Punkie @ punkwalrus @lemmy.world

Linux nerd and consultant. Sci-fi, comedy, and podcast author. Former Katsu

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Joined

2 yr. ago

This right here. I have worked with a dozen PMs in 30 years, only two were any damn good. One managed an IT team, and she didn't know tech worth squat, but God damn, did she keep the flow going and know how to get shit done without being an ass about it.

On the other hand, I faught with a PM once because he didn't understand the concept of priorities or how to manage a crisis. "You want me to fix the outage or attend a meeting about it?" "Both." "Pick one. You have a choice. I can fix the issue in the data center, or join a blame session in the meeting room. Which one?" "BOTH!" I got to the meeting room, and he demanded we put down our laptops and pay attention. He invited EVERYBODY regardless of whether they were needed or not. Twenty seven people all bitching about the outage and not a single person fixing it. No meeting moderation. Just chaos until he had a panic attack. Just useless.

Because people assume all these investors know what they are doing. They don't. Now, some investors are good, but they usually don't go for shit like this. At lot of investors are VCs, rich upper class twits, who can afford to lose money. Pure and simple. It's like a bunch of lotto winners telling people they know how to pick numbers, betting outside bets once in a while, get lucky, and have selective bias.

Plus, they have enough money to hedge their bets. For example, say you invest $1mil in companies A, B, C, D, E, and F. All lose everything except A and B, which earn you $3mil each. You put in $6mil, got back $6mil. You broke even, tell people you knew what you were doing because you picked A and B, and conveniently never mention the rest. Then rich twits people invest in what YOU invest in. So you invest in H, others invest in H because you did, drives up the value. Now magnify this by a lot of investors, hundreds of letters, and it's all like some weird game of luck and timing.

But a snapshot in time leads to your 2) ?????? Point. Many know this is a confidence game, based on luck, charm, and timing. Some just stumble through it, and others are fleeced, but who cares? Daddy's got money.

Money works different for rich people. It's truly puzzling.

Found out the same between Tokyo and Okinawa. It's like flying from Washington DC to Miami. "Just take a train," is 32 hours, plus time on a ferry.

Not a really a day trip, even though it "seems like Japan is a small country."

Having cleaned toilets before, it's because a startling amount of people don't flush. In a high school, I'd say about half the kids from the 1980s didn't, so I can't imagine they started as adults. In companies I have worked for with auto-flushes, I have rarely seen a mess left in the bowl, but companies that don't about half the time as well.

I have a lot of medications like this: huge boxes containing one pill bottle and 60% air. Why??? Also, injection meds that have "display boxes" like they are high end Samsung electronics.

I toss it in the recycling bin on the way back to the house. My sister's ex used to obsess over it, though, and put it in a pile to be shredded. Then he never shredded it. His home office was a hoarders nest with yellowing junk mail everywhere.

It was all python, ruby, bash, and ansible

This right here. Plus stuff like "this is the functions section" and "this is the main script" helps make shell scripts more readable because functions have to come first, and if you just want to get to the main point, you can skip the functions section.

I had a boss who hated comments because he wanted "clean code," and that comments means you aren't using the wiki. The build approval process actually stripped out all comments via a script.

Then we lost the wiki.

I was at a crowded event, fully masked, still got it two days later. It had to be the event, I was not exposed in any other way. I work from home, so it was just my wife and I. She got it weeks later while at a nail salon. Again, fully masked.

Mine was bad, and over a year later, I am still suffering asthma side effects. To be fair, I had asthma before, but it used to be mild. My wife is still suffering from the lethargy, but she's retired military on pension, so she can just sleep.

I read this as "chow" first, and thought what a clever dog to aim that well.

I watched my Pekingese figure out a problem and use tools.

He wanted on the table where we were setting up for Thanksgiving. The table was stock full of delicious smells. Pekes are shaped like fat egg rolls with flipper feet. There was no way he could jump that high. But ohhhh... He wanted on that table. He just sat there, like a chubby kid staring at an unguarded cake three balconies above him.

After driving himself mental, pacing in place, whining, he sat down and started looking around, thinking about his plight. He saw a spare dining room chair we brought out to accommodate guests. He passed the usual heavy oak chairs to this cheap, IKEA spare chair. He scooted it with his face towards the table. He'd stop every so often, to see how close it was. He was gaging the distance.

Then, at the proper distance, he hopped on the chair and onto the the table before I grabbed him. It wasn't so much "NO PUPPEH MAH PAHT PIAH!" but I knew he'd grab a slice of meat too big for him and choke on it trying to swallow it before I got it from him.

Later, I gave him his own plate with dog-appropriate and safe food on it.

But my Peke was now another tool-user in my house.

I use Aliexpress a lot for things that I don't care if they are cheap, because it's hard to make a "bad flyswatter," for example. I avoid things that might catch fire, like charging cables or some electronics, and avoid hard drives and sketchy stuff. I buy a lot of SBC-related stuff like HATS and stuff for androids.

I had a boss who didn't allow comments. "I like clean code," was what he said. He also didn't like variables with easy to understand names, like config_file_path because he said, "this is a real company, not kindergarten."

Systems administrator. I am the "OS mechanic" for the computer world. Within weeks, cascading failure on a scale that would last a decade or more

I have a lot of SBCs, and have various ansible scripts that install stuff in "levels" depending on what I need.

Basic level is the "must-haves."

python 3-minimal, chrony, openssh-server, python 3-apt, aptitude, unattended-upgrades, boxes, figlet, dialog, apt-utils, git, htop, multitail, ncdu, sysstat, vim, tree, util-linux

There's, also "server level," "desktop level," and "demo level," for when I do training.

A previous workplace had a former contractor I constantly had to fix his shit from. One of his many peccadilloes was how he did shell scripts. He'd have dozens of scripts in folders, each named things like "bsr001, bsr002, bsr003," and so on. Each script was only three lines.

1. The usual #!/bin/sh
2. One line of code.
3. A call to execute the next script in sequence

Some of his stuff was "encrypted" by base64 so you couldn't read them. I mean, it was easy to figure out how to decrypt them, but still annoying.

Guy charged $250k/year for his work. And apparently was so surly, when I started working there after him, they were shocked how friendly I was.

One of my friends is 33 and she and her older sister can't swim. They grew up on a rural farm far away from any body of water. "Where would we have learned or practiced?" Over the years, I have learned that a lot of people in the US cannot swim, especially when they were poor as kids, even in major cities near water.

A childhood friend of mine had to sign a waiver in New Zealand because her and her team were climbing down some canyon notoriously hard to get to except by rescue helicopter. She got stuck, and the rest of the team went to go get help. She paid $58,000 in 1990s money for the rescue. So it's not just the US.

When I did sales management in the late 80s to mid 90s, we called them "penalty boxes." To get a manager to quit, you reassign then to a store or location that is either guaranteed to be soul sucking, high crime, or otherwise not profitable enough to make commission or bonuses. They do that in education as well, like send teachers to difficult schools to get them to quit and skirt union rules.