Totally not a bubble. At all.

…though I’d like to add that, in the original post, ‘at work’ == ‘at someone else’s company’

Good point, thanks for the insights

That’s … THE one argument that (mostly) vindicates my theory. It is a friggin’ ‘requirement’ because it makes you replaceable/disposable. If you think otherwise, I’m legit interested on why you think companies have your, not their, best interests in mind.

My point is (almost) exactly the opposite: I’d argue that any of those non-specialists can be replaced at any time with other non-specialists (best case scenario), or with bootlickers, nutjobs and yay-sayers (worst case scenario). In other words, you shouldn’t aspire to be the one your boss delegates every shitty piece of ‘work’ he can think of, rather, to be THE one everyone else in the company has to wait for if they want X or Y done.

Nothing too odd about that. For example, Bose assembles some of its most successful products (such as the Soundlink revolve) in Mexico, regardless of the target market.

I have ZERO sympathy for companies whose services are affected by this. Because seriously, fuck Amazon.

…and 99,99% of middle managers ‘’‘working’‘’ in tech be like yeaaaaaaaa daddy just cram that shit down my throat like I’m an abused goose!

Funny, just a couple of nights ago, I was wondering if this distro still exists. I tried it some 5 years ago and I found it sleek, but its reliance on systemd made me migrate.

NetBSD. This box seems to have a vanilla x86 processor and it has plenty of resources (for NetBSD, that is). You can’t use this as a daily driver, but it should be good enough to learn UNIX and/or self-host some stuff.

Anyone here in the mood for a tasty, crispy, roasted Compsognathus?

Biebian.

I’d say ‘change banks’.

No they don’t. There are viable, open source alternatives for 99% of the software/services we use. The fact that people are not aware of it is already like half of the real problem.

I actually fell into that trap.

I am only speaking for myself and I am most definitely not a pro, but I think preoccupation with efficiency and usefulness is the main obstacle to actually liking programming, which is itself a must if you want to get good at it. Some years ago I read an article with the title ‘why I spend my time writing useless software’. I can’t remember what it actually said since I only needed the title to really internalise the fact that programming is an art. Imagine telling Monet, Picasso, Michelangelo or John Lennon that their line of work is ‘imperfect’ or ‘inefficient’. If that sounds like a ridiculous thing to do, that’s because it would be. I’ve written at least 15,000 lines of code (I’m a sysadmin, not a programmer), most of it for production in banking systems. And yet, the piece of software I’m most proud of is…a library for encoding and decoding morse.

It’s Monday, but I already know what the ‘best thing I’ve read all week’ is.

WTF is that last name.

Hospitals are dangerous for children, the elderly and immuno-compromised patients not because of risk of contagion, but because the bacteria that have survived the aggressive chemicals hospital surfaces are cleaned with are the strongest ones (shamelessly plagiarised from my 8th-grade chemistry teacher).

I used to have a mid-2012 MBP and its broadcom WiFi card was either not working at all (all BSDs and some Linuces) or working, but at ridiculous speeds and providing a very flaky connection (Red Hat derivatives). I settled for a USB wi-fi adapter. I found the Netgear ones to be more reliable. If you live in Europe, Technoethical (no relationship) has one adapter that uses the pretty generic Atheros driver.