This site, and this community, is great in my opinion. But it's not without valid criticism, especially considering the impact it can and has made in the industry and tech society.
"naively uninformed tantrum"
I'm unable to find the posts you're talking about.
Sorry if my distaste for these "I'm so cool look at me go" Twitter rants is seeping out here. If you go to his profile and scroll back a few days of posts you'll find them. Anyway it looks like he's humbled and corrected himself after seeing this writeup. Maybe I'll give him another chance.
If you're not familiar with it, their platform security team releases a whitepaper about the technical details of their security. Regardless of how you feel about Apple, these documents are incredibly well done and interesting to read. The Find My section may have more information, as will their contract tracing docs (which use a riff of the same technology)
They do yearly updates, the 2022 doc will very likely have more information. Regardless, the 2021 doc has some key foundations of the technology that are worth knowing.
The contract tracing docs _should_ be almost the same technology, and knowing how that works _should_ be a good start. At least, from my eyeing the OP's article as a lay person.
I can't go too into details, but now that the AOP is doing cryptographical operations and key escrow, the internal bus is likely to show up in future documents. Maybe not the AOP but certainly the mechanisms it uses to interact with the find my network. It may also be a separate find my network whitepaper.
> Sure you document such stuff before releasing it?
Uuuhh so, bad news. Basically nobody ever does that. Since agile, everyone seems to just iterate like mad, release, then document after release if you have time.
>Sure you document such stuff before releasing it?
These are all likely documented internally - the process of cleaning it up is probably something they only care to do once a year. Very little of this affects most developers, and the stuff that does is available in the dev docs.
I made a coworker really uncomfortable by offering to smoke him out after work when he was visiting our site. But there really wasn't any recourse - he was conservative visiting from a conservative area (where it was "understood" that pot is a hard drug). I'm from the Bay Area: I'd been smoking weed since I was 16.
I've always been cognizant of differing understandings around the drug, but I definitely think it still takes some discretion.
By the way, the key difference between a drink at lunch and some pot is that im pretty useful around 2p with a drink - stoned, I might as well go home for the day. (Of course, everyone's different).
So, I think this discussion is worth having in a respectful manner - it's new rules.
> By the way, the key difference between a drink at lunch and some pot is that im pretty useful around 2p with a drink - stoned, I might as well go home for the day. (Of course, everyone's different).
The actual key difference is the person, then, right? Because plenty of people I have encountered get tipsy or lose focus after one drink. And there are acquaintances that can smoke a bowl and still function well enough to perform their job.
Similarly, I can take a gummy and still work. A couple drinks and I'm useless.
> The actual key difference is the person, then, right?
And perhaps, for this reason, drugs shouldn't be a part of the workplace at all. Go visit Japan if you want to see what social pressure to drink after work does to a person's health.
I don't even want to consider what marijuana would do to an intelligent person's focus and clarity of thought, if subjected to social pressure to smoke after work.
Social pressure to consume any substance is not cool. But if it's a mutual desire, and in the right context, alcohol (or coffee I guess) can be a nice catalyst for bonding with coworkers and clients. It should by no means be a requirement of course.
This is true. The fact that we allow an addictive stimulant with severe withdrawal effects into our offices is insane. Drugs like coffee have no place in a professional culture.
Caffeine doesn’t have severe withdrawal effects lol. Alcohol, while a depressant and not a stimulant, is much worse in both addiction potential and withdrawal and it would have made your point much more salient.
Agreed. My ability to socially interact and be productive is pretty heavily affected when smoking, much more so than when drinking (heck, the right amount of booze might even improve those qualities a bit). Like you said, everyone is different, but I personally wouldn't consider getting high in a professional setting.
Also, a lot of people might not have any experience with pot, so they don't know what (if any) effect it will have on them. Unlike alcohol. People usually don't want to experience novelties when there is business or a potential deal on the line.
Further, as much as cannabis advocates may try and argue against it, there's much more chance of having a scary or frightening experience getting high than there is from alcohol. In my experience, even a small amount of weed can trigger severe anxiety attacks in usually healthy people. It is more volatile for sure
I strongly agree, cannabis can have really unpleasant side effects, and it can be unpredictable and volatile. It does differ from coffee and even alcohol in this regard, though in a varying way.
Start with coffee. Coffee isn't dangerous from a fatal overdose perspective. It would take ~80+cups of coffee in a very short amount of time to reach life threatening caffeine levels. Something other than the caffeine would threaten your safety before the caffeine did. You can drink enough coffee to have a very unpleasant experience (I certainly have), but it's not a confusing substance, and most people know their limits (1-2 cups every few hours at most), and it's easy to stay within these limits. Different brews can definitely spike the coffee level, and I've had a few moments where I had just one (admittedly large) serving of a high caffeine grind and found myself more wired than I wanted to be.
Now, that said, if you eat three spoonfuls of caffeine powder rapidly, different story. That is quite rare in the caffeine world, though, and most people wouldn't consume the drug this way (it would in fact be rare, though caffeine pills might do it?).
Moving on to alcohol. It actually is quite dangerous from a fatal overdose perspective, mainly because many people enjoy (at least short term) getting quite drunk. It's generally easy to find alcohol in mild, easily understood doses, with some risks - "IPA" beers can surprise people who are accustomed to drinking pilsners. However, alcohol is regularly served and available in high concentrations that can be rapidly consumed before the effects set in. Coffee is easier to regulate, people don't generally enjoy getting too wired, and has an incredibly high fatal overdose threshold. Alcohol, on the other hand, is a substance that people usually consume like coffee (a couple pilsners, or glasses of wine), but there is a common use case where people deliberately drink a lot on purpose, and the delta between very drunk and fatal overdose on alcohol is much, much narrower than very wired and fatal dose on caffeine.
Now on to cannabis. Cannabis almost only exists in something similar to that highly volatile, powdered form of caffeine, and unlike whiskey vs pilsener, it is not apparent what you're consuming. Weed ranges from 1%THC to 35%+. If it is smoked, the effect at least comes on relatively quickly, but there's a long enough time lag that people can unintentionally take up to 100 times the dose they intended to. If you eat extracted THC, the risks amplify even more.
Another interesting thing about cannabis is that it appears that high doses, you get an unusual effect - the opposite of what people experience at low doses. For some people, if you drink a little caffeine, you get a little wired, if you drink too much, you get too wired. Same for getting drunk with alcohol - high doses have a similar effect, but to an undesirable magnitude. Weed, for some people has a different effect - take a little, get a little relaxed. But if you take too much, you don't get too relaxed, you experience the opposite, extreme anxiety and paranoia.
One saving grace of cannabis - unlike alcohol, the delta between being way, way too high and dying of an overdose is massive. In short, the danger of an unpleasant episode of cannabis is the unpleasant episode (well, there may be long term psychological effects).
My opinion is that cannabis should be legal, and that the practice of putting the potency on the label from a proper lab is a huge improvement over what we had before (some dude on Haight street reassuring you "nah, dude, this is the chillest, the chillest bud"). I also suspect that people who experienced heavy paranoia might not have been on the very low doses though thought they were (we're talking about 1.5-3% vs 30%+). Some people claim that CBD reduces the risk of anxiety, though others think that this is just a result of lower THC levels among high CBD stains.
Anyway, that was a very long passage of agreeing with you. It's hard to take a "small" dose of cannabis, it's hard to know to potency of what you're taking, you're "all in" before you find out, and the effect of large doses can be the opposite of small doses. There may be long term effects, certainly of excessive use at high doses, but the odds of a fatal overdoes, on the other hand, are vanishingly low.
I would argue that much of the anxiety in first time users stems from the perception of marijuana as a dangerous or illegal substance. Not to discount the negative effects of cannabis because they do exist (cannabis induced psychosis is very real in heavy users), but there are also plenty of medical use cases where cannabis is safer than the widely-accepted alternative. I actually use it for anxiety attacks myself; a good mellow indica works better and impairs me far less than a Xanax, for example.
I really really could not disagree more. My anxiety attacks were much more about getting stuck in vivid loops thinking about really bad situations happening, literally anything like someone calling or knocking at the door. I know it isn't legality because I had my worst anxiety attack of all in _Amsterdam_. Weed makes some people have horrific anxiety attacks, I think nothing more needs to be said. I don't think it's because of the danger or legality. I smoked weed for years in comfortable settings and always had anxiety attacks (I was addicted even though I was panicking every time...) I know a lot of people who have had anxiety attacks even though they are in safe or legal environments
Yeah, the paranoia can be very real. When I do smoke, I mostly like to do it alone where I know I won't have to interact with anyone and can completely control my environment.
I think weed affects people in wildly different ways. I know folks who can smoke all day and still be very social. As for myself, I generally need to remove myself from a social situation if I get too high, due to weird anxieties.
edit: I use the word paranoia here just because that's how I've interpreted my own experiences. I think "anxiety" is probably a more apt description.
I think generally it is anxiety, but I have also experienced paranoia. That is, usually the feeling is "I feel really bad and worried and I think something is going to go wrong", but there have definitely been a few times where I'm sitting looking out the window terrified that each person is going to knock on the door, or just properly scared of every little sound. I would call those paranoia.
Well, I had been a moderate stoner for a few years, and I had no concern about the law. Then, I went through a phase where I had horrible panic attacks every single time I smoked. It seemed purely a chemical thing to me. Now, in middle age, I only ever feel mildly stoned and body high, no matter how much I smoke or what strain.
I don't think HN was ever about just "technical" stuff. There is Lobsters for that kind of thing.
Out of curiosity, I brought up HN from 10 years ago on archive.org. I counted - 10 of the top 20 links were things that I wouldn't consider to be "technical".
You've always been able to turn it off with group policy and disabling the reporting service. It still bugs me, on principle, that you can't easily disable it even on the Pro edition.
That’s like trying to disable all those similar things in Firefox. But you can’t really, not unless you stop updating it, because you’ll miss something at some point. And that’s not even an ‘evil corp’ we’re talking here.
>So far, Microsoft seems to respect group policy on Pro edition
the group policy description explicitly says it does not respect it unless you're using enterprise or education.
> [...]
>If you enable this setting, you can decide what level of diagnostic data to send to Microsoft, including:
>- 0 (Security). Sends only a minimal amount of data to Microsoft, required to help keep Windows secure. Windows security components, such as the Malicious Software Removal Tool (MSRT) and Windows Defender may send data to Microsoft at this level, if enabled. Setting a value of 0 applies to devices running Enterprise, Education, IoT, or Windows Server editions only. Setting a value of 0 for other editions is equivalent to setting a value of 1.
>- 1 (Basic). Sends the same data as a value of 0, plus a very limited amount of diagnostic data, such as basic device info, quality-related data, and app compatibility info. Note that setting values of 0 or 1 will degrade certain experiences on the device.
> [...]
Disabling the relevant service might stop it regardless, but it's definitely not the group policy.
Motorcycling is deceptively safe. It's just that the cost of finding out when you fuck around is very high.
Safe riding is still more dangerous than being in a car, of course. But, the vast majority of motorcycle injuries are due to known dangerous factors such as alcohol, or going too fast through turns.
"Safe riding is still more dangerous than being in a car" To the operator. If we count the lethal damage caused to others, that number doesn't look so good...
So, that's a pretty hefty claim. I'd like to see some data. :)
A very large chunk of motorcycle accidents are single party (about 25%), the rest involve a car, usually at low speeds such as an unprotected left turn or bad merge.
I did some quick googling and found that motorcycles are less likely to be involved in pedestrian accidents than cars, but I think the the onus is on you to support your claim.
I think you've misread jascii - they are saying riding a motorcycle is more dangerous for the operator, while driving a car is less dangerous for the operator compared to adjacent pedestrians (for instance).
"Passenger cars and light trucks (vans, pickups, and sport utility vehicles) accounted for 46.1% and 39.1%, respectively, of the 4875 deaths, with the remainder split among motorcycles, buses, and heavy trucks."
https://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/11/4/232
That makes 85.2% of pedestrian fatalities. This does not make automobile traffic a "safe" form of traffic in my book...
One of the reasons I stopped going on group rides was lead riders who burned through blind corners. I'll take an open corner with good visibility as fast as I dare, but if I can't see through the turn, I take it slowly.
While the veracity of this is hard to determine, these sort of actions don't surprise me. If you have some of this evidence in writing, a lawyer might be a good place to start.
However, what really stood out to me was the design, or lack of it. The childish paint.exe job on the hero image doesn't help either. It really reads like a scrawled out screed of grievances, being aired without much forethought.
IANAL, but my understanding in the jurisdiction in which I live is that having this sort of stuff up can actually make your case harder! Refine the message and make it much more clear and logical.
In my opinion, you should take this down and contact a lawyer.
It really depends on what they want to accomplish. Perhaps given the choice of (1) publicly exposing the company and causing them reputational harm, and (2) in X years time getting a Y$ settlement and having to sign an NDA saying they cannot speak ill of the company in return, they prefer 1. They don't seem to be trying to go the lawsuit way and they don't mention it in their post.
If people don't speak out about bad conditions in the workplace, it will get swept quietly under the rug. With this, the information is out there for people to make their own judgements about it.
I'm glad they drew the dicknoses, it makes it memorable.
Legal recourse is only one avenue; a settlement usually involves hushing up. That's incompatible with warning others.
I agree. There's value in people getting angry enough that they prefer to attack as hard as they can, instead of getting the best outcome for themselves.
> However, what really stood out to me was the design, or lack of it. The childish paint.exe job on the hero image doesn't help either. It really reads like a scrawled out screed of grievances, being aired without much forethought.
Can you blame the guy?
Im not some emotionless robot - I would be absolutely furious if I was peddled lies from my employer and be treated this way too.
This notion that we need to rise above things at all times is just silly. The man has a lot on his plate and has every right to scribble on two Atlassian peoples image.
I mean, his wife has cancer, and he's being fucked with. It's easy to say from a distance that one should deal with everything in a calm, rational manner.
Well, my fix would be to remove the "dick face" art.
And, if I was feeling fancy, spend an hour or two applying consistent styles, and trying to apply a linear and progressive story structure to the posts to help people understand the charges better.
One of the pennies that's been dropping for me recently is that extreme duress can provoke a mindset/belief that the capacity is not available to fulfill a particular global set of role(s), position(s), task(s), etc (in this case spanning worker/workplace-politician/father/husband/carer/human being). This "over-duress" seems to manifest as a sort of fundamental loss of core equilibrium that leaves an existential vacuum in its wake (maybe a bit like the mental spoon counter going negative), and if pushed far enough (circumstances hit the sour spot just right), I've noticed this can involuntarily be expressed to others in a somewhat irrational/illogical, clingy, needy, and unfortunately sometimes cringy way.
While I don't think this particular case is as extreme as the end-state suggested by the trajectory described above, I find it interesting that the OP of the domain has the execution to put a domain and webpage together, and has published info that describes a situation that, in theory, is still redeemable... although now that this been published I do definitely think that it's a given that there's not very much this person can do to recover their professional relationship and retain their job with everyone keeping a straight face when they theoretically next come in to work. (Cue guaranteed awkward conversation the moment they get in...)
I definitely get "just leave already, or hire a lawyer" vibes from this, but it's clear this person is at 101% emotional saturation and don't have the attention span for that, sadly. It is an excellent philosophical question as to whether this means this person's overall mental competence should be taken into question - if I'm ruthlessly honest, that's the instinctive response I have to this sort of thing, yet it's also entirely inappropriate in just about every realistic and non-realistic context I can think of. Yet it's what my brain reaches for every time. Uncanny valley is stupid sometimes.
So I guess the caveat emptor for businesses here is, sometimes people will find themselves between rocks and hard places and try to get out of them by taking you up on claims that would reasonably be immediately disregarded as fashionable puffery ("unlimited PTO" is very obviously impossible).
This person obviously doesn't care about the money. They are understandably bitter and angry and lashing out. Not sure what else to say about it. Feels a little voyeuristic just to have read it.
For the author this isn't the best way, a lawyer and some settlement + NDA would have been. But for the community it's good that he choose to publish it and allow others to see this perspective.
Not sure whether Atlassian would want to sue, that could become yet another example of the Streisand effect...
This site, and this community, is great in my opinion. But it's not without valid criticism, especially considering the impact it can and has made in the industry and tech society.
"naively uninformed tantrum"
I'm unable to find the posts you're talking about.