a lil bee 🐝

It’s 2050. Every computer scientist is named Conway. ChatGPT releases its new version of Conway4, which scrapes every ounce of private medical data we have.

Well, TIL! Darn famous computer scientists sharing last names. This Conway is still an icon.

I cite Conway’s Law (and it’s reverse corollary) multiple times a week. I’m sorry to hear this, but her contributions were many and 85 is not a bad run. I hope she was happy and fulfilled, in the end.

Ugh this sucks, but no, not really. LinkedIn isn’t just a platform, it’s the people on it. No other site exists that will get you the same amount of exposure. There are definitely other sites and non-internet options for networking in general though.

Oh cmon, being jailed by the Taliban has gotta be peak transition goals

I hope that gets to the point where major players are able and willing to use it. I only have so much sway with my clients when it comes to tooling choice and open source options can be hard to sell to some enterprises until they hit a certain proliferation point.

Most of my clients were not impacted by that change, since it was more related to building Terraform-adjacent tooling and not so much products built with Terraform. I was not a fan, but it didn’t necessarily kill it as an option for me. This though… IBM will absolutely fuck this up.

Oh christ, there goes Terraform… That really sucks.

…right, so you’re asking for all media orgs to selectively choose stories in an attempt to make the Overton window (one of the most overused and abused concepts in online political discussion right now, to be frank) what you want. I’m not cool with that, regardless of the underlying validity of the stance you want to push. You can call it fighting fire with fire or whatever, but I call it losing every principle you have in the pursuit of protecting those same principles.

End of the day, I want the news I’m reading to tell me the opinions of the citizens I share space with. It doesn’t matter if I like it or not, it is out there and I need to know about it. The news is responsible for reporting on where the Overton window is, not where it should be.

Edit: I also wanted to add this. This conversation was on my mind as I was reading some of my news feed today and I saw the following articles posted by NYT just in the last few days, that are also discussing the left or their points of view.

How ‘The Squad’ and Like-Minded Progressives Have Changed Their Party

The Small-Business Tyrant Has a Favorite Political Party

Rural Voters Are More Progressive Than the Democratic Party Thinks

And here are some rather right-wing perspectives, from actual conservative politicians, although Cheney is certainly no longer a darling for them.

Liz Cheney: The Supreme Court Should Rule Swiftly on Trump’s Immunity Claim

Mike Pence: Donald Trump Has Betrayed the Pro-Life Movement

I think it’s completely reasonable to share these views with everyone. We need to know what our fellow citizens are talking about and believing, even if it’s completely bonkers.

It’s an opinion article, so I don’t think NYT has committed any malpractice here. They published an op-ed from Pence last week about Trump not being harsh enough on abortion, but that absolutely does not mean they dislike abortion. There are people who wanted FISA renewed because they are in intelligence services and see the benefits directly. I’m also skeptical of mass surveillance laws, but I’m glad NYT posted this article so I could read an opinion from someone who disagrees, and I don’t think this establishes an opinion or stance on the part of NYT at all because it’s not what op-eds are for.

Or, maybe it was never quite so bad as we all believed? There is no doubt that the internet and social media impacted all of our lives and routines drastically, but I think some of the impacts of social media are exaggerated by layfolk just reacting to how they feel about it. There are tons of great studies showing its impact to the mental state of children and we have to work on that, but I don’t think it has entirely uprooted the childhood experience. Just my two cents.

Oh this can absolutely happen at the less luxurious positions. For instance, FAANG (the big 5 tech companies, if you don’t work tech like 3/4 of the Fediverse) can afford to pay salaries well above any other employers. We’re talking 200k-400k here, not obscene billionaire-class stuff. Once they grab you, they can treat you worse once you get adjusted to the salary that no one else can match. I’ve seen it happen to a lot of people who end up miserable until they leave and have to go through the readjustment period.

Wow, those are some serious Licensed Insurance Agent skills

Yeah I’d be less worried about internal pressures (which should be minimal at a halfway decently run org) and more about the externals. I don’t think you would actually end up dealing with anything, but I’d know those reliant huge corps are pissed.

Man, your on-call situation sounds rad! I was salaried and just traded off on-call shifts with my team members, no extra time off. Luckily though, our systems were pretty quiet so it hardly ever amounted to much.

That’s fair. Yall, I was really not trying to be shitty. It was just shorthand I used, thinking of their HQs. No ill intent intended and I apologize for any harm it caused.

I’ve been an SRE for a few large corps, so I’ve definitely played this game. I’m with you that it was likely just the FB identity or ad provider causing most of these issues. So glad I’m out of that role now and back to DevOps, where I’m no longer on call.

The country where all of those services are maintained and hosted in… Just colloquial shorthand, not trying to be exclusionary.

Looking at the downmeter shot someone posted above, it’s half the SREs in the country. Not sure what the root cause will be, but damn that’s a lot of money down the tubes. I would not want to be the person who cost Meta and Google their precious thirty 9’s of availability lol.

Krazam completely on point, as usual. Gonna be mouthing “my pipeline is green” to myself even more than usual now.

I read NYT pretty consistently and I don’t think they’ve been “both sides”-ing this at all. I think they’re just reporting on the political conversation, which was squarely focused on Biden’s age for a few days. I don’t like it either, but a good chunk of the populace does view those as equivalent, or even lopsided in Trump’s favor, and the media has a duty to report that.