Gustek's comments

GPT store kind of has it already, tell it what you want and it will give you suggestions for GPTs

My understanding of ePrivacy (mostly GDPR) is that this kind of feature does not require consent. It's only features that would allow you for tracking of the user that require consent. Storing some setting in a local storage, never sending it to the server is fine.

Things get a bit muddy when sending to server but even then you may not need a consent if it is a feature that is required for correct working of the website or better experience without tracking and profiling.

12 years ago, when I just arrived in UK and was renting a room in a house, one day in the morning we got woken up by banging on the doors by police looking for one of our housemates. They kept asking him where is the phone, he showed them all phones he had but they were not the phone they were looking for.

He was a door security in one of the clubs in central London and apparently a police officer lost their phone in that club last night and gps did point at our address so they assumed he stole it. They kept searching the whole house, including my room until they finally found the lost phone in another room. Another flatmate went to that club that night for a party together with security guy. Strangely after they found the phone they kept searching.

In the end they finally told us they were not really looking for a phone but for a police badge that was lost together with the phone. The guy said he found only phone, I think he was laying but that is not part of the story. Point is, they have ability if they have motivation. Took them only few hours since party was over to come knocking, 7 officers, and do the search.

I guess the security guy living in the area where GPS was pointing could be considered extra evidence but surly if with enough phones stolen and clear pattern of them going to the same area they could collect enough evidence.

I think, they don't do it for each phone because they don't have resources and these are low priority not because they can't do it.

I see many of my favourites already mentioned by others but something not listed yet: https://www.youtube.com/c/InstituteofHumanAnatomy videos with real cadavers explaining how human body works

And already mentioned by others but just to give it another thumbs up:

https://www.youtube.com/c/inanutshell Very nice animations explaining various topics from science, philosophy and politics. The only channel I literally seen all the videos. They sometimes make videos with fun ideas like what would happen if we nuked the moon a bit in the spirit of https://what-if.xkcd.com/ but most videos are on more serious subjects in a very easy to understand format.

https://www.youtube.com/c/PracticalEngineeringChannel mostly covers civil engineering. How we handle sewage in big cities, how roads are built, how power grid works and many more.

https://www.youtube.com/c/EconomicsExplained As the name suggests, explains economics. Makes videos per country about their economy and created his own ranking of countries.

These are my top just to keep it short :)

Is building trust and growing genuine care for someone easy for you?

Trust is always a gamble, at extreme you are putting your life on the line and you never know if the other person will decide to betray you next time regardless of what they did in the past.

Caring about someone is even harder as it is not a conscious choice we are making, it is feeling. You can't just decide from today I care about this person so they are my friend.

My point was, how do you know someone is your friend not how to make one. There is no method to make friends, at best some tips or guidelines.

I think there are only 2 questions you need to answer to decide if someone is your friend.

1. Do you trust them?

2. Do you care about them?

Ideally it should reciprocated. The hard part is getting there, usually it comes naturally as you spend more time with the other person out of your own volition. Just because you are meeting someone everyday at work does not mean they will become your friends, do you trust them? do you care about them?

Once you friends you don't need to meet often as long the trust and care is still there. You can become friends in short time as well if you decide to put the trust early into the other person and they reciprocate. Point is, there is no formula or plan to follow.

When I say friend I mean a true friend, not colleagues or acquaintances. Were these meanings mixed into "friend" word before Facebook as well?

I used to work at the Pret during my student years. All employees, we were very puzzled by why Pret is so popular and why are they willing to pay so much for the food. Today with a better-paid job, when in the centre and need to get a quick snack, Pret is often my choice. End of the day they have good food and offer good service. You hear many stories about people who used to work for McD and they say they will never eat there again. I can confidently say that at Pret, I did not see any red flags that would make me not eat there.

I wonder how the subscription idea will work for them. Pret is a sandwich shop, but most of the profit comes from coffee. When I used to work there, the price of a coffee was £2, and the cost was £0.20. I guess they expect most people to not max out on the offer, which is probably a reasonable assumption.

At the time, we were told the reason Pret does not offer free coffee after N transactions is because they want to make a customer feel special when they get free coffee. That's why all employees are allowed to give free coffee to anyone at their discretion, just not too many :) Sounds like it is about to change.

There are many of them out there, but they have a much lower budget than banks, FAANG, and other top tech companies. Because of that they usually have a much smaller reach, and you don't hear about them much.

Computers are everywhere today, and charities do work more efficiently thanks to specialised software as well.

In the UK, for example, you can find a job at a charity on https://www.charityjob.co.uk/, and some need software engineers/web developers.

If you want more of technology-focused companies, one example that comes to my mind is a Little Ripper, life-saving drone https://thelittleripper.com.au/.

Another one, online GP https://www.babylonhealth.com/

They are out there, but sadly they don't have the same reach as corporations. Another debatable reason: to save our planet, all of us need to take action and software can't help here.

I have changed the job recently, and I did a few interviews. I enjoyed pair programming and code review that some of them did. Especially that this is something a software engineer, does daily as opposed to implementing complex algorithms, it felt more like I am being tested on skills that are required.

One of the companies, most interactive, did a bit of role-playing. Interviewers took on the roles of product owner and my teammate to help with code if needed. They provided a simple code base with REST API, and I had to implement new endpoint and later there was "change in requirements". I had to refactor the code a bit. Tasks were simple but stimulated a lot of conversations about how and why allowing to cover a wide range of concepts.

Two companies said "pair programming", but in reality, it was me writing code for tasks they wrote down for me without much interaction. Interviewers were mostly silently watching me with occasional nudge if they saw me struggle at some point. But still better than whiteboard :)

One company provided me with a task to solve, and I had a few minutes to read it and ask them questions if any. They left me for an hour to implement it. I don't think they expect anyone to 100% solve the tasks, but I'm sure it could be done in that time frame if you are fluent in tools best suited for it. After one hour, they came back, checked my progress, asked questions about decisions I made and followed up with a conversation on how I would continue and implement remaining parts.

Code review, I was presented with one page of code, nothing complex, but there were either some bugs or code had a questionable quality. We had a conversation about what I think should be changed and why.

I know you asked for company names but I think if you job hunting just ask for a details of the process on first contact. They usually provide it anyway and see if they do things you like and cut it short if they have some things you don't like. I just wanted to share that if the have pair programming and code review in the process they may have a good process.

One of my side projects was to make a game where you need to calculate your odds correctly as fast as possible but main goal was to learn some TypeScript so I lost interest after I was satisfied.

Anyway, I got at least one "game" done, you need to correctly count your outs. It is not perfect but covers most cases well.

https://github.com/GustekDev/poker-odds-game

I think the only valid interpretation of the IQ test is that you are good at solving some riddles and spotting patterns. In no way, it can be used as a generic metric of who is better or worse.

I took the MENSA test last year just for fun, I did not get in :) The examiner before explained as well that the exam measures an only small part of what is considered an intelligence.

In short, it is a fun exam if you like riddles and no other value.

> Generating and inserting fake data

Sounds very promising just to be very quickly downgraded to

> something simple and quick

In this case that is only how to insert a bunch of rows that have only numbers and timestamps as these are types that `generate_series` supports.

Maybe someone will actually find it useful, so not saying that a tip is completely useless but personally I think it will be very rare for it to be actually fit for purpose. A huge majority of the time when I need to generate fake data there are other data types involved and usually, there are some constraints between them as well.

Other tips sound very nice and will keep them in my notes.

@squidrings I believe you are the author?

Very interesting post especially as I am myself currently working on my first firebase based app and making sure I don't get huge bills is one of my worries.

Just little correction needed:

> July last year, a crowd funding campaign went viral in Columbia

It's Colombia not Columbia.

From how I understand it the author does not make any suggestions to use natural keys as primary key. He just defines what is natural key. And he does mention that they may change and it has to be considered.

Actually in the summary he suggests to create column with uuid in each table and use it as primary key.

Not sure what you asking about. Do you mean if I define database structure in my code? The answer is: yes. I don't know about any database abstraction library that would provide you with convenience methods to query database with type checking and stuff without giving it the schema.

I like to say "ORMs make easy thing easier and hard things harder".

What i mean by that is, any simple CRUD operations are much easier in ORM. The hard things, i mean any complex queries that need more than one join you are probably better of writing yourself.

In the end i prefer to do inserts, updates and deletes with ORM (or some other database abstraction tools) but most SELECTs i write myself, fetching exactly what i need and mapping result to objects if needed manually.