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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Here are some things you can do, roughly ranked:

    • Use a password manager
    • Assume anything you post/do online/financially can and will be used to build an advertising profile on you/train AI/be shared with government authorities
    • Disable ad personalization/history/sharing of information via privacy settings of mobile phone, mobile apps, Google, Facebook, banks, credit cards, ISP, cellular service, everything
    • Turn off third-party cookies.
    • Use an ad-blocker on desktop and mobile. They also help prevent a lot of tracking.
    • Don’t use Chrome. Consider Firefox/Brave/whatever else
    • Avoid using ad-supported services/companies. Consider using paid alternatives. This means using alternatives to Google Search, GMail, Facebook for photos, etc etc.
    • Use a profile deleting service like https://monitor.mozilla.org/
    • Different browser profiles: general use, Facebook, personal (GMail / Google Docs), and maybe more
    • Use a VPN w/ secured DNS
    • Many Google accounts: one for general, YouTube, Google Docs/personal, and maybe more
    • Use a different email address to sign up for every account. I use StartMail’s aliases
    • Don’t use your personal phone number for most things (finance/healthcare excepted). Get another number via a call and SMS forwarding service

  • Look for another job.

    Companies like that are very unlikely to change their view that engineering’s quality and sustainability practices are a perpetual waste of money.

    That, and product doesn’t know what they’re doing, and they’re okay with making engineering also suffer for it.

    Nor do they care in practice about the engineers getting burned out.

    After you leave, when you glance back at the company at any time for the next 5+ years, you will see that they have learned pretty much nothing.

    I’ve been burned out once, and I’ll never let it happen to me again, or anyone I work with. It’s like depression; it’s an indescribable experience.

    Here’s one self-test to measure how burned out you are: https://www.peoplestorming.com/burnout-assessment.




    • Katana - quiet, and meant as a weapon against humans
    • Night vision goggles - can take advantage of the cover of night
    • Water purifier - greatly simplifies one human necessity
    • Body armor - will put it on whenever there’s a risk

    None of these are common household items, whereas some of the items on the list are, and thus, scavenged easily enough.


  • Not original commenter, but, I was able to look at the Apple Weather forecast right before I napped at 2pm Friday. The forecast then pretty much said showers for a few hours that day, but definitely was nowhere close to the amount of rain that actually fell. The weather there can be unpredictable.

    I took a photo of the forecast on Thu to show campmates, this is what it looked like then: https://sincere-zenith-02b.notion.site/Forecast-Photo-88c591169ea74fd7961136a7f4409a63. Friday was the day with the heaviest rain.

    A crew of people is there for a whole month before the event starts, and it pretty much always rains at least once that month, and we read about them having to stop work, shelter, and avoid medical emergencies. This year, Tropical Storm Hilary passed through a week before the event start, and the community as a whole was keeping a keen eye on it.

    You may have seen the word ‘playa’ in reference to the event grounds. In the general English context, ‘playa’ means ‘dry lake’. The entire event is literally held in a dry lake. If you want many square miles of ground that can sometimes be asphalt-like, you go to a dry lake. And for the land speed records, it also happens to be super flat. It’s the accumulated standing water that does that.

    It’s widely known to most attendees how impassable Black Rock Desert is when it rains. My camp and all the camps around us had food and water for at least a few extra days, and we had more than adequate morale the entire weekend. This year, I personally brought at least 2 weeks worth of kilocalories, and packed 3 raincoats. I handed out 2 of the raincoats to campmates pronto.

    If you look at the back of the event’s paper ticket, and then the official survival guide, for this year, and years prior, they mention rainstorms, and what to do in such a scenario.