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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Not crazy, just sad.

    Middle of the day, sitting at our desks working. This middle aged guy who was usually happy as Larry gets up and leaves the office leaving his stuff behind. Not a word said. I just assumed he was getting a coffee or something.

    End of the day rolls around, stuff still there. Same thing the next day. Still there the next week.

    People start asking what happened to him, but the agency he was working through kept telling us he’s coming back soon.

    Over a month later, someone packs up his stuff and puts it in the bin. The guy was never coming back, turns out he went left and ended his own life the day he walked out. Never made it home.

    The agency apparently only found out he was dead a few weeks after the incident, then strung us along so they could find a replacement. We terminated their contract and offered the handful of other employees jobs.

    ———

    Another job, we had a new guy start. Very conventionally attractive and he seemed normal enough.

    A few weeks later one of the women complained to HR that someone was stalking her. She was getting ‘flattering’ letters, emails, notes etc and they often contained information and photos in/about/around her work. Flattering, but not something she was comfortable with

    Few weeks later, we’re told new guy won’t be coming back due to inappropriate behaviour.

    Woman had to get a restraining order against the guy. In a twist of irony, she said that if the guy had just talked to her, she would have gone on a date with him in a heartbeat.


  • Imo, the term “buy” for all goods should pass some sort of litmus test. Eg:

    does the product being sold have the same properties as a brick?

    • can the product be resold privately?
    • can the product be lent to another user temporarily?
    • would the product still perform its function when the manufacturer stops supporting it?
    • would the product still perform its function if the manufacturer ceased to exist.

    if the product does not pass all these tests, the customer is not buying. Consider using terms such as ‘rent’ or ‘lease’ or ‘subscription’





  • Yale’s Assure SL doesn’t have a key, but you can power it externally with a 9v battery. (And, keys are just another failure point). They also make some keyed variants.

    It out of the box doesn’t have any network capability. You can plug in a zigbee or Wifi module to give it connectivity.

    Zigbee support is pretty primitive. Basic functionality works fine. Lock, unlock etc. afaik, you can do whatever the unit can do through zigbee commands but I’ve not seen (nor really looked) for a usable interface to it.

    [edit] realised I mixed up zwave and zigbee.






  • I used to love ‘the cloud’. Rather, a specific slice of it.

    I worked almost exclusively on AppEngine, it was simple. You uploaded a zip of your code to appengine and it ran it at near infinite scale. They gave you a queue, a database, a volatile cache, and some other gizmos. It was so simple you’d struggle to fuck it up really.

    It was easy, it was simple, and it worked for my clients who had 10 DAU, and my clients who had 5 million DAU. Costs scaled nearly linearly, and for my hobby projects that had 0 DAU, the costs were comparable.

    Then something happened and it slowly became complicated. The rest of the GCP cloud crept in and after spending a term with a client who didn’t use “the cloud” I came back to it and had to relearn nearly everything.

    Pretty much all of the companies I’ve worked for could be run on early AppEngine. Nobody has needed anything more than it, and I’m confident the only reason they had more was because tech is like water. You need to put it in a bucket or it goes everywhere.

    Give me my AppEngine back. It allowed me to focus on my (or my clients) problems. Not the ones that come with the platform.