schmookeeg

Came to say this too, basically. The FTC is currently a bright candle in the swamp.

I think we need a word for this work. Maybe disenshittification? :)

Seriously. This grabbed every buzzword I've ever been affiliated with -- but no interest in hybrid. Even if I could rationalize the commute from OAK-SQL, which my lizard brain is trying to do. :) "Maybe get something like a little Beech Skipper and just fly over..."

I find it really strange that the 3 paragraphs of text at the top needed the comics summarizing them below. Like, did our short attention spans need those little footholds in order to progress through the point being made? :)

Sounds like I need this book added to my reading list. I've not been able to get through Brave New World, but I might give it another try also.

deliver the joke

with tinderbox-dry humor

enjoy the whooshes

I've said this to any of my engy friends who will listen. (not many) There's a small, yet tangible benefit to having a blank hardware slate to just riff on an idea when it strikes you, and having ample compute/storage/bandwidth to play with the idea. Or to send yourself down a spaghetti sysadmin nightmare you get to untangle. :)

It's been a consistent part of my career since 2007 and I'd hate to not have it. Homelab is great, but spinning up your own VMs, architectures, all of it... is a superset of that same satisfaction.

I live in Alameda and colo in San Jose and would way prefer the shorter drive, even though I never visit my server.. but... this webpage isn't a real product offering is it? Like, you made it in response to the topic post (right?)

I lol'ed regardless. Bravo, and... I may look you up if OpenColo keeps irritating me. They have been surfing that line just below "irritated enough to move". They recently rug-pulled my whole IP block and forced a bunch of reconfig on me I wasn't down for. I'm still salty. Quadranet never did that to me in ~13 years with them. AWS neither come to that.

I was gonna ask the same thing, but then she called me a usual broken people and I decided "not me" was a good enough answer :)

This was a tortured way to setup a colo. I bring rackable gear, no switch, and use the colo's "setup station" to do final config, then I rack the sucker. They can always VLAN me and my laptop together somewhere for a final check before I leave. I'd be worried if they couldn't.

I've been colo'ing forever. I'd consider a Lantronix spider ipkvm available on request to be like minimum viable colo service. It's usually up in 5 minutes when I submit a ticket to the NOC.

I bet your provider has something like that. It's a godsend when you screw up, say, the hypervisor running state somehow and need bare metal access to unbork it :)

I actually think this is worse in countries with socialized medicine, because now you're not just "openly mockable" but you're also "taxing the system" with your "vice"

Cruel indeed.

I wonder if this is why most of my engagements over the last 5-10 years were teams that hired "senior only" engineers, whereas some ocean of HTML updates could be handled by any number of juniors, and also provide a needed training funnel to move people up in seniority.

I certainly don't appreciate the cognitive load a lot of my daily stuff takes. It used to be simpler, more direct, and more satisfying.

Ugh, min-max culture is out of control. But I think this essay is actually anti-mediocre-books, which sort of resonates with me. Still, though, I find value in the hunt, and I am too stubborn to stop a book once I've started, so I can't agree with author's ruthless selection criteria, but if it works for them, hey, party on.

...my life, as I define and live it, is improved every time I cheer on Mr. Lee's Rat-Thing during a casual re-read of Snow Crash. :)

It allows me to reflect on all of the jobs that I have left without also posting some odious blog entry about it. So much missed opportunity.

Maybe it was cathartic to write, I dunno. I think if I'm at that point, I waited way too long to leave. Golden handcuffs, hey?

I think those two are colloquially synonymous to most people. Particularly those with Amazon Prime accounts :)

Because the local organic free-range kenyan pour-over place that serves me coffee in a biodegradable urn along with a kale-based "eco brownie" and some indie hip-hop playing at volume 11 doesn't have a drive-thru, obvs :)

That's one of the best pieces of writing I've read all year -- bravo. An angle I've somehow not noticed, but resonates with me.

I'm wondering where you experienced the "fairly severe limp mode" -- our REx can keep up with 75mph driving on a level highway, and will recharge the battery even at 65. Rain and hills have been able to overpower our REx, but never anything that prevented us from maintaining 55mph. Not really limping.

I grant that other climates and situations may have different experiences. We're on the west coast.

That is WAY better than my typical Chick-Fil-A order. What's further down from "trapped toddler" on the condescension scale? That's where I'll be.

Something changed at the top with costco a year or three ago. The friendliness seems gone, and replaced by some really strange/hostile policies.

I ended up in a shouting match with the tire center manager who claimed I was in a "car accident", and thus my road hazard warranty was void after I took a nail on the freeway. I was not in a car accident, I would have known -- I was there.

30 minutes of my life I'll never get back grappling with him and the store manager -- for them to try saving a $90 pro-rata credit. My tire business has been pulled out of costco after like 25 years. It's getting tough to justify the rest of the membership. It's always a shopping hellscape there, and everyone is rude/grumpy.

Well dang. All of my models in the last 6 months have lost all meaning now that this is here :D

Off to snap some pics of my catloaves, this is awesome.

My Gmail blocklist is basically a recruiter honeypot slash hatecrime since 99% of them are Indian. I have found nothing to combat it -- worse, I switched to date-coded email addresses in my CVs in 2008 (so email_mmyy@mydomain.com) (!) and I still get spam from those old addresses.

I should block those old addresses, and that was the implicit threat on my CV coversheet, but I haven't bothered to do it yet.

It seems most of the recruiters bought my Email from dice.com, since that corresponds to when I used the earliest email addy. I'd say I'm boycotting Dice in response (and I sorta am), but I don't think dice has been relevant in an age, so it's sort of a toothless oath. :D

The SMS are pernicious and awful. I usually drop a rude remark to them before reporting them as spam. Phone interruptions are 100x more focus-destroying than emails, and I have been forced to put my phone on do-not-disturb during the workday, and I hate it. I feel victimized by these shops.

I have seen a recent uptick in body-shop recruiters reaching out with low-grade jobs. Annoyingly, this recent batch seems keen to use SMS to reach me instead of traditional Email.

I have started to put feelers out for a change of scenery, but nothing is landing yet. It feels like the first dotcom bust all over again.

Using your own example, every "avg startup" engineer who is overemployed with only two gigs is matching FAANG money.

I think parent wanted a citation that Super Duty trucks are typically used for work, and not for Brodozer hooning and yelling "yew" out of the window in a sleeveless shirt and with a plug of skoal. :)

+1! -- I use Optiplexes in my homelab for client/misc/fw duty, and I have a pair of Supermicro mini servers with Xeon-D chips for slightly heavier stuff. Both bulletproof and small/innocuous/inexpensive to run.

I keep wanting to upgrade to something shiny or attempt to consolidate since my Dells are on some hilariously old chips (4th gen LTS "T" series i7s) but man they just keep chugging along, it's hard to justify.

I'm enjoying reading this, and I never paid much attention to the R1 product. "Carroot" was enough of a chuckle to merit the rest. :D

Hello from Alameda, CA. 15.5c per kwh here except for M-F 5pm-9pm, where it is 50c.

It's like crossing social credit score with a tontine!

...as one who doesn't run red lights and hates profiteering governments -- I'm not opposed :D

Hi from 47 y.o. and also not on the management track (any longer, BTDT, FT)

I only list the last 8-10 years of stuff on my CV. Not specifically to combat ageism (I keep a "full" version also -- 6 friggin pages these days) -- but mostly to acknowledge that just because I did something cool 20 years ago, doesn't mean I am current, fluent, or even looking to do that again -- so why bother? If anyone cares, they'll ask and I'll answer.

My full CV is basically buzzword bingo at this point, and is spanish fly to the body-shop recruiters who love to email, text, and call me with just the worst jobs ever. :) Keep that thing offline unless you like to stay abreast of junior QA analyst jobs in West Virginia for $27/hr.

I increasingly favor OAuth when I encounter the option, even though I resisted at first ("too many eggs in the google basket").

I am sick and tired of needing to conjure a unique 12-character password with 4 different keyset features in order to gain access to a coupon-clipping site, someone's blog about bundt cakes, or a forum discussing solar panels.

The exception is where loss of the credentials can do me real and meaningful financial harm. I have no problem managing unique, complex, and rotated passwords for these. I also expect 2FA for these at a minimum.

Everyone is doing this so terribly that I wish they'd all just farm it out. correct battery horse staple indeed. :)

The last year has really intensified how often I see this question here or on reddit or otherwhere in my online travels.

You're describing MLOps.

Why would you want to make this transition if you're not keen on the underlying math? Why not include DevOps or SRE if you're interested in code-based pipelines, deployments, and scaling? How are you going to get into things like drift detection without understanding the math?

(...hoping for an answer that isn't shouted by Rod Tidwell at Jerry Maguire -- but genuinely curious why I'm seeing this so much and trying not to make a cynical assumption :) )