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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • Why are you using networkd instead of networkmanager on a desktop?

    What a weird question. Networkd works anywhere systemd works, why whould desktops be any different.

    It’s the same as asking someone “why are you using systemd-boot instead of grub?” Because I like systemd boot better and it’s easier to configure. Same with networkd, configuration is stupid simple, I have installed it on my work machine even.

    As for op: since you can manually ping ip addresses and the issue seems to be time-based, could it be that your machine is somehow not renegotiating a dhcp lease?




  • Yeah that’s what we did last time. I implemented a basic framework on top of a very widespread system in our codebase, which would allow a number of requested minor features to be implemented similarly, with the minimal amount of required boilerplate, and leaving the bulk of the work to implementing the actual meat of the requests.

    These requests were completely independent and so could be parallelized easily. The “framework” I implemented was also incredibly thin (basically just a helper function and an human instruction in the shape of “do this for this usecase”) over a system that is preexisting knowledge. My expectation was to have to bring someone up to speed on certain things and then let them loose on this collection of tasks, maybe having to answer some question a couple times a day.

    Instead, since the assigned colleague is basically just a copilot frontend, I had to spend 80% or more of my days explaining exactly what needed to be done (I would always start with the whys od things since the whats are derived from them, but this particular colleague seems uninterested in that).

    So I was basically spending my time programming a set of features by proxy, while I was ostensibly working on a different set of features.

    So yeah, splitting work only works if you also have people capable of doing it in the first place. Of course I couldn’t not help this colleague either, that’s a bad mark on performance review you know. Even when the colleagues have no intention of learning or being productive in any way (I live in a country with strong employee regulations so almost nobody can be fired for anything concerning actual work performance, and this particular colleague doesn’t hide that they don’t care about actually doing a good job, except to managers so they still get pay raises for “improving”).

    Yeah, you can tell I’m unhappy


  • who is actually stopping them from dealing with it?

    Management. Someone in management sets idiotic deadlines, then someone tells you “do X”, you estimate and come up with “it will take T amount of time” and production simply tells you “that’s too long, do it faster”

    they don’t care about the details or maintenance

    They don’t, they care about time. If there are 6 weeks to implement a feature that requires reworking half the product, they don’t care to know half the product needs to be reworked. They only care to hear you say that you’ll get it done in 6 weeks. And if you say that’s impossible, they tell you to do it anyway

    you have to include the cost of managing technical debt

    I do, and when I get asked why my time estimations are so long compared to those of other colleagues I say I include known costs that are required to develop the feature, as well as a buffer for known unknowns and unknown unknowns which, historically, has been necessary 100% of the time and never included causing us development difficulties and us running over cost and over time causing delays and quality issues that caused internal unhappiness, sometimes mandatory overtime, and usually a crappy product that the customers are unhappy with. That’s me doing a good job right? Except I got told to ignore all of that and only include the minimum time to get all of the dozens of tiny pieces working. We went over time, over cost, and each tiny piece “works” when taken in isolation but doesn’t really mix with everything else because there was no integration time and so each feature kinda just exists there on its own.

    Then we do retrospectives in which we highlight all the process mistakes that we ran into only to do them all again next time. And I get blamed come performance review time because I was stressed and I wasn’t at the top of my game in the last year due to being chronically overburdened, overworked, and underpaid.


  • I am curious about this usecase. Can you share a couple examples? So far I’ve heard a few opinions like yours, but I always fail to connect the abstract “it’s a good alternative to browsing stackoverflow” to a concrete outcome. Can you share one or more concrete outcomes so I can grasp the usefulness and behaviour of this tool better?

    Edit: I should add that so far I’m strongly against LLMs, because all my interactions with this tool have come from developers using LLMs to write code that usually compiles and sometimes even works correctly in a local sense, but inevitably causes bugs because neither the tool nor the user of the tool understand the interactions with other systems. In that sense, I’d rather not have a tool that allows anybody to disguise as a programmer only to then break stuff that than I am required to fix. So I spend time fixing stupid bugs while they spend time delegating the fun part of the job (designing new systems and interactions) to tools that lack the capability to understand.


  • ugo@feddit.ittoMemes@lemmy.mlLost and found
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    1 month ago

    You have expressed my feelings excellently. I find football a very entertaining sport (not that I have the money to watch it, or the time / energy / social media connections to keep very up to date with it) but the fanbase can be absolutely braindead.

    I mean, I love rivalries and some shithousery, but things escalate too often, too much, and too quickly.

    Still, wish I knew of ways that would allow me to keep up to date with stuff without costing me a good chunk of change or a huge amount of time, or having to have a twatter account or whatnot.





  • I know looking at it from the outside can look like throwing a fit, but as a software dev I can assure you our professional life is a constellation of papercuts and stumbling blocks on the best days. It is a fun job in many ways but it’s by its nature extremely frustrating at times. For professionals, the inherent frustrations are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg, the rest of the iceberg being induced frustrations due to work environment causes of various nature, and a lot of devs who also develop stuff in their own free time do it to regain a sense of purpose and control.

    If these kinda hiccups keep happening even outside the day job of a developer, it is absolutely understandable that the reaction is simply to cut the bullshit rather than grabbing yet another shovel to shovel away the shit you’ve been covered with this time.

    Ultimately, the cost benefit analysis for keeping uBOL hosted on mozilla’s platform became skewed on the cost side and the additional expense is not one that gorhill can or wants to afford.

    So, yeah, it’s not a hissy fit.





  • Thank you for the explanation, now I understand the context on the original message. It’s definitely an entirely different environment, especially the kind of software that runs on a bunch of servers.

    I have built business programs before being a game dev, still the kinds that runs on device rather than on a server. Even then, I always strived to write the most correct and performant code. Of course, I still wrote bugs like that time that a release broke the app for a subset of users because one of the database migrations didn’t apply to some real-world use case. Unfortunately, that one was due to us not having access to real world databases pr good enough surrogates due to customer policy (we were writing an unification software of sorts, up until this project every customer could give different meanings to each database column as they were just freeform text fields. Some customers even changed the schema). The migrations ran perfectly on each one of the test databases that we did have access to, but even then I did the obvious: roll the release back, add another test database that replicated the failing real world use case, fixed the failing migrations, and re released.

    So yeah, from your post it sounds that either the company is bad at hiring, bad at teaching new hires, or simply has the culture of “lol who cares someone else will fix it”. You should probably talk to management. It probably won’t do anything in the majority of cases, but it’s the only way change can actually happen.

    Try to schedule one on one session with your manager every 2 to 3 weeks to assess which systematic errors in the company are causing issues. 30 minutes sessions, just to make them aware of which parts of the company need fixing.


  • Sorry, this comment is causing me mental whiplash so I am either ignorant, am subject to non-standard circumstances, or both.

    My personal experience is that developers (the decent ones at least) know hardware better than IT people. But maybe we mean different things by “hardware”?

    You see, I work as a game dev so a good chunk of the technical part of my job is thinking about things like memory layout, cache locality, memory access patterns, branch predictor behavior, cache lines, false sharing, and so on and so forth. I know very little about hardware, and yet all of the above are things I need to keep in mind and consider and know to at least some usable extent to do my job.

    While IT are mostly concerned on how to keep the idiots from shooting the company in the foot, by having to roll out software that allows them to diagnose, reset, install or uninstall things on, etc, to entire fleets of computers at once. It also just so happens that this software is often buggy and uses 99% of your cpu taking it for spin loops (they had to roll that back of course) or the antivirus rules don’t apply on your system for whatever reason causing the antivirus to scan all the object files generated by the compiler even if they are generated in a whitelisted directory, causing a rebuild to take an hour rather than 10 minutes.

    They are also the ones that force me to change my (already unique and internal) password every few months for “security”.

    So yeah, when you say that developers often have no idea how the hardware works, the chief questions that come to mind are

    1. What kinda dev doesn’t know how hardware works to at least an usable extent?
    2. What kinda hardware are we talking about?
    3. What kinda hardware would an IT person need to know about? Network gear?

  • That’s not how I read it at all

    By supporting work on a freelance basis for these topics, Valve enables us to work on them without being limited solely by the free time of our volunteers.

    Seems pretty explicit to me. Valve is allowing some arch linux contributors to work freelance for valve and get paid money to work on the things they would otherwise be working on for free. This allows these contributors to spend much more time working on these things because they can treat this work as the-thing-I-do-to-put-food-in-my-mouth rather than something extra they would do on the scraps of time they have on the side.