Skip Navigation

InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)K

Klox

@ Klox @lemmy.world

Posts
0
Comments
62
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • To those who are new to this whole fediverse/threadiverse/this thing, how has your experience been?

    Jump

  • I am wondering if this is presented better in different UIs. I'm regularly using the Summit Android app and there's at least a button to see cross-posted communities with a comment counter to see if there's more action traction somewhere else. It might be nice if it had some indicator that there's a more active thread than the one I am currently on. I am not sure how other front ends handle it.

    Or maybe the issue is dual posted content that isn't cross-linked because it was submitted independently. Not sure of a solution to that that isn't a lot of work.

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

    Jump

  • Me and two of my siblings went for PhDs, and only one came out successful. I got to teach a ton during my attempt which I really loved, and having the PhD would open up a few of those doors. In my career (tech) there were only a couple short times where I thought having the PhD would help, but over time I managed fine without it.

    As to why I didn't get the PhD, my advisor was truly awful and I didn't recognize the signs since I was just going hard at the work. Tons of red flags were there in hindsight. I wised up and quit a few years into PhD (after already earning a masters) and went software engineering, and by all measures have had an excellent software career. Several years later he was convicted of federal crimes and disgracefully removed from the university. So somewhat of a vindication of my experience; I regularly imagine what could have been, but not because I have any specific regrets.

    I still love learning and think I may still go for the PhD some day. Another sibling just had too much happening in life. Tried to do a work sponsored PhD and couldn't get it over the line before having to move on. She may revisit it some day, but it's tough juggling a slightly different job career and now she has kids to make it more complicated.

    For my sibling that made it, it was tough. They had alot of anxiety and stress. They use their degree to teach now so I guess it was nevessary, but it's not glorious by any means. They don't make a ton, and have had to move universities and programs. They were able to leverage a lot of skills from their degree (biology) but it's still a pretty regular battle even when not doing research. They aren't able to support a family on a single income, but that is increasingly common.

    If you have the time and passion, I don't see why not. I am getting some textbooks in some fields and will see where it goes. Maybe I'll go for a PhD when my kids go off to get their bachelors! I guess my advice is making sure you fully evaluate the program, the advisors available, the time commitment, what different exits look like, and if needed, what doors the PhD is actually opening up.

  • Trump Team’s Secret Meetings With Group Plotting to Break Up Canada Exposed

    Jump

  • I hope Canada comes through where the US has failed.

  • Deleted

    Getting worn out with all these docker images and CLI hosted apps

    Jump

  • It can absolutely be overwhelming, and very easy to forget specifics over a long time. It's partly why I don't really go for CLI apps, and ~all of my apps are just Ansible manifests. Which apps are causing the biggest problems for your family?

    What exactly is breaking each of these times? Guides that cover 95% sound pretty solid to me. It's hard to write a guide covering 100% of scenarios. Admittedly I also worked in the field, but the field is extremely wide so maybe there's some knowledge areas to deepen that are commonly giving you problems and/or move towards a less brittle setup.

    Re-evaluating what's important is important. If it's not fun then you should reflect on having the right balance of what is helping you and your family vs causing excessive stress. IMO the "avoid all tech companies" is slightly overblown (blasphemous, I know). It's a good guiding principle but it's fine to "buy services" that make your life better. For example, I self host a lot, but I was totally fine buying a finances tracking app (the spreadsheet-based one) because it's doing a lot of heavy lifting that I can't reasonably do myself at the level of convenience I want.

  • Engineer at Elon Musk's xAI Departs After Spilling the Beans in Podcast Interview

    Jump

  • they are typically for things like carnivals.

    Well xAI is a circus, so it's fairly accurate.

  • Removed

    TIL that 49% of americans believe the country is worse off under Trump than under Biden. 32% believe the country is better off. 19% say it's about the same.

    Jump

  • Why I'm Leaving Big Tech

    Jump

  • All fair criticisms that I also hold.

    Search and YouTube's ranking algorithm (and all the dimensions and weights/coefficients) are trade secrets and 99% of the company will never see for pretty good reasons. I never had access to them. I have discussed with multiple YouTube people that know the algorithm skewed towards bubbles for exactly the reasons you said: it is literally more engaging. My understandimg is it was the kind of unintentionally, institutional bias-type when you don't properly control for human psychology. The top line metrics get adjusted to try and compensate for these things in ways I am not too familiar with (for example changing the metric from "watched minutes" to "positive engagement" because Google does not want angry viewers). IMO they were too slow to respond and are definitely culpable in misinformation and radicalization in our culture. I was never in YouTube so I can't speak to it in any more specific terms.

    Android I wholeheartedly agree, but to play the devil's advocate, I provide a lot of support for non-tech folks. They are constantly losing their email credentials, getting spyware/adware/malware, etc. There's a lot of cases of scams guiding people to allow third party apps and allowing permissions they should never be allowing. People are far too gullible and can't see warnings right in front of their eyes. I don't know that Android is improving it by locking down AOSP. I personally moved to GrapheneOS after leaving Google and I know it's not for everyone, but it's got some nice improvement. Google gets paid by phone companies to have play store and a bunch of services installed, and then Google pays back the companies to have their search as a default. The first part never really gets brought up, but phone companies could go without Google services. They just don't want to make the competitive investment. It's disappointing.

    100%. Google could easily disallow specific uses of their systems. ANTIFA and anti-police state could be terms, but they don't. And Google is so freaking profitable, theres zero reason to cater to those business segments AT ALL. It would be a boon to their company image to actively NOT participate. So disappointing.

  • Why I'm Leaving Big Tech

    Jump

  • I hear a lot of different far out theories: microphone spying on Android (as a feature, not some 0-day bug), manipulating search results nefariously, handing information over to the government, and dozens more. Google wants user profiles to sell ad segments, but beyond that they do not want your data:

    1. Some data is product-scoped. Emails, pictures, YouTube videos, etc. Google can't just delete these because people want them back heh. Most product-scoped data is not accessible for analytics at all. For example, there's no scanning gmail to inform ad decisions. Data is encrypted in ways that would make that impossible, e.g. only an SRE or bug investigation might be able to review a specific email. Another example is Maps tracking data. Maps Timeline is now user-device local. Google no longer has the data. Thats pretty impressive, to have a timeline feature and not have the data!
    2. All the other tracking and analytics data (that comes from every individual user) have time-locked controls. Data types expire at specific business intervals ranging from hours, weeks, months, and more rare is a about 1.5 years. Some very special types may get retained indefinitely, such as legal holds, or data that is business-produced (as opposed to user-produced). There are both row and column wipeout processes always running for hundreds of reasons.
    3. Google has aggressive internal goals to cut costs. They don't want to host infinite pictures and videos. They improved consolidating user data so that Google Wipeout is pretty much a guarantee that you are gone from their system. Very few people do that though, so they also push the data plans to recoup some of those costs.
    4. All the user data they collect is downloadable: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3024190?hl=en. Everything there can be deleted.

    Yeah, they are excellent at monetizing data, but IMO it's not for sacrificing user privacy. From my engagement with privacy communities, that is not well understood at all.

  • Why I'm Leaving Big Tech

    Jump

  • I have for sure been avoiding programming since I left. Yes avoiding some tech as a result. I'm de-googling as they say. I've spent a lot of time with my family, pursued other hobbies, and volunteered more, which has all been fantastic.

    I know I will get back into programming at some point. I really enjoy the selfhosting community and I think I will likely be focusing on the areas of decentralized private networks (similar to Tailscale), decentralized apps (not really web3, but open source apps that can leverage ipfs easily and make it dead simple for others), and tools for public good (promoting good information, skepticism and rational thinking, promoting democracy, fighting against fascism/GOP, etc.).

  • Why I'm Leaving Big Tech

    Jump

  • I hear you on that. It seems like there's room for it, but it's just covered in this gross amorphous hyper-capitalist structure.

    I am inspired by DeepMind giving away the AlphaFold protein structure database for free. That was awesome!

    Or developing and giving away anonymous, decentralized, Bluetooth-based proximity detection for COVID tracking. That's freaking awesome!

    YouTube too is awesome, and it's profitable, but they slowly make insane, gross decisions to chase 30% YoY growth. 1.5 hour ads, double ads, cutting creator payments, etc. Just make it sustainable!

    Repeat ad nauseum across the business units. It's upsetting.

  • Why I'm Leaving Big Tech

    Jump

  • Good question. I wasn't. I was not located in California, and the union never really came up in any of my conversations with colleagues. I vaguely thought dues were 5-8% of total compensation (I see now they are 1% which seems reasonable, either I am misremembering or they have since lowered, or maybe I looked at a different union) and they did not have any negotiating rights. Admittedly, if the union isn't negotiating then I don't know what it is for. But maybe it just needed to get to critical mass to have that negotiating leverage and I could have helped by joining. My total compensation was very good though, so it didn't really seem like something a union had to protect. I had excellent work-life balance, good benefits, etc.

    Edit: Internally, Googlers are fairly transparent. There were multiple anonymous surveys run by employees for collecting compensation statistics broken down by gender, role, region, office, etc. It had a pretty high number of participants. That was very informative and I always participated.

  • Why I'm Leaving Big Tech

    Jump

  • I took a voluntary layoff from Google last year. It's probably self-rationalizing, but IMO I had an excellent role at the company for the last 5 years of my time. I helped design a system that locks down and redacts server logs across many of Google's services. Only on-call engineers with an emergency backed by a post mortem review could get temporary access to original server logs. The system doesn't delete all data but it can enforce codified contracts, country/state regulations, make certain privacy gurantees, and surface problems for auditing.

    Google has made and continues to make poor business decisions, but from my experience they are one of the best big companies managing user privacy. I can't speak for all of Google's business units (well I can't speak for the company at all, heh), but the privacy zeitgeist says the opposite which I've found misleading, but could never really speak to while being employed.

    User data is taken extremely seriously at Google, and I worked with hundreds of people that would gladly get fired if asked to do anything unethical with user data. They audit and lock down access, build systems for guaranteeing anonymization (systems in place long before I worked there), report compliance, and most importantly they work independently from the employees that use the data. Every business unit had committees to consult and review privacy specifically. I was also an expert consultant for several privacy incidents and the number of people involved and the seriousness taken was personally impressive for even minor incidents.

    IMO it's still one of the best companies to work for, but there's many legitimate reasons to cut them out. My opinion switched when Google had their first layoff in January 2023. The company had issues (I am sure there are plenty of legit lawsuits that I know nothing about that can be fixed with money and internal/external controls and improvements), but in that moment I realized it's not the company I thought I knew. Rough ordering of reasons for my exit:

    1. Government contracts supporting fascism (Israel, CBP, ICE, face tracking, etc.).
    2. The layoffs.
    3. Pichai going to inauguration and capitulating. GOP donations.
    4. 180 on remote culture.
    5. AI slop.

    There's probably more if I reflected longer. Maybe I should have resigned sooner, idk. I'm glad I made the choice that I could.

    Google was good to me for the years I was there. I got up to L6 and saved enough for my family to exit on my own terms and find a better environment. I'm still looking heh.

    Happy to answer some questions (culture, privacy, SWE/SRE, oncall, etc.) if there are any. The company is massive and I saw only a small slice.

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

    Jump

  • They do! Check out https://play0ad.com/ if you haven't. A free, open source variant that's pretty complete.

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

    Jump

  • https://tagpro.gg/

    I've played 3300 hours over 12-13 years. It's a free capture the flag web game that is typically 4v4 and around 4-10 minutes per match (6 min with a slaughter rule of 3 caps and an OT for ties).

    There are 3 types of power ups: tag pro, juke juice, and rolling bomb. There are a few special tiles: boosts, bombs, spikes, gate switches, gravity well, and speed. There's a lot of maps that rotate every month by committee vote.

    It's a good ratio of team tactics and individual skill that keeps bringing me back. The community is solid and they just slowly keep improving the experience. The community isn't huge so there's more popular regional times to have matches.

    Maybe a Lemmy hug will get an infusion of new players :) Come check it out!

  • Think he would've opted for an open casket?

    Jump

  • Was he put into the casket alive with a poison triggered by a random event? If so, love that conviction.

  • Trump’s Insane New Threat Leaves No Doubt: It’s Time for the 25th Amendment

    Jump

  • Colloquially it is also meant to include conviction by the Senate. Impeach + convict. But yes, Republicans have been assholes for many decades. It still needs to happen though, so it is what continues to get demanded.

  • What show do you recommend to watch?

    Jump

  • Fullmetal Alchemist was awesome. It gets really intense and pretty graphic. I haven't seen it in over a decade but might be time for a rewatch!

  • [Help Design Lemmy] How to describe Lemmy in a single Sentence?

    Jump

  • Yep, you're right!

  • [Help Design Lemmy] How to describe Lemmy in a single Sentence?

    Jump

  • Lemmy talk about it: open source for open discourse.

    Or just:

    Lemmy talk: open source for open discourse.

    Lemmy talk: open discourse with open source.