At a former company we got up blocked for scraping some APIs. The workaround was to spin thousands of spot instances in aws to distribute the requests from new random ip addresses. It worked well enough. There are enough cloud providers around that blocking all of them without blocking genuine requests is not practical.

My point is that IP blocking to restrict access has limited effectiveness these days.

That might be a deal breaker to have lead do a comeback in modern electronics. It was banned from solder, so it might be a hard sell to put something full of lead against your face.

Apple is based in the USA and the success of American companies benefit Uncle Sam. It does not need to be 'owned' by Uncle Sam to be part of Uncle Sam interests.

I had multiple iPhone models over the years and last time I upgraded from a 7 to a XS Max around the time it came out. I have no reason to upgrade it as it seems fast enough, and the original battery still lasts long enough for my needs. The 7 is now the road trip phone for my son and it works fine to stream YouTube and Netflix on the go.

I do tend to pay extra for the higher end model mostly so that it gets the longest support window which in the longer run pays off for itself. If you tend to break your phone then I guess a cheap mode with frequent refresh cycles is a better option. I went with the heavy case and screen protector route after an unfortunate incident.

I do have an older iPad that works but is indeed mostly useless since it only support older TLS, and that's a shame. Nowadays the faster deprecation of crypto protocols is a good way to force obsolescence of older devices and why I'm worried about IOT.

Kill all the ants before they become zombies?
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=zomb...

Thanks for the link. Before Fukushima the phaseout was planned for 2036, enough time to give the hot potato to an other government who could push the bucket further to give time for new renewable energy tech to be developed. This is what they did in 2009: a change in government pushed to shutdown further away by 14y. Fukushima brought the shutdowns back to 2022, and the Ukraine invasion delayed that by a few months.

What is a DevOps/IT job? Is it Development, Operations, or IT work? When I see a company advertising DevOps role, I know they probably do not actually understand what DevOps is about. I do see a lot of IT, Ops and even QE roles being "promoted" to 'DevOps', but that's quite off the mark. I do see a trend where the DevOps buzzword is being replaced by Platform Engineering, which is closer to the original intent.

As far as degrees are concerned ... I've seen folks without higher education degrees, or non CS degrees, being more productive and write better code than folks that did have 'proper' degrees. At the end of the day, experience, passion and common sense usually beat degrees.

The population freaked out and voted for more Green Party representatives after Fukushima. TBH if the Japanese can't make a nuclear plan safe, who can you trust?

On the other hand I do agree that this was shortsighted and Nuclear is necessary in order to get out of fossil fuel, at least until renewables are enough to sustain the growing needs in electricity, including the forced shift to EV in a few years.

Sometimes it is the same speed. A lot of Ali Express vendors are present on the Amazon MarketPlace, with a different name to avoid getting flagged by Amazon for offering the same things for cheaper elsewhere. You'll be surprised how many items have a 2 month delivery window on Amazon nowadays.

I get low cost items direct from China for things were the delivery times do not matter to me: fishing gear such as hooks and fishing line, gardening items such as grow bags, fountain pens and other stationary items. Most of these things are going to be manufactured on the cheap then sold at multiples markup. Often times you can pay more locally for lower quality. On the other hand ... a lot of these vendors use a strong reality distortion field when advertising the items. You need to do a lot more homework to be able to guess what you might actually receive, Amazon can be bad for that but they do try to cleanup ... AliExpress seem to not care all that much, and they only give you a few days to write a product review ... which prevents honest reviews after actually using the product for a while.

At a startup for over 4y, I still trust the cofounders after all that time. I did ask a lot of questions and even met with the seed VC before accepting an offer. Unfortunately we are not hiring at the moment.

If you are really curious you can find my profile and the company on LinkedIn where I have the same username.

I believe his mom just does not go down to the basement anymore because if the smell. ;-)

Spot on, if the 'gravity' is that the shareholder profits will be docked by less than the janitorial costs of cleaning the Google offices, there is no gravity to speak of. Maybe the judge could apply RICO to make the gravity more palpable by these execs.

At a former company a VP asked our IT department to set the email retention policy to 30 days. IT just pretended it was not an option of the email platform we used (it was definitely an option). This would have made working much much harder since most internal communication was email at the time. The reason for the request was 100% anti discovery as they had evidence they wanted to hide in case of such discovery requests, including from potential buyers.

I've learned to avoid companies where the executives cannot be trusted.

Come to think of it I think I was still working at Google when they defaulted the chat history to off. That was a discovery prevention move, obviously, since there was no reason that it could improve employee productivity. The Moto was still "Don't be evil" at the time, but it was clearly only used as a marketing/hiring ploy by then.

Unfortunately the bulk of the industry completely misunderstand trends and buzzwords, leading to poor implementation. A former employer (did not stay too long fortunately), decided to stop with QA since Devs should test their own code, and the QA Engineers became 'DevOps' engineers since they know how to automate things ... that was a disaster. At some point an engineer, with a long tenure in the company, asked me to run the production code with the line profiler enabled so they could show high line coverage metrics to the higher ups, it was that bad.

DevOps ... DevOps teams and DevOps roles are oxymorons if you go by the original definition. If a company creates a DevOps team as a new silo so the Devs are more isolated from the Operational side of the product, they are 100% missing the point of DevOps.

In case you are wondering DevOps is a culture or a mindset where the Dev teams collaborates with the Ops team. This lead to software that is more stable and scales better. You can, and should, add a team that helps bring the tooling and processes to make DevOps a reality, but that would be a DevOps Enablement team.