Ironlikebike

In my last job, we observed ByteDance scraping TBs of OS testing data using the restful API that our OSS community front-end was using to serve it's CI result to the OSS community. The scraping was so relentless it was causing performance problems. We were also worried they were going to cause us large network egress fees as well. We specifically locked down the API after that, and anyone who wanted to use results had to ask explicit permission and be granted access.

If you're a UK company (it's doable but) it can be a pain holding your bank account in dollars (which you'd want to do if your main customers are in the US and if you're paying your employees in dollars). Last I checked, Stripe wouldn't allow you to accept US dollars into a UK-based bank-account that holds US dollars. Maybe this has changed in the last few years.

As of April-ish 2023 there are now very strict UK rules on contractors as well. They now must be hardline treated like contractors and can not be treated like employees with special contracts, e.g., no bonuses, no perks, no company supplied equipment, etc. Too many UK companies were abusing contractor employees in order to pay low wages and skirts benefits requirements whilst simultaneously treating them like full employees.

Having had a mouse infestation at my cottage that took over a year to resolve, this would have been a great way to keep the critters out of and off the bedding during that time. I suspect for keeping guests and migrant workers in barns and out-buildings per the article, this would have been a great mechanism to keep rodents away while sleeping.

For me it's really an intestinal gas issue that's forcing my stomach to compress, such that when I lay down, the acid makes way to my esophagus.

I have a wealth of experiential data on this, validated as recently as this previous July over a two week period. Like clockwork, if I take my Vit D supplement in the evening (like before bed), I will have almost zero REM sleep and will wake up from 8 hours of sleep exhausted. I have no idea why this happens but it's very repeatable.

I take Ibuprofen, and only when I can tell there is a problem (like when I've been up several times on preceding nights). It also seems correlated with junk food and alcohol. I generally have a very clean diet, and if I slip, I generally feel like I have inflammation a few days later which keeps me up at night when I wake up needing to go.

Parent is correct. It might or might not be prostate, or my intestines putting pressure on my bladder.

Indeed, when I have intestinal gas, it pushes my stomach 'up' and exposes my esophagus to the acid.

I just use Ibuprofen when I know there's an issue. It's not ideal, but it works.

Benadryl does nothing to me except kill my deep and REM sleep and leave me "sleeping" but conscious. I'm exhausted the next day. I only take cetrizine.

I have always had insomnia and have to maintain very good sleep hygiene. Here's a few things I have found that help me get to sleep:

- No exercise after 18:30/6:30pm

- Absolutely avoid Vitamin D and Vitamin B supplements in the evening. These will suppress deep and REM sleep and I'll sleep lightly all night long if I take them.

- Hot sauna, shower, or bath before bed.

- Anti-histamine (cetirizine hydrochloride aka Zyrtec) as needed - I'm allergic to my wife's dog and some nights I feel like I have bugs crawling on my skin. It can even wake me up.

Things that keep me from waking up at night:

- Gas X as needed to avoid acid reflux

- Anti Inflammatory helps keep me from having to use the bathroom when I know I'm inflamed (getting old sucks).

- No alcohol in the evening

- No videogames, interesting books, or French lessons right before bed, or I'll be sleeping lightly and find myself ruminating in light sleep over these mentally engaging topics.

I was recruited directly out of a feeder school (University) for this company after focusing my undergrad course selection on operating system topics.

Compared to twenty years ago, there are significantly fewer operating systems which means fewer companies have a need for this type of work. If you're looking to get into this work I'd suggest looking at Apple, Samsung, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Google, Microsoft, Arm, and any Arm architecture licensee. It seems that the people with the most luck these days end up tinkering with Linux at university, do a Google Summer of Code project and score an internship with one of the above.

My experience has been the complete opposite. When I was in Uni I was required to take an assembly language course and was told it was foundational but I'd never use it in industry.

Straight out of Uni in 2001, I became an operating systems programmer bringing up a new platform and pretty much immediately started debugging C++ code almost exclusively in an asm debugger (it's what we had for an OS level debugger). I also started implementing capabilities provided by a hypervisor directly available via asm instruction because there wasn't a C construct for doing so).

After that I became a toolchain programmer (working mostly on new system libraries) and would write in C and Assembly language and debug mostly in Assembly language because, when you're working on system libraries and the toolchain for a new platform, you can't always trust the compiler, and the compiler can't always generate optimal code (or any code) based on the new instruction set. Oh, and you can't always trust the debugger either if it doesn't understand the instruction set.

While there I would work on 9 new platform bringups and would often need to stub in assembly language routines for capabilities that were in the architecture but not yet available in the toolchain. Other times, new system call routines, locking intrinsics, unwinders, exception handlers, and some optimized routines would require implementation in asm as well.

If you're only working on the non-platform part of an operating system, you might not need to learn assembly language, but if you touch platform code you will likely need to know it.

> Time to get rid of people they don’t want, without them look bad since everybody is doing it, and also they’ll have an excuse if financial results aren’t very good.

This is IBM's classic modus operandi. I worked there from 2001 - 2013 and survived 17 rounds of deep layoffs during that time. IBM constantly manipulates their financial results on the backs of their employees.

Metabolic syndrome isn't so simple. You can sugary calories in small doses throughout the day, lose weight (through caloric deficit), and still develop insulin resistance because your body is constantly saturated in insulin. The theory behind fasting and T2D reversal is that your body is subjected to insulin (especially high insulin) as minimally as possible.

I have a friend who is a competitive seniors category swimmer, and has been competitive his whole adult (and adolescent) life. At the age of 60, after a lifetime of eating 6 small carb heavy meals a day to fuel his races he developed T2D. At the time he was 165lbs of lean muscle and he started wasting away. He has now eliminated all starchy/sugary carbohydrates and fasts 12 hours a day. He has reversed T2D, as long as he maintains the diet and fasting.

I recently read a book on managing forests "A Landowners Guide to Harvesting Your Woods" and one of the salient points in the book is the fact that the majority of woodlands in the northeast are now privately held, (relatively) small parcels, that don't get harvested for a number of reasons.

1) Scarcity messaging over the last decades have created new property owners who see tree harvest as a moral outrage. 1a) Property owners aren't managing small private woodlots for harvestable lumber. 2) Harvesting small woodlots does not offer necessary economies of scale needed by harvesting operations, i.e., they're not going to invest the time to harvest < 20 acre plots.

Every new piece of paperwork that requires an additional face-to-face hand off or brings in a new entity provides another avenue for corruption to occur and a place for money to disappear.

I've had employees (in Brazil) who don't ever claim reimbursement on personal expenses because if their paycheck varies too much their bank freezes their funds (in the name of preventing money laundering) and then the employee has to go to the bank and bribe someone to get the funds unfrozen. Just showing the cause for the variation in payroll doesn't cut it. As the employee puts it, every requirement to show up in front of an official for anything requires a bribe.

> “I’m a person who doesn’t drink alcohol.”

This is very interesting. I have gradually become this person because I don't tolerate alcohol well anymore and it doesn't bother me to say this to myself or anyone else. Yet on the other hand, I have someone very close to me, who experiences incredible anxiety when embracing the identity of being a non-drinker. The way it was put to me was "Everyone will know I have a problem with alcohol and it makes me ashamed and self conscious".

And yet, my experience is that no one ever asks why I don't drink or even care and they still like being around me.

> Tip #6: Make new friends, cut back on the old ones

I've been told this is one of the hardest parts, because those old friends are often the ones encouraging and reinforcing the addiction. Finding new friends can be hard, especially if one has associated all social activities with alcohol. I have someone close to me in my life that had the perception, prior to giving up alcohol, that non-drinkers are boring and wouldn't spend time with them. Therefore this person ended up avoiding sober individuals and non-drinkers, but has since discovered that this is not the case, it was just the drinker's mind rationalizing and enabling.

My understanding is that payment processors find themselves enforcing the Overton Window lest they run afoul of present legal trends. There's a sliding scale on what is or is not acceptable for them to be facilitating and it changes constantly.

Within sex work, where on the sliding scale of acceptability does enabling a "self employed cam model", vs facilitating a "trafficked cam model" fall, especially when a payment processor has no idea what is going on behind the scenes? Is the payment processor supposed to watch the stream and recognize a gang tattoo and conclude that one is trafficked while another is not?

I can see people on the political right in the US saying they shouldn't process payments for pornography at all, and people on the left saying "I can't believe that <company> facilitates trafficking or victimization". I'd see the payments processors saying "It's not worth it to process any payments for any pornography at all".

I'm curious what they're going to do, long term, about their use of PFAS (the alleged forever chemicals) in waterproofing. Apparently they've been trying to reduce usage or find alternatives, but the alternatives aren't demonstrably better.

> If the layoffs are NOT based off of performance, as the CEO says:

Performance motivated layoffs are where a company decides they're going to do a reduction solely to cull underperformers (like what IBM has done historically with their "up or out" yearly staff reductions).

When it comes to a economically forced reduction, management is 100% going to first cut the underperformers or those whose roles are no longer needed due to a change in business direction.

> he's been able to climb up to a engineering manager in a shorter amount of time than I've been working as a SWE

If you want to be an IC, don't short change your accomplishments. Eng Mgr is not a promotion from IC, it's a career change.

The SWE career progression is much more established, and is often much more formal and understood than an Eng Mgmt track.

Your younger manager has recently gone through a significant career change that requires a significant amount of self-education to advance further. It's possible he'll advance opportunistically (if there's a vacancy) or by being clever or political, but his competency will not necessarily advance with him without him putting a significant amount of effort into learning this new career.

It's not uncommon for established SWEs to make more than engineering managers until the engineering manager has progressed to a level where they are dealing with levels of stress (business & social) that would make most people's hair fall out.

Even then many companies have career tracks that pay as well in the upper echelons for individual technical contributors as for high level eng mgrs. The one thing they have in common is that there are very few positions at the top of any career ladder. It gets competitive. Hopefully your aspirations match your talents so that you can compete for those fewer positions.

> Trees only have a finite lifespan. Even "wild" forests reach end of life stage and that's when responsible logging and forestry management can promote healthier forests.

I absolutely agree with you.

In the book "A Landowner's Guide to Managing Your Woods" the authors point out that the fragmentation of contiguous forest parcels into small private holdings is problematic when it comes to managing healthy forests in the US, especially in the Eastern part of the United States.

The book points out that in 2006 the United States grew 26.7B+ cubic feet of new timber, but has only harvested 7.6B cubic feet. The reason being that much of that acreage is not accessible to harvest.

Many small land owners of forest properties are reluctant to harvest mature trees due to conservation messaging in earlier decades. They often also manage the mature stands of forest in their small parcel for their pleasure, not for 'forest health' or optimal carbon sequestration. Imagine anyone buying a shoreline cabin property and then electively cutting down all of the mature trees on the property.

Secondly, and more importantly, many foresters can not economically harvest from small acreage/parcels. Unless many nearby land owners band together to have their forests managed at the same time, it doesn't happen.

I'm guessing that most dead-stand is going up in smoke (literally turned into firewood) because it has no utility as lumber once it has started to rot or is attacked by parasites.

For larger contiguous tracts, some counties in the US States will tax-incentivize property owners for adopting a forest management plan (that includes timed harvests of mature trees).

Some US states are also purposely expanding public forests to increase contiguous holding and close gaps (of private ownership). The goal is not necessarily to expand the boundary, but rather the consolidate the holding within the existing boundary to incentivize large tract harvest (among other reasons).

Land owners who are managing habitat for hunting are often proactively, positively harvesting (by bringing in logging companies to make clearings). Cervidae (deer, moose, elk) need contiguous stands of immature trees for habitat.

> Leaving them to stand and die in the forest releases that captured carbon.

I own a stand of mature oaks that are quickly succumbing to oak wilt. They are being naturally replaced by aggressively spreading sugar maple, which can propagate quickly in a shaded understory and then bolt up when the dominating oaks die off due to disease.

I've been turning the dying mature oaks into lumber and firewood. If they're too far gone, they have no utility other than as firewood. I'm considering pre-emptive salvage in the areas that the oak wilt is prevalent so they're not completely relegated to firewood.

Letting a tree grow to complete maturity is a gamble.

Many of the US's classic native tree species are under incredible stress (or nearly wiped out) due to the rapid spread of parasites and disease, e.g., oak wilt, emerald ash borer, Dutch elm disease, American chestnut blight, Beech bark disease, et al. Many large stands will never reach maturity/old-age. Most American hardwoods only have a maximum lifespan of 250 - 300 years.

In a stand of mature trees, only the healthiest tree specimens should remain, as they will be the most resistant to disease and parasites.

Public forests managers are using something called "pre-emptive salvage", i.e., if a parasite has breached an area extensively, they're going to log off those stands while the wood can be salvaged into products (other than firewood).

> The new sapling will grow very slowly (kg carbon per year) for the first 15 years.

The rate of growth is really a function of access to light and water (and nutrients) [mostly light]. Some trees (like sugar maple) will grow slowly, nearly dormant, in the understory of a mature forest, and explode with growth when a column of light opens up due to the death of a mature neighboring tree.

Some trees (Redwood) grow incredibly quickly, reaching 6+ feet diameter in 100 years. Other trees only regenerate when clear cut, and have short lifespans (Aspen at 70ish years).

If it's hot in the kitchen (I ferment on the counter so I don't forget about the ferments), I ere on the side of caution and use quite a bit of salt. After a few days I taste the brine. It should be starting to sour. If it's clearly too salty, I just add a bit of fresh water to the crock, taste again, and repeat.

I taste it every day and refrigerate the ferment once it's at the right sourness.

"That knowledge about GitLab left a weird and confused taste in me. It gives me an impression, that is if a free tier user becomes inactive, they're no longer valuable for GitLab and can be treated as second-tier."

GitLab has an explicit program for approved Open Source projects:

https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/community-relati...

This is their philanthropic effort. They need to remain financially solvent to provide anything long term, so of course they need to be careful how much they're giving away and for how long.

If you're not in the approved open source program, you should consider your usage of the "Free Tier" as part of their freemium business model whereby they hope to convert you at some point into a paying customer.

> GitLab should seriously re-learn what's more important for their service: user engagement or the code hosted on it.

They're a business that needs to pay the builds (including the long-term costs of storage). If they haven't approved your projects into their open source program, you should consider paying them to host the code.

I have my own issues with GitLab, but I won't judge them for the need to pay the bills.

Just because they don't broadcast that they're doing it doesn't mean it's not happening.

I think companies embrace moral relativism and attempt to stay within the Overton Window (or at most dabble near the edges). It's a survival necessity because their own profitability will suffer if they are found to facilitate content that is outside of that window. The Overton Window does drift, which explains how content can suddenly become objectionable in a matter of months.

Impostor-syndrome is very very normal (I'm 20+ years in the industry and still have it), so rest assured you're not alone. What's most important is that despite negative self-talk you're able to learn the ropes at the pace expected by your team lead and manager.

You don't know what that other Junior Engineer's story and history is. They might not be as Junior as they appear. I've hired "junior engineers" who have been programming since they were 8 years old. Even star engineers will often be overtaken by an even hotter burning, faster shooting star engineer. It's the nature of the industry that you will eventually work with what appear to be savants. There is room in the industry for mere mortals.

Regarding getting "soft booted"; As a manager I would never call a reassignment that. I might refer to a reassignment as "aligning an engineer's assignment with their talents". Sometimes I realize I've thrown someone into the deep end and they need to be pulled out of the water and given something a bit less intense; mea culpa. If someone were truly under performing I would be putting them under formal coaching.

Negative self-talk is dangerous when it leads you into to a downward spiral of under-delivery. I've seen engineers that literally self sabotage because they talk themselves out of actually delivering as expected. They constantly focus on "learning" so much that they never put what they've learned to use in delivering their assignment. They're obsessed with catching up so much that they never even start.

If nothing else, deliver what is expected to you. If you don't understand it, ask with help breaking it down. Every hint, or vague request by a manager or lead is likely a softly stated expectation. Ask for clarification: when would you like this done? how long do you think this should take?

Regarding wasting a lead's time, in my experience (as a lead engineer at one time, and on the receiving end of lead engineer's guidance) they will tell you when you're wasting their precious time. In fact, my technical mentor once told me, "first time you ask a question I'll show you how to find the answer. Second time you ask the same question I'll show you were to refresh your memory. Third time I'll tell you RTFM".

If you're doing poorly, it's likely that you'll be told in some way or another. Otherwise, If you can, don't try to read too much into things unsaid.

We did quite extensive digging into the ToS and there was nothing explicitly forbidden about what he had done and they refused to point to any rule he had violated in particular. If they've updated it, it must have been in the last 4-5 months.