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.

I work for a German company and am responsible for GDPR implementation. I would not suggest following the advice in the article. It is full of mistakes and bad advice and would easily put you at risk for a law suit, at least in Germany.

If you are coming at this from any perspective other than "what is the minimum data I need to collect to run my service" then you aren't following the GDPR.

I've noticed that a lot of US based companies claim GDPR compliance but when you read their privacy policy, they clearly aren't compliant. The biggest violations come from what companies try to claim as "legitimate interest." Things such as analytics tracking, that are not tied to service delivery, are not acceptable under legitimate interest. Sharing my visit with Meta will never be legitimate interest. And so on.

After two experiences, I no longer use or trust Glassdoor.

1. After turning in my notice to resign, the company I was leaving offered me a written agreement where they would pay me $2500 for leaving a positive review on Glassdoor.

2. Someone I used to work with posted a personal attack on Glassdoor, that was clearly against the policies (along the lines of "The CEO is human garbage"), and yet no amount of flagging or reporting the post resulted in them taking it down.

How does your team use it and how would you rate it?

My CEO wanted to introduce Gather with the idea that everyone would be in it working all day. He wanted to be able to "stroll by" whenever to see what people are up to. The team unanimous voted against this so we didn't get it.

If you are taking this article at face value then you are missing the point.

This is 100% a marketing piece. It is a standard part of modern Mentalism to pretend to explain how it works by psychology, powers of suggestion, and deep study of human nature. This is misdirection. Mentalism is an illusion, like any other magic show.

Source: Like the author I also have a stack of books on Mentalism.

Is this is really important to you there is at least one solution: Wearable Microphone Jamming[0]

0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28885739

Unfortunately I don't have a link. It was an internally developed class at that company. This was in 2002.

Back in the day, the company I worked for required all newly hired system and software engineers to take their Unix Fundamentals class. 8 hours a day for 4 days they covered how the shell, coreutils, and filesystems work.

Sometimes people would complain that they didn't need a "beginner" class but I bet there wasn't a single person who didn't learn some important subtlety like how the trailing / works in different situations.

I've never had another company require or even offer a training like that. Do other companies still teach this stuff?

edit: typos

I don't know how many times I have to repeat this advice: if it isn't in writing in your contract then it doesn't count. It doesn't matter what a recruiter or hiring manager promises. Get it in writing. Always and forever!

It's not dark at all.

It seems from the comments that most people think the only way to interact with tiktok is the fyp (main feed) but if you jump over to any hashtag you get a curated list of content on that topic. Some are much better than others of course. Many are replete with interesting content and discussion.

I think most commenting here would be surprised by the wide variety of topics to be found.

If you want to watch math content you go to #mathtok (or whatever) and that's what you see. The app doesn't try to stop you.

As a hint, when you see a video you particularly like, try out all hashtags on it. Using hashtags is how you find, join, and interact with communities on tiktok.

I am totally lost as to how this is a cloud.

The author's definition of pocket-sized cloud is "a place to run our code, which can be configured through an API - using containers for packaging" and that is not what I understand a cloud to be.

It doesn't seem to have any of the definitive properties of cloud computing. What am I missing here?

Am I crazy to think that a tool like this is an accident waiting to happen?

I'm assuming that this tool is for people who aren't familiar with the system enough to get what they need from the man pages and would rather not invest the time to become deeper on it.

If you don't remember the command you need to use, how can you be sure it is the correct command and options before you run it?

edit: typo

As someone currently working at a German startup I can tell you that there is a growing movement away from using any provider that moves data outside the EU.

Our largest customer, a German enterprise, just told us that if we don't remove all US based providers from our stack they will leave us, regardless of where the data is hosted. They gave us 90 days.

Thankfully I saw this coming and we have been moving to EU providers already.

We have a contract with our hosting provider that specifies what data they may collect, the limited purposes for which they can use it, and when it must be deleted.

This is called a Data Processing Agreement and is also part of GDPR compliance.

We have the same thing in place with all 3rd party vendors.

It seems pretty reasonable to me.

1. In Germany an IP address is considered PI under GDPR because it is easily associated to a natural person.

2. Google is open about the fact that they log IP address with Google Font request activity, which includes the page you are on.

3. GDPR requires justification by necessity to collect and/or send PI to a 3rd party without consent.

4. No consent was given.

5. It is not necessary in this case because it is possible to use Google Fonts in other ways that don't send PI to Google, without significant burden.

I'm not a lawyer but I am responsible for GDPR compliance at a German startup.

edit: typo

Gravity is a problem for N American plugs but not for Euro or Schucko plugs in Schucko sockets. This is what they have in Germany and the Netherlands. The plugs fit in snugly and do not move. If you don't push in enough to "lock" in then a spring (or something) pushes the plug back out. So it is very obvious when it is in correctly and basically can't be partially plugged in. Gravity has no impact on the plugs in my house whatsoever.

The Schucko plug/socket system is very robust, safe, and well designed.