Back in the dark, old days of Linux I spent 5-6 hours digging through dbus events and X11 configs to get my mouse working. It was unplugged.

In my defense, in those days, Linux was such an insane asylum that diving into dbus and X11 as a first step was usually the logical approach.

The exit tax is pretty insane too.

Basically if you earn a certain amount or have a high enough net worth, you must pay a tax on all of your assets as if you were selling everything you owned. You are charged this amount even if you are not selling anything.

This is the only wealth tax in America as far as I understand it.

To be fair, with a proper autoscaling scheme in place these services should scale down significantly when not in use.

That being said, a big reason for using AWS/GCP is all the additional services that are available on the platform.. If the workload being run isn't that complicated, the hyperscalers are probably overkill. Even DO or Linode would be a better option under those circumstances.

I used to have that really common thought of "I don't care what you believe in. Just don't try to push your opinion on me."

No. It's bullshit.

The very existence of religion is a psychological drain on society. We are all worse off the longer it stays around. There is no such thing as a good religious person and anyone who says they are religious I immediately distrust.

So the PAC was paying for his first lawyer.. The whole point of the PAC system is that the candidate doesn't control it, right? How does a PAC get held accountable for witness tampering?

Not an apple fan really at all but buying that chip design company way back when seems to have been the right move. The M1 chip in my mbp is fantastic.

I have long loooooong ago given up on distro hopping because, at the end of the day, most distros are close enough to each other that it doesn't really matter which one you choose at the end of the day. These new immutable ones though.. They seem cool as hell. I need to give one a go someday.

I would love an Onion for software. This was great.

Honestly just changing the interview process would be enough to get more people into the business.

Literally yesterday I did a code challenge to track the distance, speed, maintenance schedules, and predict collisions of forklifts in a warehouse. The job I was applying for was a pretty average SRE roll.. System design, IaC, CI/CD pipelines, PromQL, etc.. How is the code challenge representative of the job in any way?

I feel like I need to learn leetcode algorithm patterns just for the interviews.. I never need them for the actual jobs I get hired for.

No we're not.

Just checked. Seems like Where The Hood At by DMX is still there. Is this really any worse?

Those days gave me a career so I can't really complain.

From the CEO: "Our competitors won't accept these jobs. They result in too many workman's comp claims. We'll take them."

It's a gig economy company.. They are willing to take them because the workers are considered independent contractors and not employees. They offload liability onto the workers themselves.

Good lord do I wish I was recording that when it happened..

I interviewed at a place a few weeks ago. I asked the recruiter what the salary band was. I told her I expected to be in the top 10-15% of that range.

"Well we don't really like to hire someone at that high of a rate."

Thanks for waving the red flag. Good luck to you. Talk to you never.

The US was able to make smoking cigarettes seem uncool. Compared to a lot of other parts of the world, they seem to have made real progress in cutting tobacco use.

Watercolor.

Children play with $5 palettes. Apparently I pay $20 for a single color tube.

I see German and French posts everyday.

Correct. It's only the US and Eritrea (the North Korea of Africa) who do this. It's insane.

I'm shocked the auto zoom function isn't mentioned. I am zoomed into the area where I am. I search for something. The app zooms out to show me results from places literal hours away.. Sometimes on different continents. I'm annoyed, I zoom back in to where I was, click on a result, and it zooms out AGAIN. WTF?

Knowing this stuff is fine but make sure to keep your goals in mind. If the idea is to get a job, figuring out how Bluetooth works isn't going to get you anywhere. You need to move in the direction the wider industry is moving. That direction is running containers in kubernetes.

If you can stand up a kube cluster, write a Prometheus exporter in go, scale pods based on those metrics, and auto resize workloads' resource requests, then you should be able to find a job without much trouble.. These are the things ops people are expected to do in 2023.

EDIT: The CNCF is a great resource for modern tooling.

Enjoy it. A night out is now cheaper.

In the case of small little indie bands, they often aren't on torrent sites at all. Given the choice between Spotify and Bandcamp, I'm going to buy the album on Bandcamp 100% of the time. I can contribute to the artist more and usually end up with a vinyl copy on the process.

Pirating has always been a solution to poor ease of access to content. If I could pay a legitimate subscription for a site with the catalog of PTP or RED, I would do it in a heartbeat. It will never happen though.

Yep. Meetups are the best. You def have to go regularly though.. Don't expect magic from day 1.

Real talk, you don't have the luxury of being an idealist right out of university. Your goal is to get a job. When you're in that job you will likely not have the luxury of being an idealist either.

When you have enough experience making practical, reasoned decisions, then you can stand on principals.

For context, I have been in this business for nearly 20 years. The people I have personally worked with who have resisted things on philosophical grounds ALWAYS get left behind. I've seen it with systemd, the cloud, and now I'm seeing it again with kubernetes. You cannot escape the collective inertia of an entire industry.

Obviously there are still thresholds.. I would never work for someone like Raytheon. You have to draw lines somewhere but saying you aren't going to work for a company that does user behavior tracking is short sighted and impractical.

I seriously doubt the director said anything that provocative

Even if he did, not illegal.

ACAB indeed..

Hello from Tbilisi! Слава Україні!

Agreed. I could run water sensors and solenoid valves for my basement water heater off of an arduino or rpi. I could also use a commercial product that has a warranty and a product engineering team and a QA department and etc etc...

I'm going commercial. The potential for damage to be done is too high for some hack job.

I've been in FOSS software for more than 20 years but honestly find the absolutism insufferable. It's not always practical and there are more important hills to die on.

Containerization (even for small things) makes modern infrastructure a LOT easier.

The Big Lebowski.. The dude just wanted his rug back.

I'm an American who has been living abroad for 7ish years now. I often read comments from people who say they would do it "but the taxes are brutal." Absolutely not the case. I dug deep into tax programs when I left and can comfortably say I am better off financially now than at any time I ever lived in the States.. A major part of that is my tax strategy.

I love talking about this but most people don't really care or realize how significantly it can change their lives.. Eyes just tend to glaze over.

I'm living in Tbilisi, Georgia. There are TONS of older foreign cars here with damage that would clearly fail an inspection in places like America.. Lots and lots of cars driving around with crumple zones that have been destroyed but the engine works fine. Apparently it's cheaper to import one of these than it is to buy a car here.

It's not just American and European cat's either. There are significant numbers of Japanese imports as well which have the steering wheel on the wrong side. Sometimes you'll get picked up in a taxi and the whole radio/infotainment screen is all Japanese.

I know you said the US but have you considered moving abroad? If you want a similar timezone to the States, Mexico and Chile have pretty easy immigration programs you should be able to qualify for without much effort.. The crime rate in Chile is about the same as Canada IIRC. I left the US in 2017 and I honestly could not imagine coming back at this point.

It's a big, stupid truck but so is every other truck it's competing against. It's got poor visibility but so does every other truck/suv being sold in America. The cheapest option doesn't have the longest range but it's still longer than the average person would realistically drive in a day. It can't haul much but the overwhelming majority of people driving trucks in America aren't towing or hauling things on a day to day basis.. The people doing real work buy vans or have special purpose trucks.

The steering geometry seems nice and the rear wheel steering is interesting. Those seem like the only major positives though.

It's not as bad as everyone seems to be making it out to be but it's obviously still a dumb car that shouldn't exist. That's all cars though really.

EDIT: Since the front windshield is flat, I assume its cheaper to replace than typical curved windshields? No idea though.. Might be talking out of my ass.

I'm an American living abroad and I use a VoIP service to maintain my US number. It had actually gotten more difficult to do this because of the changes they are making.

A few weeks ago I needed to submit docs proving I was a legitimate business with US tax id and whatnot.. If you don't have that, you have to provide an alternate number from a traditional phone contract of someone who lives in the US. Unless I were to pay for a phone subscription in America, there is no option for an individual to do this independently. I needed to use a family member's number.

My American phone number is very much necessary but I only use it on very rare occasions.. Paying something like $30-40 per month for an American phone contract (that I'll never use) plus the $15-20 per month fee for the voip provider is excessive.

If they just had an id verification system for American citizens and didn't tie it to a domestic account holder, that would be something.

Don't overthink this. Just start using something.

Hotel restaurant. The HR lady was giving my brother shit for not wearing safety shoes in the kitchen. She was saying this while in the kitchen wearing heels.

She picked the wrong day. Bro wasn't having it.

"What the FUCK are you doing in here then!? Get out of my FUCKING kitchen!"

Everyone had been feeling it.. He spoke for all of us.

I bought a pair if Beyerdynamic DT770 Pro headphones at least 15 years ago. I still use them all the time. Just change the ear pads and headband whenever they get gross and they're just like new again.

An RFC that essentially boiled down to saying, in excruciating detail, that I am qualified for the job I was hired for and that I can be trusted not to break the website.

Same. 5 minutes after installing Copilot I literally said out loud, "Well.. I'm never turning this off."

It's one of the nicest software releases in years. And it's instantly useful too.. No real adjustment period at all.

I think I really only use GUIs if I am learning something new and trying to understand the process/concepts or if I'm doing something I know is too small to automate. Generally once I understand a problem/tool at a deeper level, GUIs start to feel restrictive.

Notable exceptions are mostly focused around observability (Grafana, new relic, DataDog, etc) or just in github. I've used gh-dash before but the web ui is just more practical for day to day use.

For context, I'm in SRE. I feel like +90% of my day is spent in kubernetes, terraform, or ci/cd pipelines. My coworkers tend to use Lens but I'm almost exclusively in kubectl or the occasional k9s.