Is this the one part of the night qualifies as merely mildly interesting?

Look a flagpole

Standard Form 86
Revised June 2024

Section 30 - Video Gaming Product Record
23.1 In the last seven (7) years have you participated in any video gaming product?
[ ] YES [ ] NO

Entry #1
Video gaming product name:
Dates of use:
Provide nature of participation in this video gaming product:

Was your participation while possessing a security clearance?
Do intend to participate in this video gaming product in the future?
Provide an explanation why you intend or do not intend to participate with this video gaming product in the future:

This is already said, but it cannot be too emphasized: This is not your fault. This is entirely on them. Three months is far too short to evaluate someone even if they were secretly unhappy with your performance. It might be worth talking to an employment lawyer, but likely you’ll have to take this on the chin. In the immortal words of the great Captain Picard: “It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness; that is life.”

As everyone has said, you can expect to get questions about it, and I would definitely have a prepared, rehearsed statement. Some recruiters and hiring managers make a big deal about these sort of things, some won’t even care. Again: this is not your fault and do not be apologetic about it.

Five weeks is not a lot of time to get a new software job, even in a hot market. This is the unfortunate reality and I would start making contingency plans. If living in NYC remains a goal, then this is a setback but a far smaller one than it may seem right now. You don’t have a mortgage or a family hanging over your head. Moving back to NYC will be in play, likely sooner than you think.

Spending time on career development is a good idea. Something with a firm outcome like AWS Solutions Architect is also good. I have the associate certification which I started working on while at Amazon. It hasn’t really done much for me, but I’m not seeking positions where it would hold much weight.

If you talk to people about homelessness, they will readily admit they just don’t want to see it. If go to any cheaper grocery store you definitely are rubbing shoulders with people who use foodbanks. Food insecurity doesn’t go away just because you have a roof over your head.

The rub is a foodbank in a grocery store will attract the more visible “unreliable access to showers” type of user, which would be unacceptable.

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Honestly, I’d be more curious what topics where the media does nail the nuances of. Are there any at all?

I see them as a flawed indicator of the ceiling of someone’s theoretical computer science abilities. Having worked with some brilliant people that career shifted via bootcamps, I will contend there’s value in having that foundation. I also prefer Leetcode problems over having to memorize search algorithms. But yeah, it’s not very reflective of day to day tasks even in R&D heavy projects. The most algorithm heavy thing I’ve ever done was implement Ramer–Douglas–Peucker to convert points from mouse polling into a simplified line.

(There’s clearly a “it’s what everyone else is doing” aspect to Leetcode, on top of being very practical to run, hence I why don’t see them going anywhere. They’re also as objective as anything in an interview will ever be, so as I always say: it can be so much worse.)

I intend to make the hacker “dive into an icky codebase armed with a stack trace and fix a bug” aspect of software development a part of my interview process; plus lean more heavily on system design questions which is where non-entry level engineers really ought to shine. The parts that worry me are the ability to create new tests as they inevitably leak, plus whether I can truly objectively evaluate someone’s performance.

I’m curious what you include and how well it works.

Yeah, they kinda suck and they are brutal to go into cold. Having to grind a bunch of leetcode problems is a burden, particularly if you currently have a job and god forbid a family.

I would still take them over the puzzle questions that used to be popular, or the personality test nonsense that dominates most fields. At least Leetcode problems are reasonably reflective of programming skill. I’ll also take them over vague open ended questions - ain’t nothing more fun than trying to ramble my way into whatever answer the interviewer is secretly looking for.

Personally, when the day comes when I’m In Charge, I plan on experimenting with more day to day type evaluations. I think there’s potential for things like performing a mock code review or having someone plan out a sprint based on a very detailed design document. “Here’s an icky piece of code, tell me what it does and what you would do to improve it” seems to have fallen out of style, though it’s not clear to me why.

That said, like it or not it’s how the game is played and not changing anytime soon. Get on the Grind75 train, or don’t and keep failing tech screens.

If he’s someone that’s normally good at being funny - that is good at finding humorous observations and wording things that get people to laugh - then I’d say he’s messing with you.

I would mess with him right back by acting like I’m very seriously trying to understanding the joke and ask increasingly dumb questions until he realizes that yes, I knew exactly what he was doing. Or a knowing smirk if that’s too much.

(Yes this comment is very revealing about my childhood)

This might not be what your friend is going for, but I smirked slightly and this is how I interpret it:

I particularly like jokes that take something absurd and launder it through the structure of things that do make sense. Everything in your friend’s joke is factually true. It’s structured as a logically consistent argument.

And yet it is completely nonsensical. No one has ever thought that windows make something move. It invoked a slightly confused response in me, which is why I found it funny.

It’s not a great joke, but I might tell it to feel out someone’s sense of humor plus whether they pick up on that I’m doing so. I think the analogy to Windows makes it a weaker joke, but I would give that as an explanation just to mess with someone a little.

If you are interested in this, also check out Robert Reich’s course Wealth & Poverty, which until his recent retirement he taught at Berkley. He’s probably best known for being Clinton’s secretary of labor, so not just someone who’s only taught at universities.

His course goes more into the incentives built into the economy do not merely encourage but effectively require this sort of behavior, among other topics. A key takeaway that resonated with me is the observation that there have always been greedy, bad actors in the economy armed with too much power. It is wrong to simply blame individual companies, or their boards - though don’t let them off the hook either.

If at nothing else, it’s one of the few investigations of the intersection between economics and power that I’ve found, and an important subject that otherwise doesn’t fit into any particular silo.

It’s easy* to setup Hashicorp Vault with your own CA and do automated cert generation and rotation, if you are willing to integrate everything into Vault and install your root CA everywhere. (*not really harder than any other Vault setup, but yaknow). I may go down this route eventually since I don’t think a device I don’t control has ever accessed anything I selfhost, or ever will.

I have a wildcard subdomain pointing to my public IP, and forward port 80 to an LXC container with certbot. Port 80 appears closed outside the brief window when certbot is renewing certs. Inside my network I have my PiHole configured to return the local IP for each service.

Nothing exposed to the internet at all. There is a record of my hostnames on Let’s Encrypt but not concerned if someone will, say, deduce apollo-idrac is the iDRAC service for a Dell rackmount server called apollo and the other Greek/Roman gods are VMs on it. Seemed like a house of cards that would never work reliably, but three odd years later I only have issues if a DNS resolver insists on bypassing my PiHole. And that DNS resolver is SystemD-ResolveD which should crawl back into whatever hellhole it came out of.

They could hijack your site at any time, but with a copy of your live private certs they (or more likely whatever third party that will invariably breach your domain provider) can decrypt your otherwise secure traffic.

I don’t think there’s significant real tangible risk since who cares about your private selfhosted services and I’d be more worried about the domain being hijacked, and really any sort of network breach is probably interested in finding delicious credit card numbers and passwords and crypto private keys to munch on. If someone got into my network, spying on my Jellyfin streaming isn’t what I’m going to be worried about.

But it is why CSRs are used.

Friction between Snap and AppArmor is to be expected. The corporate sponsor of Snap, Canonical, is well known for their icy relationship with the corporate sponsor of AppArmor, Canonical.

Buddy if you are waiting for a Sign, this is it. It’ll never get more concrete than this message I’m typing for you right now. Having a lot of doubts is common. It wasn’t truly real for me until I started medication.

My broad advice is to find a good psychiatrist (and don’t be afraid to switch if you aren’t happy) and dig as deep as possible for evidence both for and against. Go in with confidence that you have ADHD symptoms, but keep an open mind since there are alternative explanations. A diagnosis of “no you don’t have ADHD it’s actually ____” is also important information to know, and you will regret letting it drag out if you do have ADHD.

I’m curious what you would change about (Western?) society to make ADHD manageable like it apparently already is in “many countries,” in concrete well defined terms. Not sure how society could negate the emotional regulation issues that frequently come with ADHD. I would also emphasize there’s a distinction between “a society where people with ADHD can function” and “a society perfectly suited for people with ADHD.”

I’m sensing that ADHD is a label thrust upon you, and if you feel you function fine without any sort of treatment it’s probably not accurate. It’s also now occurring to me how hilariously easy it would be to troll any sort of mental health issue. Depression isn’t a disorder it’s just SADNESS coming from MODERN SOCIETY and we just need to uncheck the CAUSE DEPRESSION box in society’s configuration.

Anyone more first hand familiar with the politics of Chino Valley? At a glance, it’s a solidly blue district and not where I’d expect this sort of culture war grand standing. Feels like an artifact of the weird nature of school boards where usually sleepy off year elections sometimes explode and elect crazies who have a small dedicated groups of voters.

Mrs. Shaw received 51.58 percent of the votes (5,190) and Mrs. Gagnier received 48.42 percent (4,873).

Not to be not alarmed, but seems more like an aberration. There’s a good reason why school board candidates tend to run on this:

Mrs. Shaw, who campaigned on parental rights, said her goals include getting the school district back to the basics with reading, writing, and math, teaching age-appropriate curriculum, and ensuring transparency with parents.

And not culture war nonsense. I feel like Cruz and Na have likely avoided too much attention, but tying themselves to a kook who is turning school board meetings into a circus with national attention is a bad strategy going into an on-cycle election in a blue district. Unless they don’t want their seats, then maybe it’s a great strategy.

The layoff includes Mary Kirby, who’s been a core writer in the Dragon Age franchise since the first game. Saw takes that the layoffs are just eliminating multiplayer positions, but that’s not true.

I’ve long suspected that Dreadwolf will make or break BioWare. Since it’s following the same script as Andromeda and Anthem - endless delays, no public progress just lots of b-roll and concept art - I don’t think development is going well. ME: Legacy might have bought BioWare some breathing room but I can’t interpret this as anything other than death throes for the studio.

BioWare is dead, long live Larian and Spiders?

I’ve found the idea of LXC containers to be better than they are in practice. I’ve migrated all of my servers to Proxmox and have been trying to move various services from VMs to LXC containers and it’s been such a hassle. You should be able to directly forward disk block devices, but just could not get them to mount for an MinIO array - ended up just setting their entire contents to 100000:100000 and mounting them on the host and forwarding the mount point instead. Never managed to CAP_IPC_LOCK to work correctly for a HashiCorp Vault install. Docker in LXC has some serious pain points and feels very fragile.

It’s damning that every time I have a problem with LXC the first search result will be a Proxmox forum topic with a Proxmox employee replying to the effect of “we recommend VMs over LXC for this use case” - Proxmox doesn’t seem to recommend LXC for anything. Proxmox + LXC is definitely better than CentOS + Podman, but my heart longs for the sheer competence of FreeBSD Jails.