School, and the socialization that occurs there, is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Work is generally just work, it's not like your personal development suffers if you skip it.
Some people have a gene that makes broccoli much more bitter than it is to other people. Some people find 8 hours in the office harder to take than others. I agree with your point that sometimes we have to teach children to do things that are not fun in the short term for long term gain but not everyone has the same requirements.
There are plenty of people who have found remote work much more productive and others who are really wishing they could be back in the office. I hope that employers take the pandemic as an opportunity to learn about different working styles and create more flexible working arrangements that can accommodate all types of people.
I totally agree. I'm someone who struggled at first but has since found it really good, and I think would ultimately choose the very sort of 2/3 scheme being discussed by these large companies— in office for meetings and team bonding, home for focus and flexibility.
But my parent comment was specifically with respect to the business about part of school being the socialization stuff, and if it's relevant whether or not your kids "want" that.
The reason you used to think Brussels sprouts were bitter and then “got over it” is they actually were bitter and since then they’ve been improved to taste better.
If it’s their room why would they be forced to maintain it to another person’s preferences?
My comment was about this mythical socializing that kids presumably needs so much.
Not all of them do.
School as an institution exists to free up housewives to participate in the workforce and maximize employers’ profit while preparing cheap workforce by giving a minimal education to the kids. Any benefits for the children are secondary - let’s not buy in too much into the PR.
I find that boredom is death for creativity, but tedium is a goldmine. If I'm not doing anything, I don't think of anything. If I have a tedious but active chore, I need to bring a notepad along with me to capture all the ideas.
I had a friend in college who was a writer. He intentionally spent a summer lettuce farming for this specific reason. He was pretty happy with the results creativity-wise.
> If I have a tedious but active chore, I need to bring a notepad along with me to capture all the ideas
I find I'm quite mentally creative when doing tasks such as cutting the grass, which I don't find tedious, but instead require a sort of process-control mental activity. I actually enjoy cutting the grass for its physical side combined with the opportunity to get a good looking result from a task that takes about an hour. Hoovering doesn't inspire the same mental creativity.
For me, at least, cutting the grass is a rather meditative activity where I'm sorta in nature - enjoying a relatively nice day (I avoid cutting grass when it's raining because why would you ever do that). None of my troubles are in view (unless the exterior needs work) so I can relax and enjoy it. Compare that to vacuuming where you're within your space but aware of the fact that things are messy - potentially needing to contend with children or pets to actually get vacuuming done, and frequently shifting furniture and thinking about how to finish off the task in the quickest manner.
To me mowing the lawn is an activity where my mind can disengage apart from watching for the occasional suicidal squirrel - while vacuuming is an activity where my brain is constantly on the watch for something being amiss and me accidentally chewing up an expensive cable or rug.
This all aligns closely with what I think the distinction is for tasks that allow you to be creative - something relatively straightforward that requires your hands to be busy but where you can mostly zone out. For this purpose I like eating "slow fruit" namely pomegranates and grapefruits - where I take both fruits apart laboriously by hand after peeling them (eat the grapefruit like an orange - but peel each slice). While I'm doing this my mind is free to do whatever and my hands continue with only minimal guidance.
Imagine, in some distant future, where users who contributed were also rewarded for their contributions when their community "gets sold". One of the comments above mentioned that their investment into the site is 0, that may be true for them, but I most definitely invested dozens of hours of my time in order to write a well informed and solid answers (as was demanded by their community guidelines, mind you).
I am not the best example either, I know people who have written thousands of high quality answers and god knows how many hours of their time into writing these.
My gut tells me that it would be fair, and make the world a better place, if such users were rewarded as well.
But the parent to your response has a point - knowing that the answers are CC licensed and knowing that the owners might have a ten-figure exit are different things. If the community were more aware of the latter, they might have been more canny about donating their efforts.
The whole idea was that if they become evil, or sell the site to someone evil, all the content was CC-SA, so it was possible to anyone to make a clone and continue from there.
I guess most of the posters understand that they may sell the site, but the content was safe because of the license.
Not the person you originally asked, but an HOA is an additional layer for a start. Moreover it tends to have more restrictions, of a kind that would seem ridiculous at the level of local government (e.g. what color your curtains can be, in the case of the condo I'm currently renting.)
This was the same author that wrote about the Uber iOS YOLO recently [0], without cursing Travis Kalanick.
I somehow missed the second half of the title (with the word "quit") and I was worried he was again getting into a situation where he was doing a lot of heavy lifting for a company that was ultimately taking advantage of its contributors.
I don't know why you're getting downvoted, this is my experience as well. It's to the point where if it doesn't ship from Amazon, I don't buy it.
The last thing I accidentally bought from a non-Amazon shipper arrived in a semi-destroyed box, inside a too-small bubble-wrap envelope, apparently shipped from someone's condominium (I guess they bought in bulk and repackaged?)
I know somebody who sells stuff at Amazon as a third-party seller. It’s a common strategy to do exactly that: find items that are selling for more than the local store, buy it from the local store and sell it on Amazon. There’s more to it for selecting which products to sell but this is basically how it works. There are people selling courses teaching these things.
It is not always that simple. Part of the arbitrage can be generic things from aliexpress bought in bulk and shipped from china over 8-10 weeks. The mark up on amazon is partly the fact that the long ship time has already been done.
People back then knew that "hanging out" in a public place was worthwhile.
I wish there was a model of public place where you and your pals could buy breakfast+lunch, or lunch+dinner, and occupy the table for the whole time in-between.
Bars let you stay for long periods, but after three or four hours everyone ends up hammered, which is a different thing.
I lived for close to four years in South Korea, working mostly from inside cafés and often spending an entire work day inside them. There were plenty that were set up for this - they often catered a student crowd that would hang out there for long durations studying (quite a few had open for 24 hours, too). It meant the drink prices were quite high since it was basically rent for a seat.
Alternatively some dedicated study cafes would require a flat fee for a time duration and make drinks cheap instead.
It was also fairly common to leave laptops plugged in and leave for half an hour to grab a meal elsewhere and come back.
A few years ago, travelling in the US we, a group of European exchange students) I remember well how we were after lunch or dinner almost thrown out of restaurants by servers (i.e. brought the bill without having asked for it, etc.). I remember it so well because it really felt rude to me (we were not really hanging around unduly and might at times have ordered a round of deserts with a small break after the meal which the business then lost but that is another story).
Of course from a business perspective its better to get 3 parties to have lunch on a table than 2, and esp. in the US with the enormous tips (and lowered minimum wage) for servers, there are strong incentives for that kind of behaviour. Ultimately landlords/markets also factor this in when setting rent prices for restaurant spaces.
So to come back to the Kaffeehause-style establishments I always wonder how they were economically viable back then. Probably a combination of cheap labor, people spending quite a lot potentially in the Kaffeehaus [studying math, I guess they just rented a room (potentially not even heated) and not an apartment, then socialised outside or in cafes].
I think to pull off a Kaffeehaus for hanging out today it would probably work out more in a 'Club' model where you pay a membership fee which allows for stable operation.
There's many things that seen to have been economically viable a hundred years ago, which would seem crazy today. For example, houses with 4m high roofs, thick, stable walls and stucco.
Or maybe it was economically just as little viable as it is today, but people just didn't think that much about economical viability back in the old days?
My grandmother grew up in a hut, every weekend it would be swept out with fresh sand, because it had a stomped mud floor. This was in Germany. Pretty sure the local gentry had these stucco ceilings, but not everyone.
Pretty sure a lot of what was done wasn't done with as tight calculations as it is done today. On the other hand, the markets weren't as unforgiven as today so it might have been easier to turn an investment into a profit.
It would be interesting to see the bookwork (if it even existed in the first place) of the Scottish Café, with supplemental informations by economists / historians putting it into perspective
You would have to look for places in quieter parts of a city, smaller streets, not high-traffic or touristy. It's actually not that difficult to find these in Paris, place where you can know the owner and hang out (you still pay of course). You have to start slowly, you don't come in the first day, drink a coffee and stay 4 hours with friends, you have to build the relationship with the place: come a few times, begin to know the place, the waiter, the owner, ... and after some time you might be recognised as friend and the place will be a nice spot.
There are lots of places where someone can show up and get work done. University students will know a few places, on and around the campus.
I just can't think of a collaborative space where like-minded souls collide, aside from perhaps hacker spaces. Is there anything like those Paris cafés where seemingly all famous artists went and drank together?
It's one of the reasons I was glad for the Union Society at my university. You had to be a member of the university, and then pay to join, so not exactly a public place, but it was great for this sort of thing. There were many occasions where we'd grab a light lunch there, spend a good 4 or 5 hours working on things together, then grab a pizza from a place just down the road to bring back[1]. It then had a bar that opened at 6, so you could have a few drinks before heading home.
You could do much the same in the local Starbucks, but the noise and how busy it was made it a bad place to work. The Union was generally quiet (and had an on-site library if you needed it), which was ideal. We also had a few supervisions in local pubs, but they'd generally only last an hour which sidestepped the drinking/taking up a table without buying drinks issues.
There were of course study spaces we could have used in college, but not having to worry about disturbing people as you were discussing things (as most people there weren't working) and having drinks/hot food available made it a much nicer place to work.
[1] Which you weren't really meant to do given they were selling food, but the staff let us get away with it.
Rural family restaurants can handle this - or any place where you get outside of “heavy traffic” - just ask! As long as the table would have been empty anyway it doesn’t cost them extra - or leave a generous tip.
One restaurant near me even has a plaque commemorating the group who has been eating lunch there for twenty years.
It probably depends on the city. My fiance who is in Singapore saw this article and mentioned on one occasion she was trying to work in a Starbucks with a classmate and they were asked to leave to make room for other customers. Singapore feels like a pretty crowded city though, many of the public spaces like the library are usually fully booked.
Folks can argue about the coffee quality as much as they want, but this why I love the Starbucks reserve roastery in Seattle. Decent chairs you can sit in for hours on end, and they blast AC in the summer. Noisy though.
Five years ago I had a whole bunch of extensions, but that ended whenever it was that I first learned that there were bad actors buying legitimate extensions from their developers and filling them with malware. After that I dramatically reduced the number I had installed, down to basically a password manager and ublock origin. The brief install-time vetting I used to do would would do nothing to prevent an auto update from installing something malicious in the future. Nowadays malicious browser extensions are the most common thing I find on family and friends' computers when I'm helping them with an issue.
Can confirm. As a dev of an extension with 10k users I get 3-4 emails a month in my spam which ask me to monetize my extension by secretly changing its users' search engines. My extension is open-source and quite small, but if the change was sneaked in I think most of the users would not notice. I stick to using userscripts for the most part since you can easily check their downloaded source and disable updates.
Example:
Beth Anderson <beth@monetize-extensions.com> Mon 10:58 AM
To: Mostly Spam <dev@x-ing.space>
Hello
I am Beth and I am offering monetization for browser extensions, with everything that is going on our team was extremely focused and productive in creating a way to earn revenue on extensions.
We offer to change default search to Bing or Yahoo on your extension which can earn up to $800 a month per 5000 users. This is a premium product by invitation only and can easily be added to your chrome extensions.
You are might curious to know if it is allowed? And I must say that this is completely allowed! Please reply to this email to discuss this further!
Open source doesn't solve it completely.. What you have in repo and what is published doesn't have to be the same thing. Unless people are doing the extra effort to compare them, which is extremely rare unless its quite popular. I've seen this happen a few times.
"You are might curious to know if it is allowed? And I must say that this is completely allowed!"
I feel like this would make a great corporate logo for a discount legal firm on It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia that Charlie would start when high on Elmer's glue.
I had this amazing extension for Google play music. it had cover art and some great hot keys. I noticed a bug with it pulling low Rez cover art sometimes so I tried to see if I could fix it in the source code. The GitHub repo was not public anymore, so I made the changes locally and it worked.
I emailed the dev (his email was on the about section of the extension). He told me that the code was no longer public because he was selling it to someone else that wanted to take it over. I had all kinds of red flags from this, so I uninstalled it right away.
Ublock origin and https everywhere improved security by removing deceptive advertisements masquerading as legitimate on search engines and freeware download sites. https everywhere prevented some forms of https downgrade attacks. Also ublock has an option to remove webrtc IP leaking.
I'm not sure what you mean by non-malicious extensions being intrusive. I use a number of extensions, mostly content-blocking and privacy-related and they mostly just get out of my way. The Firefox Extension Store also has a recommended extensions feature that shows that the extension has been reviewed by Mozilla for privacy and security. Most extensions I use have this seal.
Yeah, I get that, but it seems to me like that's worse than the security model for any non-containerized application. If you don't trust the author there really isn't much there that will protect you.
That's fair, but my browser has permission to access my data for all websites, and uBlock Origin probably has my best interests in mind more so than Google Chrome.
It’s one of the nice things about brave: it had privacy features built in that you would otherwise need a dozen extensions by various people to do the same. It seems like the built in tracking protections in Firefox have caught up a lot though, I’m not sure if the extensions are as necessary now
Indeed, it's more required if you're a web developer. Extension to capture whole screen (including scrolled screen), color picker, ruler, even magnifying glass are the ones I usually use.
Of course there are, but the point is, you can not really trust any of them. Today they will be very useful, tomorrow they may be malware, and there is no way for you to know or protect yourself.
This is true of anything you find on github as well.
Open source works on the idea that "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." The thing people forget is the "enough eyeballs" part. As if people are sitting around auditing every sub-dependency of a sub-dependency of React.
In addition, I don't know of any package repository that requires the authoritative source[1] from github to match the compiled/minified/etc. package that is uploaded and published. And I suspect most repos are vulnerable to this.
There are many popular but unloved packages out there.
[1] I'd also point out how incredibly stupidly dangerous it is that the open source community has basically given Microsoft the keys to be the authoritative source for all of open source. No one has learned a damn thing. And, somewhat ironically, Microsoft buying out an entire user base for their own nefarious purposes really fits the topic at hand.
2) Recursive dependencies massively increase that risk.
3) You should check all your dependencies into your repo, or at least some kind of manifest with secured signatures of those dependencies, and never automatically update dependencies.
I see a few things that can improve this situation by quite a lot:
1) Languages should provide an extensive and expressive standard library of some sort, either one bundled with the language, or a tightly vetted and controlled set of first-party dependencies.
2) Package managers should not automatically resolve recursive dependencies, but should force users to manually add all dependencies of any dependency that is added. This additional friction would force you to acknowledge all the risk you are taking on by adding dependencies, and it would force the ecosystem as a whole to reduce the number of dependencies.
Linux users who install their apps via a package manager (other than, iiuc, AUR) have at least the vetting of a third party. And this is why a lot of work goes into reproduceable builds and minimal bootstraps.
Apps provided on any platform by major, trusted vendors are much more likely to be safe. Apple/Microsoft/Adobe might find themselves compelled to add a government backdoor, but they're probably not going to chuck in code to send your credit card number to the darkweb.
As for install random programs from unknown vendors on the Google Play Store, yeah, I'm a bit nervous about that. It would be nice if we could manage trust on such platforms in some way, but all we can do is hope to be on guard at all times. Google clearly doesn't care if you get hacked by a third party, as long as they don't do it directly.
Web browsers do a lot of sandboxing to prevent outside tampering by other applications. Your secured content is encrypted by HTTPS between the server and your browser... but extensions sit inside the browser sandbox, often with full access to your decrypted web traffic.
If most of your secure information is handled via web browsers, as is usually the case today, extensions are drastically more risky than arbitrary software, because of the privileged place in the stack they operate.
not the person you are replying to, but for me, it applies the same. I only have uBlock Origin and password manager for extensions, and my phone has very few apps. I don't trust other devs to not succumb to temptation, so I don't use their apps. It would not be difficult for me to give up the smart phone for a feature phone.
