u/Warp_Speed_7

Taking the family to Maui in a few weeks on miles. I spent about 218k miles for us to get four economy tickets, because I didn’t have enough for F and United didn’t give me an option for Economy Plus. Now that they’re ticketed and seats selected, I wanted to see if there’s an option now to buy Economic Plus upgrades with miles. I don’t see one - just the option to drop a minimum of $179 per person on the upgrade.

Is there a way to buy Economy Plus with miles or a combination of cash + miles that I’m just not seeing?

A few days back, I asked this sub whether a serious tech startup could be built and sustained in the North Bay instead of chasing the black hole of SF/Peninsula talent gravity and quality-of-life. The response was more enthusiastic than I expected, and a good number of people asked what I was actually working on.

Short answer: an early-stage Public Benefit Corporation working towards greater human resilience from natural disasters, cyber attacks, supply chain collapse, and more. We're building decision-grade analytics on cross-sector critical infrastructure risk and resilience at a national scale. Vague on purpose. Happy to go deeper privately.

This will be my one post on this; I won't be making a habit of recruiting here, but there was enough interest in seeing more companies in Marin that I thought it would be worth trying.

I'm looking for three senior hires to round out the founding leadership team. We are targeting a late summer raise, so this is not immediate - comp contingent on raise, equity commitments real now. Marin/North Bay preferred (leaning Larkspur for HQ), but will be hybrid by design. Goal is tier 1 SF comp ceilings, 100% family health/dental/vision premiums with no employee cost-share, meaningful founding-team equity, and eventually pensions rather than 401(k). Yes, we are building a different kind of company. Quite deliberately. Resilience starts and ends with people.

** CTO / VP Engineering 20+ years of technical architecture and engineering leadership, ideally with one or more CTO or senior VP runs at growth-stage companies. AWS architecture depth, security-first instincts from day one, and real experience with graph databases or complex provenance-rich data models. SCADA/OT familiarity is a serious plus given the domain. You'd own platform architecture across three integrated products, hire and run the engineering team, and sit on a Product Council that governs feature decisions alongside the analytic and mission leads. Not a coder. An architect and team builder.

** Chief Data Scientist 12-15 years applied ML in production, not research labs. Graph analytics and network science (cascading failure, propagation, centrality), probabilistic and Monte Carlo modeling, and real LLM integration experience (RAG, prompt engineering, model-augmented analytic workflows). Python fluent, Neo4j or equivalent strongly preferred. The title says "Chief" because I'm leaning towards a seasoned practitioner, not an executive. The job is doing the work and building a team to support. You'd own cascade and consequence modeling methodology, confidence scoring frameworks, and AI-assisted analytic tooling. If you've ever shipped a model that survived contact with operational reality in enormously complex environments, we should talk...

** VP Intelligence This is the unusual one. 20+ years in enterprise analytics and intelligence analysis. IC background (NSA, DIA, CIA, NGA, NRO, etc.) or military service equivalent is strongly preferred. You'd own analytic tradecraft standards, sourcing discipline, ontology integrity, confidence scoring, and the analyst workflows that keep our knowledge base honest. Not a data science role and not a product role. This is intelligence leadership applied to a dual-use mission, and you'd be the reason our platform's output is defensible to boards, regulators, and operators. Given the nature of this field, you will almost certainly be managing a widely distributed team across multiple geographic areas. You will supervise collections, analysis, data engineering, data science, and knowledge management, fusing it all into a coherent analytic capability. Also serves on the Product Council that governs feature decisions alongside the technical and mission leads.

If any of this sounds like you or someone you trust, DM me. Happy to share more about the company, the funding situation, and what we're actually building once we're off the public thread.

Active duty USAF. Senior enlisted. Over 20 yrs.

I have had two recent total hip replacements, a knee surgery, and a broken tibia that never healed quite right. These are all related. The surgeries are not going super well and I am almost certain to bust the limited duty limits and head into a MEB in a few weeks.

The prosthetics themselves aren’t my biggest concern. The underlying cause was advancing osteoarthritis, and debilitating pain and immobility brought about from an extremely rare musculoskeletal deformity. The deformity itself is permanent and cannot be fixed but the surgeries might fix it enough to restore my mobility. I am doing better than pre op, but a long road from “recovered” with some lingering questions about how much it’ll restore and when. My surgeons are optimistic. My PCM is less so, noting recently I am unlikely to return to pre surgery levels. Either way, the recovery timeline is all but certain to be much longer than the AF’s tolerance for limited duty.

Making things more complicated, the doctors can’t tell how or when I got this. Congenital or acquired are both real possibilities. We will never know. Symptoms have been going on for 10 years. But no one including me even knew about this problem earlier. Which also means I somehow got through MEPS and their endless battery of tests, exams, and X-rays without anyone seeing it. And years of specialists treating the symptoms who never identified it either.

I’ve filed to start the VA rating process. Received my confirmation but still awaiting them.

I guess I am wondering how likely a MEB would be to kick me out and how the VA might handle rating a significant underlying problem with an unknown future and an at least as likely possibility I was born with it (congenital not genetic) as I acquired it at some point in my early years.

I’m starting a new company that’ll be funded soon. Debating where to put our primary hq and technical office. The company is a combination of advanced data science and enterprise software that will serve a mix of government, industrial infrastructure, finance, insurance, and disaster response markets.

I am trying quite deliberately to build a different kind of company. I am looking to avoid the SF and SV and Oakland startup culture and the absolutely disintegrating quality of life in those areas. The extreme competition for talent. The obnoxious cost of living (yes I know the North Bay isn’t much better but it’s…slightly…better). The density and endless sub/urban pavement pounding soul-sucking commutes. So many reasons. I would rather lean towards older, family balance oriented workers than your typical RSU-hunting job hoppers who stick around 18-24 months and then jump ship to the next opportunity. I’m trying to build something that’ll keep people for the long haul, reward them well, pensions over 401k, etc. Got a long road to get there, but let’s just say the vision is definitely not the typical SF/SV story.

I know Marin tech workers lean that direction, but I’m concerned it’s just too small a market / not enough of them. And thus too hard to recruit. (Relo offers won’t be an option for us until our second round of funding).

Grew up in Marin. Still in love with the area. It’s the kind of culture I want. But I was absolutely floored to see even Autodesk has left and moved its entire HQ to SF. That really made me start second guessing dropping our roots up that way. If a multi-billion dollar company like that, entrenched in the county since 1992, can’t even find a way to remain there, how could a startup?

Am I missing something? Is my read of the talent market off?

I have to anchor in the Bay Area, even though I would kinda like to be somewhere I don’t have to pay a 25 year old with three years of experience $200k a year. Talent is here. I get it. We will anchored here. My shortlist is Marin (perhaps Larkspur to be as close as possible to the ferry); East Bay (Alameda Point/old Naval Air Station, San Ramon, Dublin/Pleasanton, or Livermore); or if I really had to, South Bay (Moffett Field).

What do you think? Would it be a mistake to build up north?

I have two TSP accounts, one mil and one civ. A few years ago they created a new online amount system and we all had to re register for access. I didn’t have anything with my account number on it so to verify I’m me, they said they’d mail a code I can come back online to enter. Those codes came but I neglected to process them and eventually they got thrown out. Next time I realized I need access, I had to go through the code mailing process again. But this time the codes never get to my mailbox. I’ve tried four more times over the last few years but it doesn’t work.

I have called TSP many times. They don’t know what’s going on. They have opened “investigations” to figure it out but I never hear anything more. They have no way of manually triggering new codes, nor of verifying me over the phone or giving me my account number so I can register directly for online access.

My guess? Software logic glitch where it doesn’t trigger if it thinks the code has already been sent. 🤷🏼‍♂️ But who knows.

Regardless, I’m beyond frustrated. Fortunately everything is still in the allocation I want I just need to get access.

And yes, deposits still work. Like clockwork, I have 5% allotments going to my TSP every month.

Desperately for answers.

Anyone have any brilliant ideas?

Almost a year ago, caldigit's official IG account posted this photo of their lineup: https://www.instagram.com/p/DLVWG2kz5po/

Those have red sides...unless it's a special effect of the photo (which is my assumption). But just wanted to make sure before I buy one...there's no red ones out there, right? Looks great! Would love to get red instead of silver.

It's not random enough. It's just random enough to be a challenge, but after you've played the game a number of times, there is some degree of muscle memory and understanding of the alien's behavior/patterns. Enough so that at some point it's not particularly challenging anymore, even on Hard and Nightmare. There are both the scripted scenes where you know the alien will be. But how awesome would it be if the alien could show up anywhere, at any time, or even not at all. If I'm in one area of sevastapol station, maybe the alien doesn't show at all. Maybe it does. But the way the AI was built, I can be asolutely certain that the randomness that does exist will exist in the vicinity of where I am, and various laps around the broader area and its vents.

The problem is even worse after you get the flamethrower. Before the flamethrower, at least the randomness is bracketed by a need to minimize every sound and avoid steps or movements that are risky. You're constantly reacting. But after the flamethrower, the alien is an effortless problem to solve. Even on Hard after a few plays, it's not that difficult to beat the game with a nearly max amount of flamethrower fuel, because you've lost a lot of the randomness / it's more predictable, and the few times the alien surprises you, you've got four taps of the flamethrower to deal with the alien and then you just move on your way.

My hope for the next version: nightmare mode has true, complete randomness. You have no idea when or where the alien will show itself. You'd be on the edge of your seat every last minute of the game.