> I've told them over and over I'm not capable of that
I can relate and empathize. And also provide this suggestion based on my own similar experience: if you can't provide evidence (e.g. doctor's diagnosis) that you are "special" or "not capable of that", then they don't have to care and will take steps to force you out. I wish you all the best.
> Concert tickets are almost certainly in the 'dinner reservation' category. They have no need to identify me for national security reasons
Admittedly I haven't been to many concerts, but 'national security reasons' seems like a reasonable rationale to me because a packed concert sounds like a great place to set off a suicide bomb vest for maximum impact. Have a cut-out who doesn't raise any red flags buy the ticket and hand it off to the person wearing the vest. No ID check? Mass panic ensues when the vest goes off, and people are hurt in the stampede for the exits even if the blast radius of the vest itself isn't all that large.
In my workplace, its availability. We have to use US-only models for government-compliance reasons, so we have access to Opus 4.6 and GPT 5.4, but only Gemini 2.5 which isn't in the same class as the first two.
I complain about movie costs while I watch movies at home, drive a VW that was under $40k new, live in a state with a minimum wage over $17 an hour, and refuse to pay $14 plus tip to a food truck that doesn't provide seating when I can pay $12 and no tip at a fast food restaurant that does provide dine-in eating.
Some of us live our principles, we're not all just whinging hypocrites.
> when I have something to say about my day, there's nowhere to say it; no one on HN cares whether I fixed up the blinds or cooked pork steaks.
As someone who lives alone, two ways I address this aspect: talk to yourself out loud and to your pets like they're people, and also write these things down in a journal. Every night after I get into bed but before I turn out the light and fall asleep, I write a journal entry. Sometimes they're quite mundane, exactly like your examples. "I cooked a steak for dinner that turned out better than I expected" or "Tomorrow I'm thinking about making some bread." There's no pressure on length of entry, I fill anywhere from three sentences to a full page each night, but it helps fill the 'how do I communicate this minor accomplishment or discomfort that nobody else cares about' need for me.
I haven't tried it myself so you might be right, but I was thinking of the silver conductive pens from Chemtronics with a conductivity of 0.02-0.05 ohms/sq/mil.
For attachment, I'd evaluate their conductive epoxy or maybe glue down the underside of the component and then smother the lead with the silver conductive ink. But again, just hypothetical since I have a quickturn shop make cheap prototype PCBs for me and either hand solder or use a stencil, paste, and a hot air gun for my hobbyist projects.
For the 2D version, you might not need very much custom. Use a regular pen plotter and use a pen with conductive ink. These both exist today, though personally as a hobbyist PCB designer, I can get 2-layer and 4-layer boards cheap enough from JLCPCB or Oshpark or PCB Unlimited that I don't bother trying to make them myself.
I grant that SpaceX engineers are smart people and can figure out how to make Starship and Superheavy reliable and reusable.
But if they have to launch 10-14 times in order to get the propellant to the LEO depot in order to fuel the Lunar Starship, can we actually deliver that many launches worth of LOX and LNG to the launch pads in the timeframe needed to prevent it all from boiling off once in orbit before Lunar Starship can get there, get refueled and head to the moon? I don't know the answer to that, and to me that seems like the hard problem.
I'm an embedded software engineer by day and like it or not I have to acknowledge that AI tooling is coming to our work, so I'm currently working on learning to interact with AI coding tools like Claude Code more effectively and efficiently by "vibe-coding" a game for a family member on my personal time. Something inspired by a blend of 'Recettear' and 'Stardew Valley' with the touch that the player shopkeeper is an anthropomorphic cat.
Not OP, but one example I can think of: Jeff Bezos moved from Washington state to Florida two years after Washington enacted a 7% capital gains tax "on the sale or exchange of long-term capital assets such as stocks, bonds, business interests, or other investments and tangible assets"[1] which "reportedly helped him save $1 billion in taxes."[2]
I think it might be a organizational architecture that needs to change.
> However, we have never before applied a killswitch to a rule with an action of “execute”.
> This is a straightforward error in the code, which had existed undetected for many years
So they shipped an untested configuration change that triggered untested code straight to production. This is "tell me you have no tests without telling me you have no tests" level of facepalm. I work on safety-critical software where if we had this type of quality escape both internal auditors and external regulators would be breathing down our necks wondering how our engineering process failed and let this through. They need to rearchitect their org to put greater emphasis on verification and software quality assurance.
> In particular, our code to parse .deb, .ar, .tar, and the
HTTP signature verification code would strongly benefit
from memory safe languages
> Critical infrastructure still written in C - particularly code that parses data from untrusted sources - is technical debt that is only going to get worse over time.
But hasn't all that foundational code been stable and wrung out already over the last 30+ years? The .tar and .ar file formats are both from the 70s; what new benefits will users or developers gain from that thoroughly battle-tested code being thrown out and rewritten in a new language with a whole new set of compatibility issues and bugs?
I worked with ASN.1 for a few years in the embedded space because its used for communications between aircraft and air traffic control in Europe [1]. I enjoyed it. BER encoding is pretty much the tightest way to represent messages on the wire and when you're charged per-bit for messaging, it all adds up. When a messaging syntax is defined in ASN.1 in an international standard (ICAO 9880 anyone?), its going to be around for a while. Haven't been able to get my current company to adopt ASN.1 to replace our existing homegrown serialization format.
> This friend told me she can't work without ChatGPT anymore.
It doesn't say she chooses to use it; it says she can't work without using it. At my workplace, senior leadership has mandated that software engineers use our internal AI chat tooling daily, they monitor the usage statistics, and are updating engineering leveling guides to include sufficient usage of AI being required for promotions. So I can't work without AI anymore, but it doesn't mean I choose to.
I'm looking at getting a SawStop table saw so I can teach my child woodworking with slightly more peace-of-mind that if something goes wrong, they'll be less likely to lose one or more fingers. Kids get distracted, they forget what rules you've taught them in the past, accidents happen.
This is also a tool I'll consider purchasing to provide my child an introduction to the concepts before graduating to the bigger, louder, stronger wood saws.
I can relate and empathize. And also provide this suggestion based on my own similar experience: if you can't provide evidence (e.g. doctor's diagnosis) that you are "special" or "not capable of that", then they don't have to care and will take steps to force you out. I wish you all the best.