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  • 1 Post
  • 33 Comments
Joined 16 days ago
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Cake day: March 10th, 2025

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  • I don’t know. I might say “Matrix” and run a private server? But that’s a bunch of IT work. It’s attractive to use a SaaS because you don’t have to do any long-term planning or hiring; just pay Slack a crazy amount of money and it all works.

    Corps also like a commercial paid service because they get a contract with an SLA (even if it’s rare to actually get anything from these SLAs).







  • it is agnostic of cloud providers: you can use it to deploy infrastructure to multiple providers

    Nicely put. I frequently see the first part of this sentence and not the second. (Maybe I only pay attention to the first part and then disappoint myself…)

    Terraform/Tofu allow me to use the same basic syntax and to have one project that controls AWS/GCP/K8s/my home servers, but I cannot use it to describe “a running server process” and just deploy that on any of those places. Instead I’d need to have like aws_beanstalk_service { ... } and gcp_application { ... } and kubernetes_manifest { ... } and systemd_service { ... } and the contents of those blocks would be totally different (and I’d need a bunch of different ancillary blocks for each of those).


  • The job market is not terrible. But there is a frustrating thing where a “senior” developer with 3 years of experience will get tons of recruiter-spam offering them $200k+ positions, while a junior developer (your position) will get ghosted when you apply for a job that’s offering to pay $50k. So it can feel demoralizing because people you see as your peers are having a very different experience. (And if you go in some circles the FOMO just never stops; people telling you you’re wasting your life not being a Meta dev getting $800k TComp or founding a unicorn start-up…)

    You say you enjoyed programming, which sure sounds to me like you could enjoy getting paid to do it. But it’s easy to overwork yourself because your boss says that real developers pull 80-hour weeks. Or burn out because it’s so frustrating to watch bad decisions ruin your good work. If you can find the right balance of caring and not caring, you can make good money and enjoy your job.

    And it only takes a year or two to get rid of the “junior developer” label and then jobs are a lot easier. (Others have said that the market is bad. And it is bad compared to how it was in, like, 2020. But it’s still a very good market all things considered.)





  • Consent in a situation like this is difficult to establish, to the point of it being pointless. Your comment implies to me that you think if the person said “OK” to a search request then whatever happened next is their own fault.

    Consider just the situation where you’re in the immigration line and two uniformed officers walk up to you and say, “please come with us.” If you go with them, is that voluntary? If you say “yes” I just think “voluntary” doesn’t hold much meaning. What happens if you don’t volunteer to go with them? Surely, they say, “come with us now or you’ll be arrested.” And if you don’t volunteer at that point, they’ll physically restrain you and take you away.

    Since most people are able to understand the subtext of the situation, they’re able to tell that, “please come with us” actually means “you are required to come with us now. You may either walk of your own accord, or we will take you captive and punish you beyond whatever we initially intended.” So, there’s not any consent happening. Just deciding whether being beaten and dragged away in public would be helpful to you, and in many cases it is not.

    You might be confusing US law around unlawful search and seizure with US law around border crossings. While the ACLU’s position is that the 4th amendment trumps CBP, CBP’s position is that it does not and that you cannot stop them.



  • I have no idea how well it works in reality, but I can imagine the Lifetime Pass being a good business model for them: only the most enthusiastic user will pay for 3 years up front (lifetime currently costs 3x the yearly). So when they get a Lifetime pass they’re getting 3 years paid up front and an evangelist who will probably tell their friends about Plex. If that Lifetime subscriber gets even one person to sign up for a yearly sub who otherwise wouldn’t have, then Plex came out ahead.





  • Changing jobs carries a lot of risks:

    • Many Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck and cannot afford to quit their bad job before looking for another
    • American healthcare system means that if you are between jobs and anyone in your family gets seriously sick/injured then you will be in medical debt for the rest of your life
    • For many people, there are few jobs available. Maybe the other jobs pay too poorly for them to live on
    • As discussed, employees aren’t given slack-time, so they can’t search for a new job while at work
    • Because they’re exhausted, they can’t search for a new job while not at work
    • Amazon isn’t the worst place to work. Your next job might be worse! (Small businesses in the USA are exempt from many rules and effectively-exempt from many more.)


  • The row limitation seems, to me, like an actually-good thing. Excel is for data where you might conceivably scroll up and down looking at it and 1M is definitely beyond the ability of a human even to just skim looking for something different.

    An older version of Excel could only handle 64k rows and I had a client who wanted large amounts of data in Excel format. “Oh sorry, it’s a Microsoft limitation,” I was thrilled to say. “I have no choice but to give you a useful summarization of the data instead of 800k rows (each 1000 columns wide) of raw data.”