If you ever have the chance to visit the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam, during the educational talk they discuss why the Dutch army wasn’t able to resist the German tanks. They show this picture, and at least on our tour said it was ok to laugh.

He should just be honest and said “this $1m is a mandatory payment to trump so that he exempts Apple from tariffs, no other reason”, of course, then it’s an obvious quid pro quo.

Load virus on to banking system to embezzle fraction of cents on each financial operation.

Not that easy when it’s a fleet of servers in multiple remote data centers. Lots of IT folks will be spending their weekend sitting in data center cages.

Just got back from a 3 day trip to Brussels, we loved it. Plus, Smurfs (Les Schtroumpfs) everywhere. We did take a day trip to Bruges though, that was even better than Brussels IMHO. Especially since I could walk around saying to my wife “If I grew up on a farm, and was retarded, Bruges might impress me but I didn’t, so it doesn’t.”.

Meanwhile, me over here with the self-doubt slamming ctrl-z

The 2017 tax bill that the Republicans rammed through had a time bomb in it for software developers. Starting in 2022, companies could no longer expense R&D costs, and instead had to amortize them over 5 years. This has led to massive tax bills in 2023 for companies. I have no doubt that this is another major factor in the recent tech layoffs.

Take an imaginary bootstrapped software business called “Acme Corp.” This company generates $1,000,000 of revenue per year running a SaaS service. It employs five engineers, and pays each $200,000. That is $1,000,000 paid in labor costs. For simplicity, we omit other costs like servers and hosting, even though those costs can also fall under the new R&D rules, and have to be amortized. So, how much taxable profit does this company make?

In 2021, the answer would be zero profit. In 2022, the answer was $900,000 in profits(!!)

https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pulse-will-us-companies-hire

Assume positive intent. Amazing how much lower stress your stress levels will be if you don’t feel attacked (on the road, on social media, in conversations, etc).

Oh yeah, and buy a bidet. Your bum will thank you.

Classic: A Christmas Carol, the 1951 version with Alastair Sim. Sim’s giddy portrayal of Scrooge on Christmas morning is one of my favorite performances of any actor.

Modern: A Christmas Story, and Elf.

I think it varies by seniority. We had layoffs, and all of our lead and principal engineers were able to land a new position in 4-6 weeks. But the junior, mid, and even some senior level engineers had a far rougher time. And managers/directors are having a really difficult go of it right now.

Somewhat related, at least on Linux and OSX, GNU Stow is a great way to manage dotfiles.

I guess it depends what one calls “the media”. Something like IEEE Spectrum is top notch for tech news. Reuters and AP generally are pretty good for normal news. Past that, maybe something like The Conversation?

For a lot of these you need to study/practice on sites like HackerRank for a while first. Some companies go overboard and expect you to build some crazy recursive dynamic programming implementation in 15 mins without an IDE, others are more realistic and just want to see if you know things like algorithm complexity, can pick appropriate data structures, and write logical and clean code. And yes, very little of it applies to what most of us do day to day. Anyways, HackerRank is great for interview practice, you can Google for pretty much any solution to their questions.

Gross, yet probably not unusual for the Red line.

Dongles!

So he went to public school in New York back before Reagan started cutting taxes for the rich and exploding the wealth gap. The taxes that paid for that very school and gave him his start. Now this twat is on the conservative side of completely gutting public schools.

V.J.s Drive Inn in Winnipeg MB Canada. Greasy heaven.

Any products that support Koch Industries. Horrible people.

People who are unable to feel empathy for others outside of their “in-group”. Racism, oppression, genocide, all of it stems from that same basic disorder. Unfortunately this is an all too common trait in humans.