NaraVara's recent activity
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Comment on If you had to buy a car today, what would you buy? in ~transport
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Comment on If you had to buy a car today, what would you buy? in ~transport
NaraVara LinkI think I’d lean towards a Mazda CX-70 or CX-90 plug-in hybrid (basically the same, the 90 has a 3rd row and the 70 has more cargo space). The plug in range is like 50-70 miles, which means it’s...I think I’d lean towards a Mazda CX-70 or CX-90 plug-in hybrid (basically the same, the 90 has a 3rd row and the 70 has more cargo space). The plug in range is like 50-70 miles, which means it’s basically an EV for most day-to-day driving and becomes a hybrid with great mileage for longer road trips. It handles really nicely and the interior feels pretty luxurious, they’re approaching a fancier Toyota or the lower trim BMWs. Plus it’s a Toyota drive-train so parts are cheap and maintenance should hopefully not be too eye-watering.
Other options, the new Toyota Sequoia comes in a hybrid that gets great mileage. I test drove it and it’s extremely practical. It’s boring compared to the CX-70, which itself isn’t the most thrilling ride. But it’ll haul your kids and stuff and it’ll be reliable and cheap to maintain if that’s what you need.
I wish they had a hybrid Sienna or Honda Odyssey now because those minivans have all kinds of great family/dog bells and whistles. The Sienna has a small refrigerator and a built in vacuum cleaner! But it’s also boring to drive. And I live in a dense enough city that parking these big boys is a hassle.
On the more fun side, I’ve been looking at the new Honda Passport and Toyota 4Runner. The 4Runner comes as a hybrid, but the mileage is still like 19 mpg in the city. But they look cooler and are more fun to drive. But it’s definitely an aspiration thing for me to need stuff like 4WD and all this overlanding frippery.
Basically everything new is gonna end up being about $10-15k over your $30k price range though unfortunately.
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Comment on Beware tech career advice from old heads in ~comp
NaraVara Link Parent1.) The field used to recruit primarily for smart generalists who had a solid foundation of technical skills and were good at figuring stuff out. The field now recruits primarily for people who...1.) The field used to recruit primarily for smart generalists who had a solid foundation of technical skills and were good at figuring stuff out. The field now recruits primarily for people who check the boxes on having experience with specific, highly abstracted frameworks, tools, platforms, and technologies which makes it harder to get your foot in the door or dabble in multiple things.
2.) There is a LOT of competition because of a glut in hiring and poorly designed training programs/bootcamps. There’s a lot of people now who have nearly 10 years of experience as “engineers” but whose actual engineering skills are lacking because they’ve been able to job hop or coast largely by drafting on other people on their teams. Because of the credentialism in item #1, it’s hard for a candidate to stand out or show that they’ve done good work unless they have a big name on the resume.
3.) Most technical problems now are actually strategy and business problems, but company IT departments are too engineer-brained to admit it. Everyone wants to pretend they’re AWS or Google and solving cutting edge engineering challenges, but for most companies’ use cases the engineering issues have mostly been solved and are matters of implementation. What’s actually holding them back is that the company’s silos don’t collaborate effectively and their data architectures are too chaotic and out of date to do any cool modern stuff with them. They’re hiring for the wrong mix of people/skill sets basically.
4.) There’s just a lot more scamming and spamming in the jobs space. Recruiters are getting scammed with AI applicants and scam placement agencies. Applications are getting scammed with fake job postings, umpteen million “knowledge checks” before you can talk to anyone, and very dumb resume filtration systems that make no sense and drop good candidates in favor of manipulative SEO people.
There’s other issues, but those have been the major ones. The other one is just a pipelining thing. The incoming generations of technical talent simply lack a lot of technical foundations AND basic office/professionalism skills that used to be taken for granted and teams and management styles have had trouble adapting.
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Comment on Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones in ~tech
NaraVara Link ParentThe problem there is that one end of the chain is the hardware, so anything being displayed by that hardware is a potential point of compromise. Like I said, I think the way to do it is with a...Communication between the phone and watch could easily use some other method
The problem there is that one end of the chain is the hardware, so anything being displayed by that hardware is a potential point of compromise.
Like I said, I think the way to do it is with a very restrictive “licensing” program that can get all support pulled if you violate it. But companies like Facebook and Amazon are too big for Apple to really enforce such rules on, which ends up fucking the whole ecosystem.
I really don’t like the EU approach to regulating these because they mostly just seem to be focused on punishing Apple (and other large American tech companies) instead of setting up better rules for the market. It’s often rules that are like “Apple unfairly privileges Safari so let’s further entrench a world where everything is Chrome/Blink.” Or “Apple’s App Store restrictions are anti-competitive so we need to create a world where Epic is reaping the profits of abusive casino games for kids instead.” It doesn’t feel like they’re addressing the root cause of the suckage so much as trying to make sure different players benefit from the suckage.
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Comment on Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones in ~tech
NaraVara Link ParentThere’s also Podcasts, which is so open that most people don’t realize the iTunes Store is primary directory that everyone references.There’s also Podcasts, which is so open that most people don’t realize the iTunes Store is primary directory that everyone references.
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Comment on Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones in ~tech
NaraVara Link ParentOn some dimensions but not all. E2EE is one of those things where there can’t really be an expectation of privacy unless the devices on both ends are trusted. They could do something like a...A company with the resources of Apple could absolutely find a way to allow more 3rd party support without significantly compromising on security
On some dimensions but not all. E2EE is one of those things where there can’t really be an expectation of privacy unless the devices on both ends are trusted. They could do something like a licensing program for third party hardware AND the messaging software they run to comply with however iMessages is working, but that would be so burdensome and onerous that vendors would still complain and most probably would not bother.
In most cases, people just accept the risk that the recipient they’re talking to is not using compromised hardware or a compromised client on their end. It’s probably not a big deal for the vast majority of people, but becomes a big deal for a handful of people like celebrities and business owners.
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Comment on Rodent for dinner? US residents encouraged to eat invasive nutria. in ~enviro
NaraVara Link ParentYeah that case doesn’t involve eating the rats, it was a bounty on tails.Yeah that case doesn’t involve eating the rats, it was a bounty on tails.
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Comment on Rodent for dinner? US residents encouraged to eat invasive nutria. in ~enviro
NaraVara Link ParentCommercial fishing must be forced by laws and various contracts (which are seldom enforced) to not fish native species of fish to extinction. What makes you think rodent trappers would somehow...Commercial fishing must be forced by laws and various contracts (which are seldom enforced) to not fish native species of fish to extinction. What makes you think rodent trappers would somehow successfully restrain themselves without any of that working against them? If they wanted to breed and grow protein sources in captivity, I don’t know why they’d pick something illegal when they could just do chickens or rabbits or something instead. I don’t think it pays as a delicacy or anything.
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Comment on Disney scales back ‘Snow White’ Hollywood premiere amid Rachel Zegler and Gal Gadot controversies in ~movies
NaraVara Link ParentThere’s a whole trope of sort of minstrel humor involving people with dwarfism where they are hired to act as clownish freak show figures to be gawked at. It doesn’t really relate to mythological...There’s a whole trope of sort of minstrel humor involving people with dwarfism where they are hired to act as clownish freak show figures to be gawked at. It doesn’t really relate to mythological and fantasy concepts of a “dwarf” but lots of pop culture depictions of dwarfs (or Christmas/Keebler ‘elves’) end up leaning on those “midget” tropes either for comic relief or just because they’re hacky and well worn tropes. People with dwarfism tend not to like when pop-culture depictions of dwarfs (fantasy) tip into replicating those problematic “midget” stereotypes. The Oompa Loompas are an example of some of those stereotypes in action.
I know nothing about the movie and whether it actually did this. But the general idea is that it’s the use of little people primarily as objects to be gawked at for being “weird” that bothers people, regardless of whether they’re being dressed up as fantasy dwarves or pygmy chocolate factory serfs or whatever else.
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Comment on Disney scales back ‘Snow White’ Hollywood premiere amid Rachel Zegler and Gal Gadot controversies in ~movies
NaraVara Link ParentThere’s a bit more overlap than you’re granting I think. Like “Oompa Loompas” are basically all the mistrely Dwarfism stereotypes rolled up despite them also riffing on a kind of magical Christmas...There’s a bit more overlap than you’re granting I think. Like “Oompa Loompas” are basically all the mistrely Dwarfism stereotypes rolled up despite them also riffing on a kind of magical Christmas Elf thing. So I wouldn’t say it’s “zero” connection. It’s very easy to float in and out of those problematic tropes. Though you are right that the mythological “dwarf” is distinct from the entity of a human with dwarfism.
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Comment on Repeatedly upvoting violent content on Reddit can now get you flagged in ~tech
NaraVara Link ParentMost people who engage in Reddit don’t post at all. They ONLY vote and their votes are what encourage different sorts of content to be posted. If the posters are the problem it’s easier to skew...Most people who engage in Reddit don’t post at all. They ONLY vote and their votes are what encourage different sorts of content to be posted. If the posters are the problem it’s easier to skew the incentives for the content creators by not rewarding violent content.
Automated detection of violent content is probably not super precise, so if they assign users a score instead and wait until they’re confident your score is high enough that it’s not a false-positive they can scoop you out without too much bycatch.
Then they probably also want a deterrence effect from the threat, because otherwise they’d have just downweighted your upvotes. I believe, (though could be wrong) that they already do this for detected bots.
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Comment on Digg is relaunching under Kevin Rose and Alexis Ohanian in ~tech
NaraVara LinkI might have been one of the last people who still visited Digg semi-regularly, like maybe weekly. I didn’t mind what it turned into, it was just a place I peeked at and occasionally found...I might have been one of the last people who still visited Digg semi-regularly, like maybe weekly. I didn’t mind what it turned into, it was just a place I peeked at and occasionally found interesting content on. I mostly don’t use algorithmically fed media anymore and the stuff I do use (Mastodon and BlueSky) is focused on just follower feeds and my follower lists don’t pick up much of the general “internet culture.” So stuff like Digg was really my main way of knowing what the trends are on TikTok and Twitter aside from various group chats and discords I’m on.
I wish the internet had more places that you check on once or twice a day or week (which is basically how I use Tildes now as well). It definitely did not have any sort of community anymore though, so it’ll be interesting to see how this “director of vibes” thing will go. Community features do tend to make a site more sticky and encourage more visits and interaction. Which also leads to moderator headaches sine people will also step out of line then. But my impression of a lot of people who go out seeking mod powers often can’t help themselves but to get hyper-focused on those sorts of exhausting nitpicky stuff. Like yeah the janitorial duties are annoying, but the parts about intervening in pointless arguments type things seem to be what drives much of the mod drama in communities I’ve seen in the first place. This would sort of select for a completely different psychological profile around what sort of person would want to moderate a community.
But that all assumes this is anything different from the sorts of mod tools Reddit already provides. I’ve seen some pretty thorough automod configurations in the past that can get very particular about what sorts of participation they permit. Why wouldn’t you be able to build many such features into a site like Reddit? The main things Reddit mods can’t control is the algorithm, so if something hits All they can get overwhelmed. They can try to hide the upvote/downvote buttons or do some CSS to remind people about downvote reddiquette. But these are all small potatoes workarounds for the fact that what shows up on the feed is a consequence of mass votes and that sets the vibes ultimately. I think what you’d actually need to curate vibes would be granular controls over what sorts of content are promoted by the feed. But that’s in tension with the need to sling ads in people’s faces, so how well can it ever really work?
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Comment on YouTube Premium Lite: Ad-free viewing for $7.99/month in ~tech
NaraVara Link ParentIt’s not. SEC, CFPB, FTC, and FCC are all gutted. They were next on the list right after USAID.It’s not. SEC, CFPB, FTC, and FCC are all gutted. They were next on the list right after USAID.
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Comment on Cousin marriage: What new evidence tells us about children's risk for ill health and how governments are responding in ~life
NaraVara Link ParentGenerally these marriage norms form in places where customary inheritance is to divide the property amongst all sons. It’s a way to keep clan ties tight and property within the family to prevent...Generally these marriage norms form in places where customary inheritance is to divide the property amongst all sons. It’s a way to keep clan ties tight and property within the family to prevent it from being too far diffused over time.
The consanguinous marriages are arranged for economic considerations they’re not all just falling in love with their cousins. If it was just that it probably wouldn’t be that big a deal. AFAIK one off cousin marriages aren’t that big of a risk it’s just that it starts to compound the more loops you have in your family trees so when it’s a cultural norm the risk magnifies.
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Comment on Wealthy Americans fuel half of US economy consumer spending in ~finance
NaraVara Link ParentGiven how much of that wealth is just paper value that relies on the land value of their homes, that’s also a lot of room for the economy to contract in ways that completely collapse. I can...Given how much of that wealth is just paper value that relies on the land value of their homes, that’s also a lot of room for the economy to contract in ways that completely collapse. I can imagine a pretty calamitous scenario where we end up in a feedback loop where low demand leads to people losing jobs, leads to housing values dropping, leads to further demand contraction as people lose their nest eggs, and on and on.
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Comment on Wealthy Americans fuel half of US economy consumer spending in ~finance
NaraVara Link Parent$500k is a small one bedroom apartment here. It’s not usually adequate to comfortably raise a family in.$500k is a small one bedroom apartment here. It’s not usually adequate to comfortably raise a family in.
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Comment on Wealthy Americans fuel half of US economy consumer spending in ~finance
NaraVara Link ParentIt’s honestly absurd how far a dollar goes outside a major city. I think it makes more sense to evaluate incomes as being above median home price as your actual income because the rest is an...It’s honestly absurd how far a dollar goes outside a major city. I think it makes more sense to evaluate incomes as being above median home price as your actual income because the rest is an unavoidable expense.
This is basically what your taxable income is anyway since you get a mortgage deduction, though renters are screwed.
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Comment on US President Donald Trump cuts short talks with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy after Oval Office blow up in ~society
NaraVara Link ParentThe minerals deal is not a real deal and Zelensky has absolutely no reason to trust people who talk to him like that to follow through on their end of it. Europe needs to sack up and defend...The minerals deal is not a real deal and Zelensky has absolutely no reason to trust people who talk to him like that to follow through on their end of it.
Europe needs to sack up and defend Ukraine on its own. America is lost.
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Comment on US Democrats want to repeal Section 230? in ~society
NaraVara LinkBeing as how the internet has devolved into little more than a disinformation puke funnel I’m actually not opposed to just getting rid of a lot of services that rely on deriving value from user...Being as how the internet has devolved into little more than a disinformation puke funnel I’m actually not opposed to just getting rid of a lot of services that rely on deriving value from user generated content.
The idea of Section 230 was that these services are dumb pipes and aren’t exercising editorial control over the content posted to them. But as soon as you introduce an algorithmic feed that prioritizes and deprioritizes content you are exercising editorial control. It’s wired to promote controversy, discontent, and a whole host of social harms that they are completely exempted from. Speech worth protecting remains protected on free speech grounds, what wouldn’t be protected is serving up content to prime compulsive behavior from probable gambling addicts in order to prime them to click on a DraftKings ad further down the scroll.
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Comment on US Democrats want to repeal Section 230? in ~society
NaraVara Link ParentProportional representation systems do not seem meaningfully less polarized than the American system and, in fact, our current level of polarization is actually quite unusual historically. The...Proportional representation systems do not seem meaningfully less polarized than the American system and, in fact, our current level of polarization is actually quite unusual historically. The last time we were this polarized had a similar problem to the present, where one party had a total lock on certain regions of the country where races were uncompetitive. We couldn’t really fix that until Reconstruction, which was itself incomplete.
The media is what causes the polarization, the party polarization is downstream of that.
Didn’t they conclude it mostly came down to poorly fitted floor mats getting stuck under the pedal?