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Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: August 4th, 2024

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  • I just gave the chat bot that was put in place at the IT department where I work at a poke. It answered my question perfectly: “How do I print from my laptop to the library?” And it’s not like the chat bot is the only route for support, but it does divert a lot of routine questions from our help desk so they can focus on questions that require a human touch. That could be people where a chat bot is not a good format or it could be a non-routine question.






  • I work at a university IT department. It’s been a struggle with our auditors to loosen up the password expiration requirements. At least with the students they let anyone with 2FA to go without password expiration, which acts as a nice little carrot-and-stick. But for staff it’s two years (2FA always required), regardless of password quality. I’d rather be able to base password expiration on password quality, personality.


  • LessPass and similar software has some problems. Things like you can’t simply change your master password, you must then recompute and change every site. It’s also not strictly stateless, since you need to know which password iteration you’re on and the user name. Full fledged password managers also typically provide other secret management features, like API keys, SSH keys, credit/debit cards, and identity cards.








  • At the place that I interned in software development, there was a period of time before I was there where the hours were starting to creep to long enough that the workers (salaried) were effectively being paid less than minimum wage. Legend has it that there was a mention of a lawsuit if the company didn’t shape up. One coworker who had been there at that point described it as a dark point in the company’s history. In response, they temporarily switched to hourly and 40 hours a week.

    Later, some people apparently started working over 40 hours a week of their own volition. Workaholics, I guess. At the behest of one of the people on my team, the CIO talked to them about sticking to normal hours. Part of it was that people just aren’t great developers after already working a long day. The other part was that no one else wanted to slide back into those long working hours. A few people also had had kids in the intervening years, so I don’t think they wanted to see their hours eaten by work.


  • I work in IT at a university. There is a state parental leave program, but above that the union bargained for additional parental leave.

    The US has a significant separation between the federal and state levels. For a policy like this, you usually would find some of the more progressive states trying out different programs. Some more backward states will take a long time to come round. It really is more like a bunch of small to medium sized countries in that respect.

    Russia is also working under very different demographics, which is probably driving at least the maternity leave. Birth rates are low and net migration, while positive, is not enough to keep up. The US has a birth rate that is closer to replacement and much higher net migration. That would mean lagging states would have less pressure to reform.