schmookeeg

which is why it's hard for me to take these "yay kids are awesome" posts seriously.

I would enjoy seeing your virtuous corporations list. "The devil you see in social media constantly and relentlessly" vs "the devil you never knew existed" seem... not all that different to me.

I suppose it's another way of saying "I'm exhausted trying to find the sucks-less providers of my everyday existence" which I grant is my own failing.

Thanks. I already retired once at 39 with this exact view in mind. I'm frankly amazed I'm still overemployed at 48. But yes, I've been super bearish on the remaining chapters in my career. I've hedged by paying off a (argh, low-interest) mortgage, stacking the bank, and I have a very well developed and near-tech-money side hustle that is ageism resistant.

I keep waiting for this shoe to drop. It hasn't yet. Now the pendulum has swung far enough that I want to preserve my time more than I want to stack more bricks. Amusingly, it's a source of tension with my wife who plans to work for another 15 years and will not be excited to see me out playing without her. (her people live into 100 on the regular. My people die in their 40s and 50s with alarming frequency -- our horizon perspectives are very different :D )

All good problems. If I lose all my tech jobs tomorrow, I will be grateful for the run and not be going hungry. I half expect I'd be relieved.

That sounds fascinating, and I worry it will be "humor that is way more documentary than I am at all comfortable with", like, say, Office Space or Idiocracy. :)

Great timing, though, I've been in need of a new read and I'm a Ricky Gervais fan. Thanks!

Sadly my experience has been that "Perhaps" there is doing more work than it can bear :)

I have traded within a quite tight comp band for my entire 30 year tech career. I am useful in general. I have been valued by being offered "promotions" and "strategic instead of tactical" positions, but I always chafe.

I enjoy the work. I enjoy solving specific problems in tech.

I do not enjoy the "business" of tech and have no interest in any of it.

I definitely have inadequate drive to grow a business and make others wealthy, even if I get a few crumbs.

For me, contracting is the perfect match. I don't need to get involved in your politics, I just need to eat jira tickets. Realiably and well. When there are none to eat, I can go do my own things.

I would need to care a LOT more about the business and dollars to excel at it, and lately I lean in the opposite direction. I see nothing wrong with simply being comfortable and useful. We have it good that we can make this choice.

$0.02 :)

We're an AWS shop, so for lightweight or one-off stuff, it's a typescript lambda. Everything else ends up in a python script to output glue-friendly stuff to S3.

Assume at some point, the data will bork up.

If you ingest Excel (ugh), treat it like free range data. I have a typescript lambda that just shreds spreadsheets in a "ok scan for this string, then assume the thing to the right of it is this value we want" style -- it's goofy AF but it's one of my favorite tools in the toolbox, since I look magical when I use it. It allows me to express-pass janky spreadsheets into Athena in minutes, not days.

It is based on the convert-excel-to-json library and once you grok how it wants to work (excel -> giant freaky JSON object with keys that correspond to cell values, so object.A, object.B, object.C etc for columns. array index for row number), you can use it as a real blunt-force chainsaw approach to unstructured data LARPing as an excel doc :D

I'll take a crack -- I think America's puritanical roots are STILL in play today, and mentioning the very idea that people have sex, even married people, instantly triggers pearl clutching.

I don't think it's rational either, but it is pervasive. If I described the lunch I had with my lover in a work setting, I'd expect to get tutted or an email from HR. It would probably be nonspecific and merely say that I am making others uncomfortable without mentioning the actual problem -- because to put it into words exposes the ridiculousness.

$0.02 :)

> When I was growing up in the 90s my hand writing was so bad it was assumed I would never amount to anything.

I'm curious where you grew up? I am high school class of 1992. I skipped third grade, where a lot of penmanship is taught. We had a computer lab in Junior High (so late 1980s), I had a PC Clone at home that we bought in 1985. I'd turn in writing assignments printed on my epson dot matrix printer. To my knowledge, my appalling handwriting was never considered by anyone.

One of my favorite JS libs. I assume it's part of the validator sequence in LLMs that write JS code :D

Here I assumed I just fat-fingered something when doing an Uber. I never sign up for the recurring charge stuff and recently saw the UberOne subby and canceled it.

I guess now I'll be a party to the class action and get a gift card in 10-12 years from this BS. Neat!

As an agnostic who spends a lot of time reading scriptures of several religions, trying to grasp the themes and motivations of others I share a world with -- those passages are particularly inscrutable.

Thank you for this. You gelled several ideas I was ruminating on over my morning tea -- my aloofness and my sneaking suspicion that self-sufficiency is isolating from society at large.

I still pull over to help motorists. You've inspired me to look for more opportunities like those. :)

Both draw a line, and often the purveyor is trying to adopt a "with me or against me" stance.

My amateur and unpracticed use of the French language has probably mis-pronouned plenty of folk across Europe and West Africa. Luckily everyone understood my motives and took it in stride.

I have plenty of reasons to be annoyed at Apple, but this is NOT one of them. A mouse is a tactile and highly personal choice and F this article for trying to demonize Tim Apple and his preferred input device.

That's brilliant advice.

This reads like all engineering types are jerks, which I politely disagree with :)

I've always thought the solution to this was to fix a tax rate, but let the people apportion the spending themselves, to discover what they find important without letting them claw back the taxes, which I agree would be the default.

Seems like it would shut down entire swaths of "I don't wanna pay for your <x>" bitterness and resentment.

I have compared AI to junior engineers a few times. Not in terms of treatment, but in terms of output quality. Is there a better analogy I should prefer? Or if my thinking is horribly wrong, I'd love a different perspective to think on.

Using an instrument of chance to name a data store technology is pretty amusing to me.

I find Miro the least vexing to use, but they are all pretty limited.

I keep expecting him to rally his support base and attempt to overturn the 22nd amendment. Short-term "winning" might be exactly what he needs to rally them.

Honestly I expected it on his last term.

"nobody cares" except if you've been rejected, then life has some sort of blackball effect on you?

I'm sorry but nonsense. You need to find someone to slap sense into you, you're too far down this dark hole.

You got the job to keep the wife who left anyway and apparently took the house. The job sucks. This seems like two parts of the equation that cancel one another out -- so dump the job. Work as a walmart greeter or something for a bit. go travel, backpacking, hosteling, hey, be one of those traveling beggars that I hate so much -- I bet they don't wake up every day and think about societal black marks on some imaginary scorecard. They think about bumming a ride to that badass glacier over yonder because they want to yell at it and listen to the echo.

the rut is deep, but you can walk right out and reinvent yourself. I hope you find a path to do so, even if it sucks for a bit. It sounds like it can only be better over yonder, wherever that is.

I'm overemployed as a 40+ but this would get a CV from me pretty quickly.

Offer some part-time options and you'll get a custom-crafted cover letter professing my love and why I am a perfect fit as well. :)

I use a mini in-flight. I welcome anything to bring the price down (currently $250/mo for 50 GB)

However, this "fix" not being put out for bid is ridiculous. That's not how competition and the market works. This feels like African-style "whatchu gonna do about it" big man corruption.

As someone who spends a lot of time battling mis-use/over-use of PII constantly, I am adopting MTTL as a term of art. :D

I was that way about a year or two ago. The stuff is moving fast, the water is warm. Unless your objections are rooted in privacy or some other perceived misdeed, I say give it a whirl.

If nothing else, use Dall-E to draw stupid pictures to make you and friends laugh. :)

A Leaf was our first EV. I still maintain that if I had kids of driving-age, this would be my ideal first-car for them. Short leash, easy to drive around, room for friends, but not much scope to get into big trouble with.

Holy cow they're cheap now. Note that they can be absurdly bad in cold/rainy weather -- which prompted the sale of ours in Portland. Our ostensibly "80mi" EV got about 22mi once before howling for a charge, and that spelled "Adios Sparky" for us :)

Yeah I've wanted to and the "bring it back fully charged" requirement is hopeless. I rent for convenience and have zero interest in solving this problem for the agencies.

"bring back >80%" would be easier and tempt me on certain missions where I have the free time to navigate Plugshare and figure it out.

In thinking about it this morning, this is probably where one could use the "prepaid fuel" upsell option. I might consider that next time I rent something away from home. There have been some really dirt-cheap "manager specials" that are apparently code language for "EV rental we can't rent out otherwise" -- like $6, $8/day cheap. :)

I am on record as loving our BMW i3 and its Range Extender. :)

The German over-engineering of stupid things has been it's primary downfall, not the ICE+EV combo. We are approaching the end of our extended warranty period, and we have had two failures -- electrically actuated rear trunk latch and our electrically actuated charge-port-cover latch. Both ridiculous and unnecessary. Both about $4K at the dealership, with no real viable alternatives. Unfortunately, we are likely to replace it due to the obscene repairs of minor and unnecessary components.

I don't think there is anything else similar coming out. We won't be considering the RAMCharger, which is at least the same idea :)