Sanguinaire's comments

Sanguinaire | 4 years ago | on: Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?

0. Linux support, specifically with the option to purchase without paying the Windows tax for an OS I'll never boot. This is a deal-breaker for me, meaning Dell are one of the few main-stream manufacturers I'd go with.

1. No touchscreen (I'd rather have a higher quality, low glare non-touch display).

That's about it, actually. Practically all modern laptops seem to meet my expectations on battery life and performance in a way which corresponds well with their cost. Weight is mostly a non-issue since I'd only consider a 13" chassis anyway. Screen resolution can be traded for battery life without concerning me.

An M1 Mac with a non-apple keyboard and full Linux support would probably be great, but I don't hold out any hope for another manufacturer matching the M1 without ruining it somehow (looking at you, Chromebooks).

Sanguinaire | 4 years ago | on: Remarkable starts implementing subscription plans for its cloud features

Likewise - incredibly disappointed. I don't even want to use their cloud storage; I'd much rather be syncing to a server I control. With the current pricing and the fact that I passed on my old rM1 to my wife when I got an rM2, we'd be looking at 2 subscriptions when we next upgrade devices - which pretty much rules it out.

Sanguinaire | 4 years ago | on: GCP releases Spot VMs, the next generation of Pre-emptible VMs

It's weird how the 3 major clouds have taken different paths to what must be an almost identical resource allocation problem.

AWS has had this kind of spot instance for years, but with a 2 minute grace period rather than the 30 seconds GCP is offering. Azure and GCP both originally went with the 24-hour cutoff (which can easily be replicated on a regular spot instance if needed), but now GCP are backing off on that restriction.

Sanguinaire | 4 years ago | on: Localstack – Local AWS Emulator

OpenStack is an over-complicated mess. Most enterprise IT orgs already struggle to hire the people with skills to operate a public cloud account, nevermind having to build the underlying infrastructure as well.

Sanguinaire | 4 years ago | on: Turmoil at Bezos' Blue Origin: Talent exodus after CEO push for return to office

I have been 100% remote for years and am content to continue to be so, but I totally see where you're coming from. I was never thrilled by my train journey into London, but the short walk I had on the home end was some of my best "thinking" time. One of the ways my mental health has suffered most since moving on from that time in my life is a steady decline in enforced personal time, and a lack of willpower to re-introduce it. Not made easier by our shitty weather discouraging impromptu walks.

Sanguinaire | 4 years ago | on: This career feels like a few key hours with year-long cool-down periods

Thank you for expressing what I struggle with every day.

The additional counterbalancing layer on top of this is an internal drive for justice - this is what pushes me to work for a big tech company rather than doing something which gives me more self-respect. If other people can earn 6+ figures to fuck about with computers all day and deliver nothing of true societal value, why should I be the sucker doing scientific research for a fraction of that?

Sanguinaire | 4 years ago | on: This career feels like a few key hours with year-long cool-down periods

It's not about petulance, it's about motivation. I'm in a similar position to the author but acting more like you would want; I care about being good at my job and want to deliver because that is how I was raised, but there is a constant tension in me that this is the "wrong" approach since no company actually rewards loyalty or expertise, at least not nearly as much as self-promotion and being a corporate mouthpiece.

Regarding promotion and being indispensable, that cuts both ways - in some roles being impossible to replace also means you are impossible to promote, since the next step up the rigidly defined corporate ladder may not have sufficient overlap with your current role.

Sanguinaire | 4 years ago | on: Blue Origin has a toxic culture, former and current employees say

I suppose a parent might be held responsible for their kids below a certain age - and getting pissy about what a 15 year old is saying on their Twitch stream is totally in keeping with my experience of Bezos' corporate PR.

That said, this should be laughed out of court regardless of the age of the "heirs". In Europe you could reasonably expect that to happen with minimal bother, but in the US I expect the employee would end up paying a six figure sum for the privilege of getting the case thrown out.

Sanguinaire | 4 years ago | on: Pumps run dry at gas stations in Britain

From a purely selfish perspective, the worst outcome of the pandemic so far is that it has served as a distraction and shield for Tories who bungled Brexit and have yet to face any political consequences.

Sanguinaire | 4 years ago | on: Why I Use Nim instead of Python for Data Processing

I have tinkered with both. Basically if you need to write a FORTRAN application but don't want to use FORTRAN, Julia is the correct choice. If ease of use is more important than having a diverse collection of pre-existing numerical libraries to play with, I'd go with Nim.

If Nim had cloud SDKs I would use it as my default language for pretty much everything.

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