For second hand, user-to-user sales via EBay and Vinted are the cheapest, but it takes more effort and you could get scammed.

I’ve bought a few devices second hand at a second hand electronics shop. In the UK, this could be CeX, for example. With many of these you’ll get a limited warranty, and you can walk into a shop and ask to look at the phone and ask questions. You can ask if it is locked and return it if you can’t use it.

Why not buy the phone from the manufacturer directly so as to not give money to Big Bezos, if you’re going to buy new?

Or was this talking about used Amazon listings?

Explorer already crashes enough without this.

Why don’t they work on Explorer’s awful performance and constant hanging before working in another chatbot?

You know, useful software development work?

That’s a fair point. I think some of our interviewers have said that they don’t mind the candidate using a LLM, as long as they are up-front that they are doing so.

I’d say the kind of use is important. If they are using it as a form of advanced auto-complete, that’s fine. If they are using it uncritically, or to avoid thinking about the problem, I doubt I’d hire them.

We need engineers who can solve problems, not a salaried middle-man to an LLM.

Many of our candidates are from abroad, and we pay their VISAs and help them move here if they are hired.

You can offer in-person as an option, but I’m not sure most of our applicants would want to travel hours for an interview. Especially if there is more than one stage with deliberation needed in between.

Most of our applicants seem to be people currently in employment but who don’t like their job. They are likely doing interviews on the sly during work hours and likely don’t want to take a full day off or signal to their employer they are looking for a job.

All this to say I doubt forcing employees to do in-person interviews is a good option for most people, but I do agree it should be an option the interviewee can ask for.

Playing devil’s advocate: The reason companies feel the need to put these systems in place is most likely because many candidates cheat using chatbots.

In my company, until very recently, engineers were running the first and second stages of interviews (right after CV vetting) and I’ve heard many times in the last couple of years that my colleagues suspected candidates of using LLMs. There would be unnatural pauses, typing after every asked question etc.

Granted, I don’t think any have slipped through to being hired, as it’s still pretty obvious, but I can understand why companies may want to put safeguards in place.

Are they going too far here? Absolutely.

For us, we actually sit with the candidate in a pair-programming kind of setup to gauge their vibes, way of thinking and confidence as they solve coding problems that closely match what they would do on the job. That usually eliminates “seniors” that haven’t coded for 5 years or that got there by nepotism or sheer passage of time.

I went through the exact same thing with Dyson back in ~2018 worst interview process I’ve ever experienced.

It’s not particularly bad value for what they’re offering, which seems to be a component library and set of templates.

For a comparison, the company I work for are paying over a £1000 / year for MUI-X, which is a set of paid React components. It’s cheaper and more efficient than paying someone at our company to maintain our own component library.

Even a single engineer spending 10% of their time (as I used to) maintaining this stuff would cost the company over £5000 / year in manpower.

It’s effectively an alternative to plain CSS. Works well with component-based systems like React and Svelte.

I used it for a few years and thought it was pretty good. I still use it on some of my projects.

I don’t know why people are saying a 200km range is bad. Most people I know don’t drive more than 25km to work per day. Surely even 100km is perfectly fine for a daily driver.

My brother had an 80km range car for years and was perfectly fine.

Is it just that it’s not competitive at this price?

Good article with many links to other interesting articles. Acts like a good summary for the situation this year.

I didn’t know about the MAHA thing, but I guess I’m not surprised. It’s hard to know how much is incompetence and idiocy and how much is malicious.

That’s a much better sourced article and an interesting read, thanks.

What is this website used as a source?

It doesn’t have sources, an about page, contact page or even proper navigation. Is it some sort of blog?

Edit: I managed to manually navigate to their about page using the URL, and all the images there are badly AI generated, the content is meaningless.

I don’t trust news sources that are not transparent, provide information about themselves or use AI for key resources. Even if I agree with the stance in their articles.

For all I know, all of the content of the article is made up.

I don’t think I’ve had a locked phone since around 2012.

I’m guessing people still get them because they need financing? Seems like a poor choice most of the time.

A good question.

Obviously the people inside the UK are desperately trying to get these absurd rulings / laws / policies overruled. Even within the UK, people are boycotting companies like Barclays for their trans-exclusive policies.

The odd thing about the situation in the UK is that some organisations, like the girl guides (kind of like girl scouts) are excluding trans people out of fear that they will be sued for discrimination for not allowing boys in too if they include trans girls.

It’s absolutely absurd, but that is genuinely happening. It’s a gender critical tactic to force trans people out of their spaces.

It’s hard to blame these organisations that run on a shoestring budget if they have genuinely been threatened with legal action.

Personally, I’d advocate for a boycott of all companies you can that have been in the news for trans-exclusive practices that were not done under duress.

It’s ultimately up to you though.

Still better than the Cass Review.

In that case, is there any change? Companies could already do that if they wanted. Many of them already did.

It’s kind of unclear what “voluntary” means. Is it voluntary for countries to enforce? Is it voluntary for companies to scan chats?

In the UK the calculus is quite different, as it’s £0.25/kWh or over double the cost.

Also, an empty Synology 4-bay NAS can be gotten for like £200 second hand. Good enough if you only need file hosting. Mine draws about 10W compared to an old Optiplex that draws around 60W.

With that math using the NAS saves you 1.25 pence per hour. Therefore the NAS pays for itself in around about 2 years.

Given this, do we actually know that the French government is targeting GrapheneOS in a significant way, or is this just another dramatisation?