I don't want to unsubscribe to this or that.

I want to give natural language filters like "I never want to see a political email again, from anyone"

Or maybe "If they make it sound urgent but it's not urgent at all, don't show it to me and remind me a week before the actual deadline if it's at all important".

As others have said, unsubscribe links often do not work and it's probably all the Gmail feature will use.

Damn you ruined my joke. You are right

On the one hand, this isn't in the job description, so...no.

On the other hand, I actually think it's useful for people that are programming systems that other people use to actually use the systems themselves in a production environment to see how they function. If you're a programmer writing software that people at the warehouse have to use, it SHOULD be part of your description to do that job for a few days a year to understand what the biggest problems are.

And also: no volunteering. If you spend any time doing this, they pay you whatever your hourly wage is + overtime. If you're a high-paid programmer and you do this, they pay you your programmer wage and compensate you for your time. It's such a drop in the bucket for them, there's literally no reason but greed not to.

Lastly: fuck Amazon and their shitty labour practices and horrendous (reportedly) work environment. I wouldn't work there on a bet.

In Canada, literally everything with a tap-to-pay terminal supports Apple Pay. I pay with my watch at the farmer's market if they're set up to take credit cards.

And I have a 1994 Toyota pickup. There are literally millions of "old" Toyotas on the roads which will likely continue running for decades -- because they're so well designed and built. I'm 72 years old and mine will certainly outlive me.

It seems dubious to me that water in the fuel would have reached all 3 engines simultaneously, especially if one of them was not running.

I'm guessing they can tell from the wreckage that it was not running? And it should have been running by the time of the crash due to the power failure that triggered the emergency windmill generator (forgot what that is called). Is this correct? If so yea it sounds like 3 engines failed, which seems to me to mean a pretty major electronics failure?

Isn't the APU turned off during normal flight?

All crashes are due to the jet being too close to the ground.

I suspect the reason for empoyers being very reticent to hire someone with an unsual past is due to all the job-protection legislation there is now. I'd love to take more risk on people with somewhat unsual backgrounds but, working at a university in the public sector, once we hire someone it is exceptionally hard - to an amazingly ridiculous extent - to fire them which makes it a massive risk.

As a result it is a lot safer to hire someone whom you know has been at a similar job and is working well there. While we clearly do need legislation to protect employees if it goes too far it makes employers extremely risk adverse because they know they are going to be stuck with whomever they hire.

AI is not eliminating jobs it is changing them, just like computers and robotics has in the past and the assembly line did before those. Everytime we have had a leap in technology it has made some jobs obsolete but the reduction in costs leading to cheaper prices has increased demand leading to more people being employed to run the new technology.

Yes it is disruptive and it will require people to retrain for different jobs but that has been the case with all leaps in technology: short term disruption but longer term higher employment and increased quality of life. There is absolutely no reason to believe that AI will be any different.

Exactly, so how is it that guns are perfectly legal while you are banning fireworks? The UK has very strict gun control laws but every Guy Fawkes day lots of people set off fireworks in their back gardens perfectly legally. California had 11 deaths due to fireworks while the UK had zero firework related deaths in 2022/23 and only 7 deaths in total from 2010-2023.

So making fireworks legal - while putting some limits of the types of fireworks allowed - seems to save lives, especially when you factor in that the population of the UK is 70% larger than California.

LLM crawlers are understandable these days, but who on earth is actively trying to take the FSF down?

A bunch of heathen VIM users trying to stop people from accessing EMACS? What the heck?

Let's say you actually managed to take down the FSF website. Who would even notice or care? How would that help your hacker rep in any way? You'd be a laughingstock for making the attempt.

So I did my CS degree 25 years ago now.

Programming was always a means to an end. I had a couple programming courses, but almost all my classes were things like graph theory or compiler fundamentals or graphics or similar things. We learned algorithms and complexity and the history of computing that brought us to the point where we were at. I did a class on hardware where we used and/or/not/etc. gates with physical wires and solved simple logic problems. I learned the optimal rasterization of a line. I learned how lisp was designed and what left-hand recursion was. I've forgotten most of it and much of it was not useful to my career, but that's fine. When I left university, I had a deeper understanding of how computers and computing worked, the class of problems that were or weren't solvable and so many other things.

So if CS has been about teaching people how to program since I left university, it should stop being that. University is not a trade school (not that there's anything wrong with trade schools--we need more people doing those things).

Programming is a tool--a means to an end, and usually that end is learning computing science and understanding the problems that exist in the space. You're expected to learn how to use your tools almost entirely on your own time, you should not spend an entire semester on learning how your hammer works (unless you're also spending the entire semester designing a new hammer).

And look, the PROFESSORS don't need the correct answers that you hand in. Tests and assignments are also just a means to an end--you're not teaching the professor anything, you're merely demonstrating that you've been learning. Plugging things into a chatbot to get the right answer is fundamentally not the point of the class. If you don't want to learn, fine, go do something else.

Stop making university degrees mandatory for every garbage job out there, first of all. If there needs to be 4 more years of education to get a basic job, the state should make public school curricula last 4 years longer.

Second, only let people in that are interested in the topics they're studying. The ultimate goal of university should be to gain knowledge so you can CREATE knowledge yourself one day. Universities are not job training centres, they're institutions of higher learning. I get that capitalism has ruined everything, but this is what you get when it does.

Yes, we are all going to die at some point but if we can avoid all the problems and health issues that typically come from aging before we die who wouldn't want to do that?