giantandroids

US tech appears rife in this right now. I follow lots of engineers on twitter and some folks seem to spend more time enrolled in their own victimhood or the victimhood of others who cause they love to rally to (because they get to point victims and their own invented perpetrators). I often want to point this out, but I would risk losing my job.

I am very much working class / (blue collar) in my upbringing. Raised by single parent in a very run down area with a fair amount of poverty. I luckily found an early love and curiosity for computers and eventually found my way into software engineering. If this had not have happened god knows where I would be, when I look at where my friends have ended up. I learned quite early in my life, that if someone picks you out , then you need to immediately front up to it or it will just escalate from there and you're in for a bucket load of torment and bullying. I am not presenting this as any sort of solution , it's far from ideal. I can misread situations / emails and feel fight or flight come on (and my ego insists it needs to be fight 'don't let them walk all over you'). This means i ALWAYS I clash with the arseholes whenever our paths cross. It's made me quite popular with co-workers as I confront them everytime, but I don't think its doing my career any favours.

I would much rather use this, a nice secluded statically compiled blob instead of letting node.js unspool a spaghetti of dependencies.

This is still playing out in the UK

Glad to hear you got yourself back on track bruv and happy birthday!

I very rarely go on linkedin now as it's just a shell of its former self with very little value compared to when I first joined up. In past years I got headhunted twice through linkedin and landed some good roles and built up a really good network of other engineers, but now its just like a quasi mix of instagram and facebook. It's full of these annoying fuckers who call themselves 'influencers' and post cheesy inspiration / motivation crap all day like a video of some Indian construction worker who found a way to optimise how they pick up bricks or someone rescuing a puppy from the side of river.

The only contact I get now, is not around job opportunities, but people wanting to sell me some product or service 'hey, let's have a 5 minute call to talk about how our companies can help accelerate growth in exciting new ways, let me know when you're available. Let's talk!'.

> but in my estimation in-person collaboration is far better than online-only.

Being able to talk to others in person and quickly is certainly useful, but its a double edged sword as that quite often results in your stream of thoughts being disrupted and focus gone in a flash. This is one of the reasons I love WFH as a developer. I can get right into my zone and focus on solving problems or being creative without someone walking up to my desk to ask if I read the email they sent me.

You could easily argue they are doing the opposite, in that they close down potential weapons and responsibly disclose them so that they are fixed and patched. Add to that, a majority of computer security work is revolved around improving infosec. A further point, I doubt infosec researchers are the types that run a deprecated microsoft web browser.

You do have to wonder if some of this is politically driven. Germany are losing hundreds of life's a day, while in the meantime the UK has administrated 23 million doses (not sure the ratio of those that were AstraZeneca) and not recorded a single fatality or adverse reaction and are seeing infection rates / deaths drop. I can understand caution under normal circumstances, but nothing is normal right now.

I wonder if this might be implemented to encourage individuals who convert cryptocurrency to fiat , to also easily pay tax at the same time.

The B12 in off the shelf beef , chicken is from it being injected by farmers (along with all manner of other stuff such as antibiotics).

The truth is that every living being is low on B12 due to soil erosion / over farming. So in a way a meat eater is supplementing B12 by proxy of an animal, where as a vegan is buying a pot off amazon (and in turn able to get a much more specific dose).

This really is a vague statement without defining what you mean by 'nutrition'. If you're referring protein, well sort of, however some non meat based products carry plenty, nuts, black beans (15g of protein per cup).. At the same time there are plenty of vitamins / minerals in vegetables that you cannot get from meat. Vitamin C being a key one.

if you use a bash shebang in your scripts, does it not matter (honest question, I never have used fish)?

The gist of the article for anyone who wants to spare few minutes from having to read it themselves (honestly, spare yourself.

Google, facebook etc used open source and cashed out and are now driving sports cars, and Linux Desktop is dead, therefore the author has lost trust in open source.

That really is the extent of it.

That is possible, but it's also possible for any store of value , gold , fiat, stocks..

> …where my request was left to rot, without any response.

Hey, I am involved in the OpenSSF and happy to take at least a look. I maintain a popular python OSS project in the security area so we have that in common. Did your email actually go through, I just searched my list archives and there is nothing for gensim. EDIT: see your email now, have msg'ed the WG in slack.

> Made me wonder whether this is just a PR stunt / corporate power grab

I would not say it is, we have folks from OWASP on the technical advisory panel and many other non profit orgs / individual developers. One thing I would keep in mind, is that being a newly founded org, a lot of time has been spent working out and agreeing how we will operate, so the working groups are all still quite fresh.

lets encrypt are under the ISRG

This really is unsolicited advice. You really cannot assume your situation and circumstance is identical to OPs. He may well love his family dearly and already feel resolute its right for him to care for them. To walk away from family (unless you have another valid reason, such as its a dysfunctional situation) can haunt for the rest of one's life.

There are often arguments (with merit) over Bitcoins wasteful use of energy, but I expect a lot of it is from hindight of 'why the hell did I not buy some'.

Used this awhile ago for a large Python project, was very useful. I would love to use it still, but most of my work is now on rust / golang.

> There are some world class developers in Spain, Italy or France that are paid ~30K€ to 50K€ per year

I seriously question that. I hire a lot from EMEA and world class developers don't accept a pay of 30 to 50k, especially in France, Italy and Spain. Perhaps Czech Republic or the Ukraine yes.

Ironic in how it has parallels to physical rental stores (aka blockbusters) being a necessity.

This is simply false. There have been plenty of companies running 100% remote based teams successfully for a while now. Further to that, some of the worlds best open source projects are all coded as a type of remote team. Any problems that there are, are from management not being able to make the jump in culture and harness remote tooling.

It's always been a no brainer for my team to hire remote and we were majority remote before COVID. There is simple reason for this; The hiring pool is much much wider when you remove geographical restrictions. Trying to hire within the criteria of someone being able to physically transport themselves to a certain location limits greatly your ability to find and recruit talent. Even more so for niche areas where skills are even more in demand (Security Engineering in my case).

I remember just before COVID a large content streaming platform (the biggest one there is) were trying to hire security team members, it caught my interest and I was more than experience enough, but they had a caveat that hires were only available for those that can travel to Los Gatos, California. Suffice to say, being in the UK with children settled into school and liking my life here, it was a showstopper. edit: I just checked and they still have the same hiring conditions on their job board.

COVID has proven the case of 'necessity is the mother of all invention' and these companies are finally understanding that you can run remote engineering teams perfectly ok. Even though it's not like for like, open source projects have been operating this way for years and had set the blueprint on remote collaboration. Some of the folks on my team used to be office based (even though we worked together virtually, they liked the social aspect), however they have pivoted now. Firstly they love how they can spend a good 4-5 hour chunk of uninterrupted thought at pure unadulterated programming without someone wondering over in the middle of them debugging to say 'he, did you see the email I sent you'.