mrsilencedogood

Just guessing, based on HN groupthink patterns:

1. that tax return shows the former CEO was paid almost 7M annually

2. sharing that on this post, they are probably insinuating that it was a mistake for Mozilla to pay their CEO that amount just for them to lose so much marketshare that they're now nearing an inflection point

The inflection point being where a negative feedback loop starts: FF loses marketshare, devs stop testing against it, sites break for users, users leave FF, FF loses marketshare, repeat

This post in particular shows that there are breakpoints where government and government-adjacent entities have policies stating that they test against all browsers with > some % of marketshare.

The laptop thing is usually less about clawing back property and more about preventing the laptop, potentially with customer PII and source code and other stuff on it, ending up sold on ebay or left laying around as a personal device to be eventually lost at an airport 3 years later, and so on. They take them back, wipe them, then either resell them to a reseller or reissue them to other employees etc.

My experience is that Linux is rock solid as long as you're not running it on super duper expensive hardware and doing crazy-big things on it.

Randomly in my career so far, notable kernel panic causes were:

- when a spark job finishes and deallocates close to a TB of memory, kernel panic. jobs using below 750GB were typically not seeing this happen, so it was something in there. this just kind of stopped happening after we updated the kernel and spark in a semi-unrelated push, so never really got a root cause here.

- bad hardware

- a spark job that was doing simply insane amounts of shuffle output (which goes to disk) was hitting kernel panics which ended up being related to a kernel bug that only impacted ridiculously high-disk-io-using applications, with some additional spin that made me think "ah so this is basically only affecting spark jobs"

- bad hardware

Did I mention bad hardware? I've spent way too much time hunting down "bugs" that ended up just being a bad mobo and linux was kind enough to inform you of it. But "this is the only program that causes the kernel panics!" and yet when we move it to a temp server for a few days the program mysteriously stops crashing. Another reason I do like "the cloud" - I can just cycle out an ec2 box I suspect is bad instead of fighting with the IT guy about whether the 2 year old expensive server is already busted or not.

ETF's are so pervasive because they're so easy. VIX futures can be held, but people still buy VIXY and similar products. You can buy literal physical gold, but people still buy GLD et al.

And it hardly matters that wrapping it in an ETF makes it potentially really weird (like how GLD and other gold ETFs are only barely nominally like holding gold, and VIX ETFs often hold cash-settled futures based on the value of a formula that is based on another formula that takes in various parameters of the prices and durations of options which themselves are priced based on the price movements of various equity securities and .........). The depths of weirdness have already been pretty well-explored by existing weird ETFs. A bitcoin ETF wouldn't even be particularly notable levels of weird, imo.

So, just the fact that it makes it really easy is typically a big boon to people getting exposure to whatever financial force the ETF holds.

This reads to me like "the darn developers are spending too much time not laser-focused on business impact and keep bikeshedding and doing make-work!"

It's impossible to tell if this is what's happening though. It can really go either way.

I've seen orgs where the perf-review meat grinder is driven so tight that engineers are essentially punished/PIPd for doing things that NEED to happen even if they aren't sexy business impact. Like upgrading library versions (not all of them, just the core/most important ones!) so you don't wake up one day and realize you're on a 6 year old version of a core library/framework. Even remediating incidents was treated as "not impactful work". This resulted in the expected shitstorm and teams were literally churning employees because oncall was so bad and just doing anything was so awful, and it took a staff engineer's guile just to get an otherwise-relatively-simple project over the line because you had to be a ninja just to navigate the awful existing mess of 10 years' worth of laser-focus on business impact.

And I've seen orgs where the engineers run rampant, doing random side-quests constantly, junior engineers run amok over-architecting every project with all of the skills their CS degrees gave them, senior engineers make magnum opuses of medium-sized projects, and principal engineers pontificate and aid and abet any and all architecture-astronauting that anyone else in the org does. And naturally none of it was done in any way shape or form in coordination with product.

And naturally there's everything in between. So whether they have a healthy amount of focus on non-sexy work and wish they were neglecting it more to reap shorter-term product-focused gains, or they have too much bikeshedding and they want to be more product-focused, it is difficult to say.

(Naturally the cynic in me says it is probably the former, though...)

With proxmox, I click the plus sign, pick an iso image, cpu/mem, and i'm good to go and I have a remote console viewer and tons of other neat mgmt stuff.

In the same amount of time, if I were diving in to DIYing it, I'd probably be about 5 minutes into reading the arch linux wiki page for KVM/qemu.

I read this as "vitamins vs painkiller" analogy. People forget to take their vitamins all the time, and if it's expensive vs the perceived (sometimes vague) ROI, then it's going to be the first to be cut. Versus... people do NOT forget to take their painkillers and nobody is looking too hard at how much ibuprofen costs (beyond comparing costs... they're gonna buy it regardless).

Not too much new info here.

It's been interesting to me to watch this "fight" from a user perspective. I say fight in scare quotes because it seems to mostly be EGS whinging and splashing about and Steam just ignoring their existence entirely.

But it's interesting to me because I've always felt like Steam's moat was weird. I mean, it's PC. There's no moat in the same way that Android or iOS have. Prior to steam, people just put their items on their dang desktops, for crying out loud. Still can. Still do, for most software that's not games. And there's obviously ~0 cost to installing multiple launchers. It's what, a few bits of disk space (nothing compared to the size of even a small indie game, which will easily be 1GB nowadays) and an icon in your app tray, if you even let it run on startup.

AND people already use multiple launchers! It's not an fdroid vs playstore scenario, where grandma isn't going to install fdroid. Grandma is already installing random exe's from all over the internet. And gamers already have company-specific launchers - battlenet, EGS for fortnite, and so on. And they have an existing install base, from fortnite! Though I suspect most of their users are mobile. But it's a big leg up vs trying to crack the chicken and egg problem of no games = no installs = no games.

And yet, here we are. They can't even hardly give away games for free! They offer half the fees and frickin pay popular up and coming double-A titles for exclusivity. And yet still Steam is huge and games will release on EGS and on Steam and literally (there's a tweet with an example somewhere) games will see <1% of sales come from EGS.

So - what's Steam's moat? It's CLEARLY there. And I think it's simple that it's just brand and trust. Gamers (sorry, forgive me use of the term) are used to being jerked around and treated like crap, and they're tremendously suspicious of big game companies, since they're so good at ruining everything just to eke out more profits even if it kills the dang thing long-term.

But Steam has their trust because 1) they have a very good track record of not f'ing people over and 2) people trust Gabe because they know Valve is privately held and Gabe is in control. So there's this capitalist/shareholder capriciousness that's simply not a factor in Valve's business but is literally the entire business of EGS. Do people think Valve is here for charity? Certainly not. And yet there's absolutely this perceived difference between Valve and Epic where Valve is the "I make money by making customers happy, just like I have done for twenty years" type of money-making company and Epic is clearly driven in a much more stereotypically slimy sort of capitalist fashion.

I'll throw in one random anecdote: I'm sure everyone else saw the HN threads about the OLED Steam Deck? Where they're like, making screws easier for people to tinker with in the newer revision? That's the kind of thing I'm talking about with Valve. Gamers love Valve and Valve loves gamers loving valve (especially since it drives so much revenue).

Ah just to be clear, I don't think I really detailed any of the things I experience that make me suspect I have ADHD. I do struggle a lot sometimes. For instance: The kids need socks so we can leave. I go upstairs. Hmm I want to check how that download is going that definitely doesn't matter at all right now. I check it anyway. Maybe click around a bit. Now I need to pee. What was I up here for? Go downstairs. Wife (rightfully) asks me where tf I've been and why don't I have socks. Etc.

Another example: hyperfocusing on something (again, usually programming-related... thinking about a project). Need to do a simple task. Autopilot doing a different task because I'm too busy stuck in my head thinking about the thing.

It pays off during interviews, oddly enough - the anxiety and novelty have me super sharp. Same thing during incident response when things are broken.

It's the classic executive dysfunction and novelty-seeking stuff. I don't have the hyperactivity symptoms though.

This is armchair analytics so take me with a grain of salt, but:

- server/cloud computing is largely all about performance per watt

- the latest couple gens intel seem to be struggling to innovate and are just getting better benchmarks by cranking up the power consumption. even AMD's latest release is along the lines of "x% faster per core, XX% more power draw".

So I wonder if this is percolating out into the server/cloud space where people are just watching the chipmakers trade off efficiency for benchmarks and are unimpressed.

This resonated with me somewhat. I think what he describes is my default inclination... I focus very closely, struggle to multitask, etc. Classic ADHD symptoms, though I cope because a) I think my symptoms are relatively mild (though noticeable). I think I could get a diagnosis if I wanted one, but could also probably avoid one if I wanted to. And b) I have the great luck that I can simply "weaponize" my hyperfocus to get work done. I know that in general people can't pick what they hyperfocus on, but I will suggest I don't pick... it's just that I always hyperfocus on coding and coding is my day job. So, quite serendipitous. Thank you Alan Turing, I would be homeless and alone without your inventions.

But uh - back to the topic at hand - I also try hard to spend at least some time just being open and perceiving. Looking around for no purpose but to absorb and observe what is there to be absorbed and observed. I think sometimes I take it too far - missing my turn because I was examining the construction off the highway too closely, wondering what that construction worker holding the sign was thinking of to have that curious expression on his face - but I think it's better to overcorrect a little than to not try.

But this is just Windows 11 Pro, though, not Enterprise. I guarantee you gamers (who are probably a big contingent of people who buy Pro but not Enterprise) are going to be turning this off so fast.

I actually used Geany as my main editor for Ruby on Rails and ruby in general.

Python has pycharm, Java has intelliJ, but ruby has just RubyMine which doesn't have a community edition and also isn't very good (at least when I tried it like 5-8 years ago).

Geany was nice because while it didn't have autocomplete for anything but just text symbols, it did have enough Project-related features that it matched how I liked to view my files as a directory tree rooted at a project dir. And the syntax highlighting was good and so on.

I ended up switching to vscode (well, vscodium, anyway) after I used vscode at work. Maybe I should check up on Geany again as of this big 2.0 release. I'd like to use an actually-free editor, though I settle for vscodium-style "free" when there's a big delta in productivity and features.

I'll just pile on my anecdote because I am a backend dev but want to make websites since apparently end users don't like reading and hand-composing JSON or something.

A while ago, a few years I think, I learned react with class components. Hooks were never mentioned, so I don't know if they didn't exist yet or were in some nascent stage. I thought "huh neat this makes writing js not completely awful" - my only "frontend"-related background was in desktop UI development with Swing and Qt and such. As I mentioned, I'm mostly a backend dev.

Anyway, I wrote a small internal app for my job at the time and shipped it and it was neat, all the other backend devs (we had ~no frontend devs) were suitably impressed with how much less awful react was than vanilla JS.

Fast forward... I suspect 3-ish years. Suddenly hooks were popular and class components were not and people were being pushed to migrate (since newer versions of libraries were preferring hooks). My hard-won frontend knowledge is already outdated! And imagine my surprise when I learned SSR was back?? and something about next.js which I guess is still react but it's a server packaging of it as well and that bleeds over into letting you do more stuff on the frontend, something about server-side props? I was disappointed with how much had changed despite the actual product - the websites you can build - still essentially staying the same.

And this is just for React - the winner! I had managed to correctly pick the winner and there's still all this churn. Meanwhile, as you mentioned, rails is still almost exactly the same (all its churn has been trying to pick a not-awful way to integrate javascript, ironically) despite several major versions passing, Spring is the same, etc.

There's certainly different types of people who struggle to afford a home.

For people living in an expensive apartment, they might be barely making rent. Whereas they could obviously afford a mortgage for a similar monthly amount - but since they're living paycheck-to-paycheck they can't save the prodigious 20%. So they're stuck.

Of course perhaps some people have a nest-egg from a windfall or inheritance but then couldn't handle the monthly payment.

The main barrier these days to putting less down is twofold - one, you need to pay PMI which is just compounding the monthly payment problem. Two, good fricking luck getting your offer accepted with <20% down in these times. Sellers read into offers more than just "is this financed y/n" and there's IMMENSE preference for buyers who can put 20% down, because it signals that a) if necessary they could pay PMI and drop down the up-front % in order to close on a contract, and b) they probably have more cash than just that 20% and are only stopping at 20% because it is customary and they could weather unforeseen issues more easily.

To put it in anecdote form: I sold my house in 2020. We had 8 offers presented to us after 1 day on the market. All were for 20% down because my agent didn't even hear offers from people with less down, since we had so many at 20%. In mid-2023, my brother bought a house in a similar sort of area (metro area of a major-for-the-midwest city). 2 days on the market, he was one of 3 offers, all for 20% down and about 50k over asking (the house was priced somewhat low as a marketing strategy, but I'm guessing based on comps they still had to go in about 10k over a non-meme version of the list price). He wouldn't have even been in the running if he didn't have 20% down. And he also had to waive all contingencies which almost made his financing fall through/be late due to something stupid a random inspector said.

It's tough out there. Even if you can nominally "afford" a house, it can be hard to actually close on one in the open market without someone more financially established who is able to backstop you in various ways.