We own an HP printer. The other day my wife told me the printer refused to print unless she renewed her subscription. I told her no way in disbelief. That can't be legal. She renewed the subscription and was able to print again. I'm hoping there's some kind of confusion, but waiting for the subscription to lapse to see if it happens again.
Agree with this 100%, as a father of 5. I have 2 sped kiddos that are aseverely handicapped and even at 7 and 8 years of age they cant do many so-called mundane tasks. Also no one can or wants to watch them, including family. Also if you think child care is a difficult and expensive problem, try hiring one through an agency for sped kids. Also the prognosis is that they will be permanently dependent, so there's no light at the end of the tunnel. The only solution is to get acquainted with the idea that your life will never be what you wanted, and to stop comparing yourself and your career to others. If you can do that, you can talk yourself into committing to tomorrow. Not that tomorrow will be better for YOU, but your commitment to it affords a future for your family, or at least, 1 more day of future.
> The only solution is to get acquainted with the idea that your life will never be what you wanted, …
What I’ve found fascinating as I’ve gotten older is that the life I _wanted_ at different points in my life has never been what I ended up with later, but somehow that’s been okay and when I look back I always come to be thankful for every “setback”. Like Steve Jobs’ commencement speech, life has to be lived going forward but is only understood looking back.
You are certainly a stronger person as a result of having two special needs children, likely far more compassionate and understanding than you would have been otherwise.
I’ve heard the concert expressed as setbacks being our “divine moment” to move toward our true path. Maybe a bit woo woo but I certainly feel like my setbacks have put me on a more fulfilling path.
I purchased new construction once. They were putting up a thousand cookie cutter houses like ours in that neighborhood. And even that estimate missed the mark by more than 3 months. Even estimating building the same floor plan the hundredth time is hard!
Now imagine, you are tasked with building a house with no floor plan. You have to procure some materials last minute, and at least two of the materials you must create from raw materials. Occasionally, you have to remove structural parts of the house to account for changes to the requirements. Someone built their own power tool instead of using the out of the box nail gun, which injured a fellow worker and required replacement of drywall. The crew had a holiday, then it rained, then a shipment of materials was delayed. After your electrician recovered from the stomach flu, he was unable to wire the house for ceiling fans -- a late stage increase in scope from the customer -- because one of the workers wanted to learn a new technique for framing for the block and wire, which he read about on hacker news. When the construction is 95% complete, the boss asks the crew to go ahead and start on another build. Another month elapses, and the home is nearly done. Your office contacts the customer to schedule closing, only to discover that the customer changed their mind and got an apartment 6 months ago. All is not lost, however: your boss receives a bonus for a job well done, which he thanks you for. Good job! A few months later the home is found to be in violation of a recently ratified law making smart homes illegal in the county, but no one involved in its construction works there anymore so they'll each likely repeat the mistake at least once more.
I have never looked this up, but anytime I'm checking out at a brick and mortar store, I'm asked, casually, "Phone number?" Or "Zip code?" As if thats information that is necessary to check out. My response is always, politely, "you don't need that information." It annoys my wife because she thinks I'm being rude, but frankly the question I'm being asked is uncouth. Would you ask a stranger how many children they have or what time they get off work? Not unless you had some intention to use that information!
I hope you realize that grocery stores track you in other ways than just your zip code or phone number [1]. You have a beacon in your pocket that is always searching for SSIDs or Bluetooth IDs, which is more than enough to uniquely ID you. You can combine that with facial rec now and link a face, sex and estimated age to the SSID combo. Who names their phone “<Your name>’s iPhone”? They can get your name too.
If you truly wanted to be paranoid, set your device to airplane mode (don’t forget your smartwatch or wallet Tile), cover your face (this shouldn’t be hard these days) and only then venture into a store. Oh, and pay your groceries with cash.
I actually requested a card at Safeway (wanted for convenience, not privacy), but apparently they are not giving those out anymore. You have to give them your phone number or else accept the additional costs for your food and lack of benefits at the gas station.
The rewards card is a much better model in my opinion because while it gives them quite a bit of data, it does provide some anonymity. I'm sure it is possible to reconstruct from that data who I am (i.e. convert it into direct PII like name and address), but that at least takes a lot more effort and processing than if they have my phone number.
Most people are ok giving up SOME privacy for the sake of convenience/cost savings. I doubt most people are truly willing to give up all privacy for said benefits once they understand what they are actually giving up.
The typical model that I'm familiar with on those rewards cards is that they just ask for that same info for you to get the card in the first place, so it's of basically no benefit privacy-wise. I suppose this can differ from place to place, and you could always supply a different number or one not strongly linked to you, I guess.
Not at most places and often times that number will have a large reward points pool already built up because others are also using it to avoid giving out their number.
That at least takes extra processing and data sets. I think that does matter as far as privacy is concerned. We tend to think of privacy and security as all or nothing, but it really doesn't have to be that way and may be impossible to achieve if you go down that route.
> It annoys my wife because she thinks I'm being rude
You are being rude. The innocent cashier is forced to ask you that question and has no power to change the rules. Why not be polite to them? If you really want to change things, try asking to speak to the manager (after you're done checking out, of course!).
How is not giving personal information rude? He is just telling them the truth that they don't need that information which is correct. If a cashier were to ask you your bra size would you be okay with it? Why is it okay to ask for phone number which will give you all that and more.
Smart. Years ago I registered the number 500-5000 everywhere I could in my neighborhood. Just from word of mouth, the number got so popular they banned it at the local grocery store!
Give the phone number and zip of the store asking for the information. This way if there is data leak it is theroretically possible to track who originally asked for the data. This self-reference trick can be done with email address as well. The idea is that, in the event of unwanted data sharing, the consumer needs some way to know where the personal data came from originally.
Parent of 4 here, ages 6, 5, 2, and 8 months. My oldest two are special needs. Some thoughts from my POV...
My oldest wasnt trained until about 4.5 years. It took around 6 months to a year for him to pick it up consistently. Hes still not trained for overnight though. It makes me feel like a failure as a father. We have always used disposable diapers with him.
My second (5) has been out of diapers during the day for nearly 2 years. She consistently uses the toilet for bowel movements but fails to urinate in the toilet every time, except when I take her on a timer/regular interval. We aren't sure why she has this problem or how to remediate it. We are very concerned as she begins kindergarten this year. We always used disposable diapers with her, and I feel like a failure as a father on this, too.
We just began potty training with my 2 year old. We are 3 or 4 days into it, and he is already independently going to the restroom and following all the rehearsed steps when he needs to urinate. We are having occasional accidents, and he is catching on to the idea that urinating on himself is undesirable. We offer him praise when he is successful, and no praise when he fails (we just walk him through the process of washing off, replacing his clothing, etc so he understands the outcome). He was cloth diapered exclusively until about 6 months ago when his younger brother started using up all the cloth diapers! He hasn't had enough encounters with BMs to catch on to going to the restroom at the appropriate time yet, but I'm confident we will get there soon.
My youngest is 8 months and we haven't started any such exercises yet, but it sounds like it may be a good idea.
To echo the article's suggestion, possibly one of the most frustrating things is potty training. Or maybe more frustrating, the lack of potty training. I still awake to change diapers for four children every morning, and on average theres at least one guaranteed BM for me to handle. (And let's be real, a 6 year old doesn't poop like a baby.) Although its nice not changing diapers of my 5 year old anymore during the day, it comes at the cost of regular urine cleanup / permanently stained furniture and HEAVY use of our washing machine.
If anyone knows any resources for training special needs children overnight (or in the case of my 5 year old...anytime!), I would be super grateful. We had a period of 2 years where both of my older children were in therapy sessions between 20-40 hours/week, and sadly potty training efforts even by trained therapists has been met with limited success. My current plan is to stay the course, just practicing and hoping it all sinks in, especially before my 5 year old starts school, as I don't want her to suffer this embarrassment (and I certainly worry about the way she will be treated/educated as its understandably difficult and even frustrating to deal with this particular kind of problem; for example, we enrolled my then-4 year old in a private kindergarten program last year, but after 2 days the school informed us that unfortunately they cannot manage her and she would not be allowed to attend).
New business model idea: write open source software with a license that requires, well, a license to _operate_. It's free in all the typical APL2 senses, except that you can't sell it "as a service" without signing, effectively, a "lease." Now, supposing the project gains sufficient popularity / community / traction, all you have to do is wait for Amazon to take note of the project and contact you for a lease. You ask for 30% and retire. And if they invent a competing project that is at all API-compatible, they have to prove in court that they haven't plagiarized any of your open source code; but, that wouldn't happen anyway, since by their own admission, they're not focused on writing software, they're focused on operating it.
Someone with experience/knowledge in this area tell me if I'm off my rocker. I know it sounds too simple. But why wouldn't this work?
Aren't you basically describing SSPL? That's MongoDB's license that does pretty much what you're describing, except it's not considered open source [1]. And in response, Amazon created an API-compatible alternative called DocumentDB [2]. There's also the Commons Clause [3], which I think Redis Labs uses to license its Redis satellite products.
This looks like a great case-study. Basically, it seems that if the licensing isn't in Amazon's favor (take the OSS project, put it into operation, sell it as a service), then Amazon is likely to simply build their own implementation that is API-compatible. It remains unclear whether the ROI for this exists, especially for larger/more complex projects, but the precedent is very discouraging for my idea.
FWIW, that sounds relatively similar to the licenses that Redis Labs, Mongo, and Elastic recently applied to their software. I have no problem with that, but judging from the discussions here on those licenses, lots of other people did.
Thanks, this makes me feel better about my decision a couple months ago to switch to Lenovo's ThinkPad P1 Mobile Workstation. I don't have any regrets switching from Apple hardware, and frankly Linux is so much more superior (especially when using i3[0]), I'm quite pleased with it.
(The only complaint I have with the ThinkPad is the fan is super aggressive and very loud. It usually doesn't run for long, but it spins up with a whirring noise pretty often for 1-5 seconds before slowing down.)
Went exactly the same route a few weeks ago deciding between a new macbook pro or something else and went for the P1. Had some troubles with the UEFI due to outdated firmware (be sure to update that first thing) and other than that, I'm quite happy with the results. Battery life could be better, the fans are indeed more aggressive and I miss some of the touch gestures (swipe for browsing) that I didn't yet get to set up. My previous device was a late '14 MBP and that still works fine but is getting slow and quite hot.
Yeah, I am a fan of Arch on the desktop, but the P1 runs Nvidia's P1000 chip and Arch doesn't seem to like that, so I went with Ubuntu+i3 for now. Updating the firmware first is definitely critical, as you could brick the machine otherwise.
I'll echo my disappointment in battery life, although admittedly i3 and xfce defaults are probably not doing me any favors here...
I have also experienced this phenomenon. Why do you suppose we come to these surprises, and why do you suppose we experience them?
Is it because we are confident? Or because we lack sedulity? Or because our analysis was incomplete?
Is the surprise time consuming because we want/expect it to be easy? Or because we are focused on a different problem really. Or because our focus was interrupted.
This is a very interesting philosophy. A few years ago, a former coworker and good friend of mine introduced me to an algorithm for solving problems. This is a slightly different purpose than doing something hard, but there are some interesting similarities. In my experience as an engineer in software and operations, this algorithm has never come in reach of failing me, and until I was introduced to it, my own system was seriously lacking even though I didn’t know it! You can be successful without it. But you can be so confident and efficient with it! The algorithm and it’s philosophy are described in none other than Zen and the Art of Motorcyle maintenance. I think there’s also an XKCD of it, Flowchart maybe is the name.
Ha, I like this one! Actually these algorithms may approximate one another when generalized. Pirsig explores the philosophy more deeply, though; for example, generating a hypothesis: where does it come from, and is it possible to run out of hypotheses? Pirsig argues no, you practically can’t.
Although personally, I use a somewhat modified version:
1. Find the closest person who knows more about what you are doing than you do. Then, for everything you can say about the problem, do so, out loud. (It is very important that you say it out loud and not just in your head.)
There is a very good chance that you are the person who knows the most about the problem, at least in the way you are presently thinking about it. This implies that you need to speak out loud about the problem, to yourself, and nobody else if necessary. Therefore, in order to make yourself take this step seriously, record your dictated thoughts (even if you never plan to play them back). This is a very important 'hack', because it simultaneously tricks your brain into thinking somebody is listening, causing you to take what you say with utmost seriousness (even though it might start out as non-sense), while at the same time giving you the freedom to say whatever you want (which is almost never the case when somebody is actually listening, since mutual intelligibility is a prerequisite for all conversation).
2a. Draw what you see in your "mind's eye" when inspiration strikes (when with a colleague, at the board; alone, on a blank, unruled sheet of paper). Do this for months, until you become fluent in a private 'diagram language' for describing your thoughts.
Similarly, utilize a private 'jargon language' to name things that don't exist yet.
2b. Start typing it all into org-mode, until...
3. ...you realize what the actual solution is. Then go do that.
N.b.: If you squint, everything I just said is nothing more than a generalization of what professional mathematicians do at the blackboard. I learned to think this way in undergrad in the math program, but it's equally applicable to any field IMO.
Disclaimer: This technique risks making you hopeless impractical and obsessive until it starts to pay off. And I have to admit, this is not really an algorithm for solving problems, so much as coming up with creative insights about problems. I think that most problems don't need some massive insight so much as dogged persistence and organization (in which case you should completely disregard this post).
Does this strategy apply to programming? Consider the xkcd cartoon[0] that Bonooru posted upthread. One possible realization of what the the "?" step in that cartoon could be: utilize my "conceptual" strategy to shrink the amount of time spent doing actual coding to a minimum. Doing this with abandon is surely dangerous and risks getting stuck in the first, trivial loop, but if you can find a way to iterate on paper...
Mathematics is the part of physics where experiments are cheap. -Vladimir Arnold
...then perhaps, by analogy: the kind of conceptual work I'm promoting here is the part of programming where the "inner loops" (that is, actual coding, like in the xkcd cartoon) are empty. Take this too seriously, though, and you may one day wake up in academia[1]... :-)
