bowlich

I haven't done startups. But I do work with a mostly remote company. I would imagine that it would be easier to establish a remote-only work culture earlier on then try to transition to it later (where you might need to jetison some established employees who aren't interested in remote work).

Hell, I've had and have heard of service-industry level jobs doing this to people for years.

One of my first jobs was as a waiter. Showed up one day to check the schedule and couldn't find my name on any of the shifts. Management never told anyone that they were cutting staff, they would just stop schedule you and you were just supposed take the hint and move on. When I confronted them on it they were surprised that I hadn't just "gotten the hint."

And the practice must be rather wide spread. I've heard similar stories, even from corporate chains, were workers are just laid off not by a discussion with their manager but by just not being scheduled.

So I can hardly find employees doing unsympathetic.

This seems to be the zeitgeist lately -- folks wanting to get back to the small community feeling. I think some of the different "fediverse" takes are trying to do just that. I'll throw out the typical Mastodon plug.

I've spent the last four or so years hoping around dead phpBBs and empty IRC channels trying to find a community that reminded me of the pre-Facebook communities.

So far Mastodon reminds me of a kind of async-IRC for the 30+ crowd who don't have time to idle in an empty channel all day. Plenty of conversations, and If feel like I'm starting to recognize repeated posters and strike up conversations again.

Just couldn't get past the first season despite being told that it gets better.

Jekyll. Although, I would like to check out some alternative static site generators as I've never been 100% satisfied with how Jekyll works.

I like having all of my articles as self contained text files that I can run through pandoc and end up with a nice looking pdf for proofreading. I amuse myself with the idea that someday I'll write a series of articles good enough to warrant printing into a book, in which case I'm one step closer down the typesetting chain.

Also, I can use git for versioning my articles, and just back them up like any other old file instead of worrying about dumping and importing a database.

Rapidly becoming impossible. So many government services now are only available via online. They expect you to go to the library and do that.

That said, if I didn't work from home. I think I probably would outright dump my internet connection to regain freedom. Maybe I would go to the library with my laptop to do the bills. It would create a hard block for needlessly worrying about them.

I've thrown around the property idea myself (we already own the house). Instead of the big ring, or an expensive party. I could buy her ten acres somewhere nice for a future retirement-vacation house.

The value is almost guaranteed to appreciate over the course of our marriage (which strikes me as romantic) -- and if there is an unfortunate divorce, she has a chunk of valuable land to sell instead of a useless rock.

Not a great deal. I think management got together with the lawyers to do a cursory review but we've already been under similar legislation for at least one of our European markets so code-wise we haven't actually changed anything.

Cool.

Signing up, to give it a try. I've got a FT day job but have been wanting to try to crack the nut of how to land a contracting position on the side for a while now.

Don't run random Docker or Vagrant Boxes seems to be something that isn't really emphasized by the providers of these services.

I ran into this realization the other day. I wanted to give Mint a try. I run over to Vagrant's site which prominently displays a "Discover Boxes" link. But gives zero indication from the main site that these Boxes are not provided by any kind of official maintainer or Hashicorp itself but are community uploads I suppose... at least I can't find any vetted information about who the uploader's are and why I should trust them.

This should be a big read flag in the quick start guide that screams: Don't just download any old box from our site and then load it up with all your customer data and put it into production. Instead it's buried deep in the documentation: https://www.vagrantup.com/docs/vagrant-cloud/boxes/catalog.h...

If you're a contractor wouldn't your resume show continuous employment for one company (yourself) with each 3-month stint listed as a client?

Any one of those items could be problematic depending on the individual. I see it (particularly in light of the following paragraph) as a call to me mindful and intentional about your media consumption.

Me and my spouse watch a movie together every Friday night. It becomes a conversation piece as we go through the rest of the weekend. It is one thing among many things we might do together or with friends through the weekend. Some couples that I know will binge watch an entire television series through the weekend. It becomes the only thing that they do -- it carries them from the end of the work day on Friday to work on Monday in an unreflective daze. I can understand the need to unwind, but at some juncture you've gone from unwinding to simply filling time, hardly eudaimonia.

For myself, the problems has been news aggregation (I read too much, reflect on what I read too little) and social media (makes me lonely, when I could better be using the time to talk with and make friends).

If you are just there to fill the void, then maybe it would be better to work at becoming comfortable with the void.

Friends who went the Bay Area route seem to be in a much higher risk situation then those who stuck it out in the Midwest.

You might be able to pick up a new job overnight in the Bay Area, but conversely your employer can replace you overnight in the Bay Area. Friends who went out there are constantly jumping between companies as they run the risk of being laid off, of running into stack ranking, of their firm getting bought out or all other kinds of nonsense.

Midwestern friends? All still working for the same spot they got out of college. Pay might be low, but the stress is low as well since employers know that it's hard work to replace a competent developer (probably have to pay someone to move there). If they walk out, it's the firm that's going to be in a harder place then they will be -- so no one is going to ask them to work overtime, check their e-mails, or do anything to upset their applecart.

We use docs for work. I hate it. I can never find where a document is hiding (is it in drive, docs, associated with which account?). I much prefer a local file structure that I can navigate from the command line.

Some tools break on Firefox at times. There doesn't appear to be any offline mode for me to store and work on my documents locally when I am on the road and don't have a reliable internet connection.

Gmail. I pull into thunderbird via imap. It's just another back-end from my perspective.

I already pay them $5 a month so I can use myname@mydomain.com for e-mail (I believe this also exempts my inbox from their ad-based data mining, but I could be wrong) I would gladly up that to $10 or $15 a month to extend that across all of Google's products (Youtube, Search, Maps etc.) and have advertising stripped from the whole thing and my "peronalization" data sandboxed so it doesn't get leaked to the "free" version.

The difference that I see between FB and Google is that I would trust Google to get that right. I would expect FB to say they sandboxed or protected my data and then have it turn out in court in ten years that they did no such thing...

As someone who drives rather frequently in atrocious winter weather conditions. I often wonder how AEB will handle black-ice and deep snow where tapping the break gives you a chance for loosing traction and ending up in the ditch.

First rule of winter driving is don't touch the brake.

I don't understand why go through the hassle of actually deleting (particularly since it is so onerous). It changes nothing. There's probably still a shadow account of the data you gave them. Deleting the account doesn't put everything back in pandora's box.

You can just post that you're abandoning the account with where to reach you online, log out, delete the cookies, and block their domain (what I did) and have the same effect with the bonus that friends can still reach you if they wonder where you went.

Why would a hardware selection or hacking on configuration files be out of the realm for your typical PC gamer?

When they've already committed to purchasing and assembling special hardware components just to run the games? Crosschecking your build against Linux compatibility would be pretty simple...

17.10 isn't an LTS.

Why is everybody who is complaining about the Ubuntu issues trying to run what amounts to a beta build of the operating system? I think you would have a lot smoother experience of the just a to 16.04 and don't upgrade until everything is ironed out.

I heard Phoenix took quite a big hits in the tech sector in 2008.

I live out in the boonies in Arizona, I would say at least if I go off of for recruiter spam, there's been an uptick in engineering positions related to the self driving car companies.

Whether those positions are actually real I don't know, never actually replied to them.

On the occasions that I have disabled my ad blocker and visited major new sites, I found the ad experience made me greatly question the judgment of the sites editors.

How can I trust the authority of a news site, when I am also seeing clearly deceptive ads playing right next to their content?

I haven't had to completely reset my machine in probably five years. Occasionally, I think I should come up with some kind of ansible script that would take me from a bare bones of Ubuntu installed to having all of my software installed and reconfigured.

I do have a script that I wrote that will take me from a default terminal/VPS to ready to code in no time.

I ran into a site last year that refused to work if the browser reported the OS to be Linux. Worked fine with it spoofed.

Zero. I've never listed it on a resume and no one has ever asked.

As gross of a conversation can be, I always found proper squatting in the back-country pretty much makes toilet paper unnecessary.

I remember my agency days.

Now days I work on a single long-running legacy project where tests make sense. Back then, I read a lot about how testing was the "right thing to do." But I also realized that most of the time (a) the client wasn't going to be willing to pay for the tests and (b) odds are that once we launch the product, that will be last time I ever look at it.

Maintenance will occur in five years when sales talks the client into scrapping the entire thing and rewriting it -- the client won't be willing to pay for maintenance or automated tests, but somehow sales could always sell them on a total rewrite.

I've been on Mastodon for a week now and loving it.

But it's a different beast from Twitter. I find it much more socially engaging and interactive. On Twitter, I mostly just followed people and consumed their posts the way I consume an RSS feed. I re-tweeted, but never really posted much on my own or engaged in any kind of dialogue with anyone else.

On Mastodon, I don't really follow anyone. I post a lot of random thoughts on my mind, watch the local timeline and jump into impromptu conversations with people about whatever is striking our fancy at the time. I use it more like an threaded IRC channel or a very ephemeral/rapid-fire bulletin board.

Ubuntu 16.04

Why? Because it worked when I installed it.

I never got into the whole install the hottest distro each season phase, so I've never actually tried anything else (other than my work servers which are running Cent-OS, but I didn't have to bother with the hassle of installing and configuring those)

Yeah, I was going to chime in. I've had an accurate whois for my domains since the early 2000s and at most I get a couple pieces of junk mail around renewal time. No idea if I get any spam from it, the spam filter seems to do a good enough job of junking that.

The idea of hiding the contact information never quite made sense to me. If you're a business, then you already have to provide an address of record to the state for certified mail to go to.

If, as a private citizen, I am running a controversial website then there are already institutes in place that will receive, process, and provide anonymity for your physical mailing address.

I've lived in some really remote parts of the west and the worst my prime shipments have ever been is a day late.

Count that against the 40 mile drive into town that I only make once every other week -- even if they took a week to get to me it would be sooner then if I went to the store (plus all the gas savings for myself).