I am the journeyer from the valley of the dead Sega consoles. With the blessings of Sega Saturn, the gaming system of destruction, I am the Scout of Silence… Sailor Saturn.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • I hear you! If like me you have ever worried that you are overreacting; know that you are not. I have no idea how so many of my coworkers can just treat this all as politics as usual.

    My heart breaks for the civilians rounded up and treated as terrorists without due process.

    Being transgender I am acutely aware of how close I am to the top of the US autocracy’s public enemy list. This is self serving but since January I’ve been working on getting while the getting is good (plus, I hate that my taxes go to the current federal government).

    Me and my three siblings (a librarian, a researcher, and a med student) are all worried for our futures for different reasons; which is statistically just kind of impressive!






  • At this point cryptocurrency has a bad enough reputation that they have to try and ease readers into it.

    (insert clown getting dressed meme image here)

    1. It’s new digg!
    2. AI is bad (but also sexy and all powerful)
    3. so captchas are hard :(
    4. let’s make a real fancy captcha!
    5. With… Zero-Knowledge Proofs :D :D :D :D :D (all non cryptocurrency people flee at this point)
    6. Also like NFTs for products you buy so when you shill them people know you’re at least a real person doing so (maybe, kinda, sorta)
    7. So anyway I was thinking if only there was something else as dystopian cool as Sam Altman 様’s orb thing and we smeared it across the entire internet





  • To be fair their calculation also involves multiplying by the carefully chosen factors of 4 and 0.25. It’s a macroeconomics thing you probably wouldn’t understand. https://ustr.gov/issue-areas/reciprocal-tariff-calculations

    The recent experience with U.S. tariffs on China has demonstrated that tariff passthrough to retail prices was low (Cavallo et al, 2021).

    This “Cavallo” reference isn’t actually listed in their citations (gee I wonder why) but appears to be Tariff Pass-Through at the Border and at the Store: Evidence from US Trade Policy (link).

    Meanwhile Cavallo et al 2021:

    Chinese exporters did not lower their dollar prices by much, despite the recent appreciation of the dollar. By contrast, US exporters significantly lowered prices affected by foreign retaliatory tariffs. In US stores, the price impact is more limited, suggesting that retail margins have fallen. […] Our results imply that, so far, the tariffs’ incidence has fallen in large part on US firms.

    Amazing. The government’s official position is that tariffs are OK because both US exporters and importers get less money.







  • To be clear that sentence was about working in Silicon Valley (which has rot of it’s own lately) and I’ve never worked in government.

    But yeah the US government is in more than a bit of danger. If there’s anyone who isn’t convinced after reading all the headlines then there’s no convincing them.

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    Some news stories are still saying “could we be heading towards a constitutional crisis?”, but meanwhile the government is shipping Venezuelans to a concentration camp in EL Salvadore and making fascist tiktok videos about it, detaining tourists with paperwork snafus for months, threatening multiple countries, dismantling and abusing the civil service, denying transgender people’s visas as “fraud”, and putting anti-vaxxers in charge of national health.

    I have three siblings and all of us have been impacted by messed up US politics in some way:

    • I, a transgender programmer disillusioned with silicon valley*, don’t think things are going to get any better from here and am orchestrating a work transfer to Switzerland. My documentation all has my old name / gender because I didn’t think I’d have to be in a hurry to update it, and now I’m worried updating it could lead to complications or delays or worse.

    • My brother who works in medicine was looking for PHDs in the US or Europe, but recently decided Europe would be rather nicer than the US and is moving to Austria

    • My other brother is a librarian in a very republican state that sees him as the enemy. From the covid years you can find a rumble video of someone harassing him over library mask policy.

    • My sister is a researcher, who has had or is at risk of having her grants cut off due to the whole DOG thing.

    * Since I’m taking the work visa route I’ll unfortunately be joined at the hip with silicon valley until I get permanent residency.



  • Yeah I’m sure DOGE doesn’t appreciate that structured programming hasn’t always been a thing. There was such a cultural backlash against it that GOTO is still a dirty word to this day, even in code where it makes sense, and people will contort their code’s structure to avoid calling it.

    The modernization plan I linked above talks about the difficulty of refactoring in high level terms:

    It is our experience that the cycle of workarounds adds to our total technical debt – the amount of extra work that we must do to cope with increased complexity. The complexity of our systems impacts our ability to deliver new capabilities. To break the cycle of technical debt, a fundamental, system-wide replacement of code, data, and infrastructure is required

    While I’ve never dealt with COBOL I have dealt with a fair amount of legacy code. I’ve seen a ground up rewrites go horribly horribly due to poor planning (basically there were too many office politics involved and not enough common sense). I think either incremental or ground up can make sense, but you just have to figure out what makes sense for the given system (and even ground up rewrites should be incremental in some respects).