Agingcoder

This is very very very good advice, the same thing happened to me. Most importantly, I wouldn’t have enjoyed the job without coaching !

Yes I did feel the same, and it boiled down to accepting I had to try something new that I thought I didn’t want or be happy with what I already had . You have several options I guess.

- it’s very likely you haven’t mastered all layers of the stack - you maybe have mastered the parts you’ve come across though. Would you include Linux kernel development, program proofs, HPC , math-oriented software, compilers, firmwares, fpgas, database internals ( I mean, writing a full database engine ), big iron infrastructure , actual research etc in the list of things you’ve mastered? That’s what I did for many years ( not necessarily these topics ) - keep exploring , the field is massive. In my experience, the more you look around the more you realize that you haven’t seen it all, and even less mastered it.

- now, in my case, after doing just that ( trying new technical things) I realized I was getting increasingly interested in the overall technical strategy and interplay with people more so than the purely technical side of things. I had vowed I would never get into the higher spheres … but I am now essentially a principal engineer ( or whatever you call that but basically I lead some technical stuff ) for a very large org. This is not management , and I really like it. I keep learning about people and business, about how changing something big is hard and human , and balancing technical problems with human ones . It’s fascinating, and above all grounded in technical knowledge so I don’t feel like I’ve thrown away a significant chunk of my career.

In particular, if you feel that you’re not being listened to but would like to, maybe you’d be interested in that kind of job. If you’re saying you’re not always succeeding at persuading people , it probably also means there’s growth for you here, and satisfaction down the line.

- actually get into management , which like most topics is actually interesting once you get into it. It’s just different. I thought I didn’t like it - I actually do and that was a colossal surprise to me.

Whether it’s technical leadership or management, these skills can be learned, and they make the bits that you don’t like much more palatable, and the bits that are ok very enjoyable. I was lucky enough to meet very good people who taught me properly. I think this is very important. I can cook at home, but if I get proper training my food will be better and I will enjoy the process a lot more ( try chopping vegetables with no training - you’re slow as hell and it ruins everything)

- do something unrelated ( cooking etc ). To be honest, at some point I did my job but the more fulfilling exploration part of my life was at home and revolved around food. I did consider changing career completely but decided it was too risky.

To a large extent, there is limited value to your extensive knowledge if you remain at the bottom because it will always have limited impact. You seem to want the power and influence ( for good reasons !), but don’t seem to want to learn the skills that are required . ( at least management, you seem interested in technical leadership). I guess you have to choose. It’s very hard, but liberating.

You mentioned family - I also made sure I was in a good place at home when I switched. I found it hard but support from my wife helped tremendously.

Best of luck !

Point taken, thanks a lot for playing along.

I’ll do all the things if ever needed, but I get that if a cloud act request happens , your cloud provider will be able to get your stuff.

I’m specialized enough in another field to know that I’m not a security person in spite of my interest in it ( I used to enjoy reverse engineering back in the days ) - I wouldn’t make that kind of decision without consulting a professional first.

Ok I thought that was the whole point of things like Intel TDX , AMD SEV and various enclave mechanisms which provide full ram encryption and attestation ?

The only issue left would be managed services though, which then I wouldn’t use, but I’d be able to run my own postgre safely on infra I’m renting.

Thanks.

I get that FHE is not realistic today, but can’t I use ( if it’s really critical) a combination of confidential vms and an external hsm ? I understand I’ll be limited to traditional workloads , and not managed services though.

I asked the wrong question, what I really meant was ‘if I run in a less trusted environment, am I not supposed to use all possible crypto mechanisms available to make that environment more trustworthy , so that I can’t be deceived by my cloud operator sending my data to the us government’

Maybe I’m misunderstanding something - if I store my data elsewhere , am I not supposed to encrypt it anyway, with my keys ? If the crypto is strong enough then surely cloud providers can’t do anything with it ?

Yes - I tried the other platforms.

Much to my surprise (and granted, I have the means to do so) I will favor steam whenever possible, it’s just significantly better.

Comanche ( or at least an approximation of it ) on an Atari ST - that’s quite a feat!

I see your point but … trees and blobs are an implementation detail that I shouldn’t need to know. This is different from files and directories ( at least directories ) in your example. What I want to know is that I have a graph and am moving references around - I don’t need to know how it’s stored.

The git mental model is more complex than cvs, but strangely enough the docs almost invariably refer to the internal implementation details which shouldn’t be needed to work with it.

I remember when git appeared - the internet was full of guides called ‘git finally explained ‘ , and they all started by explaining the plumbing and the implementation. I think this has stuck, and does not make things easy to understand.

Please note I say all this having been using git for close to 20 years, being familiar with the git codebase, and understanding it very well.

I just think the documentation and ui work very hard towards making it difficult to understand .

This is exactly what I meant. https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Branching-Branches-in-a-N...

The book says that ‘ To really understand the way Git does branching, we need to take a step back and examine how Git stores its data’ then it starts talking about trees and blobs.

At that point you’ve lost almost everyone. If you have a strong interest in vcs implementation then fine, otherwise it’s typically the kind of details you don’t want to hear about. Most people won’t read an entire book just to use a vcs, when what they actually want to hear is ‘this is a commit graph with pointers’.

I agree with you : the information is there. However I don’t think you can in good faith tell most people to rtfm this, and that was my point.

I disagree, but it doesn’t mean you’re wrong - we might just be looking for different things.

My view is that if you’re going to talk like a bored robot, then I need a transcript or a paper which is much shorter than a talk. I distinctly remember not going to classes at university because the teachers wouldn’t give me anything beyond reading a book aloud. I just read the book at home.

Now, if you’re able to indicate what’s important and not important, what’s interesting and what isn’t , and why you like it , I’ll be delighted to watch your talk.

I think it’s very difficult to be interested in something new if the presenter doesn’t seem to care about it. This is different from something written , where I expect something dry anyway.

The git documentation is one of the nastiest docs ever just like the whole git ui. It’s technically entirely correct, but won’t help you understand how it works in any way.

It’s exactly like folks in 1995 telling you to rtfm when you’re trying to install Linux from a floppy disk. It’s doable, but annoying, and it’s not that easy.

So based on my experience teaching git ( I remember a cvs to git migration …) , reality tells me people find git difficult.

Now, once you teach them it’s a commit graph with names, some of them floating, some people get it.

The thing is, not everyone is comfortable with a commit graph, and most people are not - just like people get lists and arrays but graphs are different.

So I agree with you on principle ( it shouldn’t be difficult), but most people don’t have a graph as a mental model of anything, and I think that’s the biggest obstacle.

It's stunning.

I don't use these tools that much ( I tried and rejected Cursor a while ago, and decided not to use it ) but having played with GPT5 Codex ( as a paying customer) yesterday in regular VSCode , and having had Composer1 do the exact same things just now, it's night and day.

Composer did everything better, didn't stumble where Codex failed, and most importantly, the speed makes a huge difference. It's extremely comfortable to use, congrats.

Edit: I will therefore reconsider my previous rejection

Why bother with Xwindow when you can have this ?

FWIW I come from a non working class background ( but am not American ). My friends and I routinely debate in such a manner, and don’t see any problem with this. If confronted with a stranger we might be a bit more cautious ( basically we’ll state the rules of the conversation) but that’s about it. If needed, we’ll sometimes be a bit more accurate.

I understand your statements as you mean them - I default to giving you the benefit of the doubt, and automatically assume that black and white statements are shortcuts. Only, and only if you seem to not understand nuance then I will adjust my stance, but I usually assume you do!

The way you express it is different from most other languages I’ve come across. It doesn’t make it bad in any way ( I’ve written Ada professionally), just unusual. Basically Ada already provides natively substantial capabilities relative to encapsulation, modularities, generics etc but in a procedural context. The designers bolted on OO facilities on top of said existing mechanisms.

While it may look reasonably clean in the link below, I’ve always found it integrates badly with an existing codebase, the primary problem being that the ‘boundaries’ of the objects are not clearly visible.

https://learn.adacore.com/courses/Ada_For_The_CPP_Java_Devel...

I will add that the existing non oo features are excellent and I would even argue that in many cases you don’t need OO.

Pascal is not a low level language - quite the opposite. That being said, various implementations provide low level facilities, including turbo pascal back in the days , and free pascal which I did use in the early 2000s.

If I were you, if you like fpc, I’d actually look into Ada ( the OO part is a bit odd granted but works ). You’ll get extremely high control over low level stuff ( it’s used in the embedded world ) along with high expressivity and excellent performance.

Except that Libya never was a French colony I think.

I had the same experience as you with Le Monde diplomatique. The language used in some of the articles felt a lot like propaganda ( hyperbolic language, us vs them, anger/emotional language, basic facts being ignored etc ). I was very surprised since the paper had a good reputation , and gave up. Maybe ( hopefully) this has changed.

Same here - I did consider buying a steam deck, then after experimenting with GeForce now on a small screen realized that pc game designers assumed larger screens. This is ok, but this makes many games unplayable on a small screen unless you have some kind of cyber vision. So no steam deck, even though every now and then I want to buy one.

Yes - they told me quite specifically that until they launch their their sovereign cloud, the mothership will be around.

What I want to know is whether people who believe in a bubble actually short AI/tech-related stocks.

The increase is massive ( I’ve heard x5 over existing contracts in some places )

To some extent it’s not that they don’t live up to the hype - rather that the gains are hard to measure.

Llms have spared me hours of research on exotic topics actually useful for my day job However, that’s the whole problem - I don’t know how much.

If they had a real price ( accounting for OpenAI losses for example) with ChatGPT at 50 usd/month for everyone, OpenAI being profitable, and people actually paying for this, I think things might self adjust and we’d have some idea.

Right now, we live in some kind of parallel world.

I sometimes wonder whether there’s an eu vs us difference here. At least when it comes to tv, I found the hard way ( a long time ago ) that the amount of ads Americans are exposed to is simply unbearable. This extends to youtube and similar services.

Now, everything is global - so are we looking at European users or American users complaining ? If an American user says it’s an unbearable, then it’s unusable. If a European user complains… it depends ( and these days, it’s at least to me unusable, but I obviously can’t speak for everyone)

I like these bugs. They’re intricate, technical puzzles, that can take weeks to figure out. You need a proper strategy to figure them out, cannot rely on simple tactics, and when you finally understand what’s going on, it’s immensely satisfying.

This, and now there’s pernosco which makes everything much easier.

Now, under pressure, this is going to be a nightmare unless you have a high tolerance to stress.

The fake anonymity journalists often give to sources (‘Richard D , from small town X, aged 34, works as a carpenter specializing in 16th century house renovation’) is something I find rather striking.

What’s not clear to me though is whether they’re deliberately tricking their source, or whether they genuinely don’t understand that their source is not anonymous when they give that many details.

Fair question. Location primarily ( nothing in France ), and I’m not sure how ‘we’re looking for people who enjoy doing that kind of thing’( I very much do ) relates to the actual job offers, ie what job offer should I actually apply to.

My background is not networking ( it’s math then hpc then broader stuff ) but I keep stumbling on similar problems ( including a beautiful one related to intel NICs a few years ago which led be into a rabbit hole of ebpf and kernel network layer and which surfaced later on the cloudflare blog), and the only tech company with which this seems to be a regular occurrence is cloudflare. Their space is a bit unknown to me so I guess I’m having a hard time projecting something onto the job offers.

I’d happily chat to someone working for cloudflare though - I guess this would help me understand what it is that actually happens over there. I guess I’m a bit intimidated by this unknown yet really good looking world :-)

Excellent article as always from the cloudflare blog - engineering without magic infrastructure and ml. One day I will apply !

Compiler bugs are actually quite common ( I used to find several a year in gcc ), but as the author says, some of them only appear when you work at a very large scale, and most people never dive that far.