adamcharnock

I try and say this as much as I can, and I’m going to say it here: therapy is great. I highly recommend it, just take some time to find a therapist you get on well with.

This is in addition to the other advice here, not instead of.

Start a rural Wireless ISP. That’s what I did. Network cables and chainsaws :-)

> I completely agree with you. If they are willing to publicly trash a former employer and colleagues, what would stop them from trashing me as a new employer?

I mean, presumably your confidence in being a good employer? People don't decide to trash talk their previous employers at random, right? Surely there is some cause-and-effect involved.

When I think of spaces for men I think of my lounge, not some community centre club. I think of having a bonfire with friends. That is what I think of when I hear "a space and place".

Weirdly I guess it isn't about the space or the place. For me it is about listening, showing interest, talking a little less, not judging, and not avoiding awkwardness with jokes.

It is easy to make these spaces, you don't even need to find a space. Just listen.

There is some good advice here, so take this as an "in addition to", not an "instead of".

It may be worth checking if you are neurodivergent in some way. A number of people close to me have had mid-life realisations that they are on the ASD and/or ADHD spectrums.

Naturally not everyone that struggles with social skills will be neurodivergent, and vice-versa. But there is some degree of correlation so it may be worth considering.

Oddly, TikTok has been a pretty accurate diagnosis tool. If TikTok shows you a number of very relatable neurodivergent-related videos then that may be a useful starting point. If it just shows you a bunch of dancing people, then ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I guess I didn’t know that either. I should probably read into this in more detail…

Even as a meat eater I’m pretty shocked that this recognises them as sentient and yet does not ban their slaughter (aside from boiling them alive etc). Maybe I’ve read too much science fiction, but eating sentient beings seems Bad.

I've been living in Portugal for 3 years now. I'm from the UK, I'm not tax-exempt, I speak basic Portuguese, I live rurally in Central Portugal, I mostly socialise with other foreigners.

I'm also a foreigner commenting on a diverse country into which I only have a narrow view. My experience may not be representative.

Bearing all that in mind, here is a random collection of my experiences for those who are interested:

EMPLOYMENT

There isn't much work here for foreigners. Definitely not much skilled work, but there is occasional low-skilled manual work involving working on the land, construction etc. This kind of work is paid at about €6/hour. Many of the foreigners I know do remote work (language teaching, translation, graphical work).

There also isn't much work here for locals, but with an additional spin. When I first arrived here the land I own was very overgrown and needed a lot of work done. I made a conscious effort to try to employ local young-ish people to help, but the work was very unreliable in a variety of ways (quality, reliability, people getting into fights and feuds). I've come to the rough conclusion that all the young locals who can leave this area have left (for the cities, or UK/France), and everyone who remains are those who could not leave for whatever reason. I don't blame them, especially as I know some of them were dealt a really crappy hand.

The result is that as an employer it is hard to find good people. I know this doubly now as I have also started an ISP here. We go to the local startup accelerator and ask if there is anyone who we can hire to help us with marketing, and nothing. They've gone to Lisbon, improved their marketing skills, and not come back (because why would they)

In the end we use something like UpWork and hire people in Lisbon/Porto to do the work for us. Thereby sending more money to the cities.

BUSINESS

I think there are an increasing number of businesses who's customers are 95% foreigners. I know a Portuguese guy who sells firewood who says as much. I run an ISP and it is definitely the case.

LAND PRICES

I'm broadly aware that land prices are going up around here. Foreigners that come here mostly want to live on land, outside the villages. Typically this land has not be maintained for a long time because the owners become old, decided to stop farming it, and open a shop in the village instead (as the previous owner of my land did). The locals generally prefer to live in the villages. Yes there will be overlap, but my intuition says that rural-land-prices and village-house-prices are not rising at the same rate.

GENERAL ATTITUDES

As long as you speak some Portuguese, the locals are happy to have you (at least from what I can tell). Be nice, be friendly, always help someone out if you can (even if you're busy), and it seems to be fine.

Most of all, take care of the land. Many of the locals remember how the area looked 50 years ago and are sad to see it become an overgrown wilderness (esp in forest fire season). When I'm cleaning up the road-facing part of my land, every single person that comes past gives me a big smile and a thumbs up. Seeing those fruit trees producing again, rather than being full of brambles, starts to bring the area back to life.

The older people seem to respect practical skills and actually doing the work. I think they have seen a generation of "druggards" (AFAIK, drug-taking drop-outs) not really contributing anything. So they respect people who come here and actually do the work themselves.

LANGUAGE

People under the age of 40 typically speak English as a second language, people over 40 (ish) typically speak French as a second language.

When I first moved here it was normal to go into a shop/cafe etc and you would have to speak Portuguese (unlike Lisbon/Porto, where English is somewhat standard). That has been changing a bit over the last few years as more and more foreigners come to this area. Shops increasingly try to ensure they have someone on staff with good English. (no value judgement either way from me)

Portuguese people will acknowledge that Portuguese is a very hard language, but they'll also point out that you can get free classes in the local city. I interpret this as, "It's hard, but you gotta at least try"

FOREIGNER TYPES

I see three kinds of foreigners moving to this area: retirees, hippies, and professionals. The last category is where I am, and it is the smallest category, but it is steadily growing. We typically move here with some remote/passive income stream and split our time between earning money and house building. The money we earn we funnel into building supplies, and also vehicles & equipment.

FINAL CAVEAT

I have experienced all of the above, but yeah, I've only lived here for a few years. I'm not saying anything of the above is universal at all, and I'm sure it isn't the entire picture.

This is may be a long shot, but I wonder what “shut down the internet” means from the ISPs perspective?

Do they turn off their 2/3/4G services at the tower, or do they just stop passing traffic to their upstream providers?

If the latter then it may mean that devices on the same network can still communicate with each other. I don’t think this will solve your problem, but it may still be helpful in some cases.

Rather than trying to suppress the thing you don’t want, try to nurture the thing you do want. I suspect (but don’t know) that suppressing will have weird side-effects and not actually provide much growth, but if you nurture the thing you do want then the unwanted characteristics will naturally atrophy.

In your case, try to nurture positivity instead of suppressing negativity. Perhaps write a blog post on something you are excited about. Or write more comments of the “Yes, and…” variety.

One thing I can think of is: perhaps some sections (all?) of their network is IPv6 only, and the carrier does XLAT64. In which case they would provide custom dns servers which resolve IPv4 dns records to IPv6 addresses. Custom DNS servers would not do that, therefore IPv4-only services would not work.

May well have been something else though.

Absolutely. I was being a bit dramatic, but if this is something one is willing to do then by all means.

There was a freakanomics podcast 2-part episode on advertising which discussed this, and many other things.

At least in one case (eBay?) they discovered this kind of brand advertising had essentially zero effect. Turns out if people search for eBay, they are going to click the result for eBay, whether it is first or not.

I think this is good advice for making acquaintances, which is definitely a start.

But, IMHO, turning these acquaintances into friends takes something else: showing vulnerability and being able to support the other person when they are vulnerable.

The comments here have some great advice, but I haven’t seen anyone mention this. Personally I think this is absolutely paramount.

The best friendships I have are with people who I have shared myself with, have been willing to listen, and who have listened with kindness and understanding. People who appreciate that I am showing faith in our friendship by opening up.

Some people will not give me that space. They will look uncomfortable or make awkward jokes. They will always be acquaintances to me, never friends.

Conversely, I must be willing to do this for other people. To listen with understanding, to ask questions, and to know when my opinion is not needed.

Now, for those who want it, here’s my strong opinion: if people won’t do this for you, if they respond by looking awkward or making uncomfortable jokes, then f*k em. You don’t need that in your life, and you’ll find much better people.

I didn’t do well at this in college (/university in my case, UK). I didn’t really know much about myself which I think made it harder to connect with people. I learned more about myself in my mid-twenties which made it easier. I threw myself into that and made a wonderful group of friends and found an amazingly supportive community.

Now there is a fair chance this will not help you at all, but I’ll share here anyway. The thing that really turned it around for me was finding a minority that I was part of, in my case the LGBTQ+ community. Being in a minority community where everyone shared similar experiences gave so many more chances to make friends. I.e. more chances to be vulnerable around each other, and more changes to support others when they are in need. That’s how I made friendships that I think will last a lifetime.

This will not be the experience of everyone in such a position, but it was mine. The other comments here also have some good advice.

From my point of view I think it must be really hard for strait/cis/mono etc people. I still inevitably socialise in those circles and it seems hard to make connections.

I think this is going to be a pretty contrary comment, let's see how this goes.

I don't know what everyone is doing with kubernetes that takes up so much time and effort, especially in a SME environment.

I'm currently operating three separate kubernetes clusters for three different clients. And this is just me, there are no other tech people involved day-to-day. These clusters require minimal maintenance, just the occasional upgrade.

These clusters are small (1-10 nodes), and are on either GKE or bare metal. The biggest is around 100-200 running pods. I have a CI/CD pipeline setup in GitHub actions for each client. Development & CI uses docker-compose.

I used to do the old-hat 'scp your code to the server' kind of deployment, and this was a lot more pain. Kubernetes is big, but it solves so many problems. Ensuring everything is actually running, networking, SSL certs, persistence, configuration, etc etc.

I've been running this setup for 3+ years now. If I cast my mind back, I think I spent a weekend reading the k8s docs concepts section, then pretty quickly deployed a cluster on GKE. Given it was a team of one, I ditched RBAC which removed some complexity. Getting the CI/CD pipeline setup took some time (maybe a few more days), and I built more tooling as a went.

I really think kubernetes can be really useful for tiny teams, but there is a lot in there that is aimed at big teams. Use the bare minimum possible at first, and grow from there.

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Now here is a bonus unsolicited contrary comment.

Deploying k8s used to really require a cloud provider, particularly for persistent volumes and load balancing. But I think that has changed over the last few years. OpenEBS and MetalLB look like they are really addressing this.

Also, has anyone noticed that dedicated servers are cheap as chips now? I think the equivalent dedicated server would cost around 10x as much as an AWS instance. (I'm looking at Hetzner in particular, but OVH isn't far behind)

Given what is currently available from the k8s ecosystem, there seems to be a really strong case for deploying on bare metal these days.

For example, at a ballpark you can get a 400GB+/40core cluster for around $300/month (which also includes another 80GB/10cores of ancillary gubbins). The cost for that easily comes in at around $3,000 on AWS (ex any storage).

OpenEBS gives you replicated storage, MetalLB gives you your load balancing, and each instance has a couple of terabytes of NVMe too. And, if you're worried about reliability of physical servers, at that price you could replicate your setup across datacenters at minimal cost.

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I should add a caveat here. I've been working freelance in tech for 15 years and I am a massive generalist. I do everything from business consulting to design, devops to development, and I also run an ISP so know my way around networking/BGP etc. That being said, setting up a quick cluster on GKE doesn't require many of those skills.

Having written this ambling comment I guess I'll also say that I am am available if anyone wants a cluster setting up. I'm also about to start providing managed k8s services.

I’m pretty new to BGP, but I’d imagine that cutting off access to an AS is fast because all it takes is for the neighbouring routers update their routes. At which point any traffic that makes it that far is simply dropped.

Whereas to make an announcement, the entire internet (or at least all routers between the AS and the user) need to pickup the new announcement.

(Note: I still need to read the article)

In The Restaurant at the end of the Universe, Douglas Adams envisaged a genetically engineered cow that was intelligent enough to tell the restaurant-goers that it wanted to be eaten.

That’s a great answer, thank you. And that’s actually a lot more link capacity than I expected.

For anyone reading, Google states that the aka band is between 26.5 GHz and 40 GHz.

AFAIK, these telescopes produce a lot of data. Do we send this data back to Earth, or keep it on the moon and work on it remotely? Do we have the bandwidth to send it back to Earth? I’m really interested to know how much bandwidth can be achieved with an Earth-Moon link.

You’re mention of HN(/tech) people got me thinking about the difference between the experiencing self and the remembering self.

I can illustrate it as follows: You can go on a wonderful free holiday for two weeks, but the deal is you will not be able to remember it. Do you want to go?

Some people will say no. After all, if they cannot remember it then it is just loosing two weeks. These people prioritise the remembering self.

But some people will say yes, because woohoo it’s a holiday! It’ll be fun in the moment. These people prioritise the experiencing self.

I think this is a really interesting concept by itself.

In the case of tech people, I suspect they are mostly in the first category. So they are more in the ‘if I cannot remember anything then put me out of my misery. I essentially don’t have a self anymore.’

But I wonder if people in the second category will be of the mindset, ‘well, I’ll still have good days, which I guess I’ll enjoy at the time’

That is interesting, I hadn’t thought of that before.

I think a recent series which bucked this trend was For All Mankind. Rather than building suspense, bad stuff just happened with no warning. And it wasn’t a jump scare, it just happened. The entertainment for me then came from the characters reactions and how the plot then unfolded.

I actually class it as one of the best shows I’ve seen. I feel it managed to be very wholesome while also having some major emotional highs and lows. In particular, it didn’t build drama just for the sake of keeping the audience engaged.

I could talk about that show for ages.

I ultimately found my place while being shown around by an estate agent.

I did a lot of browsing on https://www.pureportugal.co.uk, and the place I ended up buying was listed on there, but I'd actually discounted it for some reason.

I know some people here to buy without seeing the property but – generally speaking – I think it is a false economy. This is because:

1 - Places can look much different online. I suspect I discounted my current place because the photos were taken on a cloudy day in the winter

2 - Even in person – and if buying land – it can be really hard to know how the place looks. This is because many places are REALLY overgrown. I had entire terraces which were the depth of a person in brambles. I've known people who have found entire buildings when clearing the undergrowth.

3 - The cost of a trip to Portugal was pretty minimal compared to the cost of buying. Depends on where you are coming from though.

Happy to chat more about this. You can find my contact information on my profile / website.

Also, if you move to this area you can get high speed broadband from the ISP I've just launched: https://gardunha.net

> One of the stranger conversations you can have with uk expats is those that supported brexit and are now perplexed that they suffer consequences.

I had some of these conversations in Portugal in the lead-up to the Brexit vote. "Turkeys voting for Christmas," was a phrase that came to mind.

Somewhat tangential, but I feel like writing it. I left the UK and moved to Portugal shortly after the Brexit vote. I brought a 6 hectare farm for mid-5-figures (for too big for one person really).

The process here was as follows:

1 - Get a 'this person really lives here' document from your local village council office (easy, done in a day)

2 - Get a tax number (easy, but may be worth taking an accountant with you, done on the spot)

3 - Go to your local city, show both documents, pay €16, they give you your 5-year residency on the spot.

Of course this is harder now the UK has actually left the EU, but still perfectly do-able as I understand it.

I also think this can be a tricker process in the big cities. Things are generally more chill in the rural area where I am. I.e. the local official had seen my face around the village and was like 'heh, you obviously live here, whatever', and didn't need to see any title deeds or rental contracts.

Ah no problem! :-)

I clearly should have read that comment more closely before getting on my high horse. Apologies.

1. That’s embarrassing, you’re absolutely right

2 & 3. I agree that a lot of men don’t think rationally about sex, and I think that has various societal causes. But I also think that is the problem here, and that possible obsessive OF use is one of the more minor symptoms.

Edit: as has been pointed out, I’ve misrepresented the parent comment. It’s late here, my apologies.

There seem to be a lot of assumptions here that I don’t agree with. So perhaps this comment isn’t for me, in which case feel free to ignore the following.

People seem to add so many values into the mix when it comes to sex work. If these old lonely people paid carers to visit them at home, would that be somehow different? Are these old lonely people somehow exploited because there is sex involved? If they cannot make rational choices because sex is involved then I’d say that is the problem.

Also, where does being able to “have” someone figure into any of this? There is no ‘you must be at least this hot to enter’ scale, people get together for all kinds of reasons. Plus, “have” sounds a lot like possession of someone, which I think we all think is bad? Right?

I think there are a lot of values encoded in the above comment, but I also know it wasn’t intended negatively.

A number of my friends and loved ones will be affected by this, and many more have been thrown under the payment processing bus before.

And forgive me if this seems ranty, but it isn’t just payment processors, it seems to permeate so much that comes out of the USA. See the various App Store rules too.

And this isn’t about fraud rates. Because why are the fraud rates high? It’s because the sex whole industry is pushed to the fringes, and loaded with shame. “Oh that payment wasn’t me, my card must have been stolen”.

I feel pretty angry how much this puritanical nature in a foreign country affects the people I care about around me.

If you can let China censor your platforms, you can let Europeans have porn.

Ok, rant over. Please don’t downvote too heavily.