I absolutely agree, but you’re talking about a situation where we already have 10 different ways and 20 EC2 instances. When you get to that point (or start approaching it), yeah, do the complex thing - no argument at all. The challenge is to wait until the last responsible moment to make that pivot and to not dive deeper into the complexity than you need at the current time and place. I’ve worked with countless small companies and teams in the past that have created whole K8s clusters, Terraform provisioning plans, and the whole kit for a single low volume service because “we’ll need it when things scale out later” and later never arrives.

This is great until

I think that’s the point. Don’t jump to the complex right away. Keep it simple and compose the capabilities you have readily available until you need to become more complex. When the task requires it, yeah, do the complex thing, but keep the simplicity mandate in mind and only add the new complexity that you need. You can get pretty far with the simple, and what about all of the situations where that future pivot or growth never happens?

The philosophy strikes a cord with me - I’m often contending with teams that are building for the future complexities that they think might come up, and we realize later that we did get complexity in the problem later, but not the kind we had planned for, so all of that infrastructure and planning was wasted on an imaginary problem that no only didn’t help us but often actually make our task harder. The trick is to keep the solution set composable and flexible so that if complexity shows up later, we can reconfigure and build the new capabilities that we need rather than having to maneuver a large complicated system that we built on a white board before we really knew what the problem looked like.

The Guardian’s story on this has more of the important details

The human testicles had been preserved and so their sperm count could not be measured. However, the sperm count in the dogs’ testes could be assessed and was lower in samples with higher contamination with PVC. The study demonstrates a correlation but further research is needed to prove microplastics cause sperm counts to fall.

The testes analysed were obtained from postmortems in 2016, with the men ranging in age from 16 to 88 when they died. “The impact on the younger generation might be more concerning” now that there is more plastic than ever in the environment, Yu said.

The study, published in the journal Toxicological Sciences, involved dissolving the tissue samples and then analysing the plastic that remained. The dogs’ testes were obtained from veterinary practices that conducted neutering operations.

The human testicles had a plastic concentration almost three times higher than that found in the dog testes: 330 micrograms per gram of tissue compared with 123 micrograms. Polyethylene, used in plastic bags and bottles, was the most common microplastic found, followed by PVC.

It won’t matter if there are ways to side load or circumvent, though. 99.9% of users will not be willing to be bothered with such things and the US market would effectively die for the app.

Either tiktok becomes an American company or leaves… Ah, the free market has spoken

People keep saying this and I’m struggling to understand where this idea is coming from. The bill isn’t saying that they have to sell TikTok to a US company. They don’t have to sell it to the US government, or an owner in the US. Just divorce the company from explicit control by the Chinese government. Currently, the government can request any data they want from TikTok and they are obligated to provided it. Similarly, business laws in China mean that the government can also push changes down into the company, like a tweak to the algorithm to influence foreign perceptions of a topic for example.

The requirements laid out in this bill are meant to break that obligation and influence. It doesn’t say who should own the company - only who shouldn’t.

How would we feel if say, China decided Microsoft/Google/AWS/Oracle had to sell to a Chinese company on the grounds of national security?

But no one is saying that ByteDance has to sell TikTok to a US company. Just divest it to an owner that is not beholden to the Chinese government and obligated to share any and all data upon request. Compared to the legal requirements that China puts on US companies operating in China, this is a pretty tame ask.

It has a secondary interaction interface that’s novel - if you hold your hand at the right position, it projects data or controls into your palm which can then be navigated by tilting your hand and “clicking” with a finger tap gesture. This interface is also more private, and used for entering your pin to unlock the device, but can be used for other interactions like viewing long form responses to voice prompts where you can scroll through the data rather than trying to absorb everything as it’s spoken (or if you don’t want to have a spoken reply).

It’s an interesting concept, but I tend to agree with the user you replied to in that this is a solution in search of a problem.

The Google Reader shutdown hit me hard also. They offered all of the features in a really great app and many of the competitors shut down in their wake, so when they exited the scene, it left a huge hole.

They can, though the employees would be able to claim unemployment if the job was remote and then changed to on-site but if the job was on-site with a temporary remote policy the employee wouldn’t have a leg to stand on there and could be dismissed for cause.

In the US, what you can and cannot fire someone for is complicated and counter intuitive.

A low performer that is part of a protected class is hard to fire because you need to have copious documentation that they were dismissed due to poor performance and were not targeted for their protected class status. This is a good thing and prevents unscrupulous bosses from firing a woman for getting pregnant, targeting people of a particular race, religion, or gender, or any number of other awful things. Those things will only come up if the former employee sues, and many will not, so some bad bosses or companies get away with this while others end up in court because someone that needed to be fired is crying discrimination.

On the flip side, if it falls outside of those protected classes, you can fire someone for any other reason or no reason at all. “I woke up in a bad mood and picked a name out of a hat to fire” is legal. You may get a fight if the person you picked claims discrimination on one of the protected classes and you have to explain to a judge that you’re actually just a bad human and not discriminating, but it’s allowed.

In the US, there is rarely, if ever, a contract. Unless you can show that you were let go for a legally protected cause (your age, race, religion, gender, and some other things), employers can fire you without any reason at all.

The only caveat here is the differentiation between for cause and without cause, as it impacts your ability to collect unemployment insurance payments. Employers pay those insurance premiums to the government and they are based on how often people let go from that company claim the insurance payments, so a company that lets go of a lot of employees is going to pay more than one that manages to find a way to fire them for cause or get them to quit.

I think this is very likely, though it’s also prolonging this whole exercise by avoiding the dramatic conclusion and spreading the pain out over a longer time.

If every manager at Amazon woke up tomorrow and said “screw it, we’re enforcing this policy”, that would result in a mass firing event of quality talent, and Amazon would feel the pain of their policy decisions and either have to swallow that and try to move on or beat a hasty retreat and call this whole thing off. It would be a quick and decisive end to this whole debate, but instead we have month after month of employees stressed and angry while looking rebellious and unmanageable, managers stressed and frustrated while looking ineffective, and the senior leadership frustrated and looking impotent.

Someone’s going to win this fight eventually, but everyone trying to find middle ground and skirt the policy just takes what would be one big fight and turns it into many months of slow unease and turmoil that’s bad for everyone. I want the remote people to win this, but sometimes the way to win is the lose on purpose. Let the dog catch the car so he can realize what an idiot he was being.

China coming in with the latest in new tech for people with too much money to accidentally kill themselves. The finest innovation in the field since the Cesna.

That is the specific app the person I replied to was asking about, so yea. Would have been a little weird if I was talking about some other app.

Mostly. The 6 digit standard ones that you see almost everywhere are standard TOTP codes and most apps work for them. There are some proprietary things out there too but you typically see those with a matching app from the same company. Those are far less common though so for practical reasons you can assume they are all interchangeable.

Those values are computed separately what the app is really storing is just the input values which are then combines with the current time to create the 6 digit code. That means that keeping that input value (seed) safe is a big deal, and how and where that is done is one of the major differentiators between the various options.

Google Auth works just fine. The standard for app generated 2FA is, well, standard. They’re only listing a non-complete list of options for people that don’t know what an authenticator app is and need to get one for the first time.

Too many people were making poor choices. When there’s an incident of an account that should have been secured but wasn’t getting compromised, that’s bad for the platform, ecosystem, and community. This is just another level beyond not allowing you to set a password of “password”