Dave Eggers' novel _The Circle_ (2013) is looking more and more prophetic every day.
830 karma · joined July 19, 2012
In the end I just replaced each X540-T1 with a X520-DA2 which are pretty much the same price on eBay (under USD20) and then I can just use a DAC that's a fraction of the cost of the RJ45-SFP+ transceivers.
10 x 0.1 = 1My wife is trying to sort something with a famous Irish airline who are well known for messing people around. She has LPA/POA for her mother but rather than the airline accepting the VCode (this is the UK) the airline are requesting to see the original POA certificate which is just ridiculous. They seem to be moving a little quicker now there is solicitor involved.
Given how much back and forth there has been it's probably cost the airline more than just refunding the amount at the first request. We'll keep going to prove a point.
[EDIT] The asymmetric supplier is BT via Openreach. Google something like "BT Fibre 500".
Sure, but I want to choose when I do it, not have it forced upon me.
> 75 mbit up is pretty good compared to DSL (I bet it is cable)
It is FTTP not DSL or cable. BT Fibre 500 in the UK. Almost all of the deals through the legacy/monopoly provider (BT/Openreach) are asymmetric like this.
The 2500/2500 at the new property is a different provider that has their own network and so isn't tied into reselling Openreach's GPON infra.
But, yes, that video is exactly the kind of thing I had in mind for the bend insensitive fibre.
It all depends how I set things up (and I can't tell that until I've had more access to the property). The ONT and the rack with the USW-Aggregation switch are 10 yards apart, in terms of absolute distance, but probably 20 yards if you follow the walls/skirting-boards/etc.
The FTTP is presented as 2.5GbE Ethernet (apparently) so I can either:
a) put my Unifi Express 7 next to the ONT and then need a fibre run (something like https://uk.store.ui.com/uk/en/category/accessories-modules-f...) from the SFP+ port on the Express 7 to the USW-Aggregation in the rack.
However this will be sub-optimal in terms of Wifi and I'll probably need extra APs to cover all three floors and out into the back yard.
b) put my Unifi Express 7 in the hallway in the middle of the house (which should give me full Wifi coverage with no extra APs). This would mean a short (2m) DAC to connect it to the USW-Aggregation nearby, and I can use a 20m long flat/flexible Cat-6 Ethernet cable to go between the ONT and the Unifi Express 7.
Maybe my "last house" (i.e. the one we'll get to see us through to retirement and beyond) will be Mikrotik based. By then I'll probably want as little computing stuff as possible and will just sit in a comfy chair doing crosswords and sudoku with a pencil.
The spools of bend insensitive fibre are pretty cheap and very discreet so I'll probably have a couple of those running along skirting boards/etc in order to connect disparate areas of the house. (The ONT is ~15m away from where the majority of the equipment will live, that's the main bit I have to bridge.)
Basing things on 2.5GbE would certainly have been cheaper but some things don't support it (they either do 1GbE or 10G SFP+) so settling on 10G where possible made more sense to me. My future ISP also has a 5Gbps up/down option, but even I can't justify that right now.
My wife and kid just want their phones/laptops to work, and to be able to stream stuff to watch, they don't care about the underlying speed.
Having a faster network may make some of my work related things run a bit quicker. A few times a day I'll need to pull something big down (either an ISO or a bunch of docker images) and that can take up to 2 minutes with 500Mbps down. Having those take a fifth of that time will make it seem less of a roadblock to doing work. 2 minutes meant I went and got a cup of coffee and often got more distracted, 30 seconds should keep me at my desk and focused on what I was doing. That's not a big enough reason to justify it on its own obviously.
I also want to do offsite backups with/for various family members, so something better than 75Mbps up is going to be a huge boost. Getting 1Gbps+ out will be huge (assuming whatever is at the other end can support that).
I don't do any kind of data hoarding, I think I've got something under 4TB of data that I actually care about, and most of that are family photos/videos.
Deep down it's mostly because I'm a networking geek so it's fun to play with some new kit and make blinkenlights.
I think I paid ~$15 for each X520-DA2 including postage.
The specs say they require PCIe v2.1 x8 lane.
My Proxmox server is quite old and has a Gigabyte GA-X79-UP4 mobo and has loads of spare PCI slots. One slot is taken up by a generic graphics card as the Mobo has no on-board graphics. (I think I went for this mobo because of the number of SATA ports, but it was over 10 years ago so not entirely sure.)
My general Linux server is newer and has an ASUS Prime H610M-A D4 mobo. Only two PCI slots (not used at the moment) and so the Intel X540-DA2 will use up the PCIe 4.0 x16 slot leaving just a PCIe 3.0 x1 slot. But that's fine as this machine is just a CPU (i7-13700), 64GB RAM and a 2TB NVMe. Sticking a good graphics card in it for GPU related fun had been on my list for years but I never got around to it, now the prices are just insane so I'll ignore that for now or something second hand falls into my lap.
I have a USW-Aggregation with 8 SFP+ ports arriving today too. Just have to install Intel X520-DA2 cards in two of my servers (Proxmox host and a general Linux server), and the NAS also has a 10G SFP+ port, and then connect it all up.
Most of it second hand from eBay for half the usual retail price.
(Hint: No, he's not replying with AI. Two hyphens are not an em dash. Even then there's no hint of it being an AI response. Also the person is actually the CEO of Dropbox, the very person this thread is all about. You only have to click his username to see his posting history to see he's not an AI bot posting endlessly, his last posts (prior to today) were in 2024.)
As others have said, follow-the-sun type models do exist, usually staffed by people in their normal working hours (EMEA, Americas, APAC) but this means you've still got to cover the weekend and public holidays (which there are a lot of when you factor in plenty of different countries).
Where you need a quick response you can have a core ops/noc team that looks at things with lower thresholds and shorter windows, and their job is to do the initial triage and then page the appropriate team earlier than they would have been alerted by their own alert thresholds/monitoring.
Actually clicking the button to change the status on a public status page is a whole different topic that becomes very political in certain companies.
The external page linked above goes the other extreme and considers it a bad status whenever any individual service is degraded.
In reality the majority of people only use 3 or 4 of the core services the majority of the time but since there's no "core services" SLA/uptime the usability of github for the majority of people is slightly obfuscated.
It is my personal opinion that Scrum/Agile is just a rather dramatic/over-the-top system for fixing dysfunctional teams that have fallen into poor or absent communication anti-patterns.
(I also think the general trend towards async among distributed teams is that more people have gone through this and have picked up the "better" communication habits.)
After you've done it for a while you start to find that many of the individuals are talking to each other without the various contrivances.
Planning poker isn't really about project sizing, it's about surfacing issues that the team members might not find out about if they don't talk to each other. I've been on teams where someone has spent 2 months working on something only to find that someone else had 90% of the work done in a private branch.
After the third of fourth time during planning poker that someone is reminded that they need to consider the testing/docs aspect they start to factor that in without being prompted.
The daily standup is similar. "I'm going to frobnicate the foobar today" and someone will say "Ah, have you spoken to Alice in that other team as she did the same thing with Bob's team last week, she's got a load of scripts that should save you a load of time."
Retrospectives are about acknowledging people who did good work, what worked well within the team, and also raising the things that held people back. If you have a good team leader they should be wondering why on Earth this is the first time they're hearing about any of this stuff. (A bad team leader will continue to blunder on not learning anything and being blissfully unaware that they're missing the really big neon signs, or they'll find some other way to dismiss the concerns/findings.)
Eventually you may get to a point where there is very little face to face communication required because the team starts to use the async communication systems properly, they communicate freely between team members and also upwards. But this is often a precarious situation, it doesn't take much for the boat to be rocked, new people coming in, trusted people leaving, new projects, new directions, unrealistic deadlines, etc. Every so often it requires more communication than before to get things back on track.
Once you're over the "scrum/agile solves all" hill people tend to pick/choose what continues to add value, and they discard the rest. (For the teams I've worked on in the past it was the "don't interrupt or change course mid sprint" rule that worked best for us - so many times the urgency had disappeared once we had got to the end of the sprint and we'd been saved from ultimately unnecessary distractions.)
Back to the management style in the article, even though I could work somewhere with little or no regular verbal communication I know I would quickly find I absolutely despised it.
I've done long solo projects in the past with no real colleagues or technical leadership/reporting. I found it far less rewarding than being part of a team (although it was often more financially rewarding). I get that some people thrive on this kind of thing and I'm happy for them. Every so often I like to go deep on something but how long I can tolerate this for is becoming shorter and shorter as I get older. There's a big difference between going a full day or so in focus/flow mode to extending this for days/weeks/longer.
I used to seek out 1:1s with random people in the company. I'd join the "watercooler" video call a few times a week to just chat random stuff with random people. As for async comms, although we were all good at starting off with well thought out full initial message/question on Slack (not just a "hello" and then silence) many of these were better off resolved via a quick video call once it was clear that async wasn't the most efficient method. Pretending or hoping that everyone is so eloquent, clear and exact with their language that you can do everything async is just fantasy in my experience. If the question was raised in a channel (rather than a DM) then someone would go back and provide a brief summary so that anyone finding the initial conversation by search didn't just hit a "let's jump on a call" cliffhanger with no resolution. (Then the company grows big enough that Slack retention policies become a limiting factor.)
I've definitely worked with people who can work with little or no interaction but even in workplaces with a greater than average concentration of introverts and neuro-divergence such people (who can work like that) are in the great minority (again, IMHO). Most people work better with direct access to empathy, reassurance and even just someone to listen to them ranting. The trick is to find the right balance as too much communication can be stifling, but I'd rather be in that situation and working on dialing it back.
I've worked in a variety of setups in both offices and at home.
Working for a startup I spent 18 months with 3 of us crammed into 2 normal desk widths. I think I had not much more than 60cm of desk for the whole of this time. The front portion of my desk was the keyboard and mouse and the back part of the desk was the desktop PC with monitor on top of it and a desk phone (2-4 hours a day spent on the phone to customers) to the right of that. Just enough space for a water bottle and/or coffee mug between the mouse and desk phone. I was disproportionately happy for the times when one or both of my colleagues either side of me went on PTO.
At some points I had a 90 minute commute (each way) by train and used that time to bash away at things on a Linux laptop. No chance of network connectivity on the move, this was the late 90s, the huge laptop (Toshiba Satellite things that were 50mm thick) could barely last the 90 minutes anyway. You made sure it was fully charged and that you'd downloaded everything you needed for the journey before you left home or the office. And you still took a book (or pen/paper) for the inevitable times you hadn't.
Other than this necessity it takes a lot for me to get into any kind of a flow if I'm not sat at a desk. I can't take my laptop and just sit on the sofa and do things, it just doesn't feel like "work". I'm hoping to get better at this though as I do envy people who are happy doing this.
For 18 months I worked in a classic cube farm in a corporate HQ in the US. Reasonably big cube with 6' high walls and U-shaped desk, so there was an easy way to have different zones for "laptop work", "paper work", and "other" (usually lunch _al desko_). It was nice having a little locker for hanging coats/etc, and a place for the internal/external mail to be delivered. The nearest window was probably 30 yards away from me and even then you really couldn't tell whether it was night or day. Sometimes I wasn't sure whether I was alone on our part of the floor or whether the other ~150 people were there.
My favourite office setup was back in the UK with a big L-shaped desk in an area with lots of glass partitions and windows. There were about 5 of us in the space that would usually be occupied by about 40 if they were trying to pack them in, but we were left to get on with things. It was deathly quiet too, which I loved. I had a view across South London and could see plenty of sky, buildings, trees and people.
My home offices have been OK but far from perfect. Too warm in the summer months given no aircon (I've got the sun beating down on my back right now), never too cold though. But never enough space. They've also always been a work in progress and never "right, that's all sorted" but I hope to get a bit closer to that with the next move.
I reckon I'll get it right just before I retire.
Putting them anywhere else in the house would either be more "showoff" or just less practical. It's true that I rarely ever pick them up but the few times I do I'm glad they're right next to my work desk.
There's an area on the middle floor landing that could make an ideal little desk area.
It's something like 150cm wide (my existing desk is 140cm) and deep enough for my 70cm deep desk and existing chair. There is a window directly ahead. The only problem is isolation, there's no door to close things off (noise or distractions), but I may be able to make do with a heavy curtain and my existing noise cancelling headphones.
This would mean that the spare bedroom (which would usually be the home office) could be an alternative home office for myself or my wife, and more of a spare bedroom for visitors. Right now our existing spare bedroom is a dedicated office.
I'm going to use the article as inspiration for the spare bedroom and not just putting the desk up against the wall as I would usually do, but the planning depends on what size bed we can get in this room as well as a desk.
Using the photo under the "Rethinking the desk" heading we see an Apple Studio monitor on one side.
On my monitor/browser/resolution/etc the desk is 157mm wide in that image and the monitor is 48mm wide.
The Apple specs say that monitor is 623mm wide.
So that would make the desk roughly 623*157/48 = 2037mm long.
That makes sense, his computer setup is relatively small compared to the analog side.
The game came out at the start of my upper-sixth year so it often came up during his classes.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/rxcGDAc8Dv924zkv8
(It's art: https://secretldn.com/telephone-box-installation-kingston/)
Having to switch between accounts with different tokens with vastly pared down access is going to feel quite restrictive and suffocating.
Some devs won't have the patience to wait for some other department to vet and import a new npm package, or the latest update to it, before it can be used.
Some devs will be frustrated not being able to run their favourite IDE which isn't on the approved list, or their favourite plugins which haven't been vetted yet.
Some devs will get annoyed that they have to reboot more and more frequently to get the latest OS updates because things like Copy-Fail/CVE-2026-31431 appear out of nowhere and can be weaponised by malware to break between accounts or out of VMs and other sandboxed envs to get access to more keys/PATs/etc.
Another alternative is endless MFA requests which leads to request fatigue and accidentally approving the malicious/unwanted action.
It's going to be interesting how the industry deals with all of this. I can see it getting a lot worse with some even more significant breaches before it starts to get better.
A fine grained token is likely to have read access to the IaaS repo as that is likely the very repo they are operating on when the malware compromises them.
3800 repos up for blackmail may make a good headline but it's likely that Github don't really care about 3798 of those repos being made public. It'd be annoying for those 3798 to be made public but they can deal with that. It's the 2 repos that contain really important stuff that they really don't want to be made public. You can't rely on fine grained tokens to limit the leak of these things as, at some point, someone with that very access will get compromised.
Limiting TTL on tokens/auth isn't a perfect solution either. If the token is leaked via some malware it can be used to clone repos within minutes (even seconds) of being leaked. No-one wants to have to perform 2FA every few seconds in order to get on with their day.
IP based restrictions may help, but then the malware would probably evolve to include a tailscale/wireguard key so that the clone/exfiltration is done from the existing IP address and then the data is proxied away separately.
Future dev environments are going to be heavily sandboxed in terms of "do github stuff in this sandbox, copy files to another sandbox to do package updates, vet everything coming back, etc"
If someone uses sprintf() you have to go faffing around to check whether they've thought about the destination buffer size. The size of the structure may be buried far away through several layers of other APIs/etc.
Using snprintf() doesn't solve this in any way, but checking whether the new use of snprintf() checks the return value is relatively simple. Again, there's still no guarantee that there aren't other problems with snprintf() but, in our experience, we found that once people were forced to use it over sprintf() and had things checked in PR reviews we found that the number of instances of misuse dropped dramatically.
It wasn't the switch of functions that reduced the number of problems we saw, but the outright banning of the known footgun `sprintf()` and the careful auditing and replacement of it with `snprintf()` that served as a whole load of reference copies for how to use it. We spread the work of replacing `sprintf()` around the team so that everyone got to do some of the switches and everyone got to review the changes. And we found a whole load of possible problems (most of which were very unlikely to ever lead to a crash or corruption.)
The same would apply if you picked any other known footgun and did similar refactoring/rewrites/auditing/etc.
Anyway, I haven't done C commercially/professionally for about 5 years now. I do miss it though.