Did you know that the USPS will send you scanned pictures of ALL YOUR MAIL BEFORE IT ARRIVES? Like, **actual pictures** of your envelopes? For free? It's kind of amazing.

It has proven useful more than once for me (YMMV).

(This is obviously the outside of the envelopes only. For scans of the inside you need to contact the NSA.)

https://informeddelivery.usps.com

"we pay location based salaries, to adjust for cost of living"

so, you pay disabled people more? "no" what about single parents? "also no" what about people who've paid off their mortgage, they get less, right? "as if"

ok, so you adjust the cost of living adjustments, right? "maybe we will. if it goes down"

"we just worked out the lowest we can pay people in any area and remain competitive"

it just feels more like location specific wage theft

My escape key is somehow broken on macOS (even ⌃[ which I use in (neo)vim doesn’t work). Yay, computers!

If you're in the Bay Area you should join me at CITCON Los Gatos February 3 & 4.

It's a small open spaces conference about continuous integration, testing, and feedback loops in software.

If you've never been to an open spaces conference before they're *great.* Sessions are discussion-based and pitched live by attendees, so it's basically a conference that's 100% the best parts of the "hallway track."

Sign up now:
https://citconf.com/siliconvalley2023/

Peer review has a lot of analogues to code review, though there are some pretty big differences that significantly affect the cost-benefit analysis.

https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-peer-review

Two good and sadly too-accurate pieces on how platforms are necessarily destroyed by capitalism.

• https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other-and-start
• https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/

Yup, it me. I so rarely watch any TV series anymore since it’s just too much of a time commitment.

https://xkcd.com/2727/

Ah yes, the metric SI unit of "a penguin".

The Globus INK (1967) is a remarkable piece of Soviet spacecraft equipment. Its rotating globe showed cosmonauts the position of their Soyuz spacecraft. An electromechanical analog computer, it used gears, cams, and differentials to compute the position. Let's look inside 🧵

Thinking about all the recent layoffs in tech, media, etc., and how so many of the "Nobody wants to work anymore!"/"Where'd the go-getters go?!"/"The rise of 'quiet quitting'" type articles in the past year or so overlooked the effect that the "hey, maybe we'll just lay a bunch of people off because we want to make a little extra cash" culture the business world has fostered might have on, well, everything involving worker morale/sense of loyalty/etc.

It’s so strange as a Rubyist being in the Python ecosystem nowadays. Still have a strong preference for Ruby over Python, though the thing I miss the most from Python when doing Ruby is probably the static typing.

One of the downsides to running Akkoma is that it seems like none of the native Mastodon apps work with it? Sigh.

CEOs: nobody wants to work

also CEOs: we’re laying off 10,000 workers

i was laid-off twice early in my career in very large reorgs / cost-cutting.

the thing that wld have been helpful for me to hear then was 'this is not abt you. you were a number on someone's spreadsheet. they wanted that number to go down by 1000 or 2000 or 10,000'.

so, to anyone who needs to hear that today:

it's not abt you. you did nothing wrong.

Look, I don't work at a megacorp and I've never accidentally hired, according to my notes, twelve thousand too many people. I get that I'm not speaking from experience. But I feel like "oops, I hired twelve thousand too many people" is something that... should have some sort of consequences for the people who made the decision, in error, that they should hire twelve thousand too many people?

“Don’t show me the same boosted post more than 2×” is my new, most-desired Masto feature. Until quote posts are implemented :)

.

RE: https://mastodon.social/users/bigzaphod/statuses/109717894861207161

Desktop Twitterrific got cut off, I guess I’m done with Twitter now!

That was a very nice different view on Chesterton’s Fence, thanks @rixx.

Again, the frustrating thing about this in practice is that no matter how thoroughly we are able to come back and tell our conservative friends that we do fully understand and appreciate the original reasons for the construction of the fence, they remain unwilling to “allow” us to remove it. (The word “allow” there is worth pondering. The presumption there about who is, by definition, always a supplicant, and who holds the authority to permit or to prohibit is telling. “Allow” is, in this instance, very much a fence-builder’s word.)

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2019/10/21/chestertons-fence-and-frosts-wall/

Now I’m picturing soldiers doing Silly Walks to avoid AI detection…

https://twitter.com/shashj/status/1615716082588815363