Recent submissions

Comment · 3 years ago
Patrolling the Mojave almost makes you wish for a nuclear winter.
Comment · 3 years ago
Managers that do that are objectively shit managers. Sure, if your employee whines about every little thing expecting you to fix it all the time, turning it around on them is appropriate to foster some level of help-yourself capabity. But if your employee is selectively choosing to bring an issue to you as a request for assistance, turning it around on them is the same as 'fuck you, I'm not helping'. Bad manager. People don't quit jobs, they quit bosses. That is the kind of boss you might consider quitting, because they are poor at their job and do not have your back. In fact they are not even really listening to you.
Comment · 3 years ago
Fundamentally what they've deployed here is something a lot of organisations struggle with or don't even recognize as worth having - A reliable edge which you can trust sufficiently to form the functional core of a site.

For a restaurant chain this is something worth putting the development effort into because once you've figured it out and ran it for a few years to demonstrate it's reliability you can pitch the shift from a network-optional edge at each site to a network-dependent site with intelligent components hanging off it and depending on it. That's a pathway to having a major competitive advantage in the medium term that your competitors won't be able to put into place overnight once they realize you've left them behind.

You can't get there with the amount of effort often put into untrusted edge sites like this - aka a pc in a cupboard. You also can't get there with cloud when the weakest element in the chain is unrealiable site connectivity.

They could have done it in a lot of different ways, but going with cheap commodity hardware and avoiding expensive cluster license nonsense (vSphere etc) were smart choices. Spend that money on a compenent centralized tech team rather than vendor shinyness, and you can do a hell of a lot more (and often move faster, to boot).

Comment · 3 years ago
Since Ashley Madison caters to people wanting to cheat, it would self select for people with taboo-, thrill-, or risk-seeking tendencies. So not sure (and sure hope) this could be extrapolated to the population as a whole.
Comment · 3 years ago
No, but when I saw where Meta's effort had got them it struck me they might have been better putting that development work towards modernizing an implementation of SL.
Comment · 3 years ago
That’s a great reference, thank you for the laugh.
Comment · 3 years ago
Earlier this year I packed up a lot of my computer gear and stored in at the in-laws house, because we were putting our house on the market and this got us ahead on moving into a new place. Then the housing market tanked, my stuff including a Quest 2 is still sitting there, many months later, and I'll maybe be able to get back to it now mid next year.

I'm learning from you here now that I'm gonna lose all the paid content I have on my account?

Comment · 3 years ago
cocks gun I said Get. In.
Comment · 3 years ago
Yes, that is GPT output.
Comment · 3 years ago
I've worked on both sides of this divide, and most of it makes sense by just considering Chesterton's fence.
Comment · 3 years ago
Mustard was around from the early Romans/Gauls I think, if that counts.
Comment · 3 years ago
Perhaps. But what are the long-term ramifications of continuing down this track? Does a society of individuals with low cohesion survive in the long run? What motivations to pull together and overcome any adversity that might come along exists? Is it worth it for a few generations of improved individual freedom, if that society doesn't hold together longer than that due to a lack of cohesion?

“A house divided against itself cannot stand.” — Abraham Lincoln.

Comment · 4 years ago
Perhaps more like... 'engagement fatigue'? When it's truly rote or mindless work your brain can disengage and be somewhere else. With knowledge work you don't have that luxury, even when the work itself isn't what we could consider 'engaging', you nevertheless are obliged to be engaged mentally to carry it out. Do that long enough without deriving any satisfaction, it seems a perfectly sane reaction to want to escape the situation, or just plain shut off. It makes sense for our brains to realize we're spending a lot of brain focus and time on something that isn't activating any reward centers, and insist we stop doing that. That really seems like a fundamentally sensible and healthy response from a brain functioning properly.
Comment · 4 years ago
>As soon as you possibly can, start working on something you 100% agree with.

Man, that point resonates with me. I quit a while back due to severe burnout (actually, I think now, boreout) and have been struggling to get enthused about anything. I think what you said here is the core of why I might be done with tech as a profession entirely - I'm almost completely soured with the impact and direction of it as a whole.

So then the question becomes well, what do I agree with and want to do? That's a hard one. This is the only career path I've been on and even if I do find something else, starting off at 40 with no skill base is... oof.

Comment · 4 years ago
Perhaps it crashed outside of the environment.

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