JDubbleu

Thank you! I'm already getting some great use out of it as my new company hired me largely because of my AWS experience. I also learned a ton there thanks to my exceptionally brilliant team so I can't say I regret my time there even if it was stressful.

For companies not to milk every god damn cent out of consumers while providing a worse experience than the free alternatives. Netflix limits steam quality to 720p in browsers (except for Edge) forcing you to use their Windows app or a spyware filled smart TV to access 4k content THAT YOU PAY FOR. Cracking down on password sharing such that it is an inconvenience to try to use your Netflix account outside of your home. Constant price raises to all the streaming services for lesser features over time, and content that could just disappear from the platform entirely. We haven't even gotten to ads on paid tiers and "promotional" suggestions that are thinly veiled ads on non-ad plans.

You know what doesn't do those things? An MP4 file on a Plex server. It's gotten so frustrating to use streaming services that my partner and I torrent movies we have legal access to because it's a better experience, and I'm guaranteed to be able to finish a series without it being ripped from the platform. I can also watch the 4k content I PAY FOR in any browser I please. There is zero reason a bunch of volunteers working together should be able to provide a better user experience than multi-billion dollar companies.

You know what I rarely pirate? Steam games. They've made the user experience 10x better than pirating with non-intrusive DRM and an endless number of features I use regularly (controller support, custom configurations, cloud saves, online "local" co-op, remote game streaming, workshop/mod support, community guides, automatic updates, local network downloads...I could go on for an hour). The times I do pirate are for games I'm not sure I will like or games that might not run well on my Steam Deck. You know what Valve is doing to combat this? Introducing a game trial feature.

I did a lot of research a few years ago and settled on ProtonVPN. I won't say anything authoritative regarding privacy as I haven't done any recent research, but I've been very happy with the service so far.

I run a seedbox with all the traffic from qBittorrent tunneled through ProtonVPN and I've gotten up to 200 Mbps down through a few very healthy torrents before, and on dedicated speed tests I can pull down ~250 Mbps on my gigabit service. I've also never had it go down despite using the exact same server 24/7.

Their documentation is also amazing and they generate connection configs for Wireguard and OpenVPN on their website using provided parameters making it dead simple to get started.

Yup! That's the bullshit part and what really grinds my gears when people say we're just whining. I have 0 problem going to an office that I was assigned at my date of hire. What I have a problem with is 1) retroactively assigning offices to remote designated employees and 2) forcibly relocating people across the country for zero reason. They're actively uprooting entire families and fucking so many people over.

I'm fortunate enough to have gotten another job before it impacted me thanks to referrals from friends, but not everyone is as fortunate.

Use a P2P VPN like ZeroTier. I use it even when I have router access because I'm hyper paranoid about exposing anything to the open Internet.

VSCode is great for this, but to do something completely IDE independent you could set up a VNC server and just use a client to access the machine. They work really well on local networks and are almost indistinguishable from your local machine on wired setups. Proxmox would definitely be more contained though so there's definitely a use case there is that's what you're looking for.

I work at AWS (won't after this Friday since I got a remote job), and while I'm pretty low on the totem pole, internally it is very clear what is going on. Leadership is slowly phasing out non-proximate workers. Why? No one knows really, but our best guess is unofficial layoffs and upholding commercial real estate.

It started with RTO 3 days a week for everyone except remote employees in May. Then in September basically all remote employees were forced to relocate to their team hub. This was as much of a shit show as you think. You were given 30 days to decide and 60 days to move. What people did was "decide" on the last day to move, and then drag their feet for the next 60. Then quit without notice as soon as they had another job lined up. Don't get me wrong the market is rough, but 90 days is enough to find a job if you have halfway decent connections and AWS on your resume. By now my team already lost half of our devs (3/6).

More recently, in waves, they're forcing people to relocate to team hubs. Even teams who were historically spread out across the US. I'm from the west coast but my team is in Colorado and the second I caught wind of this I grinded my ass off and got another job. When I told my manager he was very understanding but frustrated at the situation. My two teammates were even more frustrated, and one of them is on the west coast too. My team could be one person soon.

Didn't mean for this to turn into a rant, but Amazon is nuking teams left and right like this and it will catch up to them. As a whole things are breaking more often in AWS systems than usual, and our service is starting to show cracks. Our reliability is down hard because we had a collective 35 years of knowledge leave our org. Almost all of whom were the team expert.

I don't have any resources as I'm a SWE, but I do have some advice.

Ask for help from your mentor/other engineers. Seriously, I'm a software engineer (non-ML, but ML teams operate similar to SWE teams) and we don't expect interns to know almost anything, and we understand they're gonna need quite a bit of hand holding. I know I did. It's okay! That's how we all learn, and being able to ask for help when you need it is one of the most vital skills to have in software. The absolute worst thing you could do is struggle the whole internship without getting the help you need.

All you gotta do is say, "Hey, I'm struggling with the fine-tuning of this model for my project. My research and academic experience have all been extremely theoretical, but I never got the chance to do much practical tuning. Do you have some suggestions given where I'm at?". Obviously provide a lot of extra context for where you're at/what you're struggling with, but you get the point. They're not gonna fire you so don't worry about that (literally every interns worst fear), and they want you to learn! Asking would reflect well on you too since you're showing 1) you know your short comings and 2) you are actively working to overcome them. If you can do both of those things you're already ahead of most people.

Good luck!

Catch me loading up a new version of Super Smash Bros Melee every time I gotta save a timestamp.

For me, a native speaker, I've been confused maybe twice by the use of singular they, and all it took was a quick clarification to remedy. This is because it seems pretty rare in English to use a pronoun without some context surrounding it.

If someone came to me and said, "they went to the store" my confusion would be due to a lack of context. Who are we even talking about in the first place? In that scenario gender neutral he, which is confusing for a myriad of other reasons and can lead to false assumptions, would be just as confusing.

However in an exchange like, "where did this person go? They went to the store" or, "where did Alex and Bob go? They went to the store" the context provides whether they is singular or plural. Revisiting the first example with zero context, "they" would normally be replaced by a proper noun. This sets the required context and makes future uses of "they" make perfect sense.

Whereas with gender neutral he I'd assume you knew the gender of who you were referring to. I grew up using they in the singular form constantly, and it's not like I was surrounded by queer culture, it's just a function of how English is spoken in some places even outside of the UK (I'm from California).

I can definitely see it being confusing though if you were taught "proper" formal English. No one I've ever encountered speaks that way and it's largely reserved for academic works. Hell, should'nt've and wheredya might as well be in the dictionary by now.

The only universally correct date format is ISO.

The great thing about Linux DEs is that it doesn't matter if it's conventionally bad, it matters that it works for you. You could use the cubic alt tab animation and control your computer through seances for all anyone cares. As long as you can do what you want just send it and use what's best for you.