2ion

Time worked != impact.

And if it's a salaried position, it doesn't matter anyway because the employer is getting the better deal anyway.

> Reason 2: AWS doesn't sell based on Dev Ex

AWS's core is developer experience.

AWS is an API. Anybody who does not realize or can not exploit this fact this pays massive premiums for using it (probably a lot of businesses which should have no business using AWS directly).

The application tooling is extra. And as far as I can tell, AWS is the only major public cloud that has decent coverage by tools of any flavour against their API, and they have the most decent set of language SDKs available. I am not familiar with GCP but anything Azure puts on the table is a catastrophe when compared to the ease of using boto3 to get a certain flow working.

Admittedly, their console has some defects it ought not to have, but with some systems and software development knowledge, you can grok all of the tooling AWS releases pretty easily.

The biggest of my problems with AWS that besides their API, some of their managed services are just not on the quality level as their core services (ec2, s3, ...).

I came to dislike the control panel interface on Windows because it is disjunct from management console snapins and does a bad job at reconiling administrative/power user access knobs with basic computer controls. The control panel does not adapt to the user level / user role (Administrator, plain user) well enough. You have to switch between control panel (including "modernized" network controls), advanced properties dialogs (interesting network settings, classic style), and msc snapins for diskmanagement, event viewing, task and device management in order to get things done. On top of that gpedit is not even included in the default compmgmt.msc. Oh and these days add powershell scripts on top. Oh and regedit.

One more issue is that they kept "evolving" the design (classic, settings view, etc) without retiring previous interfaces. Now you have access to everything and you keep wondering how the controls and components all interact. Almost as catastrophic as explorer.exe and "shell" integrations, resulting in the most laggy explorer.exe yet.

Don't leave anything of significance walled in behind a Google, Apple, Amazon, or really any other account. Only physically accessible copies of your data belong to you. Everything I upload to "a" cloud, I immediately mirror to my backup rig. Do the same, don't trust.

Interesting idea, but banks block this. My German bank until recently offered SEPA "instant" bank transfers, which make the cash appear on the receiver's end if both the sending and receiving bank support instant payments, for free. Recently they set the cost of instant payments to 1€ per transaction, without guarantees that it will complete as an instant transaction (depending on the receiver's side). Nobody will pay that money without the guarantee that the service bought is also rendered as such. On the web, waiting until the next clearing window completes, or the next bank business day, is not a payment option and has impact on the supply chain (when the merchant is confident enough to start the shipping process depends on if he has payment guarantee or not).

It is simple, really: There are also many piano players who cannot make confident and accurate movements on the keyboard without looking at their hands! My process learning how to type on a computer keyboard without looking was very much like the process I experienced while working on my piano skills over the years: You graduate from fumbling with your hands and exhausting switching between looking at your hands and the sheet music to sight reading to playing with your eyes closed (if you want to). Though a lot of advanced players can and do play without sheet music and sight reading at all, interestingly, a lot of those players then keep looking at their hands instead! because the music progression is strictly following their mental model of the piece.

Where I work now, not likely, because we have hundreds of AWS accounts, VPC peering and private VPC access only over VPN, which can to my knowledge only route IPv4...

Great, now dogfood it to the guys responsible for "netsh interface portproxy", easily the most unreliability "OS level" port proxying I've ever seen.

If the state of current (10/11) Windows UI and UX is any indicator it must have gotten much worse since 2008. I would never have done anything that shows a GUI on Windows hadn't I had access to Qt to absolve me from that hell.

Get a 30" monitor and a multimedia PC like a thinkcentre, nuc, dell micro whatever and absolve yourself of the garbage that is present-day consumer electronics.

This is a bit more elaborate behaviour than what I have observed from our (small) spiders here, but as a general rule, I don't do anything to spiders in my apartment as well. They keep their territory clean of other insects and do not get into my way, so I like keeping them. Unless the spider is really large, aggressive or poisonous, I do not get why so many people are afraid of them either. Perhaps that the Australian Exception :)

How so? https://github.com/microsoft/wslg#pre-requisites It used to be on the insider preview, but that has moved to 11.

In EU, some sectors that are doing business with public institutions are effectively barred from using US clouds, esp. in education, as contracts tend to demand a degree of control and assurement that no US hyperscaler or SaaS is going to give you.

Also let's not forget that self-hosted still offers features SaaS does not, such as server hooks, which are absolutely not uncommon in grown environments based on gitolite etc looking to migrate.

I think security at NPM is "done".

It's a public repository of stuff. End of story. Why should NPM do the job of vetting everything? They aren't getting paid for it (or most of it).

Unlike the C/C++ compiler landscape which for industry use cases has a few high profile high quality candidates, and all vendors of these solutions are pretty much guaranteed to employ top level experts to evolve their softwares, the picture with the JDKs is much less clear. Apparently everybody who has some sort of name brand now rolls their own version, and even throughout this thread here there really is no sharp level of distinguishment based on a clear point of comparison between even the most popular contenders.

Looks like muddy waters to me. A shame really, they totally ran the JDK release management into the ground.

The money cost of 10 all-new nuclear reactors is minor when compared to the economic cost of electricity prices doubling and tripling again, gas and oil prices doubling again until EOY 2022. Rolling blackouts are not unreasonable to expect.

Industries have moved east and west from Germany because energy is just too expensive (besides too expensive labour due to high state quota as well). In Brandenburg, Chemical plants are threating to shut down because gas prices are out of whack (50% of gas price is tax). This is an extremely high cost for a national economy to pay.

Major consumer energy seller E.on has stopped selling household gas delivery contracts. Transportation cost in gas, diesel and electric car terms is skyrocketing as well. This makes all goods that are getting shipped more expensive. Germans are the poorest people of Western Europe. After tax, salaries are quite low. €500 to a €1000 more in yearly energy cost is a significant burden on many households, dampening spending in any other area including long retirement saving/investing.

All of the above will deconstruct industries, ruin household finances of the already pressured middle and lower class, and set the expectations for years to come when it comes to regulatory politics --- which during the past 20 years were the equivalent of shitposting on 4chan, just dressed up in nice suits and sitting in ideologically blind party councils.

10 all new power plants are chump change compared to that.

After digging a bit in Azure for the purpose of checking it out I left in despair and utterly confused how identity, policy and permission intertwine. Bonus points for enabling Azure DevOps on a Github account and finding out how that ties into your Azure account's identity management system.

A platform that's impossible to use with confidence. Like the US code allows for finding something you're doing wrong with every step you take, the Microsoft platform creates the opportunity more making serious mistakes.

It's just many things piling up. transit.yahoo.co.jp for long and short distance public transport, maps.yahoo.co.jp instead of US map services, tabelog.com for restaurant reviews, navitime for car navigation etc. Note that the desired functionality is often available only in Japanese. If the sites have international/English versions, often you get a lite version at best and a dummy version without much content in the worst case. You can observe that for example already when you research the Narita Express rail service; the JR pages in English always have less detail and info than the JP ones. A good thing about Japan's online services is that a lot of them are not "apps" they're web sites and the apps just containers for the web sites, on Android more often than not anyway, as Japan is iPhone country. So you get the same services from your desktop as on your smartphones, and many service websites still have proper, fully featured mobile web versions, as opposed to many Western online services making their mobile web versions increasingly unusable, pushing apps, like .e.g. reddit. Also JP web is much more pleasant than Anglo web in my opinion; they have stuck with a combination of "tables tables everywhere", hypertext links, and dead-simple HTML markup plus colorful icons/ads/banners in plain image formats from the late 2000s which is very easy to read, e.g. https://www.jreast.co.jp/ltd_exp/guide/#price_area2 Easy to read, easy to use.

To be fair, Japan has specific digital service offerings in a lot of niches that outdo most of internationally aligned competitors with their eyes closed.

CloudFormation can be very flexible, especially with tools like sceptre, it can work very well. A huge issue is that WITHOUT tools like sceptre, you can't really use stacks except as dumb silos. You already need additional tooling (sceptre, CDK, SAM, ...) to make CF workable. I think that most people who despise CF haven't got good tooling.

The issue with CloudFormation is that it lags behind all other AWS services quite often. It seems to be maintained by another team. I realize that getting state management for complex inderdependent resources right requires time and diligence, BUT it's a factor in driving adoption.

- New EKS feature? Sorry, no knob in CF for MONTHS.

- New EBS gp3 volume type available? Sorry, our AWS::Another::Service resource does not accept gp3 values for months after feature release.

- A AWS API exposes information that you would like to use as an input to another resource or stack. SURPRISE, CloudFormation does not return that attribute to you, despite it being available. SORRY NOT FIXABLE.

- Try refactoring and moving resources in/out of stacks while preserving state? Welcome to a fresh hell.

- Quality of CloudFormation "modules" varies. AWS::ElasticSearch::Domain used to suck a whole lot, AWS::S3::Bucket as a core service was always very friendly.

- CloudFormation custom resources are a painful way of "extending" CF to suite your needs. So painful that I refuse to pay the cost of AWS not keeping their stuff up to date and well integrated.

These kinds of lag, this kind of incompleteness when it comes to making information from AWS APIs available have driven me to Terraform for things that are best done in Terraform and require flexibility and CloudFormation for things that work well with it.

At the end of the day CF is a closed-source flavour of Terraform + AWS provider. I would like have gone all in, but just doesn't work and costs hacks, time and flexibility.

That being said, if you have no idea how to work with TF, tell the devs to use CF.

The experience of AWS support is probably also very different when it comes to feature requests. An org that spends half a billion with AWS will get their requests implemented ASAP whereas small fish have to swim with the flow and hope it works for them.

Yes, but in this context, everything depends on the interaction with the merchant. While most merchants are not pricks, they are businesspeople and won't unconditionally accommodate any claim even if it is reasonable. Based on my experience, the worst are not necessarily the small merchants unless they are just fraudsters but the semi-large online stores like Otto/Saturn/MediaMarkt which will do everything to make a return and refund as impossible as possible.

elster.de is the official means to input your tax info supported by the tax office. However, it's largely an online form with some legalese and dry formal explanations in a sidebar.

You can largely use it if you know what you are doing or have the most simplest tax case, but it won't offer you suggestions how to optimize taxes, and doesn't include large lists of items that you could possibly deduct. This service is offered by proprietary tax tools like WISO or QuickSteuer which offer questionnaires trying to cover more details of your tax situation to find out opportunities to optimize, and include large help files that contain examples and explanations.

Cost for these proprietary tools can be very low, they go on sale for like €5-€10 at discounters during tax season or are like €20 for the fully featured versions.

These tools also manage items like long-term deductions over the years, so that's their lock in effect.

- direct bank transfer = debit. When you send money using SEPA you have no right at all to charge the money back, as it's always a voluntary authorized transaction. The marchant got you by the balls.

- In DE at there are fast "instant" payments called paydirekt or giropay, which make "checkout" using your giro account fast and simply. However, it's debit again. Balls grabbed.

- Your checking account usually receives your salary, and you have to monitor it for fraudulent charges, which can just "happen" if somebody knows your IBAN. Therefore, entering my IBAN on any site that is not 100% trustworthy and liable is a no-go.

Debit is really bad for buyer's protection, and even when using "reverse debit" which means authorizing a party to draw money from your giro account, you in theory can reverse such charges, but the reversals are handled by your home bank and in many cases the reversal is getting rejected based on intransparent reasons or takes _very_ long. Customer service is simply bad at banks.

So what about credit card processors like Stripe?

- German credit cards are issued largely by banks in the visa/mastercard system. That means the banks themselves are responsible for accepting or rejecting chargebacks. Bad customer service by banks again, very high burden of proof => high chance of chargeback not going through, paper tiger wars.

- Most merchants have really shitty payment gateways in place or even store credit card information on site. The smaller the business, the shittier the storage and you can basically guarantee that data protection is effectively handled at most SMB like trash. => I do not enter my main credit card info on random sites.

So what does Paypal offer?

- almost no questions asked chargeback of any amount if you return the goods (proof = shipping label) - masks credit card number IBAN and other information from merchant

That's it. I'm ok paying small amounts using direct debit but expensive purchases, like electronics, gardening equipment and so on, go through either (a) Amazon w/ its no-fullshit refund policy (b) a merchant offering PayPal. PayPal is expensive, but customer friendly. Germany has _no_ true competitor to PayPal's service except notarized escrow, and I don't want to lawyer up just to buy a lawn mower.

Besides the SF content, A Deepness in the Sky is also one of the very very few books that have completely disgusted me about a fictional character, namely in this book, what happened to Qiwi and Kira Pen Lisolet. I had to stop reading a few times. For the writing to steer impressions this much alone this book is 11/10.

I think in a lot of "markets", uselessly drawn out sex scenes were just never there. In fact, I find this trait of Western movie and TV making highly annoying. Because those sex scenes are always the same. If you have seen a few, you've seen all of them, more variety only to be found in real porn. After N repetitions, TV and movie tropes just become boring rehashed mechanics. At that part, might as well leave it out if you can imply in a different way "and then they had sex".

Having sex scenes in cinema does not make good cinema at all just because of it.

Prime membership has no bearing of whether I buy at Amazon or not. I buy expensive electronics on Amazon because they'll refund broken/repacked pre-used/counterfeit stuff without question. I seriously do not get the point of prime unless you're ordering a $5 item every day for no reason as to not qualify for free shipping, or like the associated services like video (matter of taste, I guess).

FTR I only buy sold and fulfilled by Amazon products, I don't use the marketplace, and the seller "Amazon" always obliged to my demands.

So an unprivileged service can map drive letters on Windows?

It needs to run with elevated privileges in order to do this, right? So into the trash it goes. This is right up there with keyboard and mice configuration software running as daemons with administration privileges.

Our helpdesk will recommend Devs to switch to canonical multipass + podman on their mac dev machines, away from Docker Desktop for mac. Currently, the helpdesk is whipping up a provisioning package that includes scripts that make docker CLI and docker-compose work from the host system just as before (shimming & proxying to VM commands/tools).

Windows users will just use WSL2.

...they do that because they university pays a pittance. No choice but to have as many jobs as doable, as lecturers get paid by the course unit and not a wage.