mdekkers

> This tiny detail makes the difference why employer-mandated drug tests are not a thing in Germany like it is in the US.

Not really. The business of employer-mandated drug testing in the EU is generally tricky, and employees enjoy wide ranging protections. Most countries only allow drug testing where there is a certain aspect of risk, and in most of those case, only a physician can perform the test, and cannot share findings, only declare the subject as fit for duties or not.

In Germany, specifically, a pre-employment test but a physician is allowed, and when employed only rarely and for very specific circumstances.

Many years ago, I was sent in to, incidentally, a major car-parts reseller - almost all car parts in the EU and UK pass through this firm. This was a family business, dad had built the business, retired, and the kids were running the place. Pretty much the first order of business for the kids was the modernisation of the IT systems.

My initial task was to do an assessment of who was using what, and what for, which all went really smooth, until we got to the “accounting floor”. I couldn’t get in, as the accounting team had locked the doors, and locked themselves in. Part of the modernisation was replacing the 100% Excel-based parts/accounts/supplier/customer ERP system with something that wasn’t Excel, and they simply weren’t having any of it.

We walked away from that project, a competitor gleefully took it over, got caught in a swamp of technical and legal complications, and lost a lot of time, money, and people.

> French intelligence

What a great idea!

My work headset is DECT, I always buy callcenter-grade headsets. DECT allows me to wander around the house as much as I like or need to during calls - kitchen, bathroom, balcony, whatever - with high fidelity audio. Bluetooth and other wireless technologies are significantly limited in range.

Autosave is table stakes for good editors

I love when <works ridiculous hours> is presented as some kind of flex. It isn’t. It is a reliable indicator of chronic mismanagement, not only of their own time, but of the time and capability of everyone else around them. Guaranteed these folks didn’t get their job on actual merits - possible perceived merits, sure, but again guaranteed that scratching the surface will reveal all kinds of nasty.

In this case - the App store is a case in point. It is a financial success despite, not because of its’ management, and the many myriad of ills that beset the App store (and have been for a very long time) clearly show this to be the case.

> They have to be looking at Adobe and going "yeah we don't want that kind of reputation".

They can also look at the market and Adobe and go “yeah, they have no alternatives, everyone is a subscriber now”

Yeah, that one. Where those people then go on with their stupid, petty, political infighting and senseless scheming thereby nearly bringing about the end of human species anyway.

You’ve clearly read the book, I am curious what would drive you to make such an obviously incomplete representation of the story. Being edgy? Contrarian for contrarian’s sake? Since you offer no additional context besides a vague (and uninteresting) insinuation that im somehow wrong, I suspect you are just trolling, smegger001

Have you seen how much they all bend over backwards for China?

> I look forward to an EU wide ban on smartphones in all schools, and hopefully a more general prohibition on kids having them at all.

Yeah, absolutely!! Prohibition on all manner of vices has such an excellent track record!

> Why do you assume we distroy ourselves?

Seveneves, by Neil Stephenson, discusses the human penchant for self-destruction much better then I can in an HN comment, it is worth a read. In short, though, we cannot, unfortunately, escape our humanity, and pretending we don’t take it with us wherever we go is wishful thinking. As a group, we are ruled by incredibly base instincts that no longer apply to our situation, but they still largely determine our trajectory.

If you find this interesting, I can thoroughly recommend the “King of Kings” series of podcasts by Dan Carlin.

> Most dev teams I work with are actively reducing their actual managed server and replace it with either Lambda, or docker images running in K8.

There are plenty of services that don’t fit on k8s or Lambda. Not all pegs fit in those holes.

Pretty much everywhere in Europe it is a legal right to be able to do so.

I have rented my entire life, and “change all the locks” has always been the very first thing I do. I have a couple of different size high security cylinder locks, and whilst no cylinder lock is unpickable, I’m pretty happy with mine.

My issue is with their “we will pay you according to where you live” policy which I find an unacceptable overreach. Pay me for the value I deliver to the business, not “this is the standard of living we believe you should enjoy”

Canonical and Gitlab are both on my “ignore until the end of time” list due to their dehumanising recruitment approaches. Some companies design their recruitment processes around the “let’s see how much nonsense they will put up with” approach to filtering people, and I don’t to work with, or use the products/services of these kind of companies. They are dead to me.

> Who owns the songs I generate using Suno?

> If you are a paying subscriber to Suno, then you own the songs you generate while subscribed to Pro or Premier.

So, as soon as I stop subscribing, I no longer “own” the songs? What if they go under? That’s nonsense.

EDIT: I was wrong, that isn’t how it works

> I have also been in places where vast majority think the issue points at one team. They are silent on comms despite being present. Then miraculously the issue is gone. The response to the question of what changed? "Nothing."

I’m currently in a multi-day troubleshooting issue where some key SSO component isn’t functioning correctly. This component is operated by an offshore outfit we can call Total Computing Screwups, and the entire troubleshooting process is a whole bunch of incredibly expensive folks sitting on a mostly silent call, hitting refresh on login sessions that will suddenly and miraculously work, obviously without any changes being made.

Every single person in the call, except for the outsourced operator, is an expert in the field, and none are allowed to see the logs or configuration of the malfunctioning system. (Which isn’t officially malfunctioning, because they refuse to acknowledge there is actually a failure, which means the issue cannot be escalated)

It is one of the dumbest destructions of capital I have been forced to take part in, and it is all in the name of “cheaper”. It is so stupidly frustrating.

These folks don’t get paid enough

ACARS is pretty cool https://www.rtl-sdr.com/rtl-sdr-radio-scanner-tutorial-recei...

Given the ongoing issues with ChatGPT (slow and _incredibly_ lazy) and all the copilot nonsense, as well as my growing aversion of how MS are muscling in on this space, I’m about to make a wholesale switch to Claude for my API and chat access

> Especially in the internet, so people can learn.

Have you been on the internet?

+1 for cyc, genuinely awesome and overlooked

Thank you for your thoughtful comment

> How is taking 15% or 30% of all revenue better than €0.50 per first annual install?

I think for free apps that’s a bit of a big deal?

Thank you. I am unable to find a therapist, and I was unable to manage with antidepressants. My mechanism right now is "see if you still feel this way a week from now" which - so far - helps. It isn't so much that I changed my mind, but more that I understand that there are people that depend on me being around.

Job is indeed a major factor. I don't currently work in a great place - it is generally a rather toxic place - and age-discrimination is, like most of the industry, rife. Pushing 54 it is hard to find a new gig, especially in this market, which doesn't help at all. After 30 years working at the forefront of this industry solving some of the hardest problems around, my skills, experience, and insights are just no longer required.

Life circumstances have left me without any kind of options for retirement, early or otherwise, so this is me for the rest of my life; I'm likely to die behind my keyboard. I'd rather go out on my own terms, watching the sun set behind the sea.

> I've had my own (thankfully brief) moments where I've thought about suicide just from the perception that my coworkers, my bosses, the entire world, just does not care about doing the right thing.

Please share how you managed with this. I’ve been here for a few years - since I lost my wife - and some days I can barely hang on.

This is very much “You are holding it wrong” territory.

There is nothing wrong with wanting the same ease of use and integration that iCloud affords, but extended to other clouds. Requiring additional steps (back up to machine, then upload to cloud) are, technically, nonsense, and is simply Apple flexing its’ anti-competitive muscle.

I’m sorry. As a machine model, I cannot condone acts of violence against disks. Have you tried discussing your differences between you, perhaps with the assistance of some professional mediator?