There are tons of avid Trump supporting MAGA Republicans on HN. Over the last decade, they've been happy to jump into threads whenever possible to spout their opinions. There are most likely thousands of people here who voted for Trump and his party in the last election.
Are you going to continue to vote for Republicans? If so, please, feel free to explain your continued support for the Trump administration, the Republican party and ICE. We'd all be very interested hear the rationalizations.
Does the corruption, abuse of power, nonsensical policies and outright lies not bother you? Or are you still convinced it's a "both sides" thing, despite how unprecedented the administration's actions have been. Let's hear it.
That whole "good posture" thing is future physical problems waiting to happen. For 25 years, I've always put my feet up on the corner of my desk (to the left), set the seat as high as possible (or adjust the desk lower) and lean back, arms extended. Basically, I'm positioned like an F1 driver in a cockpit.
No back problems as there's no weight on my spine. No carpal tunnel issues, as my wrists are always flat. No fatigue from holding my body at right angles for hours at a time.
The downside is I look like a total slacker in the office, especially to narrow minded image conscious managers who expect me "to act professionally."
Random geek thing: Apple has used a couple different versions of its iconic "hello" image originally drawn by Susan Kare.
The first one starts with an "h" that has a loop at the top, the second doesn't. If you do an image search [1], you'll see the two versions. Both have been used in advertising over the years, both in print and in TV commercials.
Susan Kare sells a signed "hello" print on her website and I bought one - it uses the second version [2]. When Apple started their advertising campaign a few years ago using the original curlicue "hello" again, I looked at the print on my wall, and noticed the difference.
I emailed Susan about it and she responded that she hadn't even noticed! She couldn't remember anything about why there were the two versions. My Occam's razor guess is that Apple had recreated the original "hello" at some point and the designer decided to skip the loop. When Susan was making the prints years ago, she looked for a nice high resolution copy of it, and Apple hadn't made the curlicue version of it "official" yet, so the second was the nicest copy out there.
(If you look carefully, there's also a "hello" print ad from the 80s that looks like someone at an ad agency just took a go at it.)
Sorry for the long post, but it may be relevant to you.
I would share my personal website which I owned for 25+ years, but AWS deregistered it because of $36.
In case you use AWS as a registrar, be warned: If your account is "closed", they will release your domains. In other words, they make them available as if they were expired. Immediately.
Short summary: I consolidated my domains at AWS years ago just to make it easier to manage everything from one spot. Earlier last year, my credit card I used for auto payments didn't have the $18 I pay for monthly costs. I didn't notice, until my email stopped working because my account was "suspended" due to non payment after a couple months.
When AWS suspended the account, they turned off DNS routing which I managed from Route 53, so not only did my websites stop working, so did my email account (which had DNS entries to route to Gmail).
So I went to log in to pay my bill, but in the time since I had last signed in, AWS had added two factor authentication. But since I couldn't get my email, I couldn't log in. Quiz: How does one pay AWS if you can't log into your account? You cant. How do you submit a ticket? Create a new account, submit a ticket about the old account from there (you still can't pay). And then wait. And then send in a notarized form plus forms of identity. It took over a two months to resolve. Meanwhile, my account went from suspended to "closed".
I put that in quotes because when I was finally able to get my log in working, my account was as it was before with all data and setup intact.
Except for all my domains.
They had been deregistered, despite having paid for years more. AWS cancelled and released my domains without my permission. They actively deleted them from the register list, so anyone out there could buy them.
russellbeattie.com was no longer mine. In addition to the other 6 domains I used.
Because of the SEO of my personal blog, some asshole had added my domain to an "add/drop" service, so it was instantly snapped up and is now used as a scam website. They also have access to all my email, which I've used for everything from Apple to Microsoft to Google and more.
So, I'd love to share my blog with you, but Amazon screwed me so badly it's incredible.
Scott Adams is yet another example of the need to separate a person's work from their qualities as a person. It's just something we have to accept: Bad people can make great things.
An example that I like (that doesn't include WWII Germans) is William Shockley. He was a pretty horrible person all told. He didn't kill anyone, he was just a shitty guy. And yet the world owes him a debt for accurately describing how semiconductors work at the atomic level. Silicon Valley basically wouldn't exist without him.
Adams is like that as well. His work was funny and insightful, his politics were abhorrent. He will always have an asterisk next to his name in the history books because of it.
(Not that anyone will care about Dilbert in another decade or so. Much of it today is already about a moment in business that is long past).
I listen to a lot of Audiobooks and some authors are really, really not suited to read their own works of fiction.
Some are definitive, however. If you haven't heard Douglas Adams read all his books [1], you're definitely missing out. They're harder to track down, and not the best quality as most are copied from old tape cassettes, but I love listening to the genius at work.
Yahtzee Croshaw reading his books is fantastic [2]. As is Patrick Rothfuss reading The Slow Regard of Silent Things [3].
A more recent author I listened to was Adrian Tchaikovsky reading Service Model [4]. He was so good, I checked to see if he had theater training! Really great.
Ha! I watched it for a little while on 2x and it was very cool. Then Frodo hit the river and dives in, swimming across with perfect freestyle form like Michael Phelps!
I literally guffawed and thought, "Well, that's one good way of avoiding the dark riders." Makes that dramatic jump to the barge a little less intense. ;-)
So many people in the comments arguing as if the U.S. government made a rational decision based on specified goals and policies.
Trump is a pathological narcissist and sociopath. He admires dictators like Putin and wanted to emulate his invasion of Ukraine. Stephen Miller is pure evil, and Hegseth is a fool, so they came up with a pretext to attack Venezuela. All of this conveniently distracts from the Epstein files.
Nothing that's happened is justified, legal or rational. It's just the egos of idiots who should not be in power.
there are other people behind these decisions proposing them to trump as options, and its following the current US strategic plan about militarily dominating the americas.
its gonna be some other central and south american countries next like panama, the on to conquering greenland from the danes and greenlanders, then canada
When I was around 10yo in the early 1980s in New England, I loved to watch the Computer Chronicles - which usually was shown late at night for some reason. It's hard to describe now how awestruck I was at everything the show covered. I was too young to understand what a studio was, so I really thought they were filming from some far away skyscraper with a view of the city behind them. I wanted to be there! I still get that buzz of excitement and wonder when I watch recordings even today.
After moving to Silicon Valley, one of the things that still gives me joy is the idea that I now live close to where the show was recorded in San Mateo. It's one of those small dreams as a kid that became reality.
I have this same feeling every time I drive by the Jameco office. I used to read their catalog and buy components from them and now living right near them reminds me of growing up
There seems to be a point in every large tech company's lifecycle where they decide they can replace innovation with businesses deals.
Someone with no real technological vision takes the helm, and they end up listening to MBAs instead of techies, visionaries or even customers. They spend their efforts focusing solely on maximizing profits, and then trying to take a shortcut on invention through acquisitions or by chasing fads.
I mean, Microsoft makes like $20B in profit every quarter, so it's not like the MBAs are useless. They're just useless at creating the future.
I like to think it's a plan to kill off video games. I mean, make it so uncool that parents will be worried that the kids won't sit in front of the game console and insist on playing outside all the time.
(To be fair, game consoles outgrew kids by the Xbox 360 generation if not earlier, they'd have to ruin mobile games to change childhood)
Are you going to continue to vote for Republicans? If so, please, feel free to explain your continued support for the Trump administration, the Republican party and ICE. We'd all be very interested hear the rationalizations.
Does the corruption, abuse of power, nonsensical policies and outright lies not bother you? Or are you still convinced it's a "both sides" thing, despite how unprecedented the administration's actions have been. Let's hear it.