Just some Internet guy

He/him/them 🏳️‍🌈

  • 1 Post
  • 947 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 25th, 2023

help-circle


  • I went through hiring several times at several companies, being on the interviewer side.

    Typically it’s not the talent pool as much as what the company has to offer and how much they’re willing to pay. I referred top notch engineer friends, and they never made it past HR. A couple were rejected without interview because they asked too high of a salary, despite asking under market average. The rest didn’t pass HR on personnality or not having all the “requirements”, because the really good engineers are socially awkward and demand flexibility and are honest on the résumé/CV, or are self taught and barely have high-school graduation on there (just like me).

    I’ve literally seen the case of: they want to hire another me, but ended up in a situation where: I wouldn’t apply for the position myself, and even if I did, I wouldn’t make it to the interview stage where I’d talk to myself and hire myself.

    Naturally the candidates that did make it to me weren’t great. Those are the people that do the bare minimum, have studied every test question (without understanding), vibe code everything, typically on the younger and very junior side. They’re very good at passing HR, and very bad at their actual job.

    It’s not the technology, it’s the companies that hire that ultimately steers the market and what people study for. Job requirements are ridiculous, HR hires engineers on personnality like they’re shopping for yet another sales associate, now it takes 6 rounds of interviews for an entry level position at a startup. VC startups continue to pay wildly inflated wages to snatch all the top talent while established companies are laying off as much IT staff as possible to maximize profits.



  • Keyboard shortcuts in general.

    • Alt + left right (previous/next page in browsers)

    • Windows + 1 (2, 3, …) on Windows and KDE focuses the window at that position in the taskbar

    • Alt + Tab to switch windows (hold shift to go backwards)

    • Windows + Tab to switch windows within the same application (like, all browser windows if you’re in a browser)

    • Alt + 1 (2, 3, …) on Windows/Linux usually selects the corresponding tab

    • Ctrl + Tab to cycle through tabs like Alt-Tab does for windows (hold shift to go backwards)

    • In most browsers or things with a URL/go to bar, Ctrl+L will focus that. No need to click the address bar, Ctrl+L, example.com, Enter.

    • In Discord and Slack, you can press Ctrl+K to open a box to quickly type a channel/DM name to go to it quickly

    • If you have them, the Home/End/PageUp/PageDown keys are actually pretty useful. Press Home instead of scrolling all the way back up.

    • F1 is usually help

    • F2 is usually rename

    • F3 is usually search




  • The main issue you’ll run into is nicher proprietary software being hard to install, but that’s what containers are for. The main one I see is if you need to install some proprietary VPN client it gets annoying, but since you’ll be running a VM anyway you can do some network trickery. My work’s antivirus only works on Ubuntu and RHEL, proprietary kernel modules so it’s got to be at least one of those kernels.

    Linux is Linux, nothing’s impossible to solve even with Bazzite’s immutability. Worst comes to worst you make your own images and it’s not that hard, you basically just fork it on GitHub and let the CI do its thing.

    But do you have time to fiddle to make it work and take the risk, or do you want to play it safe? How confident are you with Bazzite’s more advanced topics?







  • It depends on your overall energy use but generally that would be negligible when compared to heating and hot water, especially during winter when the furnace runs 24/7.

    In particular, during the winter, all excess energy from the oven is heat the furnace doesn’t have to provide so it’s basically free: you’d use that energy anyway.

    Generally the economy of scale should technically favor the prebaked bread, at least before the store slaps its value added surcharge for it. The store still needs to pay for the energy (but probably gets it cheaper than you), but also needs to pay to maintain a factory, equipment, employees. So you kinda need to factor in the price of your oven too and its wear and tear.

    I just buy the loaf because one thing I know for sure is if I factor in the value of my time, it’s way better and easier to work an hour than spend an hour baking a loaf of bread. The time to bake the bread costs more than if I used that time to work the equivalent time and buy 5 loaves of bread with the money.




  • What do you want the UI for? For configuration it’s usually meh because it’s the kind of thing you configure by config file, often generated config files even. For stats it’s where it gets interesting, usually third-party options like Grafana is used along with something like Prometheus to collect the metrics.

    When it comes to easy configuration, newer options go for the zero configuration angle rather than a nice UI to configure it. Just need some Docker tags and Traefik automagically configures itself, so the UI is just for viewing information.



  • Few of them for most use cases, especially a VPS. My server have a couple of IPs each mapping to a different VM, they can all claim 22/80/443 as you’d expect, but that’s just basically the same as having a bunch of VPSes anyway.

    It’s useful for some other uses like, I might want to dedicate an IP for VPN exit that doesn’t expose any services.

    Another use is sometimes you just want two things to stay entirely separate, even if on a technical level it could work with a reverse proxy. It can eliminate some class of exploits like request smuggling.

    One use case I’ve had for a customer is they have a system that can only do TLSv1.0, which is wildly obsolete and exploitable. So that particular API endpoint was served from a secondary IP, that way I can continue to enforce TLSv1.2+ on the primary IP. It’s possible with some reverse proxy magic with HAproxy, but I could also just make a new server block in the existing NGINX bound to that IP and call it a day.


  • I think I’m kind of on the other extreme, I day dream a lot. It’s like I can experience anything I’ve experienced before on demand and replay it. Sometimes it’s annoying, it’s like someone left 3 TVs and 2 radios on in my head and I can’t turn it off.

    I didn’t know that was a thing until today, but also totally unsurprised, the brain is super weird.

    I don’t struggle to picture it though, that only works for me if the book is interesting. When it’s boring (ie. forced to read it and there’s a test), I think my brain falls back to how you read books.