volkadav

I mean, not to snarkpoast on main, but all of this has happened before re:

The massive sudden shift in the commoditization of human workers and turning them into faceless labor resources that can be inhumanely disposed of with a keystroke

Look up the treatment of labor during the industrial revolution. Similarly then large competitive advantages in automation lead to concentration of power in the hands of those that (not to spill the beans on where I'm going with this) controlled the machinery and means of production by way of access to capital. Collective bargaining of some form by labor was (and I would maintain, still is) a reasonable response, as is state regulation. Not to literally use the M-word* here but ... these problems aren't new, and solutions have been explored in the past (not that they were or are perfect!). As is typical in tech, we could stand to learn a bit from history when considering paths forward from the present. History may not repeat verbatim but it sure as hell rhymes.

idk, just my two cents as someone in the technical trenches who happened to fall in love with an historian. :)

* Marxist/ism. The communists certainly had/have their problems, as did Marx's analysis itself, but he wasn't wrong about there being some society-scale Problems with unfettered capitalism.

If you mean an isolated linux instance _including a linux kernel_, that would be provided by a virtual machine running under the bhyve hypervisor on freebsd (https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/virtualization/#v...). You probably could frankenkludge something like linux-userland-on-a-frebsd-kernel using jails but that certainly seems like the path less traveled, haha. :)

On the bright side, at least it's in the PR text and not the code? (... yet?)

Sheesh.

Sadly, today I received notice from Hetzner that indeed the prices on the older CX22 are going up.

Product previous price €3.95 New price as of 1 April 2026 €5.39 CX22 (HEL1) all prices incl. 20% vat

Doesn't seem to apply to older/deprecated gen instances. I've got a CX22 there for personal screw-around projects and it's the same £3.95/mo (pre-VAT) afaict. So maybe not much help to folks ordering new or running on the current gen as the older kit isn't something you can order now, but a small boon for us laggards.

https://man.openbsd.org/vxlan.4#SECURITY seems unambiguous that it's intended for use in trusted environments (and all else being equal, I'd expect the openbsd man page authors to have reasonable opinions about network security), so it sounds like vxlan over ipsec/wg is probably the better route?

I'm pretty sure the original 10+k/yr/employee for good ppo coverage is a radical underestimate, for what it's worth, though I guess "way more than ten" is technically part of the "ten+" range, haha.

The last time I had reason to look at full market-rate price for a family of four for a good PPO (Seattle market, circa five years ago, large tech company), it was around 3300 USD per month, or over $39k/yr. That was for cobra coverage, so a combination of what I would have normally paid and what the employer would've (about one third us and two thirds them when I was employed by that corp). I can only imagine it's gotten more expensive since then; we left the country three years ago.

I saw them on the menu at a chippy food cart at glasgow comicon this summer, so they exist here. I did not order one, but they were for sale. :)

Sorry to focus on just one aspect of your (excellent) post, but do you have recommendations for reading up on A*/SAT beyond wikipedia? I'm mostly self-taught (did about a minor's worth of post-bacc comp sci after getting a chemistry degree) and those just hasn't come up much, e.g. I don't see A* mentioned at a first glance through CLRS and only in passing in Skiena's algorithms book. Thank you!

Trip report of size one, fwiw: I have a JetKVM device at home and it's been super handy in my small homelab (half dozen or so older dells and lenovos). I haven't experienced any problems with my device. It seems solidly built, the software works well and is receiving updates, and the price was very fair from what I recall. One feature that I thought was particularly a nice touch was that you can store OS images on it and have it show up as storage on the target machine (though some of my older gear doesn't seem to want to boot from it for whatever reason -- which I suspect has more to do with decade+ old workstations that last got a firmware upgrade when Obama was president than anything JetKVM is or isn't doing).

Overall, I'd recommend them. :)

I can't say as to what it might've been like 80+ years ago, but years back I was with a friend on a trip through a PX and there was a rotary display (perhaps like you might see used for postcards in other contexts) with rank insignia and other small uniform bits for fairly low prices (single-digit dollars iirc, though this was 20+ years ago). Even if they had to pay out of pocket or deal with an irritable quartermaster, the urge to give a small remember-me-by token to a friendly (and let's be honest, beautiful) face when facing down imminent chaos and barbarity is probably strong. Similarly, I recall hearing of troops throwing their coins to kids along the embarkment route in the UK as they headed to Normandy; after all, where they were going they wouldn't need them.

doctors and nurses have enough power to demand fixed professional(0) wages that "unskilled labor"(1) does not. no one _wants_ to make $2/hr(2) and to have to rely on the generosity of the general public for a living; in other words, it isn't the waitstaff having special privileges but rather the opposite case of them lacking better protections.

(0) which is to say, much higher (1) a propaganda term if there ever was one. work one shift as a waiter and tell me it take no skill afterwards! (2) $2.13 barring state-level increases over the federal minimum, to satisfy the pedants

Location: UK/Scotland, easily commutable to both Glasgow and Edinburgh

Remote: highly preferred, inclusive of US employers (see notes below)

Willing to relocate: not at present, might be a different story in a few years

Technologies: (just some keywords for searchers, see resume) Java, PHP, Go, Python, Kotlin, C, SQL and NoSQL data stores e.g. Postgres/MySQL, backend API and scalable system design, Linux, AWS/Cloud

Résumé/CV: (us letter or a4 versions as indicated in the filenames) https://norrisjackson.com/~orion/michael_orion_jackson_resum... https://norrisjackson.com/~orion/michael_orion_jackson_cv_a4...

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-jackson-2168a71/

Email: michael.o.jackson@gmail.com

Hi, I'm Mike; I've been a backend polyglot SDE / sometimes SRE / sometimes engineering manager with around twenty five years of experience in total. I'm a pretty flexible guy; whether it's code, systems, or people I try hard to be a useful mammal. Some of the places I've worked that you might recognize: Yahoo, Oracle (at their AWS competitor), the New York Times. I've also worked at a fair number of startups and mid-size companies over the years, and spent time acting as a consultant. tl;dr for why I'm on the market is that upper management at my last employer decided to let international remote employees go (I'm a US citizen in the UK on a spousal visa; I have full right to work for both US and UK employers without undue paperwork/visa hassles on their end).

What I'm looking for: I'm happy to dive in either as a senior individual contributor or as an engineering manager. I have no strong preferences on org size; having worked at both ends of the spectrum they each have their benefits. I'm flexible on industry too (I might have to think hard about defense). I can work US compatible hours as well as UK ones. I am not a zealot about any particular technology stack or engineering process but in an ideal world I think I'd be happiest working in something like Java or Kotlin in a linux environment building things like APIs, data pipelines, etc. or leading a team doing the same. I'm open to consulting but all things considered a full-time role is more what I'm looking for at present.

Thank you for reading, and good luck to all searching for a job or a new hire! :)

Open Maryland, Not Indiana :) (So named in this case because the company that released it, OmniTI, is based in Maryland. Source: worked there at the time) It's a good OS, as I imagine the other Illumos derivatives are, but sometimes the relatively small size of the community can be felt, e.g. in breadth/depth of available third party packages and update availability/timelines.

tbh I was guessing Volvo 240-series. I suspect cockroaches will be driving those battleships around after the bomb/climate collapse/asteroid/big crunch.

Kotlin? Basically the same as the Corolla but a bit more comfortable in all regards. :)

The UK can get pretty rude, for example. ~40p/kWh is not unheard of for residential. (Natural gas price shocks, unfettered greed post-privatization, badgers in the transformers, idkwtf, etc.)

For a long time my home server was a dell wyse 3040 that I got for £25 on flea-bay. 1.4ghz quad core x86-64, 2g ddr3 ram, 8gb emmc, <= 5w max load, fanless, runs standard, normal debian like a treat. :) Eventually I got tired of being constantly vigilant about disk space and replaced it with a more traditional desktop, but I still love that little (compute) engine that could (it's still alive as a glorified ereader desktop for the kids -- just enough muscle to run firefox and epub/pdf readers without being capable of distractions).

Perhaps those are an essential ingredient for a full consciousness or experience of what we've agreed by consensus to call reality, but the parental part of me holds on desperately to the hope that if we create anew, those we create might have a better experience with vague gesture at everything than us. :)

I used[1] jetbrains tooling quite a bit on my m1 air and never had problems, though I did opt for the 16gb ram version. The newer models are presumably at least as performant if not better?

([1] These days my daily driver is an m1 mbp of some whizzbang 32gb variety, which only replaced the mba because my spouse wanted a travel machine and the mbp came for the low low cost of being caught in the late 2022 startup crash. For day to day ordinary backend dev work there really isn't a noticeable difference in my experience, except I guess the mbp is more awkward when working-from-couch. arm vs x86 was sometimes a little awkward around launch, but I can't remember the last time it was an actual hassle.)

having this open in another tab adds just the right soundtrack: http://conferencecall.biz/ ;)

"Zabha, Svvptc, and Ziccrse"

Man, I'm sure those are important changes that mean a great deal to someone, but to my naive eyes it looks like someone's cat ran over their keyboard. :)

In case anyone else was curious:

  * Zabha has to do with atomic memory operations.
  * Svvptc has something to do with memory management optimizations.
  * Ziccrse is something else related to memory.

tbh i'm just happy to see "crypto" and have it mean cryptography.

sic transit gloria mundi or something. :)

As much as I feel joy at the discovery for the advancement of science and human knowledge, a part of me feels sorrow for the wee critter so many years ago. I feel similarly for human archaeological discoveries, the illogical desire to extend warmth and comfort to those long since departed. So it goes, as Vonnegut wrote.

I sympathize with your concerns for stability and testing, but I think that you might reconsider things in open-source ZFS land. OpenZFS/ZoL have been merged since the 2.0 release several years back, and some very large (e.g. Netflix) environments use FreeBSD which in turn uses OpenZFS, as well as being in use by the various Illumos derivatives and such. It is true that there has been some feature divergence between Oracle ZFS and OpenZFS since the fork, but as I recall that was more "nice to haves" like fs-native encryption than essential reliability fixes, fwiw.

100% agreed as I can't think of any one individual since(1) who has done as much for all of science and engineering as he ultimately did; alas, they are not awarded posthumously.

(1) Newton would be a strong contender on a "for all time" basis, but even he would've probably needed to share it with Leibniz, which would have driven him absolutely ~b o n k e r s~, like wet hornet in a hot outhouse mad, LOL.

I was with linode for a loooong time for my personal VM-in-cloud (like 15 years). But I got an itch to check around to see if there was a cheaper option earlier this year and found that Hetzner would give me literally twice the machine for about two thirds the cost. ($6/mo vs €4~/mo, 1gb nanode vs. CX22 so 1vcpu/1gb to 2vcpu/4gb and 25gb disk to 40gb)

So far I'm happy with the service. Linode wasn't bad per se, Hetzner just offered more for less. Their admin console is a bit more spartan in comparison to Linode's, but that's not a place I spend much time anyway. If Russia glasses Finland and Germany I'd have to find another provider but I'm pretty sure I'd have bigger problems at that point than where to park my wordpress blahg and irc session, lol.

Looks like you might be able to at the end of the file, reading the commit message, just not willy-nilly in the middle. :)

For what it's worth, at least as I understand it, the Guardian got monikers like that due to their (for a time) extreme propensity to publish typos.

(Given the number of "fix typo" commits across all the projects I work on, I'd be the very last soul to pick up a rock to toss on that front, haha!)

<3

it's good to see a little person having fun with all this technocrap that us grognards have gotten so bitter about over the years/decades. :) i hope she continues to have a blast!

(from the dedication page in SICP:)

“I think that it’s extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. When it started out, it was an awful lot of fun. Of course, the paying customers got shafted every now and then, and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously. We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these machines. I don’t think we are. I think we’re responsible for stretching them, setting them off in new directions, and keeping fun in the house. I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun. Above all, I hope we don’t become missionaries. Don’t feel as if you’re Bible salesmen. The world has too many of those already. What you know about computing other people will learn. Don’t feel as if the key to successful computing is only in your hands. What’s in your hands, I think and hope, is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it, that you can make it more.” ~Alan J. Perlis (April 1, 1922 – February 7, 1990)