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anbotero

223 karma · joined October 13, 2012

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/abotero; my proof: https://keybase.io/abotero/sigs/OVP9RvrZzQcs5DTeWFqUjJL1c-fAkWuGpTD2xcuwB_Y ]
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anbotero··on Being ambitious and being a dad
Excellent, you reached the point that Edward Elric, from the first Fullmetal Alchemist anime, arrived at in the final episode(s): The illusion of balance, when everything in that world revolved around the Law of Equivalent Exchange.

Sometimes the rewards do not match the sacrifice/effort, but that doesn't mean you won't pick that same choice when given the chance, or that it was a "bad choice". If you accept what may come from your choices, you can more objectively act upon them.

anbotero··on Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered
I'd like numbers/evidence on it too, but for my own generation, I compared my cousins for years precisely about overprotectiveness, and those who were only protected against extreme imminent danger have succeeded in life way further (for their starting conditions, socially and economically) than those who had my aunts all over them not letting them fall and have scrapes.

Anecdotally, again, the parents of those who did NOT fall on dirt were much more wealthy, so these cousins of course inherited (so to speak, their parents aren't dead) the wealth and status, but gosh, they do everything they are told to do, what to study, etc. While those who did fall frequently when babies these days have generated about half of the wealth the others inherited and they are vocal, really nice professionals and of course awesome people to spend time with.

Girls were more protected than boys, regardless of everything else.

anbotero··on Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%
I was perhaps a bit harsher in my comment on this thread, but I like the way you describe it better.
anbotero··on Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%
Read other comments: Even engineers with 10+ years of experience don't know how to do this, think they have it all under control, then complain that management only hindered them. And if we are talking from experience, based on mine, only 2/10 good engineers actually know how to communicate results besides just delivering code/artifacts.

In some particular cases and SMALL groups I do think a Manager by itself is unnecessary, especially if everything is working out and they are responsible enough to present usable information to others in the hierarchy, but if not, please stop this fighting and only complain when the Manager is really annoying.

If you think they are robbing you of valuable time, time it. Time it and tell them with hard data you're being robbed of at least a certain % of your working time, which means you can probably deliver less if they want X action from you.

anbotero··on Talking to strangers at the gym
Are the examples so outdated? I see multiples comments/reviews (here and on the Internet) about the book not being made for modern people/society, but what you pasted looks fine to me.

Sure, there may be cultures where making comments of people out of the blue might not be seen as normal, but almost everywhere I've gone in this world allows for comments like these.

anbotero··on Maladaptive Frugality
Finally!

I've struggled with this... not personally, but watching other people going crazy with whatever money they get and then complaining about not resting enough, not traveling enough, not having fun enough.

They go ahead and ONLY take full 2 weeks vacations, never even trying spreading some of those days here and there, perhaps right next to a holiday to make it a long one, and then complain later that they are burned out...

Most people even with means complain about some of us doing this normally (we don't have to travel the world every weekend, come on), and you talk with them, and if they just stopped "wanting to live outside their means", they could actually accomplish it, even if little by little.

I commend you for living such a life, because even if none of our lives are perfect, some of us enjoy it as best we can. :)

anbotero··on IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark
Actual curiosity, how would the new filtering be/is?

I've done a lot of IP filtering, it's what a lot of systems and services allow us to, so I'm curious what the IPv6 mechanism is

anbotero··on Codex Hacked a Samsung TV
Do you recall what it did? This sounds interesting, as I too have had some issues with the receiver from time to time.
anbotero··on Nanobrew: The fastest macOS package manager compatible with brew
Wait a minute, Homebrew is slow? I thought most of the time it takes for me is downloading and installing. I haven't noticed slowdowns anywhere else, even for the ones mentioned.
anbotero··on Hard-braking events as indicators of road segment crash risk
Is there a statistics name for the last part? I'd like to compare different countries. It's definitely NOT true in Colombia at least, which makes me believe OP more.

We in Colombia had a public service announcement where it showed someone driving really fast (while still respecting semaphores), and another one going with just enough speed. In the end, they both reach the last semaphore almost at the same time and then they part ways. Essentially it shows that driving crazy fast in the city doesn't necessarily gets you faster to your destination.

Now that I'm an adult, I tested it several times, and it matches 90% of my attempts, but that's in the city, with semaphores. No way I'd think letting everybody steal everybody else's buffer would provide for a reduction in journey time, even in highways. You're adding items to a queue, it'll take longer.

Now, it is probably safer, but we can only take so much even if we are not in a rush.

anbotero··on Video Games as Art
I'm a bit perplexed at the comments saying it's not art, no matter what the article say. I'm no expert, but who's to tell me otherwise? Same thing for other commenters.

Games have had such an influence all around the world, from Oscar-worthy music to narrative mechanisms, to graphics and graphics engines (Unreal) even used to power backgrounds on loved films/series (which I guess are an art form), even at a technical level to the discovery of the fast inverse square root for Quake III Arena, to many other things. Games are more influential now than many previous art forms.

I can enjoy myself playing, these days I can enjoy seeing others play those I cannot, I can enjoy myself listening to incredible pieces of music I would NOT find anywhere else, I can enjoy some incredible drawings with all kinds of different techniques (some forced by the times, but that itself is creativity)...

I don't agree with a lot of "critics" on a lot of topics, not just gaming, because their criteria for evaluation may be flawed or outdated even, but since they have their monocles on, they know more than me. There is a reason there are critics and user ratings now. It's decadent system, but I understand its purpose, and it's helped me pick some awesome pieces of art, or games to play.

anbotero··on You’re not burnt out, you’re existentially starving
My situation is: I've visited doctors and they encourage me to try new things, "to keep coming out" of my comfort zone, but I can't seem to really feel excitement (passion, rather) anymore. The closest thing is my girlfriend.

I don't complain about mornings, about working, about any activity: I dig most of them, I really like some, but I just can't seem to feel alignment with this "purpose" thing. In my mind, my purpose is to live with health, enjoy life. For that I do the usual: travel, meet new people, practice a different sport or physical activity, hike, dive, go out to restaurants, play video games, watch films, go to theater, cook, draw, paint figurines, I help people (I'm no volunteer, though). I'm only missing woodworking because I live in an apartment and I can't fit any of that here, haha.

Am I cooked? Do I have depression and psychologists can't seem to adequately name it? Or can I simply go on with my life like this without feeling weird that every one else has/perceives all these issues that I don't?

anbotero··on We're losing our voice to LLMs
I want to agree with this. Maybe OP is young or didn't frequent other communities before "social networks", but on IRC, even on Usenet you'd see these behaviors eventually.

Since they are relatively open, at some point comes in someone that doesn't give care about anything or it's extremely vocal about something and... there goes the nice forum.

anbotero··on Why Samsung Phones Are Failing Emergency Calls in Australia
I'm scared of this.

In my country, at least on my Samsung Galaxy mobile device, they are sending Flash Messages for ads, even though I requested to be removed from their lists (and they complied... with calls and SMS).

I already see them making use of this for ads until a big group of people complain.

I'm tired, boss.

anbotero··on How to escape the Linux networking stack
Most definitely. Not just for myself, but for some of my peers here too.
anbotero··on An individual can change an organization
I'm part of a chat group related to videogames, and it took me ages to convince the Pokémon die-hard fan to stop buying the games if he found so many things he didn't like (he voiced them... ALL THE TIME).

Maybe I didn't make the best argument for it, but the general sense was: Stop buying them. If you keep buying them even when you see so many things you disagree with, they'll never improve upon them. Some were such stagnant anti-features, at that point it wasn't honest from the company to keep them in the games.

He finally understood for Sword/Shield. So he hasn't bought this last generation, although the latest calls to him because there are some interesting changes, but I told him to wait for the next refinement, assuming they really improve even more.

anbotero··on Antislop: A framework for eliminating repetitive patterns in language models
It drives me crazy. It happens with Claude models too. I even created an instruction to avoid them in a CLAUDE.md, and the miserable thing from time to time still does it.

Why?!

anbotero··on Dbos: Durable Workflow Orchestration with Go and PostgreSQL
I think this post is riddled with bots. One is marketing another competing offer, others complaining about the UI component not being open source too...
anbotero··on Formatting code should be unnecessary
Those that complain:

I've worked with several Development Leads to actually define these. After the initial adjustment period, everybody's local environment setup properly: No one ever spent time reviewing style and formatting on Pull Requests.

Just decide as a team, auto-apply if possible (less than 5 seconds for big changes), enforce, and be done with it. Stop wasting everybody's time because after weeks you cannot make your mind on it and also don't tell your team/Lead about it.

anbotero··on Using Podman, Compose and BuildKit
You know someone has NOT used OrbStack when they just think all they have to offer is the UI. In fact, I barely use the UI, I just see the icon in the Menu Bar, from then on I just love the performance, feels almost like being back on Linux.
anbotero··on I forced every engineer to take sales calls and they rewrote our platform
While PMs have their own share of quirks to work around with and your comment doesn't say they have no faults at all, I wholeheartedly agree with you here. I've worked as a developer, QA, systems operator, and a bunch of other positions. Holy cow, we are all full of ourselves (PMs included), but the disdain of a lot of developers towards the end user (sometimes PMs fault) is incredible. A bunch of nerds ignoring common people use cases and abilities. And it keeps happening and most still don't recognize what's happening.

I've worked as a Manager so I've had to deal (and collaborate) with this kind of misunderstanding, but it truly gets tiring when developers complain about users trying dumb things (for developers) over and over again, yet they themselves have learned nothing from previous encounters with this phenomenon and complain instead about stupid users (or PM, or company, or whatever).

anbotero··on SecretSpec: Declarative Secrets Management
Wait, why are there so many skeptics in this thread?

I have setup AWS + SOPS in several projects now, and the developers do not have access to the secrets themselves nor the encryption key (which is stored in AWS). Only once did we ever require to rollback a secret and that happened at AWS level, not the code’s. Also it happened within the key rotation period, so it was easy.

For us it’s easier to track changes (not the value, but when it changes), easier to associate it with incidents.

anbotero··on A manager is not your best friend
I've had bad Managers, like the ones that inspire articles like these. It's a shame people become absolutists after such bad experiences.

When I've played the Manager part, I've always tried to do my best, talk to my team, set them on the proper train to success professionally and from time to time personally too, incentivize them to accomplish company goals, but also when that hasn't worked, I've also had to set them on the proper train out of the team/company.

I've only had issues with 2 out of ~30 people I've managed, all others I've had to lay off have understood (even when there wasn't a reason: Sometimes I was just told to pick someone to send home). Some people don't take it well, no matter how justified you are to fire them. I don't stand for bad friends, why should I stand for a bad employee? Or sometimes "no one" really connects with them, and they never connect with other people, I can only help them so much; maybe this person will "click" somewhere else.

I still talk with some of these people, even sometimes meet with them when I go to their cities, have parties. Normal, human interactions.

For me phrases like "it's family", "they are my blood", "we are friends" are always played like you have to stand for bad people. If you have never cut off a family member or friend, you're probably watching too many films and following too many traditions. Sometimes no matter what, you are different or the tradition is stupid. You may try to make it work, sometimes it simply doesn't.

As a Manager, you can do your job well, you can treat people well, and still bad outcomes come from it, or you can still be seen as the enemy. Whatever, take what may seem good criticism and be done with it.

As an Individual Contributor, I'm not saying not to be best friends with your Manager, I'm just saying that one thing is "the job", which has its own myriad of things happening, and another your personal life. Both can be great experiences as sometimes they aren't.

anbotero··on Quarkdown: A modern Markdown-based typesetting system
That Typst source looks really clean. I may go back to look into its HTML support.

Thanks for sharing!

anbotero··on The Pain That Is GitHub Actions
I’ve had people like this. I’m with the other commenter that: Why do they have a say in this? No way I’m letting them decide each day when to format, what style to format to... Meet, discuss, pick a style, enforce formatting, screw you if you don’t follow.

I’m also with the other commenter about settings these things at the Editor level, but also at the pre-push level.

We benchmark how long it takes to format/lint only changed files, usually no more than a second, maybe two, but I admit for some languages this may take more. An editor with a language server properly setup would have helped you find issues earlier.

We also have reports for our CI pipeline linters, so if we see more than 1 report there, we sent a message to the team: It means someone didn’t setup their editors nor their git hooks.

If the checks take more than a second, yeah, probably pre-commit is not the place/moment. Reliability is important, but so is user experience. I had companies where they ran the unit test suite at the pre-commit level, alright? And that is NOT fine. While it sounds like it’ll find issues earlier, it’ll screw your developer time if they have to wait seconds/minutes each time they fix a comma.

anbotero··on I'll think twice before using GitHub Actions again
Do you know the criteria used to pick the nx.dev? That is, do you pay for their Cloud, or do you do some plumbing yourselves to make it work on GitHub and other things?

Looks interesting. We’ve picked tools based on time saved without too much extra knowledge or overhead required, so this may prove promising.

anbotero··on GitHub Git Operations Are Down
I was the administrator of a GitHub Enterprise Server instance back in 2015-2016 (I think 2014 too).

Rock-solid stability, for a company with 300+ microservices, 10+ big environments, 50+ microenvironments, who knows how many Jenkins pipelines (more than 900, I’ll tell you that). We deployed several times a day, each service on average had 3 weekly deployments.

As a company, I think GitHub (public) should do better, much better, given this is happening more frequently as of late, but if big companies (even medium ones) don’t have their own package caches, they are all in for a ride.

At a previous Startup we had GitHub + GitHub Actions, and we were on AWS. We setup some OCI images cache. Sure, if GitHub went down we could not deploy new stuff, but at least it wouldn’t take us down. If we really needed the pipelines, I suppose we could have setup some backup CLI or AWS CodePipeline (eww) workflows.

anbotero··on Show HN: Werk, a simple build tool and command runner
What in particular tips the balance to Taskfile compared to just(file)? With one of my clients I’ve been using just for months, so I’m curious. Thanks!
anbotero··on Ask HN: What sub $200 product improved your 2024
Any particular brand/model? I used to buy some Calvin Klein in Modal textile, but they switched to Cotton which is not as smooth and piles over time. :(

Thanks.

anbotero··on Google starts tracking all your devices in 8 weeks
Netflix used to offer Audio and Subtitles in several languages. Now even subtitles the only option I get is Spanish (Latin America)... Like come on, sometimes I want to learn another language, understand the real word behind the sounds.

I may understand Audio, because of Edge location storage costs, but Subtitles... that’s blasphemy.

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