fooblat

As an American who moved to Berlin 15 years ago, I love not needing a car. We like to visit Paris, Amsterdam, London, Florence, and more cities multiple times a year and we never get a car. Between public transportation and my bicycle, I can get just about anywhere I need to and usually faster than in a car.

If I need a car for some unusual errand, which is rare like once a year, I use an app to cheaply rent a car of the needed size for a few hours.

Recently had to go to the US for a short trip and I had to rent a car. It felt insane how much time I had to spend in my car just to visit people who all live in the same metro area, due to all the sprawl.

This article could have been published 30 years ago. In professional unix admin circles this was already well known back them. Although I could be misreading it as the article is not very clear. I think this are the points it is trying to make:

1. Once upon a time you could rely on the passwd file and shell behavior as an effective means of authentication and access control.

2. It has been a very long time since that was an effective approach, for a variety of reasons, and you should not do this on modern production systems.

In case you aren't aware, UTM is a full featured VM solution for Apple Silicon machines which is freely available and easy to use.

This is not a case of one or the other. I do all of the above and more.

I imagine that (at least) 2 things have happened to Google Search.

1. SEO content farmers have filled it up with low quality results.

2. Google used ML to tune the system and it optimized for the lowest common denominator, incompetent searchers.

The average person never learned how to construct succinct search queries and so habitually enters too little or too much into the search box. Current Google Search wants to help the poor searcher so it adjusts their entry, or in some cases rewrites it completely, before processing it and returning results it has decided that they really want.

edit for clarity

Yeah, I refuse to buy any product that requires a subscript simply to be able to use it. A subscription should bring new value every month, like a magazine. I'm OK with subscribing to streaming video services as long as they keep updating the content.

I mostly run open source at this point because I'm also tire of everything commercial having telemetry built in.

That's why I laugh when I see they want to charge a subscription for this. It's easy enough for any competent developer to take available open source tools and crank out something to meet their needs in an afternoon.

Before UTM came out I was using xhyve with a little custom scripting. Not a solution for the masses but good enough for me.

I love UTM.

It works great for my needs. I mostly develop infrastructure automation and configuration tooling and I run all my VMs in terminal mode. The wide availability of arm64 distros and OSes makes this easy.

I also use it to run a tiny pi hole instance when I'm traveling.

In my recent experience, Google search is totally broken for anything that is hard to find or uncommon.

I recently search for "raspberry pi uart hat" and Google responds with the following:

     Not many results include the word "uart" so we eliminated it from your search terms. Here are thousands of irrelevant results about random raspberry pi hats you aren't interested in.

I don't understand this logic at all.

From my perspective this is undesired by the vendor because there was no therapy session, just various free uses of OpenAI via their account.

I'm starting to see a lot of products in "beta" that seem to be little more than a very thin wrapper around ChatGPT. So thin that it is trivial to get it to give general responses.

I recently trialed an AI Therapy Assistant service. If I stayed on topic, then it stayed on topic. If I asked it to generate poems or code samples, it happily did that too.

It felt like they rushed it out without even considering that someone might ask it non-therapy related questions.

For me this article joins a long list of "I don't believe in X" where the author has apparently only experienced bad versions of X.

Most of the time with the articles, the answer to "X done poorly" is to switch to "Y done well" but doing X well would have likely worked too.

Personally, my most enjoyable job as an engineer was when I worked on a project by myself in 1 week sprints. I spoke to my manager twice a week: 15-30 minutes Monday morning for "sprint kickoff" and 15-30 minutes Friday afternoon for "sprint wrap up" and how I spend the rest of the week was up to me. When a second more senior engineer joined the project it was even more enjoyable to work on it together in the same sprint format.

Having a great manager also helps a lot!

My HR team got a Leadership Development plan for several of us from sharpist.com. They match and supply the coaches. Very happy with it so far!

I have been an engineering leader for over 10 years and in all this time I received almost no training or coaching. I was pulled up from my role as an engineer.

For the past 6 months I have been working with a remote leadership coach and it has been incredible! My coach is extremely experienced and alternates between prompting me to solve my own challenges and sometimes just telling me what to do in a given situation.

I highly recommend it to anyone in a leadership or management role.

edit: typos

I took a look at their privacy policy and the company behind this blog isn't even GDPR compliant, despite their claims. Note the following from their privacy policy:

"Research and analysis - We may process usage data and/or transaction data for the purposes of researching and analysing the use of our website and services, as well as researching and analysing other interactions with our business. The legal basis for this processing is our legitimate interests, namely monitoring, supporting, improving and securing our website, services and business generally."

This for of tracking requires consent. It cannot be justified as legitimate interest. Even this questionable blog post itself says so "Why: Because analytics is not required in order for the site to function."

edit: typos Their site never asked for my consent.