gombosg

> Just save a ton, buy whatever stuff truly makes you happy, and your savings give you flexibility.

Retirement simply means that you could just live off of your savings interest. But that doesn't mean that you have to stop working.

For me, this is about three things: 1) Prioritizing joyful experiences, social connections, self-development and happiness over (expensive) material possessions 2) Being financially responsible, knowing how much I earn, owe, spend and save 3) Maximizing future life options involving less well-paying jobs (working part-time, retiring, taking some time off, starting a new career, whatever) when I get bored/burnt out of my current career or get health issues, need to look after a family member etc. So much can happen in a life.

Yes, it's a real issue, unluckily having expensive hobbies instead of cheaper ones. :)

For example, I love motorcycling and really enjoy skiing - but have to find a balance in order to save some money. I guess this is up to everyone's own to find out.

Personally, I keep on motorcycling with a simpler, older bike that's cheap to maintain. And I don't ski, because nobody else in my family does, so we choose other activities that we could enjoy together like traveling a bit or hiking.

Nice! Looks pretty good as long as I stay here in Central-Eastern Europe and live a minimalist lifestyle. (Buy second-hand clothing, used gadgets, no car as long as possible etc.)

Actually promoting a materially minimalist life is very healthy, because - as long as it's voluntary - it lets one focus on maximizing happiness not coming from material possessions.

Wayland became the default in Fedora maybe 2 years ago. I'm still using X.Org on my desktop (nvidia card), and _experimenting_ with Wayland on my laptop.

I love the touchpad screen gestures and overall it's a solid experience, but screensharing e.g. in Zoom is still kind of broken or not working as expected. Not really a drop-in replacement. :(

The initial TLS handshake contains the hostname in plaintext, also DNS queries can be sniffed. On the other hand, MITM would be like changing a certificate in an attempt to alter traffic, this case is simple traffic blocking by doing packet inspection. (Which is also not nice obviously)

Are you sure you need to have that Drata agent on all the time?

AFAIK it only checks a few items. We had to install it, too for SOC2 compliance. I installed it, let it send in a report (because I'm on Linux, I manually had to make a few screenshots as proof), then uninstalled it.

I'm happy to do the above process next time they complain, if ever.

I heard about these tracking software and I sincerely hope they won't get any more prevalent. As I see they are somewhat present in the contracting world.

I treat it as a total, humiliating devaluation of creative engineering work (and thus their identity!) to that of unskilled factory workers.

Everybody feels this friction when committing to some decision, especially when they are life-changing decisions like moving to a new area, taking up a new job (or career), marrying somebody, having kids etc. It's natural.

Usually it's impossible to evaluate every circumstance and make a 100% rational and informed decision. And you are right that committing to something - walking down some path in life and staying responsible to your choice - closes other doors in life. This can lead to analysis paralysis, being stunned by the variety of options.

What you can gain by making up your mind and having a responsible commitment is that it can bring you to depths you have never seen or experienced before, which can lead to more happiness and self-development (spiritual development).

In many situations like choosing a life partner or a career path, you can only have a 'best guess', and the rest is actually made up by your own faith and hard work in deepening the relationship.

I recommend this (pop) psychology book which has some chapters touching on this topic. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/347852.The_Road_Less_Tra...

Also, the number of developers is increasing exponentially over time. There are maybe a hundred thousand people out there who have >25 years of dev experience, and millions who have <5. E.g. see [1] - 16 times more engineers filling the SO survey with <5 years of experience compared to >25.

The job market has to roughly follow this demographic trend, otherwise companies would fall behind competitors.

[1] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#developer-pro...

I'd like to add that modern agile IT environments are different than that of traditional engineering.

We aim for fast MVPs, fast iterations, "failing fast", "moving fast", "delivering value quickly", generally preferring speed over quality, agility over "waterfall" planning, continuous delivery over batched releases and, well, often accruing tech debt over shipping features later.

One can argue that "fail fast" should not be about code & feature quality but rather about determining proper scope, splitting features sensibly etc. But then we still have deadlines to meet and code quality suffers.

What I'm saying that this kind of fast-moving environment actively discourages traditional (like doctors & civil engineers) engineering practices.

You might have lots of (unit|integration|E2E) tests but the company may miss practices like proper security reviews and code won't be reviewed, tested and approved by multiple people like, say, bridge building plans are.

This problem mostly comes up not with your usual web app but when critical systems are affected (like in the aerospace industry or industrial systems). But through supply chain attacks, nearly any system can be vulnerable these days.

We should definitely have better regulation on how software is made.

Thanks for recommending this, it's awesome!

> the proper byte-code interpreter could be enabled in Freetype and the autohinter disabled

Can you point me to some docs about how this can be done?

No, it's not supported on Linux due to this Chromium bug [1]. For example, GNOME automatically switches themes via an extension [2], and most apps like Firefox honor that setting. But not for Electron apps, at least not yet.

It would be great, since my personal preference is also light theme during the day, dark at night.

[1] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=998903

[2] https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/2236/night-theme-swit...

How would you pay for individual articles?

Up-front? (If not, that's called donation.) If so, then what happens if you happen not to enjoy the content?

Will you (users) feel like playing lottery every time you purchase an article? Feel disappointed for the purchase you just made? Or just quit paying on a certain site, for a certain author etc. after reading too many 'bad' (subjectively) articles?

From this standpoint, I understand that subscriptions are for sites - they have editors, policies and a reputation to maintain and you buy into that with a single purchase.

Or rather not, as the article argues... and I argue that per-article micropayments may not be the way out.

The problem with over-engineered projects... our team inherited a project that was designed by some architects in an ivory tower and implemented by some other engineers.

It was quite complex (message queues, multi-threading, async etc.) so that it would be 'scalable' yet crushed under the slightest load, customers were experiencing delays during peak hours.

We removed about a quarter of the code (some intermittent queues & components), nothing changed in terms of functionality. Now we're removing more code and switching over to less complex data structures to fix the delays.

Maybe a complete rewrite would have been better after all, who knows.

I'm not a very experienced developer. I like to ship stuff and get projects done in reasonable time and a "YAGNI" attitude. Let's just rewrite stuff and introduce more abstractions when it actually hurts and a refactor is in scope.

On the other hand, I see a tendency that if you give projects (it could be a greenfield project or some maintenance) to a team of, say, 6 developers, then they will just 'create work' for themselves, filling up the todo list with items which may lead to an over-engineered project that could have been easily be done by 3 people within the same timeframe.

If you have some good reads/stories on this topic, patterns to watch for, I'd appreciate if you shared them.

I don't think so, in Fedora already python == python3. I guess it's a matter of breaking & fixing many packages.

At high school we were not allowed to play games in the computer lab. Liero fit on a floppy disk so we could hide a copy of it on nearly every computer and play it during every break when the teacher was not present in the lab room. Good memories of nuking the hell out of everyone and filling the screen with Zims and watching the poor worms die! :)

Exactly. We use Renovatebot for the same purpose. It pins dependencies and creates PRs for updates. Amazing to see how often the builds break, even sometimes after minor updates. But at least we fix them before release, and not after... :)

I sincerely hope you're being sarcastic here.

I totally agree and it's likely that the public will be much better equipped after this pandemic ends. So all of us will have a box of disposable masks at home, and will be educated about when and how to wear them properly.

Right now, the average person probably only has 1 or at most a few masks, they don't dispose of them after use and probably wear (put on/off) them in a wrong way.

Out of the 7 references, most of them are journalistic articles and not actual scientific research.

The question is 'does wearing masks out in the public decrease virus spread, when social distancing measures are already in effect?'.

One linked (not cited...) research examines virus transmission and effects of mask use in a hospital setting - irrelevant for the question.

Another examines filtration properties of homemade masks, and concludes that they have little if any effect if not used with other measures, and doesn't (!!!) recommend their use.

A third one, a SCMP journalistic article refers to a Chinese scientific journal article that has been retracted.

I don't find these as very compelling arguments.

It's OK that your 'belief' contradicts official WHO guidance but that 'MASKS-NO MASKS' graph went a bit too far as a misstatement (i.e. "presenting facts in an alternative way").

Let me paste the official advice here for educating readers: https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2...

> If you are healthy, you only need to wear a mask if you are taking care of a person with suspected 2019-nCoV infection. > Wear a mask if you are coughing or sneezing. > Masks are effective only when used in combination with frequent hand-cleaning with alcohol-based hand rub or soap and water. > If you wear a mask, then you must know how to use it and dispose of it properly.

The kind of misinforming you are doing is dangerous in these times, especially that the official WHO standpoint is that wearing masks in a wrong way (using it multiple times, touching or taking off in a wrong way) is worse than not wearing them at all during already decreased social encounters (i.e. already staying at home, and going out at most for groceries).

Or are you stating that the WHO is lying?

Those Asian cultures have a different epidemic curve not due to mask wearing, but because a totally different social structure, prior experience concerning epidemics, preparedness, attitude towards authority & emergency measures and other factors. So it's a fallacy of cherry picking to say that it's 'because they wear masks and all our authorities are wrong'.

or Windows, right? :P

Hairy indeed.

I just spent 2 days programming a timezone selector in a React form that changes the displayed date/time as you switch timezones but the underlying UTC representation wouldn't change.

All this without loading 500k JS timezone libraries. I only used Intl API and tz.js [1].

The trick simply was to temporarily shift the date by the difference between the local time and the edited time zone. :)

[1] https://github.com/dynasty-com/tzjs

Such a good read, thanks for sharing this page! (And the authors of course)

It's a nice article, but the title says, how to improve your productivity - and the article contains a whopping 120 occurrences, of "me, my(self) and I". It's really hard to read it and relate to it that way because it sounds like the bragging of an egocentric person instead of useful, actionable advice.

I totally agree and an electric bike (even a small motorbike) is a great choice for daily commutes.

I really hope that car ownership will decline once we'll have usable self-driving technology with shared fleets.

Yes. You'd (we'd) need better infrastructure (20 miles is doable via train or something) and more remote work. That's also something that will be more widespread in the coming years.

Plus we need more environmental-conscious lifestyle choices from people. Where one lives is also a lifestyle choice, not an invariant.

The only reason today's cities exists the way they are (huge suburbs, lots of commuting) is because they are based on car transportation, unfortunately this is pretty hard to change.

See this for a historical overview: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/08/commute-time-...

> ...dragging 2 tons of car along with you just to go get groceries is a little bit like paying $5 for single day of cable TV even though all you watched that day was two minutes of the weather channel...

If only humanity would start to realize this, that would alone help to save us from the coming climate catastrophe.

By the way the article does a nice job at describing why this is so hard for hundreds of millions of people, especially without help from the government in the form of nudging and infrastructure development.

Oh heavens. I played the free version in 2009. That was more than 10 years ago! Only Xen was missing back then... so I waited. And now it seems to be ready :D