Yes but what do you expect from the people who brought the world Google+? Google prints money in so many ways they should just stop trying to get into the social media game at this point. Stick to search, ads, email, cloud services, hardware, etc etc etc...
Yes! They're the computer equivalent of buying a water filter for your kitchen sink or a dimmer switch for your bedroom. No point in redoing the plumbing or rewiring the entire house but you can throw one tiny cheap appliance in there and solve a single discrete problem pretty quickly.
I have a couple at hand near my desk at all times and can just flash a MicroSD card and boot one up in a couple minutes. They're incredibly handy for prototyping things.
I needed to test out an Onvif setup, I was able to flash a Pi Zero W and have a functional Onvif camera in 20 minutes.
We got some windows blinds and I noticed they used Z-Wave remotes so I pulled out a Pi and setup an HA server running them on schedules with-in half an hour.
Setting up a pi-hole DNS server for my wifi network was one of the best decisions I've ever made. Horrifying to see what percentage of traffic is on the ad server blacklist though...
I wasn't aware that my Samsung Smart TV had been logging almost my every action on the TV until I set up a PiHole server. Also, my respect for Apple grew by the fact that only device that wasn't doing loads of telemetry turned out to be my Macbook in the whole household.
Yes!! I was so grossed out by all the logs from my Smart TV. I'm embarrassed to say that I worked in ad tech (as an engineer) for years but I still didn't fully comprehend how pervasive that kind of tracking is in literally every environment.
> Also, my respect for Apple grew by the fact that only device that wasn't doing loads of telemetry turned out to be my Macbook in the whole household
Turns out that modern electronic devices are expensive. If you are not charged up-front, there's a good chance that you are being charged in some other way.
Apple devices still contact the mothership nonstop even with telemetry disabled, for a bunch of different reasons, even if you don’t use any iCloud or Apple services. Don’t be fooled by the DNS logs.
I wanted to do that, but I had a look at Pi Hole and ran away screaming. Instead of proper packaging, they have a 3000 line install script they want you to pipe into Bash.
I went a saner route, and used dnsmasq and a blocklist[1] updated nightly via cron. Dnsmasq in turn queries Stubby that talks to uncensoreddns.org via DNS-over-TLS. Boom, DoT on my entire LAN.
They acknowledge that piping to bash is controversial in their install guide and they provide other options for installation. I think they were intending for it to be as accessible as possible to non-technical users and piping to bash was the easiest way to make installation a one-line command that requires zero additional knowledge and still works on the tiny raspberry pi zero w. I can't say I agree with it as a general practice but it wasn't enough to turn me off since their software takes like 15 minutes to set up, provides a nice monitoring dashboard, and runs on the raspberry pi I'd relegated to my junk drawer. Your route may be saner to you but it certainly isn't for a lot of people who tinker with raspberry pi and want something like pi-hole but don't have extensive technical knowledge (I am not one of those people I am just a lazy engineer so it works for me too).
Would you feel better with a 3000 line install script inside a package? Or maybe you would prefer the same 3000 lines of code nicely compiled in a single binary?
I'd feel better if the install process didn't rely on manipulating the system package manager using janky scripts. That's a very poor way of handling dependencies, not to mention it's difficult to port.
My assumption here was that you didn’t like some rando script running on your machine with escalated permissions.
I figured running it in a sandbox in a rocker container would be safer to you. Also, it’s easier to get up and running, though more difficult to update.
My favorite one continues to see the 1000+ dns requests that my Philips Hue lights send after disabling diagnostics on them. It was the same beforehand :)
Hah, what a strange dystopia we live in where it's impossible to stop your LIGHTBULBS from tracking you via the internet!! I'm a total curmudgeon about smart home stuff, I don't want any of it beyond a TV in my house if I can help it. It freaks me out seeing people with no technical knowledge outfit their entire home with Nest/Ring/Google Home/Echo/Phillips Hue and even smart refrigerators, while they know virtually nothing about how much privacy they've just relinquished to these companies and they don't have the technical skills to even attempt to mitigate it. I feel like a paranoid doctor who's starting to notice the damage done by cigarettes while the general public is still blissfully puffing away...
You are not alone. It's pretty heartbreaking to see how so many promising products are really surveillance nightmares. I've noped right out of using some nice-but-not-necessary features on some things, because their app wants location access, contact lists, or other things they have no business accessing. WTF?!
I was going to do this, but you can usually just change the DNS and add a hosts file to your router assuming it can run firmware that allows it (like tomato or ddwrt). It seemed pointless to try since the charts work for http and everything is https now.
I didn't setup specs for traffic but the setup I use is much lighter. Just wanted to suggest this for anyone who might want to block on their home network. I also use it as a NAS with USB3.0 to SATA with An SSD.
You can set up DNS over https with pi-hole btw, I did that for mine. It's definitely not the only way to achieve this kind of ad blocking but if you're like me and have several old raspberry pi's laying around from abandoned projects then it's a nice way to put one to good use.
Obviously this isn't an ideal solution but I wonder if this might be an opportunity for the people with means to pay for a babysitter (but not necessarily a private teacher) to hire some of the 2020 college grads who aren't going to find a job any time soon as daily tutors/online school facilitators for their kids? There are going to be tons of educated young adults out of work in the coming year and given their lack of experience they'll be less expensive than hiring an actual teacher, but they may be able to provide enough feedback and structure to give the kids a better quality online education. I don't have kids though so I don't really have a dog in this fight, just an idea. I used to enjoy babysitting back in the day and I would have loved an "academic babysitting" job like this when I first graduated.
I used to work in a client facing role for enterprise software before I got into programming. The ability to stay cool and override nerves with sheer adrenaline that I developed by attending high pressure client meetings is 1000x more helpful to me in technical interviews than any leetcode practice problems. If you have the basic technical knowledge and problem solving skills then 99% of the interview is just staying calm enough to use them properly without coming off like a nervous mess. Much easier said than done, I know.
Also, a principal engineer is more likely to be older and have a family and other commitments outside of work. They're therefore less likely to be able to spend all their free time working on side projects or contributing to open source. If you have a robust github profile with lots of contributions that's great, especially for a junior, but I dislike this expectation that candidates should be judged on whether or not they spend their free time coding outside of work. When I get home I want to log off and spend time with my friends and family, get outdoors, exercise, cook, read, participate in other hobbies etc etc. Not all of us are 22-year-old startup kids whose lifestyle consists of work-party-code 24/7 - and that's okay (no shade to those kids, I used to be one but I'm old and boring now...and a much better engineer). Nobody judges lawyers on how many case briefs they read in their free time or asks doctors to spend the weekends treating their friends and family for minor ailments. It's silly.
> whether or not they spend their free time coding outside of work
I would argue that candidates should absolutely be judged on whether they have significant portfolio work available to view publicly. Of course, this is dependent on the hiring managers' being competent.
Candidates shouldn't necessarily be judged on not having any public portfolio work though. I'm an advocate for take-home challenges. I think these give the best representation of actual work.
What do you mean? They should be judged on whether or not they have something that they should not necessarily be judged for NOT having? That doesn't make any sense. But yes I'm in favor of take home challenges as well. I know a lot of people hate them but it's the best way to get an idea of how someone will work under normal constraints (i.e. not during a timed hackerrank exercise).
How does anybody tolerate that kind of work environment? Maybe I'm weak but no amount of money could compensate for that kind of stress and misery IMO. I work for a well-known company that's below FAANG tier but is basically the anti-Netflix. It's just so freaking NICE that I never want to leave even though my salary is slightly below market. I never feel guilty taking time off, employees are encouraged to take sick days which are unlimited and don't count towards PTO, people are out of the office at 6 on the dot, benefits are some of the most generous I've ever seen, and almost everyone is just straight up kind and supportive to one another. Even for things like on call schedules it's understood that it's universally unpleasant but everyone handles it with a positive "we're all in this together" attitude. It sounds corny but these things really do make a great workplace. There are a few people who seem to be institutional dead weight because it's not easy to get fired, but dealing with a few underperformers is a small price to pay to feel happy and relaxed at work every day and live life without perpetual fear of the hammer. Thanks for this reminder that the money is always greener on the other side!
I imagine the money helps. Compensation at a FAANG or other top tech company seems to be on monumentally different tier than the next level down.
You could splurge it, but you could also manage it well and potentially retire early? My friend seems to be on this path.
You could use your time at a FAANG to get experience, accumulate money, and have the FAANG brand on your resume to leverage for future job prospects?
Also from everything I hear, working as a SWE at FAANG and other top tech companies are still more pleasant to work at than as a SWE in other industries - i.e. finance.
Do you find that you tend to get sucked into to ANYTHING in your life? Content, substances, activities? I find that I have a very addictive personality across the board - once something feels good it's very hard to stop even when I consciously want to or it's making me feel bad. This happens to me with social media, TV, alcohol, drugs, and occasionally even reading or a new hobby I'm really into. Rather than the ability to delay gratification, I'd imagine social media consumption is correlated to whatever it is about the brain's dopamine pathways that leads some people to get addicted to things more easily than others.
At this point I consider both reading and TV, and especially movies because they don't encourage bingeing, more worthwhile than internet use of any kind - mainly because they require sustained concentration and don't encourage the tab-jumping, notification-checking, infinite-scrolling content addiction that I feel myself falling into when I'm on the internet. There's something to be said for sustained focus on one piece of content, even if that content is Love Island.
It has always amazed me how well Grindr works, and yet every dating app catering to lesbians is a complete trainwreck. No hetero power dynamics on Her either but everyone on there seems more than a bit unhinged (as compared to the crowd on Tinder/Bumble) and the entire user experience is terrible. But on apps that allow hetero dating there are sooooo many men posing as lesbians by changing their gender settings or "bicurious" women who aren't actually looking to date women but changed their settings to show their profile to women just for fun because they like swiping and there's such a low barrier to entry. In case anyone reading this works there: I know I'm not the only one who really wishes Grindr would create a women-only clone of their app!
The same type of technical app may still turn out quite differently if it's for a vastly different demographic; it may be worth comparing outcomes to some relevant baseline metrics, such as the female divorce rate being >2x that of the male divorce rate in homosexual marriages in most countries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divorce_of_same-sex_couples
Very true. Based on personal experience I'm convinced that the female/female divorce rate is so much higher not because women have worse relationships with other women but because women have a tendency to rush into "serious" relationships that ultimately don't last. This would certainly lead to a different dynamic than you see on Grindr. The lesbian dating style is very much:
1. meet girl you like
2. almost immediately become exclusive
3. date "seriously" for several months, effectively skipping the early phase of the relationship where straight couples tend to play mind games or continue casually dating other people
4. break up
5. repeat
My gay male friends tend to casually sleep around a TON until eventually settling into a very serious long-term relationship, while straight couples are somewhere in the middle and have a much longer casual dating phase before making relationships official (at which point the relationship is more likely to last). When you take men out of the dating equation, the vast majority of women become serial daters who hop from one semi-serious semi-long-term relationship to another. It makes sense that a number of those couples would get married and then quickly get divorced before an equivalent straight or gay male couple would even get married in the first place.
It's actually quite interesting to observe these dynamics IRL; makes me feel a bit like a dating anthropologist.
