aksss

Hey, I met Vint once at a conference - we were talking about some subsea fiber projects I was involved with. At the time he was working on interplanetary IP (IPIP? jk), which I thought was pretty stellar. Nice guy and very curious - qualities we should all work hard to foster.

Something I hated about working in corporate America was surviving multiple leadership regimes, watching the same lessons being learned over and over, having to recount history to new regimes, it got really tiring, and particularly dealing with the attitudes and self regard of some.

I remember these issues from earlier Surfaces. I was not impressed. Latest ones are pretty dope tho, IME.

If you have desirable skills, why does the business have all the power? If you don’t have desirable skills and yet remain employed, how could you expect otherwise?

Just being real here though, hiring flaky employees is enormously expensive. Every hiring manager / business owner would just as soon not waste their time on it. So there are these heuristics that have organically developed for how to spot good employees vs bad. Not having the stability, foresight, or courtesy to (be able to) give notice is merely an indicator of whether you have your shit together. Similar example: an HR director once told me early in my career that drug tests (back when those were a thing) are basically just IQ tests - the company doesn’t give a shit if you smoke pot, but if you can’t control yourself enough knowing you have a test coming up or you can’t figure out how to engineer a workaround, you’re probably dumber than the candidates we want.

The system is reasonable in the sense that it’s explainable and predictable on both sides. Social convention seems preferable to me in this context to binding contracts.

Globalization played (plays) a huge part in this timeline too. If I can outsource your job to a place that really does treat their employees as disposable, you should just be happy to be employed. And even if I don’t want to offshore, how does my product/service succeed or remain sustainable if my competitors are all offshoring (or indeed come from offshore)? I’m not defending this attitude just distilling and illustrating through extreme language what I see as a reality of global competition.

Post-WW2, America had a lock on global manufacturing and was like last man standing in a burned down world.

It was/is an illusion to think that could be a permanent state.

The pre-war employment situation in America looked nothing like post-war. Your race to the bottom narrative is probably better framed as reversion to a multi-polar world with bonus features of higher global prosperity and capability, lower barriers to access foreign markets (whether laborers or consumers), and mature logistics infrastructure. In short - more people than ever want YOUR job, and to live in YOUR house, and have YOUR safety net, such as it is, it’s not just some focus on quarterly reports.

How would you characterize the functional differences between the good and the bad companies that allowed for a great implementation of unlimited PTO? For instance, is it more overlap in job responsibility, less silo’d single points of failure? Better project management? I mean, it seems to me it’s never “a good time” since most of us could work 24/7 if just based on demand.

It reminds me of the Dilbert joke about asking to be put on 4-10’s and the boss replies why would I do that when I already have you for 7-12’s? With unlimited PTO, if you can only take it when there’s no work to do.. well in my business the work is never done. Demand outstrips supply so completely and consistently, it would be an impossible hurdle. I’ve worked in jobs where even limited PTO was near impossible to take beyond the occasional one or two days. Banked PTO was basically considered your severance package. Seems hard to set expectations correctly with unlimited PTO plans.

Taxi companies in most cities were exploitive oligarchies - it was textbook regulatory capture. Often their workers weren't any better off in terms of lopsided deals. And the customer experience sucked sooo bad. The smells, the illegal "cash only" bait and switch, the runarounds. I remember. I was there, Gandalf. And I'll take Uber any day over going back to the old system.

A good habit to build is knowing when to abandon a session and start over rather than trying to correct. There’s room for correction but you can kind of smell when the whole discussion has become rotten and inefficient. Sometimes it’s just better to use the session as rubber ducking to learn how to correctly articulate what you’re after and start a new session with that clean and correctly articulated foundation.

I don’t think VS Code is remotely a replacement for VS/Rider. I use VS Code for a lot of things but for large and complex project sets the automation and features in VS are luxuries you really miss. It’s like going back to the Stone Age to use VS Code in those contexts. Trying to fill the voids in VS Code with extensions makes VS Code very brittle. VS Code has its lane but I think they are different tools suited to very different jobs.

Interesting, for my part I would never build a data center (or underpin critical infrastructure) with Ubiquiti but I have a lot of it at blind remote sites and it works well enough - WAN failover, and they've built out a fair bit of downstream failover as well - shadow gateways, RPS, etc. Has replaced a lot of Meraki subscriptions.

"Project Gutenberg began in 1971 when Michael Hart was given an operator’s account with $100,000,000 of computer time in it by the operators of the Xerox Sigma V mainframe at the Materials Research Lab at the University of Illinois."

https://www.gutenberg.org/about/background/history_and_philo...

a more balanced version: <bunch of weedy ACLs, judgement calls, liability/>

Too complicated and subjective, stinks of more risk.

Also, I don't think it's dehumanizing it all (having been on the receiving end of it way back when during a layoff, and involved in the process more times than I care to count). It's standard practice for involuntary terms at all companies we work with, whether employee is IT or not. If a company is not doing this already, I'd encourage them to.

Which isn’t to say government is bad as an institution.. just to say that we regard it with an assumption of good faith at our collective peril - it’s track record counsels the opposite.

"Ostensibly" is the mistake in your formula. Current events are replete with examples to the contrary. It's not equivocating to recognize that governments are organizations of humans, subject to the same limitations - the larger they get, the harder they are to manage well; talent is incredibly important to success in mission; leadership is incredibly important to integrity, ethics, and strategy; lower oversight and mediocre control structures lead to abuse. You can see the challenges that government as an organization has there. And as to scale..? Son. At least you can "ostensibly" choose whether or not to interact with corporations unless they are colluding with... government.

corporate overlords? These are the state governments selling your data. The call is coming from inside the house. The sooner we realize that government is comprised of the same slithering slime of human greed and laziness, the more realistic discussions we can have.

Narrator: "But it did neither."

Honestly, we're better off with it than without it, speaking as someone with exposure to that industry's internals. That act drives a lot of good security practice within the organizations (mostly liability shifting, but still good). Specifically, the fear it instills of ruinous penalties from regulators drives good practice adoption, IME.

Further, multiple crappy patient portals across providers is a crummy experience, but it's an improvement over the world where providers held the data hostage and had zero interest in accommodating your requests for it, or even the idea that you owned it.

You would prefer emotional and impassioned hyperbole? Arm waving and hand-wringing? Self-flagellation? Navel-gazing? Struggle sessions?

Classic Scorpion and the Frog tale, or the older Farmer and the Snake. https://read.gov/aesop/094.html

$0.60 + 2.25%.

The excise tax is a fixed .60+ per gallon, going up July 1. The sales tax is 2.25%, and local sales tax some additional percentage.

Good for California's budget as well.

Drink some clarit with the valit over a good filit.

"Clothes make the man", as the idiom says. Clothes don't impugn your character, but they define you in the eyes of others.

Having been a long-haired holey jeans-wearing guy in my past, I was naively surprised when I cut my hair and noticed that people treated me very differently in business settings. When I started wearing nicer clothes on top of that, it was night and day - the kind of reception you get in banks, anything like that. It sucks that humans are built to judge and filter on appearances, but it's just the reality. You can use it to your advantage.

Honestly, I trust these systems more than humans to do the same work. While we're all talking anecdotes, this one time at Walmart (how all good stories start) many years ago I was in the music section and these two in-store security guys approached me, saying they had told me to never come back in the store, etc., making a big scene. I so rarely go to Walmart and found the situation kind of humorous and wanted to see where it would go (knowing I had not done anything wrong now or in the past). They had seen me on video evidently and thought I was somebody else - serial shoplifter or public urinator or who knows what. Anyway, I tell them I've never been told to leave prior to this visit, didn't know what they were talking about. They were adamant that I was in the wrong, asked me to come back to the office while they looked into things. I was like, "sure!", more entertained than upset. So there I am sitting in the office while some guy combs through video footage. A guy of authority comes in, tired demeanor, asks these guys - well, did you match his ID? "No", says he. Checks ID, realizes I'm not their guy. Many stressful apologies on their behalf. But that's humans for you.

Have you ever tried milking a moose?

There was an article about a year ago concerning the students' using AI to complete work, and teachers using AI tools to detect if AI tools were being used to complete the work, so (even a year ago) you found this absurd scenario where it was just robots checking the work of other robots. Did a quick search for said article but couldn't find it. Anyway, humorous. Coupled with the WaPo article today about people "speed-running" their degrees, it's wacky, wacky world for "education". https://archive.is/bPi82

utopian dreams got hijacked by self-dealers

Such is the fate of all utopian dreams.

I can foresee a modern code-signing regimen with paid gatekeepers coming to mitigate the risk of supply chain attacks. Imagine the purported strength of mythos automating scans of PRs or releases with some manner of indelible and traceable certification. There's some industrious company - a modern verisign of old - that will attempt to drop in a layer of $250-500 per year fees for that service, capture the app stores to require it. Call me a cynical bastard, but "I was there, Gandalf".

What defines hobbies is not what or why you do it, but when you do it. The phenomenon of hobbies has been mulled over quite a bit - activities that engage many disciplines of an actual job, activities that for other people actually are jobs. The key difference in the nature of a hobby is that we do the activities on our own schedule - we are in no way compelled to do them but have complete ownership over the execution.