danielodievich

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18 gün öncediscuss

5 years ago out of necessity I made a CLI around a private product API to manage something it wasn't making publicly, by reverse-engineering the API and complex logons and etc. It was very useful to ~ 100 people worldwide but it was enough of an audience. But I couldn't get any traction releasing it publicly until a distinguished engineer very far away from my org was in need of just this tool for his project. All of a sudden I got an innovation award from company leadership and legal fast tracked open-sourcing it. Pushing something like this out into public repo without legal review is suicidal.

19 gün öncediscuss

back in 2019, I was thinking of getting an MBA and as part of the exploration, shadowed an MBA class at University of Washington for a day. It was so fun. One of the things they were discussing in the class that day was a case study of Valve, specifically around the Steam Machine. The team's consensus was that Valve was carefully arranging money in a barrel, lovingly soaking it in high octane gasoline, and was about to light a match.

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I meant interviewer. Sorry!

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All of those are included in the bulk of the documents passing my work input these days. It is infuriating. Out of principle I maintain 100% me in all my writing but I don't know if it matters. Well maybe it does... an interviewee recently complimented me on the "nicest and most human resume" they saw recently. That felt good

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like 6 years ago I had a job reach out to me once from I think the filecoin or some such. It wasn't something I was interested or suited for but I spoke with the guy and we were clearly talking at right angle at each other. Whatever. I then went out for brews with my friend who is also in tech and I told him about this. He looked into it and then went and bought like 500K of seagate stock, saying to me "these idiots are going to lead to hard drive shortage". He's made all kinds of money on that. Wish I took his lead on that too.

2 ay öncediscuss

When I was around 12 years old in USSR, my family took a vacation to Georgia to ski in a lovely resort of Gudauri. A big group of us skiers were riding a soviet made PAZ (or PAZik as it was often called) bus. It wobbled a bit since the airport, and about 100km into the ride as we were finally entering the mountains, it vibrated very badly. At some point the driver yelled really really loud - "everyone, to the left side of the bus, NOW", and we all moved to the left, and then we saw the rear wheel of the bus separate and roll forward past the bus. The pin holding the wheel in broke. Quality engineering, that pin design! I wonder if Cybertruck inherited some of that stuff.

2 ay öncediscuss

So just to test, loaded qwen/qwen3-v1-30b locally, and fed my 100% human-written resume and asked it "Make this resume more professional".

Mucho bullets came out.

My sentence "I specialized in enterprise data modeling and worked on Cost of Goods Sold optimizations across entire customer base." became a bullet sentence "Specialized in enterprise data modeling and performance optimization, driving $5M+ in recurring cost savings across the customer base.".

The $5M+ sure sounds awesome, and clearly the corpus of resumes lean towards metrics, but its not true and I didn't ask the model to make up numbers.

Oh and it awarded me a "Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from University of California, Berkeley | 1996 – 1998" out of thin air. My resume has a SDE job between 1996 -1998. Oh man.

2 ay öncediscuss

We had cloth diaper service for our two children, where they'd deliver a huge stack of nice soft thick cotton squares, and take away the dirty ones, once a week. They barely smelled, especially in the beginning before solid foods start. They were excellent as burpy cloths on the shoulder too. Disposable diapers were more excellent for outside, and at later times for sleeping through the night when we realized that the absorbency was better for sleep. We definitely felt better about the environment with the reusable cloth ones.

3 ay öncediscuss

One of my formative consulting projects in like 2002 or 2003 was in St. Louis, where couple of hundred of accenture and avanade and microsofties got together for like 6 months week after week to hack on a large software project for multiple states. It was a total crazy show but who cares. I had to take a red eye from west coast to Chicago which landed at 5, then take a 7am to St. Louis. I found some places to just lay there for 2 hours in Ohare, which is already hard. But they all had those TVs that were blasting CNN. I was smart and bought a legendary TV-B-Gone https://www.tvbgone.com/ and it would work on those! And on so many other tvs out there, from the sports bars to obscure brands in the airport shuttle buses. Thank you TV-B-Gone!

3 ay öncediscuss

My well educated physicist grandfather was downwind in Gomel. In the immediate aftermath of this, all the while all the May parades were going on to show "everything is normal", he called my parents in Moscow to tell us to not send us kids to Belarus that summer, has locked his family in the apartment and sealed all windows with paper tape for a couple of weeks. After that we were never allowed to pick chanterelles in forests near Grodno downwind from Chernobyl, or pick linden tree flowers for our dried tea. Plenty of people did and sold that stuff at the markets to unsuspecting people.

3 ay öncediscuss

At Microsoft TechEd in 1997 in Orlando, Florida, Microsoft bought out SeaWorld for the attendee party. I wound up getting really wet from the orca that they used to have there splashing people and met 3 other guys on the bench in same state. We went wandering around laughing and drinking. There was an Australian from NSW, New Zealander from Auckland, a French Canadian out of Ontario, and me, a fresh off the boat immigrant from Russia. I couldn't understand half of what was said! Aussie and kiwi were giving each other lots of good natured ribbing. The canuck was having fun and so was I as we got progressively more silly. One of the best parties at an industry conference I've had. Ahh the joy of dialects!

3 ay öncediscuss

Not exactly on the same topic, but I think it's a good story. When my children were little we'd put them into summer camp. I would send an appointment with "something rather summer camp" from my @live account to my wife on her @hotmail account (you can tell the vintage of us by those, but anyhow). By then both of those were running on Exchange infra. I also had a b-dash@microsoft account at Microsoft which was was sure on Exchange, I wanted to block that time on that email. Well, I'd get these bizarre failures to deliver those calendar that were incomprehensible. I eventually tracked it to not liking "summer camp" in subject line. I changed it to "summer lamp" and they went through. !!! Because I was quite connected to Microsoft ecosystem, I was able to file this in proper raid/product studio repo and get it fixed (never sure of the exact reason though), but for years after that my children always went to "summer lamp" because it was funny that way.

3 ay öncediscuss

My wife was talking to someone in her early 20ies and mentioned DVD player and apparently that's considered ancient now. Ahh to be young and blithe about it.

We have a 4K Blu-Ray that gets used every once in a while and the 4K Dune and few other titles looks absolutely stupendous. Local 4k streamed from Plex is pertty close. but nothing supposedly 4k streamed from Youtube or Netflix really compares, the blacks show artifacts and stuttering, even through gigabit fiber. can't beat local playback!

3 ay öncediscuss

I was about to post the same thing. Except here someone wants that minus brain? good luck. I recently saw someone watching The Island on the airplane recently and remembered being reasonably well entertained by that movie. Obi-wan was sure having fun riding a motorcycle in it.

3 ay öncediscuss

I had a Mazda 3 hatchback, fun little car with stick shift, when our second child arrived. It was not possible to fit in a second rear-facing car seat behind driver AND have the driver seat be in any acceptable position for me or my wife, there was just no space left in front. We researched the seats and ultimately it was easier to get a bigger car than mess with it, so we got a Volvo XC70 that had plenty of space. Once the kids could face forward, the typical Graco style seats were too wide and the middle rear passenger seat was not usable, so we invested into 2 narrow-profile seats that left the middle seat more useful. I can't remember the brand anymore, but it took a lot of research to find the narrow ones and they weren't cheap.

And none of this have contributed to us not wanting more than 2 children. That wasn't going to happen regardless of any car seats. People not wanting to have more than a 1 or 2 kids has so many other, more important reasons, I very much doubt that car seat size has much to do with it.

4 ay öncediscuss

I am from that side of the world originally and been paying attention to this conflict daily for last 5 years. It is infuriating to see the terrible arrogance of the weapon makers towards hard-won cleverness and ingenuity of Ukranians and even Russians. The era of high cost high tech things like helicopters, tanks and airplanes is clearly in transition to cheap swarms of drones. The famous operation last year where the Ukranians drove trucks to airports, launched drones from them and destroyed a bunch of irreplaceable Russian strategic aviation can be trivially done here at Lewis McChord base and I am sure nobody would be able detect it. The current war in Iran shooting down cheap Shaheds with multimillion dollar Patriots is also insane. This is yet another example of established companies just milking the budgets and not focusing on next conflict.

The sci-fi authors have been writing about this for a while. Artur C. Clarke's "Superiority" comes to mind as exactly that situation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superiority_(short_story) and I remember reading somewhere it used to be mandatory reading in Army education. But of course none of our leaders here read anymore.

4 ay öncediscuss

Back in the Longhorn (that is, Vista) days, I was friends with an engineering manager on the core desktop services team. He told me about how the "combine icons" in taskbar feature came to be. I think it came out after XP? mmm. I think yeah it came in Vista right after XP. Or was it one of the XP service packs? Anyhow, it was endlessly introduced by PMs, and endlessly cut after obnoxious reviews. Per this guy he just coded it one day and pushed it into daily build. Got in a lot of trouble but it made it.

Glad they're putting taskbar back into whatever sides. I despise my work Mac's single location at the bottom, wasteful waste of space. I've had icons on the left since Windows 95 and I like them there.

4 ay öncediscuss

If you take the English, run it to LinkedIn, and then swap the sides, it translates back to English. It is very funny to keep doing over and over, it gets progressively more absurd.

ENG: Amazing -> LI: Game-changing -> ENG: It's the same thing we've always done, just with a different name. -> LI: We’re sunsetting our legacy frameworks to double down on a rebranded, high-impact strategic pivot—same core DNA, but optimized for next-level market alignment. #Innovation #Branding #StrategicGrowth -> ENG: We're killing off our old, broken tech to try a desperate rebrand because the original plan failed. It's the same crap as before, but we're hoping a new name makes people actually want to buy it. -> LI: We are sunsetting our legacy infrastructure to pivot towards a bold, strategic rebranding initiative. By evolving our core identity, we are aligning our vision with current market demands to better serve our community and drive meaningful engagement with our innovative solutions.

It is a terrifyingly broken telephone

4 ay öncediscuss

My recently deceased mother had a talent for talking to anyone at any time in any language. She's always been incredibly social and could establish connections with strangers very rapidly. One time she brought in a school teacher/sheep farmer from Dagestan selling yarn from his sheep's wool, she met him at the market and bought all yarn and asked if he had somewhere to stay before going back, and he didn't. He stayed in our house for a couple of nights, and then we visited him in that little village in mountains of Dagestan on a summer vacation, talk about going back a few centuries in time, an incredible and unusual experience.

I've had to spend week and a half battling Gmail daily email account limits sending batches of 500 emails just to notify people in her address book, receiving hundreds of responses. Her memorial was attended by hundreds of people.

It served her very well in her chosen career of real estate sales, although I think she'd might have done really well in community organizing or even politics where those skills are also very useful.

On the flip side, it was sometimes difficult to be there as family wanting some attention, since her bright light was always shining in many directions.

I've inherited just some of that talent, and I think it is a talent, but trainable.

I miss her already.

4 ay öncediscuss

As fresh immigrant to USA, watching it on local PBS on the gigantic back projection jumbotron TV someone offloaded on us back in mid-90es, it made a huge impact with its absurdity and silliness. I sing "Drinking Fresh Mango Juice" every time I get it out of the fridge, and when my wife and I visited Egypt and got room service with fresh mango juices, it was in heavy rotation. And every time I leave and it's cold outside, I tend to sing "It's cold outside!". RIP