Posts by Michael Hoffmann 859 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jul 2007
uBlock works (agaiin), but you will have to keep up in the whack-a-mole game.
According to their Github Issues posts, you will have to regularly go through a "export settings->purge->update->import settings" cycle, to get the blocking to work again. It's been stable for a week now, so we'll see if they've come up with a generic approach to GoogleTube's script rotation.
Is it all in the US?
Because I've not heard of any significant, if any at all, lay-offs here in Australia. And I assume Europe, with proper labour protection laws, also doesn't practise "hire'n'fire".
At most, from what I've seen, their doing a bit of "get back in the office or else" - even though they were knowingly hired living 500km away. That too is mostly the US tech giants. For contractors rates are still going up, because overall there just aren't enough good people around.
I suppose there's your choice US tech workers: unionise or emigrate.
Those are utilisation numbers that almost any other bodyshop or consulting firm dreams of.
Do they allow for illness and leave? Accounting for those, 70% is just about full-on on assignment and below that your previous KPIs start to suffer and the next round of layoffs may hit you. (ask me how I know that).
Does anybody still believe these aren't hidden ways of staff reduction?
It seems to strongly correlate with companies that a) over-hired and b) find themselves in financial difficulties for any number of reasons (*)
(*) financial difficulties being defined as real or merely "the stock price isn't where we want it and that affects the C-level bonuses. those new yachts and jets don't pay for themselves"
I watched the Uni of Kentucky livestream and it's astounding what they've achieved. The process will only accelerate.
Personally, I'm a bit disappointed that it, so far, seems to indicate that the villa owner was mostly into Epicurean philosophers. I would have loved to see missing parts of the Satyricon - or a copy of Claudius' works on the Etruscans. Oh well, it's still amazing.
Paraphrasing from an observation I made on another forum:
What does it say about the future of GCP.
- under any other circumstances you would think that they simply can't afford to give up Cloud
- but GCP has been losing hundreds of millions every year, and they're pretty far behind the 2 juggernauts
- AWS and Azure are rolling it in, despite spending decreases
- they can't just fall back to their trusted approach of "when in doubt inject ads or hoover up all the data"
- try that with cloud services and you would have a rare moment of unity with corporations and governments clamouring for a nuclear strike on Alphabet HQ
- far from the ever-upward gravy train of cloud spending, companies have reined things back, and of course, as denizens here like to point out, cloud isn't a panacea
Having now worked with it a fair bit, it's a good platform/product, but when has that ever stopped them from cancelling something if it doesn't make money?
Shout out to Fiji Air here, while we're digressing.
When I recently had to cancel a trip due to surgery, they refunded non-refundable tickets, once I provided a medical cert. They would have been fully in their rights to just let me take it up with the travel insurance, but they didn't.
Miracles do happen!
The Chinese high sea fishing fleet has been seen to deploy boats into Lake Moultrie and Marion in large numbers. How they arrived at the land-locked bodies of water is not yet clear.
When asked, the commanding officer stated "Chairman Xi is a huge fan of Lake Marion trout, that's all!"
I just did and - colour me impressed. For years I avoided US carriers because their product had been years behind other top carriers (only BA and LH were worse, which didn't bother me on trans-Pacific flights). Has anybody really tall (>190cm/6ft) had a change to try it? That's become a problem (again) when even airlines like Singapore "re-invented" their C-class and cut inches such that I can no longer properly stretch out all the way.
(the foot well in the 321 does look a bit tight, same problem as with Singapore: big feet get squashed and you can't fully stretch out)
Why is this suddenly making such a come-back? After years of debunked-by-billions-of-mobile-phones-with-cameras (XKCD), suddenly we're dragging this nonsense out again.
Is it the times? The knowledge that "crap, we really messed up and have no idea how to fix the planet" we're back to hoping for the aliens to save our bacon, because prayer to gods sure as hell (ha!) didn't work?
Going what I know (and think) of that company, I wouldn't be surprised if *they* put those ideas into the heads of carmaker execs in the first place.
If you follow the chain of all that seems to be in corporations, from open plan to staff attrition through "back to the office" and everything in between, it seems you find their name pop up somewhere.
The legal fines embedded in law simply were never designed to cope with transnational corporations whose revenue (and profits) dwarf the GDP of some entire countries. The fines set in law may hurt some "normal" company, even some corporations, but for these megas it's less than their execs spend on drugs at Burning Man.
IANAL, and thank the gods, not a politician, so I have no idea why the law doesn't prescribe percentages instead of absolute amounts. (But I am a cynic, so quite possibly because, just like in the robber baron days, these corporations OWN the courts and political systems. And these lawsuits are just electioneering and grandstanding to show the plebs Something Is Being Done).
Back in my days we didn't have all this software around airplanes!
You tuned your NDB to the nearest country-and-hillbilly AM station and off you went into the wild blue yonder! IFR meant "I Follow Roads"!
Your approach guidance systems was the volume of the passengers screaming in the back! Dispatch was when the stewardess(!) served you donuts and coffee.
Icon, as it's the closest I could find to a geezer ->
Was our little cabal the only one who used UUCP to exchange feeds? Every night at 11pm, I'd hear the clickety-click of my modem dialing and polling my peer upstream (rotary phones in Germany back then, still).
That led to my first O'Reilly purchase, as Managing UUCP and Usenet was invaluable. Before they became this mega-conglomerate.
Where the hell did time go?!
Will they call it "Elysium"? Or is that still reserved for Space Karen's future billionaires-only space utopia?
As for thousands of jobs: will they live *in* the city, in appropriate slave and serf quarters, of course, probably underground, so as not to spoil the view with favellas? Or drudge in and out like the the throngs in Metropolis? The AFB won't be a problem - I'm waiting for the day when they finally have their own private armies. Russia sort of shows how it's done.
I have a voice that naturally carries. A lot. That's just how it is (*). A reverberating baritone. It's either that or down to a whisper that is a) incomprehensible and b) makes my throat hurt.
When I'm in the office, and someone comes to me for some of that synergy and cooperation and innovative chattedy-chat, it will take a minute before the dirty looks start - on the other side of the building, courtesy of the abomination of open plan offices! Go to a meeting room? With those paper walls, it either does nothing, or you'll feel you're next to an obnoxious nightclub, where you hear nothing but a deep base droning.
That's when I'm calm. If I get excited about something (or annoyed, but that almost never happens in all things IT, amirite?), my voice increases in volume and carries across several floors.
Be glad I'm almost never in the office anymore!
(*) back when I was in the military, I was sometimes roped in for leading drill and parade duty. My bellows would bring a tear of joy to Sergeant Fred Colon.
With regard to the "must be human created", I was curious and looked up the situation of animal-created art and, of course, the (in)famous Macaque selfie.
Turns out that yes, this holds absolutely true: only a legal person can hold copyright, which an animal is not, and the copyright may also not be claimed by the human owner/trainer/wild-life photographer by proxy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal-made_art
There's precedence, especially as I would argue your average elephant, cat, monkey/ape has more sentience/sapience than over-hyped "rapid look-up engines cum neural network" called "AI". Naturally, therefore this hold true for a computer.
At least right now. Our future machine overlords may revisit this and add an inflammatory reply some time long after I'm gone and give a flying f*ck.
Just reading this article gives me something akin to PTSD, remembering my time there.
3 months of doing nothing much but learning and drinking the kool-aid, 6 months of an amazing project - followed by 9 months of hell. Trying to get to 2 years, somehow, for the stock options, but had to bail or face months of therapy (which is what happened to a coworker, who stuck it out and had to spend months getting mental health treatment). The lowest rated manager was put in charge of the team, after the 2 *highest* rated ones were driven out and the regional manager bailed in disgust after a mere 4 or 5 months. I went from getting cheered and accoladed to being put on a PIP in 4(!) weeks, just as a result of that "civil war".
With the good people leaving - or getting laid off - what's left must increasingly be a sediment layer of sociopathy, looking more like late Western Rome or Byzantium, in its internecine warfare and backstabbing, while waving their previous, weaponised "leadership principles" around like a Labarum. (yes, I've been reading A.Goldsworthy's Fall of Rome, why do you ask? ;) )
Was thinking of posting this anonymously, but no, I'm leaving my name on this. You can get fucked, Amazon/AWS!
Having literally just (4 weeks ago) having experienced the unbelievably excruciating pain of a protruded disk pressing on spinal nerves, having to live off opiates and finally having surgery, but possibly having to live with nerve damage in my right arm for the rest of my life........ I almost feel sympathy with Elon. At least I most certainly empathise.
You're risking decades in the clink for $15K?! I thought the US military paid somewhat decently and you got pretty good healthcare?
Any Chinese "spymasters" reading this: add 3 0's before approaching me. I want my wife and pets taken care of, if I spend the rest of my life in a 4x3m cell.
(do I have to add "no this was not an incitement to approach me about espionage" in this day and age? Probably, yes. I don't even work with or for the military)
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