eeks

In any job you must be given the opportunity to grow. The best employers will give you that chance over multiple dimensions: knowledge, wealth, reknown, responsibilities. Most employers will give you only one dimension. As long as you keep growing along that dimension all is well. But that single dimension gives a lot of leverage to your employer. He can use it to coerce you and force you back into line. When that happens, it’s time to go.

From the horse’s mouth: https://youtu.be/omnskeu-puE

Can an mod add the date to the title? This piece is from 2015.

> not inventing the next thing

Not keeping up much with the world of computer science are we? Innovation is not limited to phones, private data mining and self driving cars. I would suggest you read about Q, or the world’s smallest computer, or the brain chip, or silicon photonics, or the 5nm transistor, etc.

IBM Research. Each researcher has his own office.

The day when Trump lost 90% of his base.

Citizen, background checks, and for DoD, secret accreditation. So the chance of a Russian employee working on a DoD project are non-existent.

If GRU agents use only a single hop to ambiguate their connections when attacking their mightiest foreign opponent then we don't have much to fear from these guys.

You are right, this is B2B. However, AWS is mostly used by large corps as IT offloading, which is not a business where IBM is a competitor.

> Its clear that IBM's products aren't as good as Amazon/Google

You may want to reformulate. Neither Amazon or Google are competitors to IBM because they don't target B2B. Besides, IBM has products in many market segments where these companies aren't.

My 16 years old will be pretty independent. He'll have a car and a motorbike. He'll be able to go out by himself, experience real people. He'll be able to work odd jobs, manage his own money, read whatever books and learn whatever things he wants.

But he won't have a smartphone or unsupervised internet access. Neither provide independence, but shackles to kilotons of the worst quality content humanity has ever created.

You must not read much technological news. From the top of my head, I can cite Quantum, Photonics, the Neurosynaptic chip, the 5nm chip fab process, POWER and Z, ...

I was looking for a proper answer to that parent comment. I could not have come with a better one.

Life cycle management, process synchronization, lockfree data structure, user-space networking... I can't remember the last time I didn't use a state machine.

I have almost the exact same setup as OP. I put close to no maintenance time in it. Adding all the extra configuration (SPF, DKIM, etc.) to let the world that you are not a filthy spammer is important, tho.

The strongest hold is the one no one tries to break into.

Hyperfocus is amazing. I also suffer from anxiety and, if I don't luge, I get the same experience as the girl in the video on a racetrack with my superbike. For 20 minutes at a time it's just me and the machine and everything else disappear. Ironically, the best place for me to get inner peace is on a piece of metal gushing down the track at 140mph.

Yes, however matter-of-factly while moving about the office. I did not perceive any difference between the Mac plugged in and on the go.

I must concur. With an equivalent vim setup and code files, nothing beats X11/suckless terminal on my OpenBSD machine. Comparing to that, even Alacritty looks like a slug.

I must say however that things are looking a bit better in iTerm2 when switching the Metal renderer on. It's just a shame that an Nvidia GPU on OSX is necessary to compete with my $1000 Lenovo with its crappy Intel chip on OpenBSD when it comes to text editing latency.

Can’t agree more. OP argument only holds if “value” is an absolute and objective concept and if everyone in the company is measured by it.

It just does not work like that. It’s a simple maximization problem. If your ideal is science and engineering and good code then your value will only be recognized by people who share the same ideal and these people are usually not the one distributing money.

If your ideal is making money then you will do everything in the book to make sure that the ones that distribute it mostly distribute it to you. That means taking credit, over promising, transferring blame, sabotaging careers, networking, shmoozing, etc...

Sounds familiar? That’s the ABC of the corporate world. That’s why most large companies end up being steered by incompetent people (Peters principle, IOW the last level you can reach before your incompetence really shows and shmoozing is not enough anymore).

If money is what you are after, either stay in a big Corp and forget about technical excellence or start your business and pray. Or, realize that there can be other form of rewards than money for your excellence.

> Briefly read, it looks like an idea and not an 'apparatus'.

It's patent law lingo. The patent covers both the idea (the "system") and subsequent implementations (the "apparatus") that are direct implementations of the idea.

This. Where there is no ability to summarize or paraphrase there is no comprehension. We need to stop calling fast pattern matching intelligence.

Nice +1 I wasn't aware of that.

Please check their website. You have extensions for Firefox, applications for Android, etc... It is an alternative, albeit not a drop-in replacement.

> Slightly off topic, but one of the only software issues holding me back previously was 1Password compatibility on linux, but apparently, it is now available (1).

Well, it's a Chrome extension. For some people (including yours truly), it's a deal breaker. I would suggest `password-store`[0] if you don't need to share your vault with anyone.

[0] https://www.passwordstore.org

I disagree.

Apple has always made clear that information stored on their iCloud service were subject accesses by a third party with the proper authority. Whether this third party is US or Chinese does not change anything.

Only the information that is resident on your phone with the Secure Enclave is tamper resistant.

That's the spirit. Let's make people un-hireable not based on their skills but on their personal opinions. 0% chance that that would backfire.

Managing large memory objects, shared or not, is a very commmon problem with garbage-collected languages. The solution of “hiding” the region from the GC has been around for quite some time for languages such as Java, C#, and even OCaml. That being said, it’s a very enjoyable little write up.

I'm sorry to have to rain on OP's parade, but this is wishful thinking.

First and foremost because "best" is highly subjective and will not be interpreted the same way depending on whom discuss the idea. In practice, "the idea of the guy that has decision power" wins. Or, in a more democratic setup, "the idea that makes consensus" wins.

As an example, take the Seinfeld joke described in the article. It is assumed that the joke was included because it was inherently good and everyone agreed to use it. But if you listen to the podcast carefully, it was actually included because Larry David found it funny and vetted it. Had he not liked it, it would not have made the score.

Same goes in technology. "Best idea" from a technological or scientific standpoint rarely wins. Many factor ranging from financial to political weigh in the final decision and what gets implemented is often subpar when looked through the technologist lenses.

YMMV certainly. As it does for all of us.

What I can say however is that the overall perceived stability and performance of my Mac has declined since the good old days of Moutain Lion. My 2017 MBP often freezes upon resume, there is a palpable lag with the overall UI experience, and the OS experience is bloated with the App Store/iCloud/iTune Store shenanigans.

For the last part, I know things have been adding up for a while, but I feel we are now reaching a tipping point. Enough of a tipping point that I now find myself relying more and more on my 2015 OpenBSD Thinkpad for work, music and movies although it has half the computing power of my Mac.

The downside is the missing ecosystem, the lack of seamless synchronization with my other iThings, which keeps me one foot in. For the moment that is, because I am slowly exploring self-hosted alternatives. And once I am confident my self-hosted system can match Apple's for most of the required features, I'll say goodbye to a 15-year relationship for good.

small edit

It's a two-way street: my expectations are probably higher that what they used to be.