tech bubble: Make someone ugly cry. Adobe can help.

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > YOSPOS > tech bubble: Make someone ugly cry. Adobe can help.

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Soricidus: Oct 21, 2010; freedom-hating statist shill

Shifty Pony posted:

advertising companies would jizz themselves to death if people started commonly using hardware with built in eye tracking and Microsoft or Google's permissive attitude towards letting programs do whatever the gently caress sort of data collection you can get a customer to agree to in a eula.

it's all good imo if it results in dead advertisers

# ? Apr 2, 2015 17:16

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ? Jun 4, 2024 21:12

Jonny 290: May 5, 2005; [ASK] me about OS/2 Warp

teen bear posted:

can someone post the "are you robbing me?" google glass story for me where the guy gets robbed in a subwa?. tia

it was cory doctorow and it was a pair of steampunk goggles

Today I was in a hurry, walking down to my local subway station, the 16th and Mission BART, and, as usual when I'm too late to take Valencia, this took me past the cluster of drug-dealers who hang out on my corner, in the north Mission. I was wearing the groovy MiG goggles I'd bought last month in London at the Camden Market and have been using as shades, and this big drug dealer cornered me and started harassing me to try them on. Then he started rambling about what he does for a living, just talking a load of really boring rounder horseshit that probably sounds good and Elmore Leonardy when you say it to yourself in your head but just sounds banal and incoherent when you're standing on a corner.
He's a big guy and so I "let" him try on my shades. Then it transpires that he wants me to buy drugs from him in exchange for my goggles. I explain that I'm not in the market for drugs, but he won't give back my shades and he's talking more bullshit. Finally I say, "So, you're robbing me, right?" and more bullshit ensues. I repeat the question a couple times, then walk off.

I'm really pissed. Really, really pissed. I really liked those goggles and clearly this guy decided he wanted to just gently caress with me for the hell of it. Short of flying to London, I can't replace them, ever. (Update: an alert reader pointed out a mail-order site, so I've replaced them)

I could go to the cops, but here's the thing: if I do, he'll know who did it and he might shoot me.

If I don't go to the cops, though, I am going to walk past this guy twice a day for the rest of my tenure in this apartment and he's going to know that I'm a soft touch and I'm bound to be in for more harassment.

This corner is visible from a nearby police station -- cops who park their cars there can easily and continuously see the swarms of crack, heroin and grass dealers who congregate on my corner. It sure doesn't feel like reporting a petty robbery is going to make a difference.

I asked the advice of two transit cops whom I ran into on BART. They said that cops see busting the dealers in the north Mission as a futile exercise, since the system just dumps them back out on the street. They recommended writing to the SF District Attorney's office, just let him know that there's political will to do something about this.

This is the kind of thing that drives me completely nuts about San Francisco. There is visible corruption, felony crimes, and human degradation everywhere, far more so than any other city I've been to in North America or Europe (excluding Naples). There are people squatting and taking dumps, there are streets whose sidewalks are lined with tents and whose gutters are lined with sealed, fermenting 40 oz. malt liquor bottles filled with urine deposited by tent-dwellers who don't want to live in their own piss. Everywhere you go in the city, you step through drifts of discarded pipes, needles, condoms.

The taxes here are extraordinary -- comparable to Ontario, certainly -- but the evidence of government spending is nowhere to be seen, from the potholes to the prostitutes, from the limping transit to the visible and desperate pervasive poverty.

OK, I'm ranting here. Getting robbed -- even getting robbed in such a minor and meaningless way -- sucks, and it rattles you and makes you bitter and angry. This crap makes me want to move, if not back to Toronto then at least to some yuppies-and-dogs neighborhood like Noe Valley or Pacific Heights, where my rent will be even more extortionate (you would not believe how much money I pay for my tiny apartment in my filthy, dangerous, feces-strewn neighborhood).

OK. I'll stop now. Thanks for reading.

Update: a few hours later.

Let me clarify here that I'm not advocating any kind of round-em-up-and-ship-em-off policy. I am no great fan of the penal system, the war on some drugs, nor am I unaware of the social factors that give rise to the problems in my neighborhood.

But there are damned few places where these problems are this visible and dramatic. I don't have a solution, but I do know that other cities in this state, country and continent don't suffer to this degree. There must be a lesson in one of them.

There are many things to love about SF and about the Mission. First and foremost, there's the EFF, as good a reason to stay here as any I can imagine -- working for the EFF is a dream come true, and the benefits thereof far outweigh the problems of this neighborhood.

There's the concentration of amazing, witty, intelligent, thoughtful and technically literate people in the Bay Area. On a good day, SF is a geek's Shangri-La, with excellent nerd and art culture on every corner.

There's the vibrancy of the Mission, the vast majority of good people who are running small businesses, making merry and who greet me with a smile when I walk past.

Getting robbed makes you bitter. If I could have stepped around this guy, I would have, but I couldn't and I ended up getting robbed. I've written to the SF District Attorney's office to point out the drug-dealers on my corner and their seeming truce with law enforcement. There's a great sushi joint, Country Station Sushi, right on the corner where I was robbed. The family that runs it are world-champion taiko drummers, and I feel for them, feel for their struggling business that is effectively barricaded by the dealers on the corner. It's not fair.

I don't have a solution, but it doesn't seem like the city can go on like this. Link Discuss

# ? Apr 2, 2015 18:02

Jonny 290: May 5, 2005; [ASK] me about OS/2 Warp

"drug-dealers"

# ? Apr 2, 2015 18:03

qirex: Feb 15, 2001

The founder and former chief executive of a San Francisco startup has been sentenced in federal court to two years in prison for fraud in a scheme in which he bilked several investors of more than $500,000.

Jonathan Mills, 31, the founder of a company called Motionloft, was sentenced Tuesday by U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg in San Francisco. The judge also ordered him to pay $572,039 in restitution.

Mills, of San Francisco, pleaded guilty before Seeborg in October to two counts of wire fraud.

U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag said that during his guilty plea, Mills admitted he obtained money from several investors by falsely telling them that Motionloft was going to be acquired by a well-known Silicon Valley multinational corporation and that they would reap large profits.

There was no acquisition and Mills spent a substantial amount of the investment money on personal luxuries, including rental of a private jet, a penthouse suite and lavish vacations, Haag said.

Motionloft uses sensors to gather data on movements of pedestrians and vehicles. Mills was fired as chief executive by the company�s shareholders on Dec. 1, 2013.

According to documents filed by prosecutors, the $572,039 in restitution represents funds obtained from five victims. One of the victims was Mills�s doctor and another was a woman who left her job while she was pregnant because she believed the investment would make her rich, according to a prosecution sentencing brief.

Prosecutors said in the documents that another Motionloft investor has repaid the victims $251,000, so that amount of the restitution should go to Motionloft and the remaining $321,000 should to the victims.

# ? Apr 2, 2015 18:27

Forums Terrorist: Dec 8, 2011

gross

should have just played another round of investor storytime with vcs, at least then he'd be stealing from people who deserve it

# ? Apr 2, 2015 18:38

prefect: Sep 11, 2001; No one, Woodhouse.
No one.; Dead Man’s Band

qirex posted:

Mills was fired as chief executive by the company�s shareholders on Dec. 1, 2013.

it's rare to see somebody high-up like that actually getting fired. that's nice, at least

# ? Apr 2, 2015 18:50

teen bear: Feb 19, 2006

Jonny 290 posted:

"drug-dealers"

this is somehow even more sad with steam punk goggles instead of glass

# ? Apr 2, 2015 19:10

Luigi Thirty: Apr 30, 2006; Emergency confection port.

system shock taught me that taking drugs with cyber goggles rules though

# ? Apr 2, 2015 19:47

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

Subjunctive posted:

seller's market in tech these days, use your leverage.

only if you dont need training because you're already an expert with lots of experience in the thing theyre hiring for

very few employers are desperate for "i don't know how to do this thing but i can totally do it if you just have someone teach me how and train me"

# ? Apr 2, 2015 20:06

qirex: Feb 15, 2001

Main Paineframe posted:

only if you dont need training because you're already an expert with lots of experience in the thing theyre hiring for

very few employers are desperate for "i don't know how to do this thing but i can totally do it if you just have someone teach me how and train me"

and a nice fat secondary industry of hey pay 10 grand to come to our hacker camp

# ? Apr 2, 2015 20:13

Luigi Thirty: Apr 30, 2006; Emergency confection port.

please don't disparage the elite traditions of Hacker School, thanks

# ? Apr 2, 2015 20:16

Munkeymon: Aug 14, 2003; Motherfucker's got an
armor-piercing crowbar! Rigoddamndicu𝜆ous.

qirex posted:

and a nice fat secondary industry of hey pay 10 grand to come to our hacker camp

or train yourself during your copious free time

family? what's that?

# ? Apr 2, 2015 20:25

Subjunctive: Sep 12, 2006; ✨sparkle and shine✨

Main Paineframe posted:

only if you dont need training because you're already an expert with lots of experience in the thing theyre hiring for

no, I mean that you are able to do X and they need people who do X, so say "hey great, I'd love to do X for you; how would I go about learning to Y at your company? I really want to make sure I keep growing". maybe they say "yeah, we don't do that", in which case you can decide how important it is to you, like commute/office layout/benefits/catering/dress code/reputation/etc.

in tighter hiring markets like the bay area, you definitely get companies hiring for general competence rather than domain expertise. the vast majority of FB developers are hired on the strength of "you seem like you can think critically and solve problems, and have acceptable general coding ability", not expertise in any specific language or technology. there are some positions like AI, Oculus, mobile front-end, some network ops where domain experience is important, but once you're inside getting cross trained is very much a thing. smaller companies I know hire the same way, because who knows what tech you'll be using in a year anyway?

there's no way I could have hired enough "mobile developers" to fuel the big pivot to mobile apps, so I put 800 high-grade generalist developers through high quality training and then sprinkled the hen's-teeth experts through the team. I'd staff like that over and over again, because specific technical expertise is not the scarce commodity. there are lots of people who know Cocoa really well but can't structure a program or intelligently discuss an algorithm or explain a concept.

# ? Apr 2, 2015 20:34

JewKiller 3000: Nov 28, 2006; by Lowtax

Subjunctive posted:

there's no way I could have hired enough "mobile developers" to fuel the big pivot to mobile apps, so I put 800 high-grade generalist developers through high quality training and then sprinkled the hen's-teeth experts through the team.

so why does it take 800 people to make an app that sucks

# ? Apr 2, 2015 21:13

Subjunctive: Sep 12, 2006; ✨sparkle and shine✨

JewKiller 3000 posted:

so why does it take 800 people to make an app that sucks

we couldn't make it suck enough with just 200 people

# ? Apr 2, 2015 21:13

EMILY BLUNTS: Jan 1, 2005

half of them are going through the databases by hand rolling back changes to privacy settings :v:

# ? Apr 2, 2015 21:14

Moist von Lipwig: Oct 28, 2006; by FactsAreUseless; Tortured By Flan

Parallel Paraplegic posted:

holy poo poo

# ? Apr 2, 2015 22:20

pr0zac: Jan 18, 2004; ~*lukecagefan69*~; Pillbug

Subjunctive posted:

we couldn't make it suck enough with just 200 people

sucking @scale

# ? Apr 3, 2015 01:32

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?