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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • This isn’t the best or most popular way to do it, but: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install

    There is a way built into windows to deploy and use Linux from inside windows.

    It’s not the most pure experience, but it’s a way to make sure you have something like a feel for how some parts work before jumping in any deeper.

    A bootable USB stick is another way to try before you commit. Only reason I might suggest starting with trying it the other way first is in case you run into issues connecting to the Internet or something you won’t feel totally lost. Having to keep rebooting back into windows if you have a problem can be frustrating, so getting a little familiarity with a safety line can help feel more confident.

    Issues with a USB boot are increasingly uncommon, as an aside. Biggest issue is likely to be that USB is slow, so things might take a few moments longer to start.

    From there, you should be pretty comfortable doing basic stuff after a little playing around. Not deep mastery, but a sense of “here are my settings”, “my files go here”, “here’s how I fiddle with wifi”, “here’s how I change my desktop stuff”. At that point a dual boot should work out, since you’ll be able to use the system to find out how to do new things with the system, and also use it for whatever, in a general sense.

    If it’s working out, you should find yourself popping back into windows less and less.



  • Some of your emphasis is a little backwards. In the cloud computing environment, Amazon is bigger than Microsoft, and windows isn’t even particularly significant. Azure primarily provides Linux infrastructure instead of Windows. AWS is bigger in the government cloud sector than Microsoft.

    For servers, Linux is hands down the os of choice. It’s just not even close. Where Microsoft has an edge is in business software, like Excel, word, desktop OS and exchange. Needing windows server administrators for stuff like that is a pain when you already have Linux people for the rest of your stuff which is why it gets outsourced so often. It’s not central to the business so no sense in investing in people for it.

    Microsoft isn’t dominating the commercial computing sector, they’re dominating the office it sector, which is a cost center for businesses. They’re trailing badly in the revenue generation service sphere. That’s why they’ve been shifting towards offering their own hosting for their services, so you can reduce costs but keep paying them. Increased interoperability between windows and Linux from a developer standpoint to drive people towards buying their Linux hosting from them, because you can use vscode to push your software to GitHub and automatically deploy to azure when build and test passes.
    Being on the cost side of the ledger is a risk for them, so they’re trying to move to the revenue side, where windows just doesn’t have the grip.



  • So, I wasn’t referring to enjoyment. I spoke of engagement or interest. It’s why programming is more appealing than data entry.

    You’re just doubling down on the false dichotomy I spoke of. It’s not at all uncommon to find someone with plenty of experience who can easily and honestly tell you why they think what the company they work for does is interesting.

    Asking someone why they think working at the job they’re applying for is appealing isn’t “hiring for enthusiasm”, and it’s honestly odd that you keep casting it that way.
    I get where you’re coming from, and I partly disagree. It doesn’t seem like you’re parsing what I’m saying because of this “either one or the other” attitude though.
    No offense intended, but it makes you come across as burnt out and sad. I don’t work for small companies, with inexperienced people, and I’m not constantly shipping broken code that needs rewriting. I’ve been doing this for roughly 15 years and I can honestly say “working in security in general is interesting because it forces you to think about your solution from a different perspective, the attacker, and working at $AuthenticationVendorYouQuitePossiblyUse in specific is appealing because you get to work on problems that are actually new at a scale where you can see it have an impact”.
    That’s not gushing with enthusiasm: it’s why I’m not bored everyday. If you’re actually just showing up to work everyday and indifferently waiting to be told what to do because it’s all just the same old slog… That’s sad, and I’m sorry.


  • I’m lucky that after all these years still get those moments of great enjoyment when at the end of doing something insanelly complex it all works

    I just think it’s worth pointing out that that is an example of the work being engaging.

    No one is so naive as to think that you work a job for anything other than money. The original post doesn’t even seem to convey that it’s bad to ask about the pay and benefits. It’s saying that if, when directly asked, the candidate has no answer to what seems interesting about the job they might not be a good fit.

    You seem to be an experienced software developer. You’re easily qualified to do basic manual data entry. Same working environment, same basic activity. Would you be interested in changing roles to do data entry for $1 more salary?
    I’m also a software developer, and I can entirely honestly say I would not, even though it would be less responsibility and significantly easier work.
    Even the boring parts of my work are vaguely interesting and require some mental engagement.

    It seems there’s this false dichotomy that either you’re a cold mercenary working 9 to 5 and refusing to acknowledge your coworkers during your entitled lunch break, or you’re a starry eyed child working for candy and corporate swag. You can ask for fair money, do only the work you’re paid for, have a cordial relationship with coworkers, and also find your work some manner of engaging.

    It’s not unreasonable for an employer to ask how you feel about the work, just like it’s not unreasonable for a candidate to ask about the details of the work.


  • Sure. I wouldn’t disqualify someone for being ambivalent towards what we’re working on, but the person who seems interested is gonna be better to work with.

    Likewise when looking for a place to work, if the tangibles are equivalent I’ll prefer the place with better intangibles.

    I’m not in HR or management, so I don’t care about cost effectiveness or productivity beyond “not screwing me over”. From that perspective, it’s generally nicer to work with someone who finds it interesting than with someone who doesn’t.

    There’s no point asking “why do you want to work here”, because the answer is obviously a combination of money and benefits, and how food and healthcare keeps you from being dead.
    I can’t fault an interviewer who’s clearly trying not to ask the obvious question and instead actually ask how the candidate feels about the work instead of disqualifying them for not volunteering the right answer.

    It’s not unreasonable for an employer to ask a candidate how they feel about the work anymore than it’s unreasonable for the candidate to ask about the working environment.


  • I actually kinda agree with both here.

    It sucks working with someone who is utterly disinterested in the work, if it’s anything above rote work.
    Asking the candidate what they found interesting about it is at least a basically fine idea. If they can’t answer when you ask, that actually is kinda concerning.
    Big difference between asking and expecting them to volunteer the information.

    At the same time, if the people interviewing you can’t even pretend to show basic conversational courtesy by asking some basic “what do you do for fun” style questions or anything that shows they’re gonna be interested in the person they’re looking to work with, that’s a major concern.




  • Typically people propose switching everything to UTC.

    The read this doesn’t work is because humans are still bound by a diurnal cycle and you won’t have everyone wake up at 0800, since for some people that’s the time in the middle of when the sun sets and rises.
    So you still need to communicate to people across space where the sun is or will be for you at a time in the future, or otherwise relate where in your wake cycle you’ll be.
    Tied to this is legal jurisdictions. Within a legal jurisdiction it’s important for regulatory events to be synchronized. For things like bank hours, school hours, government office hours, things like “no loud noises when people tend to be sleeping”, “teenagers old enough to have a job aren’t allowed to work late on school nights”, and what specifically constitutes “after hours or weekend labor” for the purposes of overtime and labor regulation you need your definition to be consistent across the jurisdiction. Depending on where you are in relation to Greenwich a typical workday can start at 1900 Friday night/morning, and extend until 0300 Saturday morning/afternoon. Your “weekend” would start when you woke up around 1800 Saturday evening/morning.

    Right now we solve this problem by deciding on a consistent set of numbers for where the sun is across some area that inevitably lines up with legal jurisdiction. Then we use a lookup table to translate our conception of where the sun is to where it is elsewhere.

    Without timezones you instead need to use the same type of lookup table to find the position of the sun at the time and place of interest, and then try to infer what the situation would be.

    We have UTC now, and people inevitably already use it where it makes sense. It’s just usually easier to have many clocks that follow similar rules than it is to have one clock that’s interpreted many different ways.




  • It’s absolutely not required behavior! Software for servers has very different requirements from software for end users, and if you have a lot of them you also want to manage your end user machines differently.

    Updates can go wrong, and if you roll out a bad update to everything at once you can crash everything and lose a lot of money. As aptly demonstrated by cloudstrike.

    That’s why Delta and many other companies disabled the auto update functions: so they could control the rollout cadence.
    They reasonably believed that disabling autoupdates disabled them. They didn’t expect a second autoupdate system that wasn’t documented, wasn’t controlled by the autoupdate system settings and couldn’t be disabled.