Sanguinaire

£100k base, about £175k all-in. Developer-adjacent role. Realistically I can only think of 5 companies globally which would pay this much while also being interested in my niche skillset.

I was thinking the same, assuming it eventually goes on sale in the UK. Actually the 3:2 screen ratio is one of the new laptop developments I am less keen on; 16:9 or 16:10 feels a bit better for having 2 side-by-side terminals in i3.

0. Linux support, specifically with the option to purchase without paying the Windows tax for an OS I'll never boot. This is a deal-breaker for me, meaning Dell are one of the few main-stream manufacturers I'd go with.

1. No touchscreen (I'd rather have a higher quality, low glare non-touch display).

That's about it, actually. Practically all modern laptops seem to meet my expectations on battery life and performance in a way which corresponds well with their cost. Weight is mostly a non-issue since I'd only consider a 13" chassis anyway. Screen resolution can be traded for battery life without concerning me.

An M1 Mac with a non-apple keyboard and full Linux support would probably be great, but I don't hold out any hope for another manufacturer matching the M1 without ruining it somehow (looking at you, Chromebooks).

I seem to remember the Azure 24 hour limit being in place in 2018, though it wasn't highlighted particularly well and came as a surprise to me. Could well have been removed since.

Likewise - incredibly disappointed. I don't even want to use their cloud storage; I'd much rather be syncing to a server I control. With the current pricing and the fact that I passed on my old rM1 to my wife when I got an rM2, we'd be looking at 2 subscriptions when we next upgrade devices - which pretty much rules it out.

It's weird how the 3 major clouds have taken different paths to what must be an almost identical resource allocation problem.

AWS has had this kind of spot instance for years, but with a 2 minute grace period rather than the 30 seconds GCP is offering. Azure and GCP both originally went with the 24-hour cutoff (which can easily be replicated on a regular spot instance if needed), but now GCP are backing off on that restriction.

Don't fall victim to resume-driven development; keep on KISSing.

Or better yet, rewrite it in Go to avoid both the fat blob and python dependency management at the same time!

OpenStack is an over-complicated mess. Most enterprise IT orgs already struggle to hire the people with skills to operate a public cloud account, nevermind having to build the underlying infrastructure as well.

A bit disingenuous I think; people are concerned about security when worrying about random packages, but privacy with Microsoft.

MS have a history of being hostile to open source, but have been able to launder their image somewhat.

I have been 100% remote for years and am content to continue to be so, but I totally see where you're coming from. I was never thrilled by my train journey into London, but the short walk I had on the home end was some of my best "thinking" time. One of the ways my mental health has suffered most since moving on from that time in my life is a steady decline in enforced personal time, and a lack of willpower to re-introduce it. Not made easier by our shitty weather discouraging impromptu walks.

Thank you for expressing what I struggle with every day.

The additional counterbalancing layer on top of this is an internal drive for justice - this is what pushes me to work for a big tech company rather than doing something which gives me more self-respect. If other people can earn 6+ figures to fuck about with computers all day and deliver nothing of true societal value, why should I be the sucker doing scientific research for a fraction of that?

It's not about petulance, it's about motivation. I'm in a similar position to the author but acting more like you would want; I care about being good at my job and want to deliver because that is how I was raised, but there is a constant tension in me that this is the "wrong" approach since no company actually rewards loyalty or expertise, at least not nearly as much as self-promotion and being a corporate mouthpiece.

Regarding promotion and being indispensable, that cuts both ways - in some roles being impossible to replace also means you are impossible to promote, since the next step up the rigidly defined corporate ladder may not have sufficient overlap with your current role.

I suppose a parent might be held responsible for their kids below a certain age - and getting pissy about what a 15 year old is saying on their Twitch stream is totally in keeping with my experience of Bezos' corporate PR.

That said, this should be laughed out of court regardless of the age of the "heirs". In Europe you could reasonably expect that to happen with minimal bother, but in the US I expect the employee would end up paying a six figure sum for the privilege of getting the case thrown out.

Anything which visualizes a Gantt chart will automatically look like steaming garbage.

From a purely selfish perspective, the worst outcome of the pandemic so far is that it has served as a distraction and shield for Tories who bungled Brexit and have yet to face any political consequences.

Sounds like we just need to gamify productivity, it's a wonder no-one has ever tried that before...

(/s for the dull and witless hordes)

If you're not against "Old Media" and classical liberal ideas, I'd suggest just getting an Economist subscription.

I have tinkered with both. Basically if you need to write a FORTRAN application but don't want to use FORTRAN, Julia is the correct choice. If ease of use is more important than having a diverse collection of pre-existing numerical libraries to play with, I'd go with Nim.

If Nim had cloud SDKs I would use it as my default language for pretty much everything.

The problem here is letting drug companies market to the uneducated general public - there is a good reason why that practice is banned in most countries.

All-caps mode exists as a safe space for FORTRAN programmers.

"College" in the UK education system already has a definition; it is the place you go from 16 to 18, studying a narrower curriculum than regular school prior to 16. You will also hear references to "sixth form college", which is the same 16-18 education but delivered at the same physical school as under-16 teaching.

Hexagons are the bestagons; better than all the restagons.

I lived in Luton for a year and commuted in to London. Yes, it is certainly more affordable; but only because the NHS covers the cost of dealing with your stab wounds.

For non-UK people: yes of course I'm joking, however Luton is the home of both a large immigrant population and the "English Defence League", the closest thing we have to the KKK.

There is/was a UK government "Help to Buy" scheme aimed at people who can only afford a 5% deposit, where the gov basically took part of the equity and then charged you rent on the portion you don't own. Never seemed like a good idea to me; just skews purchases to more expensive areas (ie London) and leaves the taxpayer with an even bigger share of the risk in the event of a house price crash. The only upside is political - the government gets to say they are helping first-time buyers.

Nature is correcting for our artificially enhanced lifespans thanks to modern medicine.

Life, uh, finds a way.

Once you factor in long contracts, the people who are desperate to go back to the office, and greater space requirements for proper social distancing - they pretty much do need to pay for those existing offices. Hopefully things will re-equilibriate, but I'd guess that will take another 2 years at least.

The patent system is just not fit for purpose. Even for pharmaceuticals and other long-development-cycle products in the real world it has been corrupted beyond reason; I worked on battery materials for a while and even though there was plenty of prior art, a couple of players had basically patented every metal oxide possible under the guise of a cathode material, even though most of them would be utterly useless. Until there is some penalty for such time-wasting chancers, nothing will change. The software world makes it even worse by removing the already low bar for a proof of existence or actual benefit.

I wish more people were au fait with this concept. If a small business can only exist due to paying bottom-tier wages it is perfectly OK for that business to be squeezed out of existence in short order.

Options are problematic because you end up with a competitive/tragedy-of-the-commons situation, where no-one really ends up having the option at all if they want an appealing job or competitive salary.

Using national-level regulation to define a "new normal" isn't what I would choose by preference, but I just don't see anything else working without side-effects undoing all of the potential advantages to employees.