abridgett

I'll just leave this little NSA intercepting Cisco products reminder here: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/photos-of-an-nsa...

The hazard perception test was a great addition in my opinion. (Basically a video plays and you have to press a button when something dangerous has happened).

I passed my driving test 30+ years ago and then took the HPT as part of a motorcycle test 15 years later.

Paying attention (to the kid bouncing a ball at the side of the road, to the cyclist when it's windy weather etc) is a key part of road craft and I hope this made it much clearer with some (contrived) examples. TBH I just wish they let you click earlier (for _potential_ threats - i.e. before they step into the road, not just afterwards).

If a president flaps his arms on one side of the planet does this cause a hurricane of chaos on the other side of the world? And everywhere else.

This sounds reasonable. However there was a study showing major economic benefits if was free. These benefits came from more people implementing it, time saved by all those additional users, removal of licensing hassle.

Their "paint" advert wasn't bad either: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-ut_2GWIm4 though it can't compete with the music.

It's a sad indictment that it took all this effort, in 2019, to convince a world "leader" that climate change was real.

I wish companies were more environmentally conscious and stopped churning out swag. It's such a waste. Much of it you would never have bought, most is low quality. We don't need it.

I've asked them: a) _what_ details may have been involved. Currently the criminals know more than we do. b) why EBT had any data if Wise stopped working with then in 2023.

I'd except there to be a fairly strong obligation (probably on both parties) under GDPR to ensure that EBT destroyed that data.

I'll be following up

I still remember playing Quake on Linux - with the X display being displayed on a different computer over the network. The different computer was running HP-UX (HP's Unix) on a PA-RISC chip.

I'm not sure it can replace non-trivial setups - sudo/doas looks set to stay.

e.g when you need to restrict a set of users to run only certain applications with certain other users. sudo can do this (even if the config format can be painful).

No major spoilers that I noticed. Really recommend reading the books, each was pretty mind blowing to me in a different way. The best kind of sci-fi - that which makes you think and wonder.

I've only seen this behaviour once. Someone very publicly shouted at and then privately apologised to. Needless to say the shouter lost any respect I had for them - firstly for blaming without facts, secondly for being so pathetic they didn't make a public apology. The victim in this case went up in my estimation and us now a very successful team leader.

Google weather desperately needs this whenever it reports weather from "The Sun" (awful awful "newspaper").

Today: "Brits to bask in 20C sun" (that's 68F) Yesterday: "Yellow thunderstorm warning..set to spark travel chaos"

Just a tad over the top! Genuine weather extremes in the UK are pretty rare :)

It's even worse - under RIP act not only can you be "forced" to reveal any passwords:

- the onus is on _you_ to "prove" that you don't know it or have forgotten it - you can be told not to reveal that you've told them the password

Anyone administering systems might want to think about this, governments aren't known for good security.

No doubt this will lead to complaints that foreigners are coming over stealing our secrets _and_ our jobs at the same time :-)

IIRC they did something related a long time ago when you could get a 8 CPU box which was physically restricted to 6 CPUs purely so that it didn't fit into the "can have 8 CPU" Oracle license. About 2/3rds of the servers we sold at the time probably went to run Oracle and it gave us a massive TCO (total cost of ownership) advantage compared with other vendors, especially as the POWER chips were faster than the competition too. When most of the cost is in the software, the choice of hardware can still make a big difference.

GeForce Now was/is great. Bethesda though (amongst others) have lost a formerly loyal fan due to pulling their games. Why? I own the games, I paid for them. If I had my old PC still I could play them just the same. Presumably so that in several years they can run their own cloud service.

The greed of companies will be their own downfall.

Might want to change the subtitles from "that was sick" to "that was disgusting" just to prevent anyone misinterpreting that (unintentionally or otherwise) as "sick" is slang for "excellent" in some places.

It's particularly silly when you consider the number of offices and timezones. Not only is a large amount of interaction via video call, when on site there'll be a shortage of rooms and the sound quality is usually pretty dire.

I think there's a better idea: how should you become a better you.

Attempting to be 100x better "than the rest" strikes me as a _very_ unhealthy approach. To paraphrase an answer I read somewhere else:

"The best way to be a 10x developer is to make 10 of your colleagues twice as effective"

Note that _you_ don't achieve anything more - you've just unlocked the potential elsewhere. It's also immensely satisfying - much more so than being a "rockstar" developer (also known in many circles as the "a*hole").

Looping back to your question:

- look around you - solving a key problem currently ignored could be the best thing you can do for the company - compound interest - invest in making repeated actions better (automation, cookie-cutters etc) - improve efficiency - IMO docs, single source of truth are typically seriously undervalued leading to questions and mistakes both of which waste a lot of time - take a healthier attitude - it comes across to me as a rather immature "look at me, aren't I _amazing_" desire which will rub people up the wrong way. - learn at every opportunity - senior devs don't know everything - I've also learnt from kids still at school, sales people, friends...

What's worked for me:

- Try and become a child again (when I didn't have these worries/frustration). Concentrate on what's in my control. Don't worry about things outside my control.

- Stop reading the news. A family crisis after the shit-show that was 2016 clarified what _actually_ affected me.

- Stoicism. "Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius (recommended many times on HN) helped. That what he wrote 2000 years ago is so relevant today made this stick.

- Appreciating how fortunate I am (good job, health, life). I'm mostly happy, I try and act this way. Cut myself off when I'm going off on a rant. "Thinking happy thoughts" in other words, it's not nice for anyone else listening to doom-and-gloom. This also helps with the next topic:

- Friends. Putting in some effort with (not yet friends) at work, on walks, meetup etc - sometimes you end up with a few more friends.

- Distraction. Keeping busy with other things. Preferably creative or in-the-moment things.

You aren't going to fix the worlds problems. By _all_ means help and do your part, however getting angry and upset is only going to make you unhappy.

e.g. with all war in Ukraine, yes it's horrific. Perhaps you are in a position to help - offering a home, help or financial support? Sympathy and understanding for people you know who might be affected, reach out to them.

You comparison with building bridges without adequate testing is unfair. It's about increasing control, not giving permission to lower quality.

In terms of rollout it's more like releasing new drugs - initially it's very small groups that will be tightly studied, over time these groups are increased in size (and monitoring is probably reduced in scope).

The use of feature flags to control rollout and "blast damage" from unexpected behaviour or bugs is really useful. Let me give a real example I was involved with - mobile app development.

You can never test everything (not every Android phone variant, nor every 3rd party app which may interfere). Being able to roll out a new feature gradually and then revert (or in our case even blacklist certain models) is key to increasing quality and reducing problems. It also accelerates development and (in my mind a _key_ benefit) reduces stress/anxiety for the developers.

I did this in two different houses and it does depend on if you have bad culprits. By far the worst for me was a Zanussi washer/dryer with an on/off that went "clunk/click" and popped in/out - but would still use 10W (about £10/year back then). I just ignored that switch and used the wall socket switch instead.

A few timers on other devices to turn off bluetooth speakers overnight. Over the ten years I lived there it was a decent saving.

I wonder what systems the ISP has in place to avoid such networks becoming sthe source of DDoS attacks.

Given the generally dire security of home routers (and understandably low security of most home networks/users) it feels a little like giving people far more power than most can safely wield.

Some of these are pasting over product weaknesses: - inability to change private channels to public "as you might accidentally reveal secret info". Yes, but that's _my_ decision, not Slacks. - more than 1 or 2 active threads/channels is extremely painful and very easy to lose your way - whilst search is good, finding a thread from just a day or so ago can be very difficult (especially when there are many channels) - abuse of @here, @channel - this only seems controllable at a workspace or org level, not a per-channel level.

Yes, email and ticket systems have drawbacks, however slack is almost an anti-knowledge base in it's current state.

A public speaking & confidence course really helped me to _slow down_ - mostly whilst speaking but also whilst coding. I take my time to explain what I'm thinking and why. This has made me less nervous in interviews (and subsequently helped that nervousness beforehand).

Distraction - do something else, keep busy. I also have some "interview notes" I built up which I refresh _just_ before the interview. These notes are reminders for common questions (e.g. "describe when had to reach out to other teams").

Have several interviews - if you are interviewing at several companies then there's less pressure on an individual interview. You'll have many opportunities - even if you don't get into Meta now, I'm sure they'd like you to retry later.

Lastly, take it as a reflection of the company interviewing you. Some interviewers are more interested in tripping people up or showing off how much _they_ know rather than getting the best from the candidate - I'd just avoid those companies. Others bend over backwards so that you can shine, putting you at ease (detailed info about the interviews, conversational style interviews, friendly interviewers, relaxed surroundings etc). You may have the option to perform a take-home exercises which I certainly found less stressful (but take more time).

How does this compare with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X2x? x2x is over 25 years old. I'm sure UC is more streamlined, however the basic premise is the same. I did actually use x2x for a while (but normally just "exported the display" back to my home system. X-windows was/is rather amazing.

Whenever a google search shows up an Arch Linux wiki page I know the contents are going to be detailed and technical. I don't use the distribution itself, however this level of excellence has given it a place in my heart. Thank you to all the contributors :-)

I've been really enjoying https://www.youtube.com/c/ArjanCodes and frequently watch one over my lunch break.

He covers a lot of programming principles and good practice with realistic examples (i.e. _not_ "class Animal")

Rather interesting! It'd be great to have a quick definition popup so help answer the obvious "what the heck does _that_ mean?" questions.