#seattle

See tagged statuses in the local BookWyrm community

The City Council has confirmed me as a Commissioner on the Seattle Commission. I want to thank Mayor Bruce Harrell for the confidence in me, the full City Council for the support and confirmation, and the Seattle Office for Civil Rights for their work and dedication. I look forward to serving the community and advancing + rights in Seattle.

Do you live or work in Seattle? What should the Commission be addressing? Let me help amplify your voice! My DMs are open.

Anybody in (or retro video or whatever) want this old video / audio switch?

It acts like it works but I don't have enough of the right kind of equipment to really test it. So it might not. But it's free if you want it!

We'd arrange pickup somewhere in North King, like, Lake Forest Park, Kenmore, Bothell, something like that.

The back of said box showing component, composite, and stereo RCA inputs (four sets) and outputs (one set)
A closeup of IN3 and IN4 showing the jacks and their labels
A Dynex remote-control video switch in the form of a large rectangular plastic device sitting on a tabletop, with four-button remote control on top of it.

Hearing about a young hacker whose being extorted by the University of Washington, not cool UW.

The student claims they built an app to help kids get the course schedules they want, a hack as old as time, and the university decided to expel him until he ports his app to the university's internal systems.

This would be unpaid labor.

Until then his class registration is on hold and he can't register or attend his last few classes. 🥴

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jdkaim_github-jdkaimhuskyswap-huskyswap-project-activity-7282891503142641664-nA8Y

I reached out to request an access token. I wasn’t too ambitious up front; all I wanted was read-only access to automate the course catalog import instead of having to manually enter every class. But if things went well it would be awesome to automate the process further or even find other gaps I could fill to improve the community experience. Several hours later I received an unambiguous response: a “Notice of Violation of Registration Tampering Abuse Policy”. I was instructed to take down my demo site (and its handful of fake demo classes) or else they would begin the process that would culminate with my expulsion. I had originally reached out hoping to make the school experience better for everyone and they immediately went nuclear. I’m not too worried about the threat since taking down the demo site is no big deal. But I’m a little heartbroken to see how the school views me. I thought they’d be excited about what I was pursuing—or at least that I was pursuing anything—but they’d rather have me simply leave. I’m scheduled to graduate in a few months and am eager to move on to projects that don’t need to be cleared with the UW Registrar. If you know of anyone looking for a full-time software engineer with a knack for getting the attention of senior leadership, please send them my way! I can start full-time in June.
Welp, looks I might be getting expelled from the University of Washington. As many of you know, last quarter I built an initial version of HuskySwap for a class project. It was a simple app designed to help students find partners to trade spots in critical classes after they filled up. I’m sure other people have pursued this kind of thing before, but there’s no go-to solution at UW and I wanted to contribute something cool for everyone. At first it was a fun project to catch up to the latest versions of .NET and Angular with some practice implementing features around database abstraction, real-time chat, and the full stack challenges associated with things like role-based permissions. I was probably going to build it anyway, so it was great that I could actually get course credit for CSE 403. I was really proud of the MVP and excited that the people I demoed it for actually wanted to use it. So I set aside some time in my winter quarter schedule to start hardening it so I could launch ahead of spring quarter registration. Then I came across the swagger docs for integrating with the registration system. The site says: “The Student Web Service gives your application access to information in the Student database such as course data, registration data, section data, person data, and term data (general academic data).”

This is interesting. I'm not economist, but it makes sense to me both that workers' wages need to rise to keep up with cost of living, and that meeting these rises will hurt business owners. But eating in a restaurant should be considered a cost of living. If the people who serve you cannot afford a good living, you are not simply enjoying a quirky restaurant, you are taking advantage of workers. Take this hilariously out-of-touch quote in the article:

Isaac Seliger, grant writer, on LinkedIn: "Seems a city can't have both huge minimum wage increases and the kind of quirky restaurants that make living in the city worthwhile. Like many other big cities, Seattle had decided to commit municipal suicide."

Municipal suicide is when a city is not allowing businesses to take advantage of cheap labor? Really?

https://www.newsweek.com/seattles-new-minimum-wage-among-highest-big-cities-businesses-closing-2009421