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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • Are we talking about me specifically or people in general? I’ll assume general as I was just relaying a personal anecdote to show that my point/thesis wasn’t just a hypothetical as I do know how to get around it in my specific case.

    In the general context, that’s not a great solution for most people as it is beyond their skill or time set. For the most disadvantaged people just having the ability to have a phone at all and a place to reliably charge it is an issue. There is also the issue is practicality. When I take public transit where I live, the app pulls up a QR code on my phone they gets scanned. I’m not even sure I could fit my laptop screen into the space to scan the QR code if I was emulating Android.

    So I guess my thesis here is that systems should be made more accessible and inclusive rather than requiring those in the minority to either have to put more effort in using a workaround to reach functional parity or end up left out all together.


  • Unfortunately yes, and I would go even a step further and say a smart phone is a basic necessity. More and more companies and even government services are operating on the assumption that everyone has a smart phone. I have encountered various services where if a person didn’t have a smart phone they literally can’t use it. I even have personal experience with it.

    My landlord uses a company for payments that can only be interacted with via an app on a smart phone. There is no web portal option. There is no option to mail a check. There is no option to setup a direct bank transfer. I was essentially strong armed into it since the place itself was (and still is) better than almost anything else I saw and is a reasonable price.



  • I’m not convinced the employers know that. At least not the ones that ultimately control hiring. Granted, I’m not CS, I’m in the Mechanical Engineering world and it seems like a similar issue has existed (for possibly different reasons) for the last decade or so. That goes double for the skilled trades that our work heavily relies on. Companies don’t want to spend the time and money developing new talent, they just want to find already developed talent.

    They may throw some money and lip service at some school or community programs, but they don’t really take on the responsibility of insuring a sustainable ecosystem of people in the industry. Like a lot of issues it’s the Prisoner’s Dilemma. I’m not sure how it is in other parts of the world, butat least in the US, with some rare exceptions, I don’t see people and companies changing from being selfish to trying to maximize the benefit for all without changes in policy, and the likelihood of that is well…


  • Doing work, solving problems, and failing is often the best way for people to learn. I will damn near get fired before I let management schlep menial busy work onto an intern or tell them look but don’t touch. If an intern has to do some kind of mind numbing repetitive task, it won’t be anything that I myself haven’t already had to an equal amount of or at least will be doing side by side with them. As you said, they are there to learn, not fill a hole management was too cheap or lazy to do. .

    It is probably worth while to note that in my industry interns are generally paid pretty well. My internship back in the day paid about double what my job in IT paid when I took it.





  • Currently typing this on a Fairphone 5 that I imported from Europe. I would personally say no in terms of it being an answer to the above poster. At least as of now. I’m not saying I dislike the phone. I’m fairly happy with it, with the only real complaint being battery life.

    Although it is easy to repair, as far as I am aware none of the phones really share any parts or have an upgrade path which is what I would really like to see. Similar to the Framework laptops (which I also own and just upgraded). I think the SoC in this phone will last me for quite some time, but if the Fairphone 6 ends up having a much more energy efficient screen, I would love if I could install it on my current phone, but that is highly unlikely as far as I can tell.


  • I would add to this that almost all the companies I have worked for (from local businesses to multi national corps) constantly “save” money by hiding it in labor costs. There is some line item or other thing that is clearly definable on a budget and so they will outsource it in some capacity and then pat themselves on the back for the cost savings. However, what ends up happening is the resulting product that comes in is dog shit and it forces the people on the ground to fix it or otherwise make it work.

    Most regular people just want to do their job and not rock the boat, so rather than make this new issue a pain point for management, they just deal with it. Over time those types of things start to add up and burn people out, but the higher ups are never directly effected and so I think they get a weird sense of anything they say ultimately “just working out”.




  • I kinda wish my employer would do something like this for our current applications. Right before I started working there they switched from giving engineers desktops to laptops (work station laptops but still). There are some advantages to having a laptop like being able to work from home or use it in a meeting, but I would much prefer the extra power from a desktop. In mind the best of both worlds would be to have a relatively cheap laptop that basically acts as a thin client so that I can RDP into a dedicated server or workstation for my engineering applications. But what do I know ¯_(ツ)_/¯