757 karma · joined August 13, 2011
Only pet peeve I have is... jeffiot is in Nebula, Tom Scott is in Nebula, Lindsey Ellis is in Nebula... where is f4mi????????
I find it extremely sad that blogging shifted from personal writing to a performative act - we can feel ashamed stating something obvious because the expectation is to get approvals and shares, rather than us writing something we find intriguing, interesting or worth writing down.
My line is clear, if you use copy paste the AI output that's not your writing. I am okay with AI collaboration - it detects the errors, you decide what to do with them.
Vote with your wallet. Do not hesitate to boycott.
Then the world digitalized, and people who do not have any interest in computing and computers in general became "experts". That's when the ball begin to roll. This created people who can't give a french fry about the work they are doing? Quality? Efficiency? What do they matter, it was a job you did for 9-5 and you got your salary. If money was in say, haystacking, they'd be doing haystacking.
Now whenever someone utters "crypto" I do a doubleback and realize they mean cryptocurrencies, not cryptography. I do not expect any of my new hires to know the word "grok" (other than the AI of course), enjoy science fiction or any nerdy things we did. IT was a community where like minded people were working, now it is not.
- Rename the offending folder from the web
- Unlink the folder from the user's machine
- Delete the existing onedrive folder
- Relink and resync
The best part is, the web side of onedrive has practically unlimited length, the windows part has. As long as you don't sync, you don't experience anything but god forbid if you try to do it.
Also do not get me started on "Add a shortcut/Sync" debate. All in all, onedrive feels like a system that works but will feed you to the wolves the moment it hiccups. But on the enterprise side that's the only game in town so... we suffer altogether.
Then again I also moved from gmail to mailbox.org and am a happy camper since. I don't know if we are a majority but I find myself cutting all ties with google services (youtube premium, drive, gemini etc.) as they try to force unwanted features and workflows in my daily life.
For the normal queries and questions though I use their cheaper selections from the normal screen. My go-to is Kimi usually and I like how, unless specified, the chats disappear in 24 hours.
As a search engine, it does not work for me. I see promoted links above the thing I actually search for. Moved to Kagi and didn't look back.
As an AI it does not work for me. I am seeing an arbitrary usage limit, refreshing in 5 hours and a weekly quota given in a percentage. That is as opaque as it gets. Again, to give Kagi as an example I look at my usage details and I see how much is remaining in a clear way. Not working for Kagi by the way, I am just a happy customer.
As a cloud storage, it does not work for me. Probably some shared folder I am working with others has a spam user and/or a hacked account and they periodically spam x-rated notifications. And that's not only me (https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/1azf25v/myster...). Moved to apple iCloud and done with it.
Mail is fine. After 22 years of usage, I kind of delegated it to a non-important stage in my life. The important bits have relocated to European providers anyway.
From a creator's standpoint, a software project exists to solve a problem - or at least make the lives of the software users easier. But the moment a company bigwig clique decides to make money out of company, "bad" projects pop up.
To my chance, I experienced this for three times. The signs are nearly the same. The company has a lot of workflows - usually handled by excel and/or internally developed apps that actually reflect those workflows. Then comes the buzzword team proclaiming miracles, snake oil and an app that will even cure the dandruff - just sign here. Of course, the clique has their cut - that's why they say yes or advice the board to say yes.
Then begins the grueling process of "analyzing workflows". Do they contact the actual users who are doing the work? Hell. No. What they do is, create a "Project Team" - usually hired anew, with no information about how the company does its work - and they try to "understand" the workflows. Then it becomes like that game, user says one thing, project team understands another and says a different thing and the outcome is a different product that solves a problem but not the user's problem.
Of course, this process burns money. You gotta do development, you gotta have a server to run the app, you have to book meeting rooms in hotels to train the users, you have to create fliers internally to promote the app - and create pdfs, many many pdfs to make the users understand how the app works. And no one asks "hey, if this app is reflecting our workflows... why are we getting this training?"
Because at the end of the day, this app only exists to make some people money. And after a certain point, no one dares to say anything because of all the money spent. An ambassador who says "the app we spent $10M does not work" will be get shot. People get retired with the f-you money they gained and the company tries to work with the app they "built" usually it ends up hiring an internal team and do it from the zero - and the expensive shit becomes a thing nobody talks about, a company omerta so to speak.
First time I switched to asus kernel from the generic one was magic - I know asus-linux exists and following the instructions probably would have ended up in a working system, but with bazzite I wrote only one command and everything worked. It still feels weird not to monkey around with package installations (and this was a dangerous path, usually ended up with more work for me) but this is a tradeoff I can live with. The software I used - luckily - already moved to Flatpak so everything was a breeze. Also the fact that I can switch to a working state with one keypress is a stress reliever.
I agree. Linux is good now - for the common user. I still can't see immutable distros can be used for all scenarios but for gaming/home use, this is a methodology I can easily recommend for my friends and family who only want a computer that works without messing with console.
The interview went well. I was honest. When asked what my weakness regarding this position I told that I am a good analyst but when it comes to writing new exploits, that's beyond my expertise. The role doesn't have this as a requirement so I thought it was a good answer.
I was not selected. Instead they selected a guy and then booted him off after 2 months due to his excessive (and non-correct like the link) use of LLM and did not open the position again.
So in addition to wasting the hirers' time those nice people block other people's progress as well. But, as long as the hirers expect wunderkinds crawling out of the woods the applicants try to fake it and win in the short term.
This needs to end but I don't see any progress towards it. This is especially painful as I am seeking a job at the moment and thinking these fakers are muddying the waters. It feels like no one cares about your attitude - like how geniunely you want to work. I am an old techie and the world I was in valued this rather than technical aptitude for you can teach/learn technical information but character is another thing. This gets lost in our brave new cyberpunk without the cool gadgets era I believe.
You know what I get? Additional assumed responsibilities is what I get, because I read the goddamn mails sent to the goddamn regional IT staff distribution list - I am the "knowledge base". If you are naivé you might, just might, assume that additional responsibilities involve a raise or a title change.
Hell. No.
The final straw was a person got promoted without any interviews etc. to a position I am de-facto doing. So you keep the people who care in the same position because "they get the job done" and you raise the people who doesn't care and the end result is this situation.
But hey! KPIs are green, the job gets "done", right? Who cares?
Thanks to this (and Steam Deck for a great deal) I jumped to Mac and not regretting it. The system boots in seconds, has great eyecandy and just works for me. My work pc uses Windows and its taskbar behaves weirdly, right now, and its quarter shows the desktop image. Update breaks the soundcard and I will need to install it again. Oh and I see another update queued in - which may or may not be a false alarm.
I am not sure which was the most stable one, Windows 7 or 10. But 11 is a mess and nobody dares to admit it because sunk-cost fallacy and with the invention of recall it will act as a data collection agency for AI - as far as I followed the discussion.
Without going into details, I find its core methodology cool.
- You meet with the client, get an overview of the project
- Cobble together something in the given time
- Show the product-in-development, get the feedback from the client
- Rinse repeat until the product and the client needs are aligned
But from my experience the real-world implementation is meetings. More and more meetings. After a while client loses interest and basically leaves you to do something, which diverges from the real world need and solves an imaginary problem.
This happened so much that, I find my gorge rising whenever someone says "Oh we are using agile methodology"
With Pop_OS! my distohopping days were over. I install it on my devices and I forget it. I am sure their COSMIC DE will be awesome to use.
I think this is because they have skin in the game. They sell computers and they make sure they work as flawlessly as it can be with the OS they are developing. They are not selling their devices in my country but who knows, if they start to do that they have a ready customer here.
Linux has its own pain points, I agree, but especially after 2019 they are rare. With Pop_Os! I never experience any of the stuff I deal at work. I dare say Pop makes Linux boring - because everything works out of the box.
There are other issues as well, Onedrive, Office 2016 and Windows 11 combination has problems - Word and Excel crashes with no rhyme or reason, some documents which were not shared ask for credentials for accessing and so on.
Also there is the fact that they declared that 2016 and 2019 won't be eligible for connecting to Microsoft 365 services after October 2023 (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/endofsupport/...). So there is a clock ticking if you are using those versions of Office.
And getting fired after a whiteboard session with no heads up? Even though he knew he is going to fire you the next day? Man, you are BETTER off without that company. There will be other jobs, there will be other gigs but nothing is worth this.
My 2 cents anyway.
The thing is I began this thing as a wonderful skill to build new things. I was coding in C64 when I was 8-9 years old. But we lose our "mojo" as it turns into a humdrum everyday job where we know our limits. Add in the business related constraints, you slowly begin to develop a toxic relationship. And like any toxic relationship, ending it is better in the long run for your mental health. It was for me.
Taking a long vacay doesn't work if you implicitly know that you will return to the same routine by the way.
Hope it helps.
Edit: Currently working as a general IT troubleshooter guy who is also doing some coding in his spare time.
So seeing on HN was a shock to me. Recommended for old hardware nonetheless!
After 10 years of "srs coding" I felt like I was burning out and I was burned out. Because the feeling of discovery, solving people's problems and teaching the good stuff kinda disappeared in the churn. What I felt was I was adding data to a database and retrieving it when needed. The software did the required transformations that's all. Back then I was writing Java mainly and its verbosity kinda added to it.
I am not an engineer, my diplomas are on philosophy (bach.), sociology (m.a.) and international relations (bach.). And I used to feel fun and joy while doing that. Now it's all about buzzwords and creating stuff that's not neither usable nor fun.
Anyway sorry for the rambling but as a person who is in his late 30ies I didn't imagine this present, where I feel queasy from coding and think I should "relearn" the trade.
Thank you for reading!