Software engineer working on very high scale systems, and dad.

Born and raised 🇫🇷, now resident and naturalized citizen 🇺🇸.

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  • 3 Posts
  • 124 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • I once had a conversation under NDA (which has expired since) with an engineer at Apple who was working on iCloud infrastructure, and he was telling me that his team was a bit shocked to read that Dropbox was releasing apps for photos at the time “because they’ve noticed that most of the files users are uploading to Dropbox are photos”. He was like: how do they know that exactly? His team had no idea and couldn’t possibly find out if the encrypted files they were storing were photos, sounds, videos, texts, whatever. That’s what encryption is for, only the client side (the devices) is supposed to know what’s up.

    Not having that information meant a direct loss of business insights and value for Apple, since Dropbox had it and leveraged it. But it turns out Apple doesn’t joke around about security/privacy.







  • What job were you doing? I’m realizing I may have confirmation bias, because all the people I asked about it were in the restaurant / bar service industry, so my conclusions probably only apply there.

    You mentioned DoorDash, and I’m realizing I never asked anybody who works for one of those “sharing economy” monsters. I can totally believe that for them, it’s more likely to be a wage escaping scheme, since wage escaping is, well, kinda their business model in the first place. Am I assuming right that you were working for one of those?

    Thanks for that, it’s definitely helping me getting a fuller picture.


  • I’ve never worked a tip-driven job, but when talking with people who do, I’ve never met anyone working a tip-driven job who wanted tips to be gone or blamed the employer for it. It’s starting to feel to me like the people who are against tipping culture tend to be people who have never experienced it from the inside.

    I don’t disagree that it’s an awkward setup, I don’t love the idea of it either. But I’ll take my cues from the people I’ve met who know better about it than I do. And it seems they seem to tend to agree with you.


  • Maybe it extended it, maybe not, my understanding is it’s hard to say.

    One thing for sure: slavery lived on quite a lot more than 20 years. The abolition of the Atlantic trade was later voted to be in effect on Jan 1st 1808, the very day that it was constitutionally possible to abolish it; but that didn’t free the existing slaves quite yet. 50+ years went by to attempt to resolve the issue diplomatically, which eventually failed and gave way to 4 years of Civil War. So, that’s almost 80 years total.

    But on the other hand, my understanding is no one really knew clearly what the King had in mind to do about slavery, and it was not in his interest to be too clear about it and risk to alienate either side, before actually taking action. Maybe he was planning to quickly abolish slavery indeed; or maybe just to limit it, or maybe to tax it. The Southern states were very worried they he may abolish, but I’m not sure it’s well known what his actual plan was. So, maybe he would have stopped slavery earlier; or maybe he would have regulated it the way he wanted to and then let it happen, and slavery could very well still be active to this day. No idea.