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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • Well, sorta.

    Plenty (maybe even most) of 1st level manages will see and understand, but are still unable or unwilling to push back on unrealistic expectations coming from outside (sometimes not even from above, just from customer) so from the point of view of those working under them the result is the same if they’re not doing their own internal time reporting averaging and and are honest towards them.

    Further, they often fuck-up things, from planning to analysis and taking in account the dependencies on external providers and it’s the team that has to make up for it. Absolutelly, the managers will notice people going the extra mile … and do the same thing again next time around and it will be just as “unexpected” and “we have not other option” as all the previous times.

    I would even go as far as saying that the “understanding” manager that fucks you up anyway (sometimes because they’ll always put themselves above those working for them and might even be fake, others because they’re not very good at playing the game that needs to be played to other stakeholders) is the most common of all.

    Looking back (to almost 30 years of experience in several countries), some of my worst managers were “really nice” people but the team still suffered massivelly because they were not in fact good managers (they suffered alongside the team, for all the good that did to the rest) - essentially the team was holding the career of somebody who should probably be doing something else and at the end of the day, the managers rather than the rest were the ones getting more pay and bigger bonuses.



  • Welcome to the world of making software for random people, almost certainly made worse by she being a woman.

    As others pointed out, most people do appreciate it, but they tend to be silent about it, whilst a small minority are demanding little whinny bitches (in a non-gendered way) who think they’re owed service and some are even trolls.

    To those reading this, I suggest when you get something you like for free you at least give some feedback that you liked it and, if the person has some kind of sponsoring scheme going on and you really like it, consider contributing, if only to incentivise more of the same.

    Those on the other side are people too and they will appreciate it.






  • Salesmanship is the essence of management at those levels.

    Which brings us back around to the original subject of this thread - tech bros - in my own experienced in Tech recently and back in the 90s boom, this generation of founders and “influencers” aren’t techies, they’re people from areas heavy on salesmanship, not actually on creating complex things that objectivelly work.

    The complete total dominance of sales types in both domains id why LLMs are being pushed the way they are as if they’re some kind of emerging-AGI and lots of corporates believe it and are trying to hammer those square pegs into round holes even though the most basic of technical analises would tell them that it doesn’t work like that.

    Ultimately since the current societal structures we have massively benefit that kind or personality, we’re going to keep on having these kinds of barely-useful-stuff-insanely-hyped-up cycles wasting tons of resources because salesmanship is hardly a synonym for efficiency or wisdom.


  • There are only two types of “Super High-IQ” people who will go for an unpaid job working in politics for the likes of Musk:

    • Very naive young things, hence very inexperienced and who are going to do all mistakes in the book and then some for the next couple of years as they learn the ropes. By the time they know enough about the job they’ll be burned out from working for a guy like Musk not to mention knowing enough to know they’re better of elsewhere.
    • Grifters looking for making maximum money from being in politics. Since they’re not getting paid, that means corruption, lots and lots of corruption.

    Also, even amongst the “very naive young things”, in my own personal experience, the high intelligent types with the personality to be real believers of far right stuff, are at most above average intelligence but below genius level IQ (which is 120) and hence not really “super high”-IQ (which would more 160+) - I once worked with a guy like that who thought himself very intelligent and in his new job ended up working in an office with two genious level colleagues and he was very entertaining because of his “buttons” were so obvious and he was so easy to give the run around.

    Super-high IQ people are often the very opposite of street smart, but one thing they aren’t is stupid and at most fall into the first part of the saying “you can deceive most people some of the time, or some people all of the time, but you can’t deceive most people all of the time” - they can be swindled but they’ll figure it out faster than most.






  • Nowadays, there are really only two classes:

    • The Owners class, which is people who live off the money that’s made by the assets they own.
    • The Worker class, which is people who live off the money they get from selling their work.

    What was called “Middle Class” generally are just workers who earn a bit more, though the older Middle Class did at times manage to save enough to buy enough assets that they could start living of the income from those assets and not have to work anymore. That’s not the case for young people nowadays who would qualify as Middle Class due to their level of formal education and the kind of work they do because it’s way harder for them to save and asset prices are through the roof.




  • The whole “work hard” being a moral dictum really depends on the country.

    I’ve worked in Portugal, Britain and The Netherlands for about a decade each and whilst the Brits have the “work hard” not just in the sense of long hours but also the bloody slogan and moral commandment, and the Portuguese too have the long hours but “work hard” really doesn’t add up to a moral commandment, the Dutch have neither and in fact it’s considered a bad thing if people are still at the office after 6 PM (many even come in earlier to leave at 4.30 PM) to the point that a manager is considered a bad manager if their people are still there at that hour (because it means they didn’t plan the project properly), quite the opposite of the other two countries were the “bumms on seats” after 6PM are seen as a good think.

    Interestingly, of all 3, the Dutch are the most productive, by far - you do a lot more in term of actual results delivered in 8h/day in The Netherlands than you do in 10-12h/day in Portugal or Britain.


  • Having worked in various countries of Europe with various different work cultures, I can guarantee you that at least in Software Development the productivity of working more than 8h a day regularly (you can get away with doing it for a week or two, but no further) is so much less than in with 8h/day or less, that you’re literally producing less results with your work in a whole long-hours day of work than you do in an 8h day.

    In simple terms, tired people do negative work and people working long hours regularly end up chronically tired.

    Maybe it works differently for people doing stuff that’s all about salesmanship (like Business Angel) for whom more hours means more “meets”, but in my personal experience it definitelly works as I described for people actually doing heavy thinking work that has to actually work rather than merelly doing talkie-talkie with hard to compare results and where efficiency is near impossible to measure.


  • I don’t think the sensors really matter for a server but the rest makes some sense.

    Still, 80 bucks will buy you quite literally a Mini-PC (a really crummy one, granted) which can run more server tasks because it has as much or more memory and storage and isn’t hindered by there being an Android OS layer there doing nothing useful, and which is absolutelly and 100% under your control because it boots into your OS of choice.

    Half than that will buy you a crummy SBC which probably de facto has as much capability to run server tasks as that Oneplus (it’s weaker but doesn’t have Android there eating up resources) though in my experience those things tend to be a bit finicky.

    I don’t think it’s actually worth it to spend $80 on an used phone to use as a server (unless you do need UPS-like features or built-in mobile nertwork access) since you quite literally have better options brand new for that money, but if you have one around it can make sense even if it’s a bit more work getting it going and is not fully under your control (unless we’re talking about something jailbroken where you can install Oxygen or Lineage on, so a Pixel would probably be a better choice).

    That said, there is a certain technical elegance in the whole notion of repurposing an Android Phone to be a home server.


  • Except the price, which is much lower for the SBC, way much lower if one uses one of the lower end Orange Pi or Banana Pi SBCs.

    Also you can put Linux on the SBCs (which always come unlocked) hence do way more with them as servers than if one has to use Android as the OS.

    I mean, I can get it if people with the technical chops, love for technical challenges and an old and pretty much worthless Android phone, configure it as a server if only because “why not?!”, but it’s not exactly a great option considering that a 40 bucks SBC can do the same, only better, more easily and with far more possibilities (given that it will be running Linux rather than Android).

    PS: Actually somebody below mention mobile network connection, which, thinking about it, would be a good reason to use an old Android phone as a server since it has built-in support for 3G (unless it’s quite old) whilst the SBC needs it add to it which might be a problem for the cheaper SBCs (just wondering about how I would get around to do it, I think you need to connect a USB dongle to it and it has to be something compatible with Armbian Linux)