abhiyerra

Chromebooks…

Your experience sounds exactly like mine. I downloaded Linux 2.6 which took 2 days to compile. Then when I installed it on my Slackware system completely hosed it. But learned so much…

I don’t think people consider the negative ramifications for this on the other side. Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft have a ton of H1B. Take India, as an example, since that is where a majority of H1Bs come from. It has been pretty lenient in allowing American tech into the country. Everyone uses Google, YouTube, Windows, WhatsApp and Amazon. All of those are profits that go to America.

If H1Bs are dropped or Indian workers are tariffed I believe you will start seeing a reciprocal tariffs, fines or calls for domestication.

H1B started off with the right idea, but has essentially become gamed to hell. It has created a new white collar slave class that companies exploit.

The Irish too… though they were given things like prisons.

Scots legacy of the empire can still be seen in the bank HSBC. Unfortunately, history sort of forgets that the Scots were involved in some of the more egregious aspects such as slavery and opium.

(Studied British Empire/Indian History)

That I have a DevOps company working entirely on Linux can be directly attributed to realizing as a kid that Unix was a real thing and I needed to install it on my own computer. Interesting it was soon after this movie came out that FreeBSD and Linux were becoming popular.

Never worked at Dropbox, but I absolutely loved Paper.

The problem at Dropbox seems to have been that there was no cohesiveness to all the products. Paper, Passwords, Sign, all seem to have never been truly integrated into a single experience. Each one felt like it was trying to have its own identity.

If you read their annual report they bet the farm on RedHat and Kubernetes. They spun off their legacy services business and have basically have monopoly power over the Federal government, banks and defense contractors. They have been buying out other Kubernetes vendors such as Kubecost. They are are pretty focused now, we will see how well they will do long term.

Heh. Got a customer recently around this. Entire infrastructure and CI/CD vibecoded. They half implemented Kubernetes in Github Actions that were several thousand lines long and impossible to understand.

I think the problem will get worst. I dislike the marketing around AI, but I do think it is a useful tool to help those who have experience move faster. If you are not an expert, AI seems to create a complex solution to whatever it is you were trying to do.

Oh man infrasearch. With Gene Kan right? Was trying to revive xcf at Berkeley with some friends.

The type of oil that the US produces (light and sweet) can't be handled by US refineries which need (heavy sours). Why we are still a major importer of oil.

All oil is global commodity and the US refineries can’t take the oil that the US produces. So they mix it with heavy sours from Canada so the refineries can handle them. So a lot of the oil in the US is dependent on foreign oil as you said.

The real problem I see is the one child policy. If China decides to go to war and say they have 1000 deaths. How many bloodline die? I feel like there would be a hesitation to fight on the Chinese side if they were to take any losses.

It is one of the reasons I don’t believe China would take on Taiwan.

Anecdotally, I heard some Indians in the USA working at Big Tech are moving back to India to take the skills they developed in the USA to train and organize teams in India.

I’d say what India struggles a lot with is organizational skills so it will be interesting if this is true and to see what results in a couple of years. Will Indians continue on the services path or will they move to the R&D path.

I’ve been wondering if the showdown in Iran if it leads to a conflict will bifurcate the oil prices, the US vs rest of the world. If the Middle East is in smokes then the US can dictate oil prices with its control of the supplies in Guyana and Venezuela.