NotVerstappen

Thanks - I wasn't aware of yours, last time I looked I just found a couple of abandoned and not very user-friendly versions for AWS.

I'll take a better look at the DO version specifically as I'd like something equivalent for Vultr and Hetzner.

Paying your full salary is not at all common - though I agree that is sufficient to make a non-compete fair and wish it would become normalised.

I think Nim would really take off if there was a good and actively-maintained SDK for a major cloud provider, or even for one of the larger VPS sellers.

I think I would've tried Pop!_OS by now if not for the name - I know it is totally irrational, but having a ! in there really pisses me off.

Very well put.

In that framing, it is often the case that US-led "capitalism-at-any-cost" over-indexes on scaling the magnitude of the vector while leaving the direction free to be influenced by other entities. The EU approach is to disregard the magnitude while keeping tighter bounds on the direction.

I'd like to think that bodes well for the UK, since we historically have trodden the middle ground between both camps - but I'm sure we'll find some way of fucking it up and gaining neither magnitude nor direction.

A lot of early cloud adopters were more "nimble" organisations who didn't have deep ties to MS enterprise agreements. We are now in the phase where those large enterprises have gotten over their early cloud experimentation phase and are migrating for real - which will result in a bit of an MS resurgence I expect.

There is zero chance that your career is going to be detailed by sticking withS technology at this point - it just might not be the most interesting.

Azure is an inferior platform to the alternatives on a technical level, but they make up for it with stronger enterprise relationship-building than AWS/GCP, and they do generally try to keep up with broad AWS capabilities of not the actual quality.

I think most people can thrive in the situation you describe (extreme hard work) as long as they also feel a sense of control. I am at my peak (in productivity and "feeling alive") when 100% of my work hours demand my focus because I have that much to do. When I have a quiet period I get miserable; I can find plenty of my own ideas to work on, but they often feel either futile or wasteful - that part is my own problem. Similarly though, when I have too much to do (ie when I know that working 100% still won't get it done) I become demotivated - after all, it seems that none of these tasks are important enough to get proper scheduling, so why bother sweating over them myself?

Second point: working full-on as you describe can apply to non-employment too. The drive towards working fewer hours (for the same standard of living) is just a direct response to growing wealth inequality and general unfairness in society, not a softening or growing laziness.

These austerity measures have just gone too far!

Watching people piss into the wind is fun until you get some on your shoes.

Been battling with this mindset shift myself. When I get annoyed with myself for delaying a task I try to remember the concept of "last responsible moment" from the Agile methodology books; after all I've never missed an important deadline so far, so clearly my effort-estimate calibration isn't far off.

Leadership principles feature in normal employee life in exactly two circumstances: when you are doing interview loops, and when you need to win an argument, eg with some jobsworth sales person who wants you to over-promise to a customer.

Think this depends on the amount - my sign-on bonus worked as you described, but some others I know got a lump sum (they were more junior and getting a smaller bonus).

I don't want any hardware designed by Microsoft in my machine. The concept might be good, but I don't trust them not to ruin my experience when using Linux. This will force me towards using a smaller number of niche vendors (good, if they survive that long) or just switching to a Mac (bad).

Give a man fluoride toothpaste and he'll have good breath for a month. Give him fluorine gas and he'll have good breath for the rest of his life.

I was trying to decide which of these I am hoping will decline, but realized the answer is actually all of them - even the one I work for.

Netflix is the only one I consider "innocent" however their market segment as a whole deserves a kicking for pushing us back towards the cable TV model.

I have historically been very anti Apple but the M1 is impressive, as is their attitude to privacy. Not such a good look on the working culture front though.

Google and Amazon are both toxic to some extent, while being so good as to be indispensable to a majority of their customers. For Google that is B2C, for Amazon (and Microsoft, who deserve inclusion here), that is B2B. On balance I expect stasis for all 3.

Having Facebook decline all the way out of existence would give me hope for humanity, but I don't see it happening.

In my childhood I remember (perhaps overly- optimistically) having distinct seasons and in particular crisp, snowy winters. The combination of climate change and moving west of the Pennines is really shit.

Might not be helpful, but at least in some cases it is sincere.

Personally, I simply don't think we have the capacity as a species to overcome the challenges of climate change right now. I'd like to be proven wrong and think we should be trying anyway, but veer towards solutions which actually provide another benefit and help with CO2 emissions as a secondary effect - the most obvious example being renewables as a means of securing energy supply sovereignty.

This approach probably won't see us beat even 3 degrees of warming but let's be honest - most people in the western world will adapt to a less convenient life, and we don't care about the pending deaths in Bangladesh and similarly poor countries nearly as much as we like to pretend.

Well thanks, that's a good couple of minutes of hilarity. You should really use an /s though; I was hoping for a breakthrough in solar concentrators or something similar.

That's a good point - thanks. "Thoughts" rather than "intentions" is definitely more aligned with where I am. Part of the trouble for me and presumably a lot of people is untangling those things - for example, would my thoughts be intentions if not for having a spouse, who I could never imagine hurting in that way by leaving? Moreover, does the mere presence of that kind of "blocker" represent a positive sign?

I pick at this stuff in my own head all the time, and just don't have enough confidence in doctors to believe they could tell me anything new. Being able to skip straight to pharmaceutical or other non-talking solutions via a disclaimer would probably mean a lot more people like me would seek help.

I am increasingly confident I suffer from depression, rather than just being generically miserable.

How do you deal with the trust issues posed by that questionnaire? I have suicidal thoughts most days, but I'm concerned that revealing this to an NHS doctor would quickly result in my freedom of choice on what happens next being taken from me. Seems like one of the few cases where US healthcare (where you are explicitly a customer as well as a patient) has some advantages.

That was my take-away from the "double empathy problem" too - and I agree that the point was hard to extract from the text.

While I agree that there is some potentially useful insight buried in here, I disagree stongly on "amazingly well written" - the signal-to-noise ratio was dreadful.

People talking about things is good, but people adopting their atypical traits as their whole persona (even if just online) surely can't be healthy?

I think like many of the current wave of "illiberal left" trends, it is a function of both space and time. I suppose the UK adopts US woke ideas because young people here are less likely to have religious conservative views than the EU average - reserving their prejudice for simple xenophobia.