Noah Richards

@noahsmark.com on the better site.

[Noah Richards @noahsmark]

Hey @FedEx, your phone system literally won't let me talk to a representative, it's *super aggressive* about getting rid of me. I have a package that is likely lost and the status is ~stuck. I want to file a claim so I can have the shipper send again. How can I talk to a human?

[Noah Richards @noahsmark]

@PSETalk did you reduce service line voltage when replacing systems? I’m having a bunch of problems with LEDs after the outage that were fine before and during (with generator). Even brand new Phillips LED bulbs take 20s to get bright now. I’m reading <116V everywhere.

[Noah Richards @noahsmark]

@PSETalk Our neighborhood was energized for 60 seconds and then went back out. Our outage (2k people in northeast King) has now disappeared. I filed an outage again but it looks isolated (my house) instead of the entire neighborhood. Anything else I should do?

[Noah Richards @noahsmark]

@jkyu06 Sorta like the Daniel / Danielle bit too on the artist :)

[Noah Richards @noahsmark]

@samhenrigold Mine lasts barely a week sitting idle (but on, I forget to manually turn it off). Truly the worst piece of Apple hardware I’ve ever owned.

[Noah Richards @noahsmark]

@StatisticUrban Gore and Aaron Sorkin taught me that norms and pageantry were more important than outcomes, took me at least a decade to overcome that :(

[Noah Richards @noahsmark]

@iavins Also “don’t worry we’re backing it up” about SQLite is certainly not giving the same durability guarantees. And that’s ok! But the description feels like “we use SQLite to do the same thing as Postgres”, but actually they use it to deliver a very different (totally fine) thing.

[Noah Richards @noahsmark]

@iavins This feels super apples to oranges, particularly the row lock bit. That’s a table design issue, not a Postgres issue, and SQLite doesn’t magically “fix” that.

[Kharg Island Margaritaville @canderaid]

cannot be emphasized enough that it is a mainstream belief among US political journalists that the general public has an affirmative moral duty to fund their work, regardless of its quality, professionalism or ethics

[Noah Richards @noahsmark]

“Bezos doesn’t need your subscription money so you should continue paying him profits” is a bad take, boycotts have caused behavior changes in incredibly rich and successful companies/owners. And this is common anti-boycott/strike rhetoric (“hurts workers, not us!”).

[Caroline Kitchener @CAKitchener]

Post reporters had no part in this decision. But when you cancel, you are hurting us, not our owner.

[Noah Richards @noahsmark]

@VicVijayakumar Why is it so…white? I’d ask for my money back.

[Noah Richards @noahsmark]

@welltypedwitch That’s great framing! An example of when it isn’t: the google c++ style guide forbids use of unsigned integers (in ~APIs) to restrict the range of allowed numbers, as too often it results in buggy narrowing conversions. That was based on actual observations.

[Noah Richards @noahsmark]

@welltypedwitch Consider the many:one harassment costs, as so much of harassment is coordinated. You want *some* friction for the harassers and (ideally) cheap mass-block tools for the harassed (like BlockParty), otherwise the math just isn’t in favor of harassed folks.

[Noah Richards @noahsmark]

@BasicMountain Yeah I have zero intuition on the diffuse effects of all these things, or the algebra around how many votes any given statement (from a candidate) will win/lose. Someone on her staff believes being positive on crypto is net positive, which is baffling, but maybe that’s correct?

[Noah Richards @noahsmark]

@BasicMountain Very much like “matters so much more how your actions affirm your sense of morality and justice”, I definitely can understand that framing.

[Noah Richards @noahsmark]

@BasicMountain @CassieCeleste Your point about applying your energy is excellent, I do hope folks can separate voting for a candidate for organizing in a way that tries to force behavior changes from the then-elected official.

[Noah Richards @noahsmark]

@BasicMountain @CassieCeleste It may be worth exploring what makes something “principled” or not, I think it’s a *bit* of a weasel word here (harm reduction is a principle, categorical imperative is a principle, etc.). And the flip side of “your vote has no value” is “your ~protest vote has no value”, no?

[Noah Richards @noahsmark]

@kelseyhightower Doing it should require:

1. That there’s enough illegal voting to significantly change election outcomes
2. That exclusionary effects preserve fairness of outcomes

#1 isn’t true today, and I’ve not heard a shape of process that accomplishes #2. So what problem are we solving?

[Noah Richards @noahsmark]

@kelseyhightower What problem are you solving?

Put another way: if it’s as easy to get an ID as it is to vote ~today, what’s the point of requiring an ID?

Voting requires identification in a general sense, your hypothetical must exclude more people to do anything, how will that work?

[Noah Richards @noahsmark]

@VicVijayakumar @aarondfrancis I think he’s reductive in harmful ways. Like the “I can buy an HDD for less than the equivalent S3, much of the cloud is like this” is inane, and the tenor is “you’d be an idiot to waste your money”. You know the difference but lots of people don’t.