a baby duck

I wasn’t able to install from the Play Store, but it’s on F-Droid too.

Same happened to my partner and I 2 weeks ago. It started with fever and chills Friday night, tested positive Saturday, started Paxlovid Sunday, fever broke by Monday morning and felt okayish enough to work (from home) on Tuesday. That weekend was a blur and we both still have a gnarly lingering cough, but not the worst thing in the world, even as someone with asthma.

I’m thankful to have avoided it for as long as we did. Not having to worry about overflowing hospitals, having access to Paxlovid, and hopefully avoiding any serious long-term damage thanks to the vaccines makes it a lot less scary than a couple years ago.

Rich asshole with a reality TV show? Probably just as likely that we elect him president, wait for him to commit treason and more felonies than anyone can reasonably keep track of, and then fail to hold him meaningfully accountable for any of it.

No judgment here, and to be clear I don’t mean to invalidate her suspicion or yours. It wouldn’t surprise me if there were unethical individuals in HR who take things like this as an opportunity to call out things they don’t like… But in my experience, the asking part is pretty typical, and I doubt it was targeted.

For me, I-9 verification was very early on in the onboarding process. A list of eligible I-9 documents was provided in the onboarding paperwork and HR scheduled a time in my first day or two to show them on camera. Took maybe 2 minutes once we were actually on the call.

I didn’t press them on why when asked to unblur, but given I-9 is about presenting documents that verify your identity / eligibility to work, I suspect it’s best practice to avoid any obvious image processing as a matter of policy. At the very least, not having to worry about the paper getting blurred just makes things easier. Ultimately, they’re keeping these images on file to cover their own ass, so they want them to look as clear and legitimate as possible.

For me it was strictly during onboarding for verifying I-9 documents. I assume it’s just to ensure any documents you present aren’t getting software blurred.

Not a racism thing. Happened to me at my last two companies (white guy, both remote jobs).

Haven’t seen anyone mention Decentraleyes yet. Serves CDN assets locally to avoid CDNs as a vector for tracking or fingerprinting.

About 20 years ago I was so outraged by Bonsai Kitten that I asked a friend’s mom to help me write letters to ISPs and law enforcement to try to get it taken down.

It was a site with pictures of cats in glass jars, but it had very graphic details about how they supposedly kept cats alive in jars and grew them into weird shapes… I still think it’s pretty tasteless, but it was clearly someone’s idea of satire. It felt like a big deal back then, but these days it would be nothing more than a bad meme.