• 3 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • There’s nothing magical about the 15th reboot - Crowdstrike runs an update check during the boot process, and depending on your setup and network speeds, it can often take multiple reboots for that update to get picked up and applied. If it fails to apply the update before the boot cycle hits the point that crashes, you just have to try again.

    One thing that can help, if anyone reads this and is having this problem, is to hard wire the machine to the network. Wifi is enabled later in the startup sequence which leaves little (or no) time for the update to get picked up an applied before the boot crashes. The wired network stack starts up much earlier in the cycle and will maximize the odds of the fix getting applied in time.




  • The article is critical of GitLabs model, not celebrating it.

    What GitLab does is far more open than what you’ll see elsewhere, but the formula is actually pretty near to what most companies do already: Have pay bands for positions, and then a modifier based on the region, level factors, and some other inputs. Normally this produces a range, not a straight number, and then negotiations take place within that band (which is also why this information and formula is not typically shared).

    As for the idea of paying a flat salary for a position regardless of where the person works, that is simply a non-starter for most companies, and essentially creates a race to the bottom to locate the region of the world that will produce qualified workers for the lowest possible salary possible. We as a society have no problem seeing fast fashion or other manufacturing that do this as being exploitive and evil, and this model is exactly the kind of thinking that drives that behavior. If we stop caring about where a person lives and instead look only at salary vs production, we will only ever hire in the absolute lowest cost of living places in the world capable of producing acceptable workers.

    We need to look at this from another angle as well - Companies are buying labor, much in the same way that they buy raw materials, property, or utilities. When buying any of these inputs to your business, how do you decide how much to pay? Certainly you do not sit down in a board room and agree on a number and then go out into the world with that number and attempt to purchase what you need. You start by looking at what the going market rate for those inputs are. People, like materials, have some wiggle room in those numbers, and sometimes paying a little more will get you better quality or more reliability, so you will need to make decisions there to determine where on the spectrum you wish to fall, but never would you pay significantly more than market rate, nor would you be able to pay significantly below.

    I see this kind of discussion constantly in the last few years, and often in terms of tying inflation to annual salary increases. “If inflation was 10%, why is my annual raise only 5%?” - because overall inflation was 10%, but the inflation in the cost for a person that can do your job was only 5%. It’s truly and honestly that simple. You are a commodity item that goes to the highest bidder - act like it.




  • For drying it out, nothing special - clean out as much as you can with towels/vac/etc, and then get as much air circulating as you can.

    For the leak itself, if it’s the sunroof, the water is more likely to come from the sunroof itself and you’d see it raining on you along with wet seats. I’d wager it’s more likely the trunk itself or a light assembly that’s leaking.

    Simplest thing to check is the trunk seal. Open the trunk and check around the seal for tears or areas where the seal is no longer attached. If there is any debris built up, clear that out too. Pour water around the outside of that seal and see if anything is coming through. Some weatherstrip adhesive fix up any cracks or breaks in the seal.

    The other place you could be getting water in is the lights. Check around the housings to see if their seals are still intact and you can test by pouring water to see if any moisture is coming through. The “correct” fix here is to have the light housing removed and the gasket replaced. That can get spendy if you’re not doing it yourself, though, so some clear silicon can be employed to seal up the gaps.

    Now, I doubt it’s the sunroof leaking, but just to be thorough: The sunroof has drains that can get clogged over time (usually see it with older cars or those that park outside under trees). Open the sunroof and check around the opening for debris. You should also be able to find the drain holes. They’re small and run through the frame and out the bottom of the car. You can test to see if it’s clogged by pouring a small amount of water into the gap and seeing if it drains or not. Some compressed air into the drain holes is usually enough to blow any loose debris out the bottom and clear the clog if there is one.


  • Being in a small company is different, but not worse (or better). With the roles you have on your plate already, you have a sprawling blank canvas to work from, and in a small company environment, you tend to have a significant amount of flexibility so long as you don’t take your eye off of the main company objectives (vs a large company where “that’s not your department” situations can squash many learning opportunities).

    First, figure out what areas you want to focus on. This doesn’t need to be forever, but you are going to need some degree of focus or you’ll risk doing a hundred things poorly and not really learning much.

    Once you’ve figured out what you want to focus on first and have done some basic research/discovery, seek a mentor. This is one place where small companies make things harder, as you almost always need to look outside to find mentoring.

    With the Project Management and Cloud Architecture bits of your role, you can look at Financial Operations. Just make sure you take a high level look first to see if there’s sense in that (make sure the ROI on you and your co-workers time plus any new services/providers needed makes sense for what you can potentially save - you want to be able to show that your time was well spent with any self-initiated project or you risk someone deciding that you need to be more closely monitored in the future).








  • Most of the west has already been dealing with this for decades, and the way they typically deal with it is through offshore manufacturing and immigration. The process has been to identify a low cost nation, build up enough infrastructure to work from there, move manufacturing to that nation, and then when the nation becomes wealthier and no longer able to be exploited, restart the process. We’ve seen this cycle with India and China, and now it’s starting to branch out (a lot of South American nations are being bulked up as “near-shore” partners that are cheap, but also in the same timezone and closer for shipping). Africa is another continent with a lot of potential future options.





  • Title’s a little click-baity there. The Massachusetts ballot initiative that passed is a poorly thought out security nightmare, so until those issues can be addressed it would be dangerous to follow it.

    Now, according to Reuters, NHTSA has written to automakers to advise them not to comply with the Massachusetts law. Among its problems are the fact that someone “could utilize such open access to remotely command vehicles to operate dangerously, including attacking multiple vehicles concurrently,” and that “open access to vehicle manufacturers’ telematics offerings with the ability to remotely send commands allows for manipulation of systems on a vehicle, including safety-critical functions such as steering, acceleration, or braking.”

    The title isn’t wrong, it just doesn’t mean what it sounds like it means.