dotdi

When Gruber mentions that he never uses Markdown outside of his blog, and hinting at the fact that it was not intended for text editors (and other apps), there's one important point I want to make.

Yes, Markdown has disadvantages, and a few rough edges for uses as the format for editors et al, but there are two very big advantages and/or sideffects of it's widespread use: (1) it's cleartext and therefore very good as a measure against vendor lock-in and (2) it has, to some extent, dampened the rampant "not-invented-here"-esqe tendency to use proprietary formats. Even in open-source apps, proprietary formats make it hard for non-dev users to get their stuff out. If it's markdown (or at least supports markdown export) from the beginning, at least you know you can take your data with you.

> I had become the go-to person for making things run smoothly, for fixing urgent problems, for delivering. But every time I pushed toward more strategic and ambitious directions, there was a lot of can-kicking and “let’s think about it” that went nowhere. I was incredibly useful to the organization, but not necessarily valued, and at some point, I started feeling a sense of stagnation. Compensation was good, the actual job was aligned with my interests, but that sense of being just a useful caretaker was hitting my motivation. In the end, I had to move on to another role.

this hits home, hard.

I haven't been on slashdot in a long time, and boy is it a shitty experience.

Using Orion browser with uBlock Origin, initially the site loads fine. Then it tries to load ads. It detects that the ads don't load, so it displays an overlay that looks like a crash modal "oops, something went wrong", shaming the user into believing THEY did something wrong.

Dismissing the modal reveals that the CSS was unloaded in the background.

Thanks but no thanks.

I feel like this is a huge load of crap.

These are highly intelligent people. They got to be very high up in the food chain. They are driven. They are smart.

Yet, the claim is that they can't imagine there exist people not like themselves? Sorry, not buying it.

More plausible to me is that remote work will hurt their bottom lines because they (and their superiors, investors, board members, etc) heavily invested in real estate.

Means, motive and opportunity.

I studied molecular biology 15 years ago. Recently I realized that I started to forget more and more about it, like how the rooms looked, names of professors, (obviously) a lot of the material I learned, etc.

But I can't forget about our professor of Genetics: he was suffering from lung cancer, so when he talked about cancer, it had a tremendous impact. He also used to be a smoker and was quite outspoken against that too.

I came here to ask "how is this better than StoryGraph", but before I could hit send, it occurred to me:

This doesn't need to be better than StoryGraph. This just needs to be different, cater to different persons, needs. Maybe not even that. It can just be there next to StoryGraph.

My gripe with GoodReads is not that it didn't evolve, or that the UI is dated. My gripe is that it's owned by Amazon. So to the new kid on the block: Godspeed.

That's why it's important to push for "public money - open source" initiatives like some countries in the EU are trying to implement.

Off the top of my head, I think the last (now failed) German coalition had this in their programme but didn't deliver. Maybe the new government will.

Maybe this is too tin-hatty, but sending the unpublished manuscript from (or to) a free Gmail account gives Google the right to use it, and therefore also to train whatever AI model they want with it.

Sounds like all of those claims where ChatGPT allegedly coded a flappy bird clone from scratch. Only it didn't, it just regurgitated code from several Github repos.

I think you got this wrong. Laws against Scheinselbständigkeit are protecting individuals from being exploited, and it's one of the things that characterizes the EU.

Don't forget that outside of Europe, most big economies were built on the ongoing exploitation of the working class. I am not saying this didn't happen in Europe, but at least there are efforts to curb this.

So a CIO complaining that he can't exploit people for cheap labour is not an argument for broken IT laws. It's an argument for seeing that it works as intended.

It's worse than that. Romania is #43 by GDP in the global ranking. There's faster internet compared to Germany in: Trinidad and Tobago, Colombia, Jordan, Panama, Ecuador, Moldova, etc.

Source: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/internet-...

the answer is simple (not easy). It works just like in any other non-trivial field: internships, connections, luck, true entry-level positions, etc.

I think one point about 100k being a large sum is that we've been talking about "six figures" since the early 2000s, and adjusted for inflation we'd be talking about roughly 180k, i.e. approaching a factor of 2.

And the second argument about 100k not being a lot of money is mentioned by the author: there are many places (in the US and outside) where 100k will not cover rent and essentials. So yeah, in this way, 100k is not a lot of money, because it will not grant you any form of comfortable life in (Austin, Seattle, most of CA, etc.), which is where a large chunk of tech jobs are located.

Cybersecurity is not full, software engineering is not full, practicing law is not full, etc. Just because there was a wave of tech layoffs doesn't mean the industry was "full" it just means money was fast and loose and you could get funding for ridiculous ideas. The markets just corrected for this past anomaly.

Yet, all of the mentioned careers have (as the author rightly points out) something in common: there's no cheat code, there's no 6-week bootcamp and there are certainly no magic shortcuts. Cyber security jobs require specialists with experience, just like many other professions.

More anecdotal evidence: while writing my Master's thesis it became clear that my advisor (the dept. head) was quite interested in the subject matter, and repeatedly asked me to shelve it, do a quick-and-dirty thesis to graduate and return to working on my original draft during a PhD. I was very open to the idea, since I was in love with research ever since childhood.

We sat down and talked about what this meant in particular, the workload, compensation, options after graduating from the PhD program.

It broke my heart, but I had to turn him down. It felt like everybody who wanted to have a shot at having a career in academia needed to put an insane (read: literally destructive) amount of effort into it, all while accepting that it was extremely easy to get stuck for good. There is extreme pressure on postdocs to produce results, with institutions and labs becoming very cautious about working with people in their 2nd or 3rd postdocs if they hadn't published in high-impact journals until then. Also, good luck finding any sort of tenured positions, with more and more universities switching to freelance "collaborators".

I was not going to spend 80 hours a week investing in something where all odds are stacked against me. I was not going to put years of my life into a thing that can go 'poof' just because your stars didn't align, or because the faculty decided instead of hiring you on a professorship track, they would rather extort some more money and "let the contracts expire" when it was no longer convenient to have you there.

Can't wait to see the factory in Germany also starting to pump out chips.

Same.

I use Firefox on all my devices. Actually, I am now experimenting with Zen Browser (FF-based fork prettier than Firefox, and even more privacy-focused). My wife and my kids get no say in it: it's Firefox in the whole household.

> LinkedIn's algorithmic feed heavily favors short-form "broetry" over substantive technical content - Twitter/X has become a battleground of AI-generated hot takes - Medium is drowning in SEO-optimized tutorials that all say the same thing

I have recently come to change my views on writing. I don't write to build a brand, and I don't primarily write in order to achieve some financial goals. I write to think, and I write to learn. Building a brand and achieving financial goals can be secondary effects.

There's also another argument to be made here: you mention LinkedIn broetry, Xitter, Medium, etc. These are all very centralized, partly tech-bro focused, platforms smack-dab in the middle of their respective enshittification processes.

I challenge you to not only maintain your own personal blog, but do so on your own infra, or at least in some form on the fediverse. Have your own small part of the internet, just as an expression of yourself.

Whenever I wanted to buy stock images, I was shocked how expensive they were. I usually didn't intend to use them straight up commercially, but I felt like I should pay for somebodies work to produce these images. The prices were too steep though.

Unsplash was a God-sent. High quality images with only attribution requirements, which I was happy to give anyways. But Unsplash was bought by Shutterstock and became "kinda free" with the good stuff being paywalled. And now Shutterstock merges with Getty, two of the biggest players in the space.

Frankly, I am quite convinced this is bad for end-users. The space is already enshittified by all the AI junk. So I fully expect quality to go down and prices to go up after this merger.

My org has been using ULID[0] extensively for a few years, and generally we've been quite happy with it. After initially dabbing with a few implementations, I reimplemented the spec in Kotlin, and this has been working out quite well for us. We will open-source our implementation in the following weeks.

ULID does specifically require generated IDs to be monotonically increasing as opposed to what the RFC for UUIDv7 states, which is a big deal IMHO.

[0]: https://github.com/ulid/spec

Engineering Software as a Service (pt. 1 and 2)[0] had some of the all-time best ROI regarding time and effort. This is the same course that they taught at Berkeley (recordings from the classroom). It was excellent.

It was exceptionally well done, and taught me things I still cherish to this day. Assignments were graded by automated tests, which is always nice. They provided a VM for a more hassle-free workspace setup.

Unfortunately, it has been discontinued, and I doubt that it can still be followed due to dependencies going out-of-date.

Maybe somebody can weigh in with a more recent course that offers a similar experience.

[0]: https://learning.edx.org/course/course-v1:BerkeleyX+CS169.1x...

Dive into the wonderful world of cyber security by engaging in festive beginner-friendly exercises every day in the lead-up to Christmas!

I love onigiri, but over here in Europe they are still pretty niche, and by niche I mean expensive.

It's basically a sandwhich, right? Only that it costs 5-10x more.

There have been many documented cases where tech giants have outright refused to pay out, employing practices like: changing the rules of engagement post-factum, silently banning security researchers from active bounties, escalating good-faith disclosures to law enforcement, extreme pettiness from managers, etc.

> The sums involved are not meaningful to the company

Which makes it the more bewildering to see how mishappen the handling is

Well, in contrast to other situations, this appears to be a zero-sum game.

A company has a certain revenue, which is used to pay employees, invest back into the business, etc. If you pay the CEO an exorbitant amount of money, it means it takes up a larger part of the income, which means you have to pay employees less, invest less, etc.

Then these lowest-paid employees need to be supported by social programs, which means we - the taxpayers - are subsidizing the enormous paychecks CEOs are taking home. Corporate socialism.

Eat the rich.

I started working with Microcontrollers when 80C51s were still somewhat modern, and I remember how frustrating the toolchain and the general experience was.

When AVR came out with their ATmegas, it was a revelation. Not having to use shitty proprietary programmers and windows-only software was amazing. We could finally use Linux. PIC was one of the main competitors in our circles, but it was losing the foothold quickly, because the AVR tooling was just hands-down better.

Also, documentation was easier to read and interpret, especially compared to PIC, which is still giving me slight PTSD when I try to recall how hard it was to get non-mainstream features to work. Whenever I had to deep-dive PIC documentation I stumbled over weird behaviour or outright hardware bugs that, in some cases, could not even be worked around.

I don't actively work with microcontrollers nowadays, but I am excited to hear that AVR is still making an effort to have an objectively good product. The market is tough nowadays, with ESP32s and ESP8266s being so cheap and widespread, but I hope AVR keeps it up.

I agree. I've been using Copilot for several months now, and the only thing it (almost) consistently helps me with is predicting relatively trivial snippets.

Anecdotally, I've had it mispredict from very simple contexts, such as skipping numbers in series' where the pattern should've been extremely obvious.

I've had it sneak in sublte and obvious bugs on a regular basis, to an extent where I don't have much confidence beyond any code I can grasp in a single look and be confident it's correct. Sorry bros, I'm not on the hype train this time. Feels like crypto all over again.

> Despite the apparent advantages of reusing Instagram's platform for Threads (much faster delivery time), Malkani admitted the company introduced a substantial amount of technical debt that must be addressed in the future.

This is not the feel-good "ye olde ways are always better" post that the headline suggests. This is a quick-and-dirty ship it by tomorrow™ and we will worry about building it properly later.