mr_isomies

  Location: Canada
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: Depends
  Technologies: Elixir Phoenix, nodejs, Linux DevOps, PostgreSQL, InfluxDB
  Résumé/CV: https://kuzyn.info/scousin_resume_2025.pdf
  Email: [see resume]

I specialize in Linux DevOps and functional programming. With over 10 years of experience, I have deployed various stacks on every continent except Antartica. I have worked in regulated, high pressure, and multi-stakeholder environments, delivering projects for the Formula One and Formula E championships, the British National Health Service, and the City of Montréal. My SSHRC-funded graduate research focused on digital technology and its effects on surveillance, radicalization, and community building.

Once I bought a Casper mattress, king size, something like $800. Got in touch a few weeks later to return it, it was too big for me. They said here's your RMA, print it and send it back no question asked & you get a refund.

Well, the mattress comes rolled up in a box, but obviously cannot be put back in the box. It was impossible for the FedEx guy to fit it anywhere in his truck.

No problem they said, find a local charity and donate it, we'll issue a refund. In the end, I didn't even have to give them a proof of anything, and they sent back the money, no question asked.

I'm not one to worry about other's businesses, but at that moment I felt like I was part of a very big scam that I didn't fully understand. This was 3 years ago.

Not buying into this sort of conspiracy theory myself, but since I'm reading some Cixin Liu I'll indulge in some creative thinking.

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This is pure fiction:

Seeing this as an offensive weapon, if it were indeed man-made, is a mistake imo.

Right now the market is cratering, China is pretty much in economic lock down (which would have been impossible to enact otherwise), while being self sustained. Population of elders (i.e. non-working population) are being purged. Aren't we in the middle of an economic war between USA and China? China and the world, even? Who is gaining from this situation right now? Or rather, who is suffering less, from a medium/long perspective? If it does get to the States, with no healthcare safety net in place, the country will go through a lot of pain, economic and other.

I think that by the end of whatever _that_ is, China comes out on top from a game theory perspective. It's a bit like the Schwabb vs Ameritrade commission cutting playbook: if we both suffer but you suffer more, I still win in the end.

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Again, pure fiction. I do not subscribe to any of those views. I am not that cynical! Just a fun writing exercise.

Interesting. Maybe it's a demographic blind spot? I do all of my UK banking on Transferwise, and so have heard of or researched Revolut, N26, Monzo... In fact, I think that both Monzo and Transferwise are UK based, and I've definitely seen their ads in the tubel, know people who work there, etc.

They also offered a solid metal card and lounge-access perks, so I suspect that their core demographic are young-ish "digital nomads". Maybe that's where most of their marketing went to?

Not on a personal note (and maybe there are details missing) but this comment makes me sad: it's like we've internalized the codes of capitalism to the point where we, as individuals, feel obligated to fulfill our marketplace commitments while we accept that corporations such as Amazon will not fulfill theirs. Did you invoice AMZ for your time? Will AMZ do you a "favor" as well? Personally, I see no moral obligation in my transactions with corporations, as they see no obligations towards me, my patronage or my data.

Again, not addressing this personally to you but just responding here.

While I approve with the general direction of your comment, I think that characterizing Google merely as "a company" is disingenuous. Obviously it was not "just a job" for those who resigned.

There is nothing that I do at my job that could potentially disrupt the live of many; hence I don't feel an overwhelming sense of responsibility.

Now if I would be part of an enterprise whose name is said, typed or thought by billions every day, yeah maybe my sense of responsibility would be heighten and yes, maybe I would think it warrant a greater tribune or more sensational language.

Overall, that the essay was quite constructive, no?

When I saw that it required more than a 5m fix on my Lenovo I just accepted this as my new setup and committed to only using the trackpoint instead. Ironically, as a programmer the trackpoint has now become crucial to my setup (easier on the wrists/thumbs; faster), and made it a lot easier to go "all the way" with tiled windows managers. So the lack of decent trackpad support made me really consider other setups that now I realise work better for me. Obv, your mileage may vary

You should really check out https://greatescape.co/

I'm not sure if it's a startup or an MVP or a student project at this point, but it's the closest that I've come across

I have one with rutorrent that acts our house seedbox / file server. I also added droppy as a simple, user friendly file browser for my flatmates. Obviously, this all runs on docker-compose, because I'm a very weak man (but also, it makes managing the whole thing trivial once setup)

Big tobacco had "benefits to society" w/r/t the number of jobs it created, and the aggregated money that it re-invested in other businesses.

Rationalizing around individual experience buries the fact that the consumer well being is absolutely not necessary in a quarterly report: you individually gain something with FB or big tobacco; I individually loose something with FB or big tobacco. And vice-versa. In the end, the forces that matter are not tied to us as individual but to the company (or even, the industry) as a whole. Which is to say it is tied to performance, stake holders, legislation, and so on.

The only self-regulation that a company like FB (or Philip Morris) is willing to apply, is one that improve it's financial performance. Why would it do otherwise? Morality, good or bad, is a not a product of capitalism. The fact that you gain and I loose from these decisions is a happy accident, not an intentional result.

This is most likely from QLOCKTWO, who is a German company with a similar product

https://qlocktwo.com/en/

There was a long form article in the New Yorker two years ago about the Sackler family and Oxycotin. Quite a good read, in depth history of the drug, well researched:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/30/the-family-tha...

At this point there is not doubt in my mind that deceit is part of the "company culture" of Purdue/Sackler, their MO. They should be held accountable. They should be publicly held accountable.

Everyone should realise that the Sacklers that sponsors this museum, or that library, or that park, have been for the last decades willingly pushing this drug while knowing full well that something was wrong. They patented a slow-release opioid but knew it was impossible to make sure that patient wouldn't crush the pills; they never reached out to the authorities when small town doctor ordered more drugs than could ever be needed. I mean, they literally have just patented a drug (September 2018) that let you go through the withdrawal of Oxycoting more easily.

They created the problem, leaving tens of thousand dead in their track while profiting immensely from it, now they want to profit from the recovery as well? Despicable business practice, despicable business.

And subsequently loosing everyone's investment when the mine's head engineer gets thrown out of an helicopter

In the Wake: On Blackness and Being by Christina Sharpe

"In this original and trenchant work, Christina Sharpe interrogates literary, visual, cinematic, and quotidian representations of Black life that comprise what she calls the "orthography of the wake." Activating multiple registers of "wake"—the path behind a ship, keeping watch with the dead, coming to consciousness—Sharpe illustrates how Black lives are swept up and animated by the afterlives of slavery, and she delineates what survives despite such insistent violence and negation."

https://www.dukeupress.edu/in-the-wake

Funny enough, the national press is covering the other-side of this issue (in French). That is, the displacement of artists & creatives:

https://ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle/1130346/305-bellechasse...

What used to be the "creative bohemian area" of the city has been heavily invested in by Ubisoft (first), and then by a slew of other tech startups. The same thing happens in every city: the artists and the small community shops are being forced out to make space for poke bowl restaurants and tiki bars when the spaceship lands.

As a result, the local framing has become "artists vs AI". Grassroot action will paint this influx as a bad thing. To be fair, this whole situation has been mismanaged for decades. By private stakeholders, by the borough's mayors. Montreal as a whole has been historically bad at using alternative scenes to rehabilitate part of itself, then undercutting support to these alternatives scenes & smaller communities... See Griffintown, St-Laurent/Mile-End, St-Henri