The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths is a page long, and you can find it online (html). It is a small example of his style. If you like that one, then you will probably like his other stories. Of his short stories, my personal favorite is The Secret Miracle (it is included in his book Fictions). He also wrote poetry. My personal favorite is The Golem (included in the book The Other, the Self).
What about banning the postal service from selling customer's data, and funding it some other way?
What about changing the "do not call me register" to a "please call me register" and making do not call me the default, and penalizing those who break the rules?
How about banning all those websites that aggregate and sell personal information from social media and public records?
Why, every time someone suggests a fix to something they see as a problem (regardless of whether it's actually a problem, or even the merit of the solution), is there no shortage of people saying "yeah but what about these unrelated problems?!"
I think everything you suggested is something that should be addressed in one way or another. I think banning the sale of medical data is probably a good thing more often than not. All these things can be true, but responding to a statement about banning the sale of medical data with "yeah well what about the post office?!" seems weird, and perhaps politically motivated.
The phenomenon of responding to a statement with a "well what about {quasi-related|unrelated topic}" is called Whataboutism[1].
I think most people use it because they feel there is a larger systemic cause not being addressed by treating a specific symptom, but it does tend to read as a way to shift conversation away from the topic at hand.
> What about banning the postal service from selling customer's data, and funding it some other way?
If you actually read the article, you'd see that this is in response to the upcoming Roe v. Wade vote and how health app data could be used against citizens in the future.
More broadly though, if we always chose to reject legislation based on the fact that we believe it could go further in some way, nothing would ever get done. It's never good enough for somebody. We're OK with businesses shipping half-baked MVPs but we always expect elegant and complete waterfall legislation from our government.
What data does the USPS sell other than change of address (which I'm a fan of since it means I rarely have to update my address when I move, the businesses I care about find out from the USPS). I know they scan incoming mail, do they sell any of that information?
I don't know if this constitutes "selling data", but the USPS allows you to run direct mail campaigns on routes and neighborhoods. The USPS provides moderately granular, aggregate data about the route/area, which you can then target. Some of the data includes household income, household size, and age brackets. Insofar that I know, you cannot unsubscribe from this type of mail.
I don't know if they're personalized or not but there are ads within the Informed Delivery emails, and it wouldn't surprise me to learn there is at least superficial tracking and/or personalization based on who you're [not] receiving mail from.
Right - work on the wording, but absolutely keep the sentiment. You are clearly valuable to the people using your skills for their own profit. You deserve compensation and respect for the time and effort you put in. Regardless of how well intentioned they seem, be incredibly insistent on payment for your work. Ideally, negotiate pay before any work is done. If they resist this, you need to walk away.
The concept of "fuck you" is important here, even if the specific words are not.
I did subcontracting work, several thousand dollars worth, for a friend of a friend. I sent the bill as our contract stated and.. crickets. Bill wasn't a surprise, I send weekly estimates.
I wait 30 days before I start in with the threats of penalties and late fees. Eventually I get back a sob story that the directs father had passed unexpectedly.
Now, I'm sorry his father passed. However, he collected the money in full from the client.. so it wasn't like that was the issue. I came back with a sincere note telling him I'd be happy to give him 60 day extension, no fees or anything, so he could mourn and all.
He sent me to his lawyer.
Of course signed contract, with weekly estimates, bill of work, etc. His lawyer offered, in 60 seconds of picking up the phone to "settle" for the original billed amount with no fee.
"Fuck you, pay me" is good advice to repeat to yourself in your head.
Also with your custom UI framework, you will need to re-implement a text editor from scratch which is a pretty daunting task by the way [0]. Do you also have plans to open source the text editing / make text editing a part of the framework? Text editing (right there with accessibility) is the core reason why one would not go with a pure immediate mode GUI for any app. I guess you are baking immediate mode with some extras?
Rust on Mac with an open source UI - wow! If nothing else, you guys are ambitious as heck. Can't wait to see more. Also, loved the youtube video you linked to earlier in the comments - great to see an actual working demo instead of just an announcement.
I took my laptop for repair to an Apple store in Germany. After that, they kept emailing me, despite me asking them to remove me from their mailing list several times. I then wrote an email to Tim Cook. They never answered back, but did not get any further spam.
I think a tree view was promised (listed on a presentation) when Flutter 2.0 was released, but no details were provided, and I haven't heard of it ever since.
You might be thinking of this package, authored by Google, mostly by people on the Flutter team but it's not an official Flutter project (as far as I know): https://pub.dev/packages/flutter_simple_treeview
After both sides have gotten a given number of acknowledgement of the acknowledgement of the acknowledgement ... of the acknowledgement: isn't it obvious that the original message was delivered?
It only takes one round-trip for both sides to be confident that the first message was received. However, the second party can't be sure the first party knows they received the message without hearing an ACK from the first party. As far as they're concerned, the first party might think it's shouting into the void. This despite the first party (hypothetically) in fact receiving the second party's ACK.
Both parties can never agree on the status of all messages, because you have to generate a new message in order for an old one to advance its state. TCP works on this principle, but because not all messages are semantically relevant to the application, it can generate extra messages to push semantically meaningful messages into the agreed-upon prefix.
On the other hand, a TCP connection must always terminate with at least one message un-ACKed. The best we can do is guarantee that there are no more application-level messages in flight.
Sort of; 1 is just as good as 100, since whether the other army is going to attack or not is still dependent on their receiving your Nth acknowledgement, and past acknowledgements don't change the confidence of its arrival.
Which brings us to the relaxed case from the OP; make it so we only need one acknowledgement, and account for the confidence level of getting that one acknowledgement.
Yeah; ultimately no matter how many levels of acknowledgement, the other army's decision to attack is predicated on receiving an acknowledgement to the most recent message, not past ones (else you don't need an acknowledgement at all). There's an inductive principle at play; even at 100 levels deep it's the same problem as the original.
Some companies even do this for job applications. A manager has a person they want for a role but, because of policy, they must publish it on their employment website, and go through the charade of interviewing candidates, wasting everybody's time. In the end, their preferred candidate wins.
The first time was in 1994 when he applied for an Air Force position in Italy. The role required a max 3 out of 3 score on the DoD Italian proficiency test and some other niche requirements, all of which my dad fulfilled. The Air Force selected my dad for the position since the only other candidate that applied was the person currently holding the position. Then there was a big debacle because the commander over that position actually wanted the extend the guy currently holding the position a few years and decided crafting a niche job spec that seemingly only he could fill was the best way. There was a bunch of back-pedaling and politics and the job position was redacted in order for the commander to keep his guy from being replaced by my dad.
The second time was similar, but at a public university. A super niche job opening for their history department was published on their site that required experience with american military history, and a few other things my dad was uniquely qualified for. He applied, and the job posting was shortly taken down and my dad got a response like "actually we've decided to move a different direction from when we originally posted that job listing. That listing has been removed and we are no longer accepting applications for it". Seemed like another instance where the candidate to-be-hired was pre-determined, but my dad threw a wrench into their plans by applying to a job posting that was only supposed to have 1 candidate (the predetermined hire).
I applied for a job that a friend of mine was up for simply because they couldn't complete the job search until they had enough candidates. I went through the interview process to speed things up for him. Got interviewed by 9 people when we all knew what the outcome was supposed to be.
I spent most of the time talking about how great he was at his job just to move it along faster.
In my experience, this most frequently occurs if the company does business with the government (fed, state, or local). In such cases, the "charade" is required by Federal or State law. I agree its absolutely ridiculous, but large companies can and are in fact frequently audited on these and other hiring practice requirements (such as interview notes, etc.).
At my $BIGCORP, if you want to give somebody a band promotion (meaning, up to the next major band), the job must be posted both internally and externally and you must interview any candidates who appear to meet the requirements. It's a pain in the ass, especially when you clearly have someone in mind. There are always people both internal and external looking at our jobs site because we're a well known Fortune 50; you're bound to get applicants to the higher level roles. It just creates extra work and wastes the time of all involved...but alas, regulation.
eta: could also be a requirement of publicly traded companies, though I'm far less sure on this.
It's not so much an actual regulation, as it is good practice that once you get large enough (ie attractive enough to sue), HR will implement actions to "affirmatively demonstrate" that they are fair in their hiring practices.
Typically, I assume most fuckery is built into a business charter and becomes so ingrained, most employees have no idea why they're jumping through the hoops
Green card job postings do this because it is a requirement to advertise the opening. So you tailor the job description specifically for the person you already employ on a immigrant visa.
You're probably referring to job postings used to justify H-1B (and similar) visa applications. Such visas are only supposed to be approved if the employer shows that no US person can do the job.
There's not really any green card job postings. But getting an H-1B can be the first step toward obtaining a green card (permanent residency) for some immigrants.
Honestly if the job ad surfaces someone who can do the job and doesn't need all that immigration rigamarole I'll take them in a flash. I'll save a ton just in lawyers and time lost.
And isn't that how it's supposed to work: hire local in preference to bringing in someone from outside? I'm an immigrant myself and I still think that's a good idea.
We had this in Australia a few years back. TCS employed a whole call centre to advertise jobs and interview many people for them so they could bring in their own overseas contractors because they could not fill the positions with local developers as they lacked the skills required. All of them.
We have done it at every company I've ever worked for, but not for all positions. Probably less than half on average. But it is somewhat common to find that someone we know and like has become available and we open a position to offer it to them. But HR makes us post it anyway, pro forma.
Yes. In fact, it's probably safe to assume it's happening unless the position being advertised is entry-level or has multiple openings for the same job description.
Every sufficiently large company will have some job postings which are charades, but that doesn't mean that every job posting from a sufficiently large company is a charade.
Getting an H1B worker visa requires the hiring company to advertise the open position and assert that no other candidate met the required qualifications.
You don't necessarily know who you want to hire when you have a position. The question is if you already know who you want to hire, do you always go through the charade?
And the answer is "almost never, unless there are formal requirements for the appearance of a hiring process, which companies will tend not to put in place unless legal/contractual/csr obligations around hiring force them into doing or they really don't trust middle managers' ability to promote". Even a charade of a hiring process costs time and money (and much more so than an RFP process)
Even organisations like universities that have formal requirements to advertise [certain positions] externally will stick to doing the minimum allowable (which might be a poorly written and overly demanding job spec put up on the org's own careers page for the shortest allowable time and any responses binned) if they've actually already made the decision.
Of course there's also a tendency of people to confuse the charade with the more common case of a position being genuinely open and contested and an internal or existing relationship candidate applying (and sometimes but definitely not always being favoured), especially if they just missed out on a job after thinking their final interview went well...
In my experience it's the opposite. I personally know this has happened for probably over 100 positions, and that's not based on rumors but something I witnessed. And I saw that across a half dozen organizations ranging from 100-10,000 employees.
So "almost never" is almost certainly wrong. My sample size is small, but it's big enough that when it happens 100% of the time it suggests it's the norm.
Your assumption that organizations are efficient might be wrong. I'm basing my judgment on observation and you're basing it on theory.
You personally know of over 100 cases where the company didn't have any sort of formal policy obliging it to advertise jobs, but went through a full fake hiring process with multiple candidates it was committed to not hiring just for the fun of it?!
(Your assumption that my understanding of hiring processes is based wholly on theory might be wrong)
By adding that clause to your statement, you're essentially nullifying your argument. "It almost never happens, except when it always happens." So I ignored the latter half because otherwise your statement seems pretty useless. Because then we're ignoring most of the data because...well just because, I guess.
Sure, if we discount all the times it happens by default, maybe your argument makes sense. But that's like saying let's ignore the majority and only focus on the exceptions and extrapolate to make conclusions about the majority.
You're answering a question that nobody asked. And I'm the person that asked the question.
I interviewed at a bank shortly after I graduated college. We had to do an exam as part of the interview process and for that a few candidates were at the office at the same time. I learned that one of the candidates worked there previously and was known to the hiring team. Immediately I knew I wasn't getting that job!
I don't think it's an exclusively bad practice, especially at larger organizations where cliques and silos are deeply entrenched. It can be hard to retain good people when every opportunity is spoken for by the director's buddy and there's no path to move up.
I'm not arguing an absolute, there should be a way for leaders to hand pick the clear favorite when they're qualified, but I don't know if that should be the default policy.
I would add to your excellent answer an anecdote about the tricks of a previous government (with mostly the same people as the current one) to hide inflation: the Secretary of Interior Commerce (a complete thug) forced McDonalds to freeze the price of the BigMac, so that Argentina would look good on the BigMac Index. The prices of all other burgers were more or less free to increase.
So can you actually go in and buy the BigMac? Wouldn't price controls cause inventory of BigMac to disappear? Or does McDonalds happily sell them at a loss?
This was more than 10 years ago. If I recall correctly, they sold the BigMac but did not advertise it (not sure if they even displayed it on the menu).
