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3 days agoThat’s sufficient right now. People were stupid.
Klox
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- 14 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: June 16th, 2023
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Not Republican is the only qualifier if you’re a sane person.
Never republican. Prior to that, whichever Democrat says they will reign hell fire.
Disbanding ICE, disbanding TSA, slashing CBP, cutting military 75+%, expanding the supreme court by 10+ seats, expanding DOJ for that massive backlog of criminal prosecutions, forcing better vote methodologies, forcing a constitutional convention (new branches of government, independent DOJ, independent science research, independent health), encouraging new states (DC, Guam, Puerto Rico) to join the union to fix Senate proportions, remove electoral college, add in mechanisms for national no-confidence votes, healthcare as a right, etc. There’s a lot more heh.
42·6 days agothey are typically for things like carnivals.
Well xAI is a circus, so it’s fairly accurate.
Good question. I wasn’t. I was not located in California, and the union never really came up in any of my conversations with colleagues. I vaguely thought dues were 5-8% of total compensation (I see now they are 1% which seems reasonable, either I am misremembering or they have since lowered, or maybe I looked at a different union) and they did not have any negotiating rights. Admittedly, if the union isn’t negotiating then I don’t know what it is for. But maybe it just needed to get to critical mass to have that negotiating leverage and I could have helped by joining. My total compensation was very good though, so it didn’t really seem like something a union had to protect. I had excellent work-life balance, good benefits, etc.
Edit: Internally, Googlers are fairly transparent. There were multiple anonymous surveys run by employees for collecting compensation statistics broken down by gender, role, region, office, etc. It had a pretty high number of participants. That was very informative and I always participated.
I took a voluntary layoff from Google last year. It’s probably self-rationalizing, but IMO I had an excellent role at the company for the last 5 years of my time. I helped design a system that locks down and redacts server logs across many of Google’s services. Only on-call engineers with an emergency backed by a post mortem review could get temporary access to original server logs. The system doesn’t delete all data but it can enforce codified contracts, country/state regulations, make certain privacy gurantees, and surface problems for auditing.
Google has made and continues to make poor business decisions, but from my experience they are one of the best big companies managing user privacy. I can’t speak for all of Google’s business units (well I can’t speak for the company at all, heh), but the privacy zeitgeist says the opposite which I’ve found misleading, but could never really speak to while being employed.
User data is taken extremely seriously at Google, and I worked with hundreds of people that would gladly get fired if asked to do anything unethical with user data. They audit and lock down access, build systems for guaranteeing anonymization (systems in place long before I worked there), report compliance, and most importantly they work independently from the employees that use the data. Every business unit had committees to consult and review privacy specifically. I was also an expert consultant for several privacy incidents and the number of people involved and the seriousness taken was personally impressive for even minor incidents.
IMO it’s still one of the best companies to work for, but there’s many legitimate reasons to cut them out. My opinion switched when Google had their first layoff in January 2023. The company had issues (I am sure there are plenty of legit lawsuits that I know nothing about that can be fixed with money and internal/external controls and improvements), but in that moment I realized it’s not the company I thought I knew. Rough ordering of reasons for my exit:
- Government contracts supporting fascism (Israel, CBP, ICE, face tracking, etc.).
- The layoffs.
- Pichai going to inauguration and capitulating. GOP donations.
- 180 on remote culture.
- AI slop.
There’s probably more if I reflected longer. Maybe I should have resigned sooner, idk. I’m glad I made the choice that I could.
Google was good to me for the years I was there. I got up to L6 and saved enough for my family to exit on my own terms and find a better environment. I’m still looking heh.
Happy to answer some questions (culture, privacy, SWE/SRE, oncall, etc.) if there are any. The company is massive and I saw only a small slice.
I’ve played 3300 hours over 12-13 years. It’s a free capture the flag web game that is typically 4v4 and around 4-10 minutes per match (6 min with a slaughter rule of 3 caps and an OT for ties).
There are 3 types of power ups: tag pro, juke juice, and rolling bomb. There are a few special tiles: boosts, bombs, spikes, gate switches, gravity well, and speed. There’s a lot of maps that rotate every month by committee vote.
It’s a good ratio of team tactics and individual skill that keeps bringing me back. The community is solid and they just slowly keep improving the experience. The community isn’t huge so there’s more popular regional times to have matches.
Maybe a Lemmy hug will get an infusion of new players :) Come check it out!
3·12 days agoYep, you’re right!
Lemmy talk about it: open source for open discourse.
Or just:
Lemmy talk: open source for open discourse.
Lemmy talk: open discourse with open source.
The AI part is that the drug riddled CEO asked AI leading questions. The AI wholeheartedly agreed the company should speed run late stage capitalism. What more confirmation is needed that AI is the future?
2·17 days agoThanks! Adding those to my list.
Awesome. I’m back to PC gaming after a lonnggg hiatus. I’ve been playing on Switch 1 so wasn’t completely in the dark about games, but I’ve recently played through Half-Life 1+2+episodes, Star Wars Outlaws, Jedi Fallen Order + Survivor, SW Squadrons, KOTOR 1 + mod packs replay, RV there yet, Schedule I, Deep Rock Galactic, and couple rogue lites. Also playing Ark for the first time.
My immediate queue is HL Alyx in VR, Star Wars Squadron replay in VR, and KOTOR 2 replay + mods.
I got the Master Chief collection and am going to go through the games chronologically starting with Reach. I’ve already played 1-3 on Xbox when they came out.
My backlog is Fallout games, Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, Subnautica 1+2, Cyber Punk 2077, Arkham Trilogy. I’m on the fence about Mass Effect Legendary edition replay (I played the 3 games what they came out). There are a lot more that I’m not committed to yet: Eden Ring, Baulders Gate, Red Dead Redemption 2, God of War, Elder Scrolls Oblivion remaster. I should add Max Payne and The Last of Us to that list.
If there’s any obvious ones I’m missing please let me know! I’m also getting my young kids into PC gaming, so will be revisiting some classics.
Something like 0.5% voted third party. IMO it’s a non issue. Never Republican is a clearer mandate. But yes, I will be campaigning hard for the best Democrat in the primaries and will be voting Democrat.