I grew up with BBS access for a number of years, but no USENET access.
When I finally got access to USENET ... what a terrible place it was! SO MUCH SPAM.
And the few newsgroups not riddled with spam just had poor behavior. The nice thing about BBS conferences were they were all moderated. And the ones I was part of required you to use your real name (as verified by the BBS sysop). They took it seriously - if a sysop was found not to be compliant, his BBS was kicked out of the network for a period of time.
The only good thing about USENET was the tooling (news readers, etc). Otherwise, both early web forums and BBS's had it beat.
Eh, I don't have the link at the moment - it was posted some years ago on HN. In the US, your employer very likely reports your salary to a national agency. And other companies can access it.
You can go to the agency yourself, prove your identity, and see all your salary history.
> seems far more efficient/reliable to get codex/claude code to write and set up a bot that does this.
I think Simon Willison said it best some weeks ago: He's capable of writing a bot like this - both before and after LLMs came on the scene. However, the reality is he never wrote one, despite wanting to many times.
Yet in just 2-3 weeks of using OpenClaw[1], I did this a few times.
Recall a year or so ago in the early days of vibe coding when people kept saying "I don't need AI to write code. It does a crap job and I can do it myself. Who needs LLMs to do it?" - You'd get lots of people countering with "Oh, in a few weeks I've written lots of automations that I'd been thinking about for months/years - that I likely would never have written without AI coding tools".
The key is the lower barrier to producing something. OpenClaw is to using CC to write that bot as using CC was to writing code by hand. I can be doing work, shopping, etc and when an idea pops into my head, I casually send a note to my Claw instance (voice or text) asking it to look into it or try making it. It doesn't do a great job, but the expectations of success are similarly low. But when it does do precisely what you need it to: Oh boy, you're happy that it saved you time, etc.
> the use case of OpenClaw is “give me access to all of your data, programs and information, and I will make decisions and do stuff without asking you permission”. It’s the MO of the project.
You say that, but you also say
> I’m not an openclaw user
Your first statement makes the second one rather obvious.
As I said some weeks ago, I've given up pointing out on HN: "Well, you could just not give it your data" only to be repeatedly told (by non-users) that the whole point is to give it all your data.
> This is the "you're holding it wrong"[1] argument
But isn't that what you're doing?
Every single submission on HN has threads where people point out how it's useful to them without giving it access to much/any data. What is the benefit of pointing out what the homepage is saying other than to imply that we are holding it wrong?
And what does it say about you that you're going off based on marketing on a website rather than actual, competent tech users who actually weild the tool?
Until recently Gentoo boasted performance as a reason to use it. Yet as someone who's been in the community for over 20 years, I can assure you the majority of users didn't care about the performance and aren't optimizing their builds for it. Who cares what the site says?
It’s funny as I see this argument from people who at the same time excuse Snowden for publicly exposing government surveillance overreach when he had similar tools (disclosure to relevant authorities) available to him.
Snowden is still a horrible analogy when comparing to this situation.
Snowden released classified data at great personal cost - he is now a US fugitive and will be promptly arrested if he ever tries to leave Russia.
Sarah Wynn-Williams wrote a tell-all book for which she was paid. My understanding is that she also signed the non-disparagement clause as part of her separation agreement, in order to get a substantial severance (someone correct me if I'm wrong).
I've only read parts of Careless People, and I think it's great that Wynn-Williams wrote it and exposed some details at the personal level of how nuts these folks are. But I take issue with framing her as some kind of victim ("Meta stole Sarah Wynn-Williams Voice" - give me a fucking break). Meta wouldn't be able to do shit if Wynn-Williams hadn't told them she'd keep her mouth shut for a pile of money. What did she expect would happen after she received that pile of money and then opened her mouth?
Snowden, similarly, signed a substantial non-disclosure agreement which was a condition of his employment with Booz-Allen.
Of course, considering the NDA was a condition of his employment, he was paid for his work that he could not have done had he not signed said NDA. What did he expect would happen after he received his money and then opened his mouth?
"disclosing them to relevant authorities" would not bring the message to those affected by such carelessness. I would think "Disclosing them to the public" brings more awareness in the public, and though might be illegal, serves better for public good.
Legal is not always just or moral.
NLRB under Biden seemed to say that yeah you can disclose this to the media, and broad non-disparagements are unenforceable. But it’s also kind of a toss up depending on the NLRB, courts, administration, etc.
Trump’s NLRB has rescinded a bunch of that Biden-era guidance, so what is enforceable and what isn’t? Kind of hard to say at this point.
Arbitration agreed with Meta, but who knows what courts would say.
Well, the whole point is that courts won't weigh in, because of the arbitration agreement.
I took a negotiations course at university, and there was a section on arbitration vs the courts. There are plenty of good reasons to go with arbitration (employment contracts are not amongst them, though).
The one thing the professor highlighted was that if the arbiter was fundamentally unfair (e.g. civil rights violation), you're screwed. You can't then go to the court and make your case. There's no appeals process, etc.
I'm guessing there is no notion of "precedence" with arbitration, this being one of the reasons.
I actually have applied, and I got the offer. And I didn't take it. Because Oracle is known for poor working conditions.
Why can Oracle continue to hire good talent despite offering poor working conditions? H1-B.
Is it circular? Absolutely.
There really should be a strict maximum percentage of visa hires for any particular job type at a company. Say, 2x the overall average for that job category, and never to exceed 30%.
If they still need more labor, then they need to attract and train local talent rather than relying solely on overseas talent.
Do you think they would instead shift to India if these measures continue. The talent is there. 80% of the for talent is currently in US due to H1b but will move back to India. And it might be cheaper to just shift offices to India
No they won't. Oracle already has many teams that report to a people manager in India/Mexico/etc. and then dotted line report to another manager in the USA who actually calls the shots.
I was able to retire in my early 40s because Oracle paid early OCI engineers very well, in order to poach them from FAANGs. I wouldn’t recommend it now but “apply to Oracle for a job” did work out for some of us :)
I probably would if they had something in my area of expertise and decent pay/benefits. Then again, isn't the point of this exercise to avoid doing exactly that?
To figure out average speed of a vehicle between two known points, you need to find when that specific vehicle was at point a and point b. Likely this would be done by automated license plate readers and storing when that car was where in some database. Great, now we're tracking the movement and location of vehicles (and people) with no reasonable suspicion of a crime. Surely this information won't be misused this time.
Don’t all modern cars have an always on cellular connection anyway?
I’ve got as big a tinfoil hat as anyone, but I think this battle was lost a long time ago. Automobiles transportation will become closer to flights, where everything is logged.
The majority of new cars probably do have driver tracking (always on cellular), but not all of them. The 24 model of the Subaru BRZ in low trim does not have a cellular modem. The high trims do. Because it's an option, you can easily remove the DCM (driver control module). I did. Most Subarus I've seen since 2015 use the same style of removable dcm and only need a passive adapter to remove.
In context, we should keep in mind that new cars may not be the majority of what's on the road.
One big thing I still miss with org-mode are explicit section endings. Just as with markdown you only have headings, the end of a section is implicit. This often leads to text getting swallowed up by the last chapter and makes any kind of restructuring fragile. HTML's <section> makes things much easier.
Having explicit header levels (similar to HTML's <h[0-6]>) is another annoyance, as that makes inclusion of one org document into another problematic and requires restructuring (somewhat workaroundable with "#+begin_src org").
You kind of do need Emacs though, as far as I know it is the only existing fully compatible implementation. As soon as the file is outside that environment, all bets are off. I tried using org-mode instead of Markdown once, not for long.
Years ago, I considered your approach. Programmatically create a custom email address for each person I wanted to talk to.
Then I hit upon a simpler solution. Have one email address. Happily share publicly. And whitelist the sender's email addresses. Emails not in the whitelist go into a quarantine folder that I glance at once in a while.
It's almost equivalent in efficacy, but much simpler to implement.
I don't have a phone ringer anymore, but when I did whitelist-only is how I screened incoming calls. Your method for email sorting has the advantage of being reviewable (verse entirely blocking specific handles@) — and much easier to implement/maintain.
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