Klox

@Klox@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Getting worn out with all these docker images and CLI hosted apps⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  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 aspects 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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If the 2028 United States presidential election was held today, who would you vote for?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Something like 0.5% voted third party. IMO it’s a non issue. Never Republican is a clearer mandate. But yes, I will be campaigning hard for the best Democrat and will be voting Democrat.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If the 2028 United States presidential election was held today, who would you vote for?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Your hot take is stupid. They are not Trump, and if you can’t see that NOW then reevaluate your entire life.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If the 2028 United States presidential election was held today, who would you vote for?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Not Republican is the only qualifier if you’re not an insane person.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If the 2028 United States presidential election was held today, who would you vote for?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Never republican. Prior to that, whichever Democrat says they will reign hell fire.

  Disbanding ICE, disbanding TSA, slashing CBP, cutting military 75+%, expanding the supreme court by 10 seats, expanding DOJ for all the criminal prosecurions, forcing better vote methodologiss, forcing a constitutional convention (new branches of government, independent DOJ), encouraging new states (DC, Guam, Puerto Rico) to join the union to fix Senate proportions, remove electoral college, and add in mechanisms for national no-confidence votes. There’s a lot more heh.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Engineer at Elon Musk's xAI Departs After Spilling the Beans in Podcast Interview⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Well xAI is a circus, so its more legitimate than it sounds at first.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why I'm Leaving Big Tech⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  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 are too slow and are definitely culpable in problems with 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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why I'm Leaving Big Tech⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  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 product 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: 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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why I'm Leaving Big Tech⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  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 thr 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.).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why I'm Leaving Big Tech⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  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! 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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why I'm Leaving Big Tech⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  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 remembering incorrectly or they have since lowered, or maybe I looked at a different union) and they did not have any negotiating rights.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why I'm Leaving Big Tech⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  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 reason for my exit:

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

  There’s probably more if I reflected longer.

  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 had a small but I think interesting perspective.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Did ICE agent who fatally shot Renee Good have 'internal bleeding'? What we know | Snopes.com⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  tl;dr Snopes said nothing of significance and didn’t rate the claim.

  They do spend a lot of time regurgitating nonsense.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You'll no longer earn Steam points from community awards, as Valve try to kill off clownface-farming⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve never used any steam points. Is there something I’m missing?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Homelab hardware choices⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  For a Homelab, I cannot imagine going with anything other than older used SFF boxes for my router. I’ve been running PfSense and then OPNSense on them for over a decade.

  [Mini PC] Very DIY, would feel afraid of misconfiguring the device and exposing myself to security issues

  The risk is there for every router software, and the form factor won’t change that. The OPNSense software is pretty solid and the tutorials are less likely to lead you astray. You will learn a lot with a deep dive on OPNSense. So I’d say just go for the used hardware. The nice thing is if it craps out on you in 5 years, you take your OPNSense config (regularly back it up with one of the plugins) and a new mini PC and you are back up ASAP.

  2. Does anybody have any suggestions for PoE capable switches and access points that play nicely with OPNSense - I’ve been considering MicroTik but I’m not entirely sure what to look for.

  They should all be fine. OPNSense is your router and firewall, and IMO it doesn’t really influence my downstream hardware choices.

  Not sure how the used market is in UK. Last year I decided to go 10G so bought a used Brocade ICX 7250 48x PoE+ RJ45 8x 1/10 GbE SFP+ Gigabit Switch for $78 on ebay. Its been so nice! 48x PoE ports and 6x 10G ports. It takes a detailed walkthrough and some head scratching to get it running well so I wouldn’t really recommend it specifically without a bit of experience. But it is easily the best bang for your buck. Throw in 10G SFP+ PCIE module into all your important machines and use passthrough DACs and you’ve got a flexible 10G setup for $200-$300.

  I am not familiar with FritzBox so not sure how that changes the calculus.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This CEO laid off nearly 80% of his staff because they refused to adopt AI fast enough. 2 years later, he says he’d do it again⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The AI part is that the drug riddled CEO asked AI leading questions. The AI wholeheartedly agreed they should speed run late stage capitalism. What more confirmation is needed that AI is the future?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Day 543 of posting a Daily Screenshot from the games I've been playing⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Thanks! Adding those to my list.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨There are only like 3,000 billionaires and they're not physically imposing people.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Sure, but it’s also proven to be more cost effective to just manipulate people and shift their costs. Some moron was arguing against California’s billionaire wealth tax bill because billionaires might have “liquidity problems” lmfao.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Day 543 of posting a Daily Screenshot from the games I've been playing⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Awesome. I’m back to PC gaming after a lonnggg hiatus. I’ve been playing on Switch 1 so wasn’t completely in the dark about games, but I’ve recently played through Half-Life 1+2+episodes, Star Wars Outlaws, Jedi Fallen Order + Survivor, SW Squadrons, KOTOR 1 + mod packs replay, RV there yet, Schedule I, Deep Rock Galactic, and couple rogue lites. Also playing Ark for the first time.

  My immediate queue is HL Alyx in VR, Star Wars Squadron replay in VR, and KOTOR 2 replay + mods.

  I got the Master Chief collection and am going to go through the games chronologically starting with Reach. I’ve already played 1-3 on Xbox when they came out.

  My backlog is Fallout games, Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, Subnautica 1+2, Cyber Punk 2077, Arkham Trilogy. I’m on the fence about Mass Effect Legendary edition replay (I played the 3 games what they came out). There are a lot more that I’m not committed to yet: Eden Ring, Baulders Gate, Red Dead Redemption 2, God of War, Elder Scrolls Oblivion remaster. I should add Max Payne and The Last of Us to that list.

  If there’s any obvious ones I’m missing please let me know! I’m also getting my young kids into PC gaming, so will be revisiting some classics.