glenngillen

At least two of these are now on completely unsupported OSes that are no longer receiving security updates (and lots of latest versions of apps won't work). Especially given the uptick in major CVEs of late I'm very nervous about reconnecting any of these machines to the internet :/

shadow power dynamics is the answer. Someone with a title of "Regional VP of Sales" thinks they have a lot of power and influence and will exert that to get whatever they want. An IC engineer or product manager understandably wants to avoid the inevitable conflict and potential escalation should they refuse to attend. I agree they should just decline. I also understand the reality is more complicated because they know a decline isn't actually the end and the anxiety about what would follow can itself feel exhausting when it happens so often. So they choose to pick their battles/take the short-term path of least resistance.

I'd been running into a lot of disk pressure on my system from agents running. I discovered two main causes:

- my approach to using git worktrees for all work. Not entirely surprising, the duplicated build artifacts in each worktree being the main culprit here. There were some limited gains to be had by just being more efficient with how builds were managed but ultimately I just had to limit the number of concurrent features I was working on in a couple of particularly large repos.

- more insidious was the fact I was actually hitting memory limits more than I realised and causing my mac to have to swap heavily. The system was surprisingly still quite performant while this was happening... until it wasn't. Unfortunately as best I can tell the only "fix" when this happens is to restart the machine. There's no way to have the system reclaim any of the swap space once it's written to disk. Which if you have it thrash a couple of times a day (especially easy if you leave something running overnight) adds up very quickly.

Yeah, which IMO is actually the problem. They got so addicted to the sugar hit of SaaS they lost their way. The game change, the risk profile dropped drastically, but they kept their own economics and upside the same and made an absolute fortune.

The type of investment called out by the start of this thread sounds exactly like the type of speculative "we don't even know if this is technically possible, much less if there's even a market for it" that Silicon Valley was founded on.

And Amazon have effectively left it because they couldn't work out a way to turn all those purchases into a stream of shopping purchases on Amazon.com. And in the intervening years they've enshittified those devices by becoming increasingly intrusive with adds and "did you know..." interjections to try and squeeze whatever engagement they can.

Apple doesn't typically have the same incentives. It could turn out to be the perfect timing to fill the vacuum Amazon is leaving.

yep, did the same for my team at one place "[IMPORTANT] CUSTOMER OUTAGE" (or something similar).

We had a publicly viewable calendar policy. And I couldn't believe the audacity of people in other areas to take it upon themselves to just book over the top of existing meetings because they had decided their meeting was more important. And I'm not talking a group meeting where it's hard to find a gap that works for everyone, these were essentially 1:1 meetings where the organizer was someone with a little more seniority. No polite ask/DM first if it's ok, or a note in the invite to explain. Just see "focus time - no meetings" or something else _they_ deemed not important and they'd schedule it in that block and assume the IC wouldn't challenge their authority.

So had to play them at their own game to give my team their time back. The meeting was as much as an invite to them to challenge my authority as their previous attempts were. Conveniently it worked and nobody would book over my meeting. I do not miss working for larger companies.

It's quite old now, but check out the book "Trust me, I'm lying" by Ryan Holiday. Talks about how he did this as part of a marketing strategy when he was working at (IIRC) American Apparel, among other places. And how easy/often it happens in politics. Keep in mind the book is almost 15 years old, and talking about things that even at that point were what he'd done in a previous life/career.

That's for H1B immigration visa applications. Those are not green cards.

The lawyer I ended up using for a lot of my structuring happily admitted as much when I was shopping around for someone to do what I needed. I said something along the lines of "all the other quotes I've got are obviously more expensive, I have to think that's because they've put a lot more work into them to cover/mitigate any precedent I need to be concerned with and/or are better equipped defend these documents if we end up in court". His reply was: "Oh sweet summer child! You think any of us are showing up in court to defend these contracts!? No. If someone has issues with any of these, you'll send them to me and I'll charge you my rate to deal with them. If we need use a clause in these contracts to protect ourselves or get what we're owed then I'll send a bunch of stern emails about it, and I'll charge you my rate. But if anything ever ends up in court... hah... that's not us man. Now you're having to find a lawyer that specialises in litigation. Nobody that you're speaking to about these documents right now is going to show up in court to defend these documents. That's not how it works".

When I pushed the others it turns out he was right (except for one especially large firm who basically did everything, but it may as well have been a collection of a dozen different companies). Really appreciated his honesty but was all the more baffled by how the whole industry hadn't already been disrupted.

I'm not sure I follow the correlation or causation logic here. By the evidence presented the conclusion I would draw is it's very difficult to have repeated success. All your stated failures predated any unionisation.

If anything to unionization seems correlated simply to how long a company has been around.

Is this unique to AI? I feel like something changed with social media becoming kinda ubiquitous. Like everyone suddenly felt the need to have an opinion on every thing. And on lots of divisive topics the fact you might not have an opinion could have you face criticism for not caring and/or being on the "other" side to whatever position your accuser/interrogator is.

I don't actually know what it is or when the phenomenon changed, but it definitely feels like people don't say "I don't know" or "I don't know enough to have an opinion on that" very much any more.

In hindsight it was quite early in my career, but a bit over 20 years ago I felt burnt out in tech and wanted to try something new. I was share trading quite a bit so thought maybe I'd become a stock broker (online trading was only just starting to become a thing, so being a broker was still a real job at the time!). I finished the degree and got qualified, and while I loved the learning I discovered I hated the industry and that it wasn't for me.

But all of that discovery work, the financial planning, what their actual objectives were, having to dig into why someone wanted to buy a house, etc. proved to be some of the most invaluable and transferable skills I've learned (that, and SQL ;). A lot of that part of the course was learning how to ask questions, and learning how to follow-up to get past the superficial and often incorrect initial answers.

To your point I feel like there's these kind of meta skills that are transferable to many domains, but are sadly lacking these days from a lot of education that is hyper-focused on very role-specific qualifications. The ones that immediately come to mind:

- Learning how to learn (i.e., how to understand yourself, and improve)

- How to ask good questions (similar to above, but about others)

- And something I need a better label for because I just clumsily call it "sales", but in the Daniel Pink "To Sell is Human" style. Something like being able to structure a coherent and compelling narrative to other people. Clearly I fall short on this one.

Totally agree with unique at own domain isn't actually privacy. It wouldn't take much of a paper trail to work out the details.

I continue to use it everywhere for a few reasons:

- if someone emails me acting all friendly like we've had some previous relationship but it's sent to linked@mydomain or github@mydomain I know they've just scraped my contact details and it's spam

- similarly, if a vendor leaks or sells my data and I start receiving marketing from somewhere I don't expect it's easier to trace the source of the leak (and in some cases just blackhole that entire email address)

- I already use a password manager and have different passwords on every site, but having a different email address too raises the barrier further for someone trying to script an automated attack based off some other pwned data set.

yes, but how else would you know that "flare" was the load bearing part of that statement? /s