I have, despite my better judgement, gone back on reddit in a limited way after exiting completely for a few months. I decided to anonymize myself as much as possible and was using Redact to cover my history. It overwrites comments with random words plus a short message that the comment has been anonymized and deleted with Redact. It's been working great for quite a few months.

Today I logged on for the first time in a few days and my comments have ALL been restored, right back to when I opened a new account a few months ago after closing my ten year old account. Everything is there again.

Not sure reddit's point in restoring them, other than a stark reminder that comments and personal info mining is the point of reddit, not community engagement, just like all the other social media.

Curious if anyone has any idea on how to permanently delete comment history?

I've been a hiring manager before across a few jobs. But, then, I was receiving maybe 50 resumes to screen a week with my recruiter. Y'all are, what, at a few factors to an order of magnitude more than that?

Are your recruiters now pre-filtering resumes before you see them? What is being used to determine whether a candidate gets an interview now?

What I'm seeing:

• Referrals almost never matter: I've gotten two interviews through my network after dozens of applications—and I'm fairly well networked.
• Experience at other well-known Tech companies doesn't get an interview
• Having the right skill set, based on the job description doesn't get an interview.

From the outside, it seems like a coin flip.

Meanwhile, I have LinkedIn's AI advisor routinely giving me flavors of "yes, you're definitely their kind of candidate" yet no responses after weeks followed by the occasional casual rejection email.

So what's happening behind the scenes? How do resumes get on your radar? How do you work from the deluge to hiring a human?

Sincerely,
A very experienced engineer and manager who is rather fed up with what seems like a collection of pseudo-random number generator contemporary hiring processes.

EDIT: I should have also included recruiters in the title of my ask.

It's nice having english language forums that don't require a vpn to access. Anyone got any other suggestions and any recommendations for vpns that work on mobile data reliably? I've found PIA, Nord, and Proton to not work but Surfshark does for now if intermittently (more reliably on wifi).

I really like this instructional video. I even downloaded a copy. The copy I downloaded is as blurry as the copy on YouTube.

Is it possible to possible to sharpen my copy of that video?

If it is possible, can it be done with freely available software on Linux?

Thanks either way.

In the recent months I started getting dissatisfied with Google the company in general, but also with its search engine due to privacy reasons, and SEO bloat affecting certain searches. A few weeks ago I switched to Duckduckgo from Google. Some searches are fine but there are three main issues I've been experiencing with Duckduckgo since the switch.

• The search "fails" and shows me results that are tangentially related to the query. Happens quite often and for various topics.
• It shows me a semi-related search results instead of the one I searched for, because it says there are not enough results for my query. Then I have to click again on the small text to search for the actual query.
• The automatic prompts that complete your query are scarce and unsatisfactory.

Because of this I've been switching back and forth between Google and Duckduckgo lately. I don't want to use Google, but Duckduckgo is definitely the worse option in general in my experience. It's better in some searches and shows useful results instead of big site bloat, but my overall experience was one of getting heavily downgraded.

This led me to a criticism about the discussions around this topic. People talk a lot about SEO bloat affecting search results, and it's definitely a real issue. It's especially a problem for some political searches, as it results in you getting propaganda results. However, recommending people Duckduckgo without mentioning its significantly worse search quality seems misleading.

I am of course not against using or recommending Duckduckgo. In fact, I wish them greater success in market share and development, as I think their policies are much better. But I think mentioning Duckduckgo's downsides is important to adequately inform people. I expected a noticeable downgrade, but I didn't expect it to be this worse because nobody mentioned it. As a result, I felt misled, and I definitely didn't know what I was getting into. Being adequately informed would have prevented that, as I would adjust my expectations.

So, this seems to be largely unaddressed in discussions around this topic, and I suspect the echo chamber effect around anti-Google discourse and privacy issues might be to blame.

What are your thoughts? Has anyone experienced something similar?

I am going to be living in France for the next year. I want to keep my US mobile phone number, and I would like it to be somewhat usable while I am out of the country, but I can't find an affordable way do set this up. I am hoping someone here has some more insight for me.

I am going to be buying a French mobile phone plan (most likely through Orange) that will cover my data usage, along with a local number for calls and texts. I already have either whatsapp or imessage set up for calls and texts to/from my family in the US. Ideally, I would like to have my US number on a second sim on my phone. I wouldn't need any roaming data for that sim, just calls and texts, and my actual usage will be very small.

Here are the solutions I have explored:

1. Porting my number to Google Voice. This is probably the best solution, but I would like to avoid google if at all possible. This costs only $20 with no monthly fees. This would require me to use a separate app for this number. If possible, I would like to be able to use the iPhone system apps for calls and texts.

2. Some MVNO with international roaming. So far the best I have seen is Ting mobile. It costs $0.30 per minute calls and $0.12 per outgoing text. This pricing would be perfect for my extremely low usage. However it requires a $10/month pay as you go plan which is more than I want to pay.

3. IoT sims (although I am almost positive this won't work). These appear to be sms and data only, so for my usage they would be sms only. Telnyx is the service I found that actually supports esim (my phone has only esim). I am having trouble with the console, but I am trying to get an esim on my iphone. If this can work, it would be only $2/month plus usage, which would be perfect.

Are there any other possible solutions that I should look into?

Sorry in advance if this is kind of a ramble. Thanks for any thoughts you may have.

This post asking about specific hardware made me realize that I have lost touch with major architectural changes in PC hardware. Back in college (over 20 years ago), I was constantly upgrading and rebuilding computers, talking about them, reading about them. But that's probably par for the course in a EE program. I'm sure there must have been other online resources, but Slashdot is the thing that sticks out in my memory of that time.

Then in grad school, my last set of desktops from college carried me through the first few years, and I had a series of laptops provided by school.

Since then, I've always just bought laptops because they've gotten good enough to do everything I want, and with kids, it's much more flexible to be able to work anywhere in and out of the house. My latest (now several years old) has a high end I7 cpu, an NVIDIA GPU, two solid state drives (1.5TB total). It weighs just a few pounds and does everything I want, including things like Solidworks, zbrush, and older PC games.

Since I can remember a time when I was excited about 90mhz processors and feeling like I was getting a screaming deal to pay $500 for a 500mb hd, sometimes it just feels surreal for this to be so normal.

So, am I out of the loop? Or is this reflective of a more general shift? What do you read / where do you post to discuss hardware, hardware compatibility, etc. Are you still building desktops? Laptops? Cyberdecks? What are your thoughts on cost/value trade off of dell, etc. vs rolling your own?

I'm working on an AI chat portal for teams, think Perplexity but trained on a company's knowledgebase (prosgpt dot com for the curious) and i wanted to talk to some people who are successfully using LLMs in their teams or jobs to improve productivity

Are you using free or paid LLMs? Which ones?

What kind of tasks do you get an LLM to do for you?

What is the workflow for accomplishing those tasks?

Cheers,
nmn

I am planning to go back to a desktop after using laptops for years.

I already have an 1080p IPS monitor. I want just the tower.

There is the new Zen 5 coming out soon.

I was thinking about buying a Ryzen 7600 and maybe buy a GPU in the future if I want to play heavier games. The Ryzen 7600 has integrated graphics for basic things.

My main use now is just some casual gaming (Afterimage, Hollow Knight, Fallout 4), movies, browsing the web and compiling some software (Gentoo Linux).

I use exclusively Linux and I want to keep using AMD.

Should I wait the Zen 5 to come out and see if the 7600 price drops or this probably won't happen?

As the title says, looking for recommendations of fun and interesting websites that don't involve current events/news. Sites where you can spend hours diving down rabbit holes, browsing fun and interesting content, or just otherwise detach from reality for a bit.

This isn't a request for just myself, but just in general. I feel like all the biggest websites just have a bit too much influence from current events and news, which can make browsing pretty stressful. And given how centralized the internet has become, finding sites outside those has become a bit trickier. It'd be fun to see some more focused sites for various topics and niches. Can be an educational site with cool articles, could be entertainment, could be a forum or a blog. Just, what sites could you spend hours on?

I know it isn't a good habit. I like to watch movies, "T.V. shows" on my computer. It was never a problem with older style monitors.

However with newer style monitors ( like I have ) and T.V. screens you either have to be far away from the monitor or be sitting up straight for the images not to fade. Worse, you can't see anything with night scenes.

Anything I can do about it aside from buying a hug TV and sitting on a couch at the other end of the room?

Update: I got the monitor /user/ButteredToast recommended. It works noticeably better than my old monitor and the price was very reasonable