Here are several different types of weird. They’re not all on the same playlist.

Autechre - Second Bad Vilbel

Jan Böhmermann - Faschismus is Back

Adriano Celentano - Prisencolinensinainciusol

Too Many Zooz - Noda

Moon Hooch - Tubes, Number 9, Bari 3

Hiromi Uehara - Canon in D

2CELLOS - Thunderstruck

Captain Tractor - The Last Saskatchewan Pirate

The Arrogant Worms - Carrot Juice is Murder

OP take note, scrubbles is spot on!

You’re not necessarily wrong, but the company is at least invested enough in this candidate to make it worth spending a bunch of engineers’ time on it. That’s why they do the offsite screening interviews in advance. I’ve interviewed plenty of great candidates, but also plenty of mediocre ones and a few surprisingly poor ones. And in the end it’s still a bit of a gamble about how a strong candidate will perform in the job. Hiring the wrong person sucks all around, and the half day onsite interview is merely the least bad method used in the software industry.

You don’t have the job, you’ve just made it past the offsite screening. I expect you’ll be in 3-4 interviews each lasting about an hour with a different person, then they might take you to lunch with a group of people. Lunch is still an interview, it’s just informal. Be a reasonable human that they want to have as a coworker.

Expect some of the interviews to involve whiteboard coding or technical problem solving, all of them to ask you social dynamics questions (e.g. “tell me about a time you had difficulty working with a teammate”), and hopefully all of them will also give you time to ask them questions. Be ready for that last part - presumably you don’t know very much about the company, and this is your time to find out more. You might be so desperate that you’ll take any job, but that’s a turn off for them. They want to see that you are as eager to find a good team fit as they are.

Each interviewer will likely do a written summary with a hire/no hire recommendation, and there will likely be a hiring meeting with all of the interviewers, either one such meeting for each onsite candidate or one meeting at the end of a series of candidates so they can make overall decisions. You probably won’t hear a decision before 8/8, a week after the onsites finish.

I’ve noticed that anecdotally as well. There are a lot of good points already listed in other comments, and I have a couple merely additive points.

On an individual passenger basis, direct flying has always been operationally cheaper if both options exist, because it’s a more efficient use of resources. In practice, financial efficiency also requires keeping all flights as full as possible, so it was maybe helpful for an airline to incentive a customer to keep hub flights full by pricing connections lower than a direct. The direct flight is arguably more valuable to a customer because it’s a better experience, so it can cost more. All three flights are going to fly anyway, so making the sale is most important to the airline.

But equally or more important, the overall volume of air travel passengers has grown enormously over the past several decades. I’d bet that many direct routes didn’t used to have enough pairwise volume to run a regularly full profitable flight, let alone multiple competing direct options. Now I expect a ton more pairs of cities to make economic sense.

Looking at it another way, that increased travel volume over decades also came with larger airports to support more total trips, and each of those new flights need to go somewhere. Airlines can add more options throughout the day to cities already served, and they can add new cities. They naturally choose both, therefore more direct routes are created. As more direct routes have supporting volume, the inefficiencies of the hub and spoke model dominate the bottom line.

Very interesting paper, and grade A irony to begin the title with “delving” while finding that “delve” is one of the top excess words/markers of LLM writing.

Moreover, the authors highlight a few excerpts that “illustrate the LLM-style flowery language” including

By meticulously delving into the intricate web connecting […] and […], this comprehensive chapter takes a deep dive into their involvement as significant risk factors for […].

…and then they clearly intentionally conclude the discussion section thus

We hope that future work will meticulously delve into tracking LLM usage more accurately and assess which policy changes are crucial to tackle the intricate challenges posed by the rise of LLMs in scientific publishing.

Great work.

Gable-mounted still incurs direct vibration into the structure. I have a QuietCool whole house fan that is suspended in midair from the gables, to reduce that vibration and noise, while being ducted from a framed opening in the hallway ceiling.

Whole house fans are pretty great during the right season, but you need to be aware of the humidity level outside or you can make things worse even if seems cooler at the moment. I also have central AC that gets run either when it’s too humid or too hot at night. But overall I’m very happy with the whole house fan and only having moderate insulation - the house resists heat incursion during the day and then we can quickly cool things down in the evening without using too much electricity.

Signal is very actively and directly working to pioneer a new financial model for long term software business stability that does not rely on surveillance capitalism. Your experience with young companies enshittifying into monsters is the natural cycle for the surveillance economy, and if Signal does eventually go that way it will be a profound disappointment, but I expect the foundation would rather die first. Check out this interview from last year with the president of the Signal Foundation for more depth on that.

You must be one of those weirdos on Lemmy. Nobody has even heard of that place! /s

Signal provides all the privacy I need, and it’s nowhere near as skeezy as most of the alternatives mentioned in the comments here. As far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing better, but if OP would like to detail their objections to it, I’d be happy to hear them.

Signal.

Almost everything in that list of new features sounds negative to me. A few are neutral, and one might be positive depending on how it’s implemented (having the phone monitor a phone call while sitting on hold). Pretty disappointing, Tim Apple.

It might! But the article I linked also suggests it might destroy ozone and have a net warming effect. We just don’t know. The upper atmosphere has never before had this level of direct pollution injection.

Even though it’s not a space trash problem, it is a regular upper atmosphere polluter of aluminum oxide ash. We don’t yet know the long term consequences.

Google bought up GrandCentral years ago and turned it into Google Voice, where they could freeze the feature set and ignore the product and any possible innovation. Multiline autoringing and speech-to-text on voicemail was it, forever. If innovation had stayed on the table, we could have had rule-based personal phone trees, maybe with different greetings and options based on known/unknown/masked caller ID.

25 years ago, I pressed 7 and got to hear the duck quack. We didn’t know at the time that it was a golden age.

From the article:

While drug companies profit from the sales of unproven drugs, everyone else — patients, insurers, and the government — pays a heavy price. In just four years, from 2018 through 2021, the taxpayer-funded health insurance programs Medicare and Medicaid shelled out $18 billion for drugs approved on the condition that their manufacturers produce confirmatory trials that had yet to be delivered.

I’m guessing their citation only includes Medicare and Medicaid because those have publicly-available data for the study to review, but I have to assume that private insurers pay a ton as well. I can see your point that insurance denials result in angry sick people, but there’s not really a lot of nuance in “that medication has never been shown to be safe and effective for your (or any) condition.”

I dunno. Everyone sucks here.

American health insurance companies are famously miserly, and this seems like a great area to use penny pinching for good. Where the hell are the insurance CFOs who should be demanding efficacy proof instead of being swindled along with the masses?

Mini pizzas. I use the naan from Costco as the base, par bake it a few minutes first, then top with jar sauce and shredded mozzarella and make everyone come and do the rest of their toppings from little bowls I’ve prepared before going back in the oven for 5-10 minutes. Kids like mini pepperoni and pineapple bits from a can. I like pesto, spiced artichoke from a jar, Canadian bacon, and avocado and freshly chiffoned basil (after the baking). Everyone gets two pizzas customized to their liking, it tastes better than any takeout pizza, and it’s inexpensive.

Gardenia flowers. Not the terrible candle or soap scents that try and fail to imitate it, but the actual live flowers.