14 votes

  16. Comment on Using AI generated code will make you a bad programmer in ~tech

    jackson
    Link Parent
    What makes you think the owners of this efficiency will pass down these benefits to the rest of us? Untold efficiency sounds like a great excuse to fire your workforce and distribute the earnings...

    If all software is made completely automatically, imagine the efficiency gains you'd get from... Everything. Even if we don't have the same relative status as before, I'm sure you could live comfortably, and probably have decent quality of life improvements.

    What makes you think the owners of this efficiency will pass down these benefits to the rest of us? Untold efficiency sounds like a great excuse to fire your workforce and distribute the earnings to a smaller pool of people.

    10 votes

  17. Comment on Using AI generated code will make you a bad programmer in ~tech

    jackson
    Link Parent
    I think the big distinction here is that AI prompting is non-deterministic, produces artifacts in a human-readable programming language, and prompts are not saved alongside generated code (at...

    He sure didn't bitch about better languages as they came out.

    I think the big distinction here is that AI prompting is non-deterministic, produces artifacts in a human-readable programming language, and prompts are not saved alongside generated code (at least in the environments I've seen).

    This means prompters must be skilled at reading code (and probably writing code – even the boring parts!) to correctly evaluate their generated code. Code reviews (aside from the prompter) will be missing the context of the prompt, which may have included a fundamental misconception of the task's goal, making the code harder to review. Even if the prompt is included, it will produce different output if re-executed using today's models.

    If I write a Python script, it will generate the same machine code (at least on the same machine) and is deterministic unless explicitly written to be otherwise. Sure, different environments may produce different results (OS differences, environment variables), but we have tools to work around this (containers, standardized CI environments).

    7 votes

  18. Comment on Why surgeons are wearing the Apple Vision Pro in operating rooms in ~health

    jackson
    Link Parent
    From the article, they said the hololens displays are not high enough resolution. Hololens was also recently discontinued.

    From the article, they said the hololens displays are not high enough resolution. Hololens was also recently discontinued.

    6 votes

  19. Comment on Passwords have problems, but passkeys have more in ~tech

    jackson
    Link Parent
    by the time you have malicious software MITM’ing FIDO tokens on your computer, i think it’s safe to assume that all of your session cookies, saved passwords, and keystrokes are being captured as well

    by the time you have malicious software MITM’ing FIDO tokens on your computer, i think it’s safe to assume that all of your session cookies, saved passwords, and keystrokes are being captured as well

    5 votes

  20. Comment on Routine dental X-rays are not backed by evidence—experts want it to stop in ~health

    jackson
    Link Parent
    That's really more what I was getting at with my comment. Yes, it's the society we live in today, but it doesn't have to be the one we live in tomorrow.

    If we "took the money out of" medical care, then I think the entire ecosystem would look much different and probably be better overall for us as patients. But that's not the society we have today, unfortunately.

    That's really more what I was getting at with my comment. Yes, it's the society we live in today, but it doesn't have to be the one we live in tomorrow.

    1 vote