Test0129

There's a reason to have a team of people doing this "DevOps" work. Just like we have a team of people who do SRE. It creates a standard and a single point which all work flows through. Then you don't wander onto a new project only to realize they use $BESPOKE_DEPLOYMENT_METHOD because "it's what we used 6 months ago". Or worse, you don't have a developer playing with a massive, nuclear powered, foot gun like Terraform and accidentally destroying infrastructure.

Making DevOps/DevSecOps/$BUZZWORD the responsibility of developers is a cost-cutting measure not a responsibility measure.

I've had people cut juniors/data scientists/etc loose on a "be-all-end-all" framework and ended up with the worst code I've ever seen. Edges so sharp just looking at them will cut you. I've seen code that imports trivial things like line counting! I've even been on the response team for a security incident involving several internal packages that imported the wrong thing from the package managers! I've had to re-write important library functions for a package that was imported and deprecated, and the author just went to do something else. Libraries are great, but they are not a fire-and-forget tool. When you use them, you must use them sparingly, correctly, and securely. Importantly, you need to pray a library will be maintained over the life of your software.

"Documentation and community support" is worth absolutely, positively, nothing if the usage of the library enabled the writing of poor code. Hire better developers, and create strong coding standards at your company. Let software engineers do what they do best and choose the right place to include a library after evaluating all options. Experience level matters. Late seniors and staff+ understand the difference. New seniors, TLs, and of course braindead management love to bring in the universe on every project.

Being in an office makes me borderline suicidal. I've been remote since before the pandemic and it seriously improved my life. I can turn off my zoom camera so I can sit back in my chair and listen/respond without the appearance of laziness. I can turn my camera on when I want someone to see my face, for example in an important meeting or a one-on-one. I can choose when and how I work and configure my environment exactly how I want it. I don't have people constantly at my desk, or work-issued hardware that is unacceptable, etc. Most importantly, I don't have to wake up early and commute to my personal version of hell where I am trapped with golden handcuffs. With remote work I can demonstrate my actual value without having to maintain appearances. I can go to the doctor, handle a quick errand, whatever, and as long as my work gets done that's all people can judge me on. It's beautiful. The meritocracy is beautiful. We spend way to many brain-cycles on the concept of appearances when work should be only measured by work.

If it wasn't for remote work I wouldn't be able to make a wage more than what my state offers. If it wasn't for remote work I wouldn't be able to take as many vacations, I wouldn't be able to go to school to pursue my passions, etc. It has actually empowered me to take care of myself first, as I should, in so many ways it really drives home the point that office work is slavery.

> I used to love going to the office. Discussing our team's latest Python problems over a coffee. Looking over at their screen and then asking them why they look like they want to beat someone over the head with their keyboard repeatedly. Guessing people's emotions in a heated Retro from their body language. Grabbing dinner with a few colleagues after a long workshop meeting in the evening and then realizing that, aside from all the differences we might have about static typing in programming languages, we all like the same exotic progressive metal bands.

You are probably generally a person who is energized by being around people. I am not, never have been, and never will be. People, in my opinion, are an unfortunately side effect of having to work in public. That's not to say I am anti-social, but rather introverted, and I prefer to control when and how I engage with people. Moreover, office politics in the "cancel era" made it so I didn't really want to talk to anyone anyway. At the height of this craze I wasn't even sure what non-obvious word would send me to HR. The office sucks, period.

> Many of these things that made my job much more than slaving at a digital conveyor belt seem to be gone these days

You were still a slave.

> I am just wondering if that is really the case for the majority or what it is that I'm missing.

Remote work benefiting people who take care of loved ones is a benefit to those in the relatively rare case of doing that. For most of us, remote work was removing the shackles of management and allowing true merit to shine through. If you can work effectively surrounded by your toys you can work effectively anywhere. Rather than playing politics and dealing with micromanagers I can just work. You can tell that a lot of people believe this because the amount of anti-remote propaganda coming out of major think tank companies is extremely high. If it didn't put the ball into the worker's court the propaganda simply wouldn't be necessary.

> . As soon as a company's IT department is practically fully remote, why should they page a German wage for someone who is a face on a screen, when they can pay a fraction for that same face broadcasted from a few hundred kilometers further east or south? German is hardly used in business context here anyway and lower-wage countries within ±3 hours timezones abound.

Remote work didn't change this. This is a misunderstanding of the market. Since before remote work so-called "import labor" formed the backbone of most major companies. It's been 30 years since country-first labor in tech was a thing. Infosys and cognizant have been around for a very long time.

> All in all, there is a gnawing feeling in me that Covid made a significant dent on the once fun (Berlin Startup) tech working culture for good.

There are plenty of ways to meet like-minded people that don't involve having to follow office politics and rules. You aren't looking hard enough if you can't find them.

Sometimes separation makes the heart grow fonder, even in tech.

I've also left jobs that burned me out for no real reason. For example, I was on a project where there were two of us holding down a critical piece of software. After hearing we will get more engineers for the Nth time I just gave up and left. I couldn't do the constant on-call, being the liaison for bugs and everything, etc.

I also deliberately avoid going into management to fix my burnout because you simply just transmute your burnout into a different form. What you need is a break. You may not wish to quit your job but it is important that you minimize your work as much as you can possibly and focus on yourself. Given you are working double a normal schedule you may even consider saving up enough money to take a month off and then looking for a new job.

Due to these heuristics IDA produces real actionable code quicker. My experience with Ghidra (less than yours) is that it produces mostly garbage on a lot of different things and it requires a lot of prep work to make truly usable. This might not be noticeable on small or simple binaries but on larger binaries it actually becomes a real measurable problem. While Hex Rays isn't perfect, it's about as close as we can come to it right now and it generates very human-looking code with smart optimization removal. One thing I remember with Ghidra not long ago was a common optimization like using SSE registers for arrays would produce a page worth of non-sense for something simple. Additionally, detection of standard libraries still isn't good so you end up wasting your reversing time on re-reversing a different compilers version of strlen than actually doing the work you need to do. If you could use FLIRT signatures in Ghidra legally I'd imagine Ghidra would be vastly improved.

I own a copy of IDA (legally). It was an absolute pain to purchase and it seems that a large portion of their margins are dedicated to piracy control. I won't detail the process...but it seems unusually personal.

If I had to guess they will expand their decompilers (the actual flagship project). It will be years before Ghidra + a community catch up to them and Binary Ninja (I also own a copy of it) may never. The disassembler is just a familiar tool. Their decompilers are way, way far ahead.

It feels like news in general leverages this for extra views. Card skimming effects everyone that includes poor people. It's not "a little more okay" when it happens to people who are not needy. However, the language seems to imply this. Like card skimming wasn't an issue until it started having an effect on poor people. It really cheapens the article when I read this.

No, getting your app launched does not make you a hacker. Being the CEO of a startup does not make you a hacker. Writing a website does not make you a hacker. In fact, in my opinion, these things are against the very spirit of the hacker.

A hacker is someone who creatively solves a problem, usually in an unexpected way. Sometimes, this is "hacking" together parts of smaller systems to create something novel and unique. The religious text of such hackers, the Jargon File, says so. Hence, why the above are not hackers. Gluing frameworks together does not make a hacker. Hijacking your CANBUS system to make your car better does. In fact, it would seem commenters here despise the idea of the hacker... there are so many posts that are either ambivalent or downright malicious towards people suggesting using a different language, trying a different technique, or whatever. To use the authors term the dominant mentality is unfortunately one of "what does this do for me" or "how can I make money with this". It seems like every young developer I talk to is obsessed with making the next big app in $FRAMEWORK or whatever. It's getting harder to find people who write code for the love of the art.

The author is correct except in his use of the term hacker. I find it distasteful to attribute the average MBA-cum-developer a title as important as hacker. The snark is deserved. Our field has been hijacked by normies. This post is an important reminder of that.

Dropping copyright cases is great if you hate proprietary code. That's fine. Open source is also powered by copyright. If we start dumping copyright cases we don't get the "well bob we may as well open source it!" We get large companies like Google just completely ignoring copyright and using open source code without attribution. What you've described (causing enough a problem in the courts) is the exact purpose of GPL. If we start dropping copyright cases altogether the open source movement may as well be dead in the water.

You don't do this. You get my books, cut out the bibliography, glue all the pages together, and then sell the book as your own.

It is my book and all you did is derive some work from it.

Curation companies have the same problem and there are plenty of high profile lawsuits about it.

It enables the large scale theft of code. It completely ignores licenses. There are plenty of open source licenses that allow code use with proper attribution yet Copilot doesn't (and probably can't) figure a way to comply with all of them.

Copilot, as the article suggests, is a marketing stunt. To me it's more than that. It's Microsoft pushing the boundaries of law using it's money muscle again. I have been screaming from the rooftops that VSCode was just M$ spyware and I get legitimately made fun of for it. Now we have Copilot as well and they aren't even hiding it.

To address your point more directly if you do any work for monetary gain Copilot is a defacto liability. You can't just take 20 lines of completely stolen code, modify a few things, and call it your own. That's why legal reverse engineering has an entire black-box method of development. QA, researchers, and developers aren't even allowed to talk to each other directly.

I hope Copilot does get shutdown. Along with everything like it. It is one thing to have an AI trained on your workplace's code, or specific code following specific licenses, but the blatant theft of not only licensed open source code, but also private code, is a terrible precedent to have.

Just don't pay it. Let them take you to small claims over an unpaid bill and then show up and say you can't afford it. Or just don't show up and let them flounder over the bill.

This is just simple intimidation. "Job training" is not the same as signing an agreement for say being put through school or get certifications. In those cases, there's sometimes significant monetary value added to the employees total comp (in the form of those certification payments). So many times an employee will sign an N year work agreement w/ repayment clause because they dont plan on leaving anyway. I signed one of these for the same reason a few jobs ago. Got some stuff paid for, they laid me off and I walked with what I bought for free. Always make sure that you red line any agreement and always get a termination clause written in. If they're unwilling to put one in, you are being scammed.

In this case initial job training is a "cost of doing business". There's no justification for such a fee. Imagine having the balls to charge a McD's worker $3000 for learning to flip a patty. It's not brain surgery.

Would you support removing cash if everyone was given a bank account? Perhaps with the government?

OPs point was that cash not being accepted means you have no privacy in a place you might want it. Governments love credit cards, easy pay, etc. Especially in the case where your transactions are kept with you forever so that future governments can punish you.

https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/14/american_tech_workers...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/13/us/politics/biden-china-t...

By forcing Chinese-Americans in particular (as in Chinese, who also hold American citizenship) to choose between their work or their citizenship he is defacto threatening to strip their US citizenship. Dual citizens have basically been handed a choice: give up your US citizenship to continue working in your field or find work in the US.

So, knowing this I would assume they will simply use this system to get access to patents for the chips they need and begin fabrication themselves. This blow slows them down but doesn't stop them. To stop them, you'd need to stop their well oiled espionage machine.

[0] https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/when-us-citizens-can...

I'm sure a LOT of countries have laws like these in one form or the other. I'd imagine that the inside baseball on this is the US is effectively declaring China an enemy, and so therefore can make this threat. The only question is how actionable it is.

Enforcement is spotty, DUI checkpoints are not outfitted with the right equipment to diagnose being too high, weed smell coming from a car is no longer enough to elicit suspicion of intoxication (due to changes in policing), its easy to escape after smoking, etc. People do it because the probability of getting caught is low. The only thing that is policed is the stores, and even then just barely. It's easier to get busted walking around with a beer where you shouldnt than a joint. Some of this is growing pains of a society now having to deal with this nuisance, and some of it feels like selective enforcement because (at least where I live) the tax money coming in for this drug is insane.

I don't care if you smoke weed. I don't care if you do it in a weed bar, or at the weed store, or in your own home. My complaint is strictly that even today I went out and got hit with yet another cloud of skunk coming from somewhere. It should at the very least be policed with the same fervor drunk driving/public intoxication is, with the same punishments, and same criminal record. As it stands now, where I live, there is no deterrent except a small fine and a court date (if you're even caught) so hence, weed smokers do what they want.

2) No idea. My Indian contractor coworkers never seemed to care. It's the H1Bs that panic during a layoff (understandably).

3) I don't think it will, that's why I get mine while the gettin' is good and hopefully have enough to not worry about the future whenever the FAANGs finally succeed at driving wages into the ground. However, given there are nearly 4 jobs for every engineer currently in the field according to the BLS I'm not worried at all about the next decade. I'll just continue to stack cash and re-evaluate every once in a while.

It's a complicated subject but the simplest answer goes back to the circle of life. There are two survival strategies of a species. Either becoming a predator, or become very useful prey. Which, in crass terms, basically means that if humans don't buy it (don't eat it, therefore don't insure it's survival), it will die out (e.g. it's "worthless") if it cannot evolve into a predator species.

Not to sound crass here but it seems like you're fishing for virtue. Hiring and firing are normal. A company of 20,000 firing 20% of it's workforce sounds major but that's the industry. It's normalized because it is normal. The field of software engineering is so fungible 20% of employees losing their job is nearly meaningless in the current job market because you can throw and rock and find another seat to warm the next day. It's not like Ford closing a factory.

In other words, you need to relax and get out of your head a little. This industry is nothing like the factories. When 20% of factory workers lose their jobs everyone rightfully panics because it's not as easy to get another factory job (at least anymore...here in the west). 20% of tech employees getting laid off from a company is a nothingburger. 99% of these people will be able to take two weeks of free time and find another job for the same (or often better) pay. This is the definition of trivial.

It's a nuisance that ruins an atmosphere. To be fair, the police and businesses should be working together to ticket these people at the very least. But it isn't being done so I guess my post is just impotent rage at something that society needs to solve. Sucks though.

We managed to ban smoking from just about everywhere except for designated zones far away from traffic. We haven't done the same thing for weed. All of that sick tax money praying on addicts and hype is just too powerful. The smell is nauseating and I shouldn't have to wear PPE to go to a park.

That's not an argument. I live in a metro. I rarely see ads for booze EVERYWHERE. TV, sure. Sometimes even the radio. But billboards? No, not really.

I see ads for weed EVERYWHERE. I can't recall the last time I saw an ad for a liquor store.

They aren't treated the same by society. Weed seems to be able to have complete freedom, while booze is still forced to be hidden. I'm for hiding both in the best possible way. If you want it, seek it out.