geekbird

LOL. My employer has this blocked as a phishing site.

All I see is the display of the egos and so-called philosophy of a bunch of rich "libertarian" punks who's basic MO is "I've got mine, screw the rest of you." They are as altruistic as a hungry bear.

If one of them walked up to me and said "I'm going to make your life better!" I'd have two questions: "How do you define better?" and "What's the catch?"

These are the type of people that push crypto cons and other destructive things.

They want to make the world better? Start by addressing the income disparity between rentiers like themselves and the people who actually build what they claim to have "invented".

IME it's arbitrary criteria - either last hired, first fired, or most expensive people, or older people (illegal, but they use other proxies for age to hide it), or most of a division because they're pivoting/no profitable, or you don't want to work 100 hour weeks sitting on the floor near your new CEOs office, or...

Getting laid off from some places is a badge of honor, IMO.

I'm less than ten years from retirement. I still need to work for those ten years, and probably afterward. Yes, I get a lot of ageism, ableism and sexism in my job searches. I don't look my age, fortunately, but having over 20 years in my field makes people want to lowball me or hire a "cheaper" (less experience) person. It's very annoying.

I get interviews with "coding challenges all. the. time. IDK why, I'm a Linux systems engineer, not a programmer.

But I constantly keep getting jerks wanting btree sorts that are like a college exam or take home challenges that assume I have industry type applications on my home network. No, folks, I don't run containers and terraform infra in my personal network. When I have to spend three hours to install a dodgy application just to start your janky "8 hour project" I lose all the enthusiasm I had for your job.

I've had bouts of unemployment lasting a year and a half. It's really hard to focus on side projects when you are worried about being able to pay the rent and health insurance and your pittance of unemployment insurance has run out.

My advice to anyone in the tech field is to try to have a lot of reserves, because tech is cyclical, and layoffs are inevitable, like every two to five years.

IMO it's partly a problem between sales and the "sprint" based development. Everyone wants fast, new and shiny and a 2 week sprint. No one wants to do tests, maintenance or even any architectural planning for their software beyond a single sprint, and architectural decisions don't flow between sprints. That's what happens when entire companies cargo-cult adopt scrum for their "agile" process, and the software suffers from the engineering equivalent of quarterly report syndrome (nothing longer than a quarter is really planned out in many publicly held companies because shareholder earnings reports are the highest priority.)

Yes, I'm cynical.

IMO it's just new for the sake of newness. Apt and dpkg work fine, but some folks feel they have to reinvent the wheel, I guess to beef up their resume or be more like MS or Apple. If they want to write MS or Apple style software, they need to just go and work for those companies.

Apparently some people think that Linux should be just as deterministic and user limiting as proprietary software. I don't understand it, personally.

Or just get the .deb binaries from Firefox, and install them with apt/dpkg.

There is no real need for "ancillary package managers", and all they do is complicate system maintenance.

IMO dnf is ridiculous newfangled garbage too. Why do people keep reinventing the wheel when it comers to package managers? Apt for .deb and yum for .rpm work fine, manage dependencies, and Just. Plain. Work. without f'ing up the system with autoupdates and bloatware. Seriously, an open source project is not for junior programmers to push their resume driven development on the rest of the community.

That's why I hate Snap. In Linux, unlike Windows or Mac, I should not have to fight my tools in order to configure a system the way I want it. Yet Ubuntu makes me do it every goddamn time for anything on the desktop, between snap and their nasty "Unity" desktop.

IMO Snap is nothing more than bloatware designed as a resume building project by newby programmers.

Not everyone needs bleeding edge.

Worse, they lock down and make their standard UI not able to be customized, and keep "deprecating" standard UI tools and configs in favor of some junior intern's idea of how real users "should" work. This sucks, and is why I won't run Ubuntu on any desktop. If I wanted to be told how to use a desktop by an OS, I'd get a f'ing Windows box or a Mac.

I use Linux because I can configure it to work the way I want. If they take that away, they are just another proprietary pile of shit.

As a sysadmin, I loathe "Snap".

There are two main packaging systems for Linux that are well known and usable. You can also use standard config management software to roll out configs for each package. Snap is a solution in search for a problem by people who are too lazy to use standard packaging that has been in existence for decades.

Listen up kids: "New" is seldom "better" when it comes to system tools. Put your creativity to applications, not trying to reinvent the wheel with "new" packaging systems.

Snap is a bloated mess, and we wish is was not on any system we administer.

I would put it as "Tell me about a time when you had to take an ethical stand or make a choice based on ethics."

Seriously. His initial premise is so far off base that the whole article reads like some sort of conservative straw man pretending to be intellectual discourse.

Are there issue with some DEI initiatives? Yes, but they are often minor, and usually due to bureaucratic laziness, not malice against conservatives or white people.

He is butt hurt that reality has a liberal bias, and wants academia to subscribe to his knee-jerk conservative fantasies instead.

He essentially trying to argue that a completely straight, cis, white, male faculty and student body would still be "diverse" because some were poor/rich, some were rural/urban, and some were old/young. Sorry, that's not diversity, it's simply variations on a theme.

And, IMO, a total waste of time for a bunch of cargo cult nonsense.

Scrum is waterfall micromanagement dressed in the verbiage of worker empowerment, and merely shortens the time between death marches.

Seriously.

One job I was at had four of us working in one room. A guy from a completely different department would wander in with his cup of whatever and talk at us for at least an hour. He was both dodging actual work and interrupting us. Since he didn't report to our manager there was nothing we could do. His boss was a piece of work as well.

It's these useless people that make open plans so toxic. It's bad enough that the general noise and visual distraction decreases your ability to concentrate and get anything done, but the wandering trolls of gossip and sports talk just add an extra booger icing on the shit cake.

IIRC Amazon does stack ranking too.

"If somebody wants to pay me $300k to work 4 hours a week, I'll happily take the deal."

Oh, you're bucking for CEO!

A lot of companies could have cut out four to eight hours of meetings a week and still maintained the same level of productivity.

I had root on my Linux desktop box at my university job, but I was in IT, administering a Linux service. Most of my coworkers were using Macs only.

Pro: Forums can have much more granular moderation than public places like reddit or discord. The making of a new login and having it accepted keeps a lot of the crap out.

Con: PHPBB is a pain in the butt, but is one of the most popular forum softwares. It needs regular and constant maintenance and upgrades, and if it's a busy forum can be nearly a full time job to moderate and maintain.

Slack has message sunset in free instances. Discord is hard to search and has a cruddy UI. Reddit is... Reddit, and it's moderation varies wildly. Twitter is like standing in front of a firehose, trying to drink just what you need.

Seriously. One discord that I am unfortunately on has one person who just drivels on and on and on. But I can't mute him, and he does this even on channels that are the whole reason that I bother with it. Apparently there is little or no moderation possible, so everyone has to put up with his train of though word vomit.

I hate discord for its threading, spaminess, and now its weirdness with multiple identities. It's also hard to sign up for without them deciding that you are a bot and arbitrarily banning you.

IMO, the rights of the child only exist after it is not wholly dependent on the mother's life to exist (ie. an actual child, not a fetus.) Which means that a dead fetus has no rights, and a fetus that would kill the mother isn't even a person, much less a person with the right to kill the pregnant person.

Yeah, IME that's what the anti-choice folks say about the pro-choice folks, but I've never heard it from actual pro-choice folks.

Yes, there is some joking about "post natal abortions" for certain extremist politicians, but it's never serious about permitting after-birth abortions".

Decentralized social networks of the past: UseNet and IRC.

No one owned all the servers for either of these. The problem came with moderation versus spammers and trolls.

The problem still exists with the centralized social networks, although theoretically it should be easier for them to deal with due to centralized identity management. It isn't.

Are you talking about different DBs, or just different tables? If it's just different tables, they can operate sufficiently independently if you design them that way, so you can change the schema on one table without messing up the others.

Seriously! I think there is a good space for the concept of "mid-services" - cluster similar and interdependent services and service fragments together, so they split in logical groups for updating.

It would be sort of like "Module A is authentication and session management, module B is data handling layer, and module 3 is the presentation and processing layer." Each of those under a microservices dogma would be two to four microservices struggling to interoperate.

I read the book written by the dev that advocated for microservices. I wanted to throw it across the room, but it was an ebook. He literally went for over half the book before he even addressed operability. Everything was about developer convenience, not operating it with an eye toward user satisfaction. The guy was clueless.