We did the same. Switching was a cinch honestly - the only thing that screwed me up was some dumb page that returned a bunch of nonsense I was supposed to do to my docker-compose.yml file to make it more compatible with podman-compose. I spent a couple hours trying to figure out why things weren't working, until I finally rolled back all the stupid suggested changes, and my app fired right up.
The only impactful difference I've noticed so far is that the company is moving to an artifact repository that requires authentication, and mounting secrets using --mount doesn't support the env= parameter -- that's really it.
I treat podman like I did docker all day long and it works great.
You might as well say gfy to anyone using chat bots, search engines and price comparison tools. They're the one's who financially incentivize the scrapers.
Giving someone a "financial incentive" to do something (by gasp using a search engine, or comparing prices) does not make that thing ethical or cool to do in and of itself.
I wonder where you ever got the idea that it does.
Because there's a market to serve, that you refuse to serve, so the stop gap solution is for third parties to acquire the liabilities and risks for compensation.
You're shifting the frame, to one where morality doesn't come into it. You're asserting some kind of market inevitability, which is probably the same sort of rationalization arms and people traffickers use to sleep at night.
A weird aspect of my childhood: I brought a sandwich to lunch every day when I was in school. At first, my mom made it, but very quickly it became my own job, not that it was particularly difficult.
The school had subsidized lunches and milk. I always brought a nickel for milk. The teacher collected everybody's lunch money at the start of the day. That way, it was utterly opaque who was getting it for free. A simple system, appropriate for the times.
But I remember that my lunch was always better than the grim school lunch, and I always wondered: Why can't they ditch the hot lunch, and just give everybody a nice sandwich, and a piece of fruit, which is better?
I'm sure there are good arguments for the hot lunch, but still it's counterintuitive to me. And 55 years later, I still bring a sandwich, or leftovers, for lunch, and skip the hot meal at the company cafeteria.
It was really the first usable smartwatch in my mind.
My absolute favorite thing was that it gave developers the ability to create custom watch faces. I wrote a bunch of them and absolutely loved the dumb thing.
I'm guessing the author didn't play Cyberpunk at launch -- the cars and pedestrians would blink out of existence if you turned around. I couldn't help but think that Rockstar had figured this out 19 years prior in GTA3. :/
Flicking the camera down to despawn cars is a common trick in speedrunning those 3d GTA games. They did it better than cyberpunk, but it was not figured out.
I feel super fortunate to be a part of that generation where screwing around at home could lead directly to employment. I taught myself Atari BASIC on my 800 and took a 286 IBM compatible to college where I was a music major. I dropped out and landed working for an industrial automation company because I knew how to write dumb little programs. A couple years later I was the sole guy programming robots for them in a structured BASIC language.
Whenever I read replies like these, I feel jealous of people who dropped out of college yet still managed to land a job in tech.
In my country, the Netherlands, it was almost impossible in the late 1980s to land a tech job other than a low-level service technician (read: roadie or cable guy) if you did not have at least a bachelor's degree or higher in a tech subject or a degree from a technical community college. College dropouts were turned away before even getting an interview, and bankers would rather commit suicide than finance tech startups founded by anyone without an appropriate college degree.
It still works both ways. I work for a very large company with no degree, doing HPC/AI
I used to work for another very large company doing the same thing, but as a contractor. A FTE position opened on our team but I was told by HR that I wasn't qualified for the role (even though I had been doing it for a few years on the same team...) because I didn't have a degree (not a requirement for a contractor)
Could you get your experience approved as equivalent to a degree, if there is such a thing - like the VAE in france.
My brother had to get a degree with evening classes for the same reason but since he was already doing the work, it was fairly easy - assuming the cost of studying isn't prohibitive where you live.
That said it is such BS. The whole contractor vs. FTE thing is.
Where I work, FTEs get laid off before contingency staff is fired. What is the point of having contingency staff if they're more permanent than FTEs?
Contractors who do the work for years can't get interviews because they're overqualified for the FTE position they apply for but the same hiring managers are happy to string them along doing the same work they're overqualified for, on the same team but as a contractor with less pay and none of the benefits.
I understand contractors applying to a junior role to even get a foot in the door when it is the only FTE role that opened for over a year... But you'd have better odds landing an FTE role straight out of graduating from college than with a track record of doing the work well for years as a contractor.
And they're "cool" so they let contractors attend a bunch of FTE meetings which has the primary effect of rubbing in all the great diversity and inclusion initiatives they are excluded from due to their second class citizen status.
At some point those companies don't deserve to have you. But even if you get paid half what the FTEs make, it's still a guilded cage with a 6 figures salary so it's hard to just give it the finger and move on.
So... The current generation? Between mobile devices, raspberry pis, Web pages, Linux and even Windows there is plenty of stuff you can do just futzing and in your basement. Yeah it might be impossible to create your own AAA game, but you can still even create your own software. Plenty of open source opportunities out there as well
Don't ask for a million dollars per year and you'll have plenty of opportunities. There are tens of thousands of unfilled software jobs for higher than average wages.
But are they willing to even talk to someone who doesn't have a degree or experience? I've never worked at jobs that were super high paying. I've never seen a fresh self-taught person on a job in the last 5 years. And I've done consulting and gotten exposure to a lot a of different companies. I've also done scrappy startups. And boring small companies no one has ever heard of.
Running into a self-taught person at all was rare, but when I did their story rarely involved not transferring from another career and leveraging some SME knowledge to get started. They already had training or a degree just not in this.
I'm not sure screwing around at home will actually land you a job. Not anymore.
There are definitely places that won’t talk to you without a degree, but many, many places will take a degree or equivalent.
> screwing around at home will actually land you a job. Not anymore
I don’t think “screwing around” will land you a job whether it’s at home or at college/uni. But a degree tells me that you can stick by something for longer than a few months even when you don’t always feel like it by our own volition.
Someone who has spent a year on and off learning to code hasn’t shown they can code or that they have any sort of consistency- both of which are (equally) as important as each other in a workplace. Someone with a degree in marine biology and a handful of GitHub projects and can pass a programming test? They’re probably my first choice. Someone with 3 years experience of writing code on their own? Absolutely. Show me those candidates and I’ll interview every one of them for a junior role.
I was a self taught programmer who at one point dropped out of college to try and get into the industry earlier. I spent about a year sending out applications and got absolutely zero response.
I go back to school for the remaining 2 years, and when I graduated I had 5 competing offers with salaries starting at double what I would have accepted when I had not finished school. This huge reversal in outcomes was purely the college degree as far as I can tell- I had less time to send out applications, no internships, and no new personal projects of any substance.
My experience is that there are too many college grads and boot campers with github profiles to get into the industry off of some basic home tinkering.
If you're going to do it, I imagine you've got to go one step up and stand out.
>> might be impossible to create your own AAA game
Like Minecraft? Factorio? Modern tools allow for very small team to quickly generate very AAA games. Eye candy is still an issue, but AI is quickly creeping into that space. I would not be surprised if within the next decade we have the tools for a single person to generate what we would today call a AAA game.
"Very AAA" games and Minecraft/Factorio are not related.
Minecraft and Factorio are both simpler productions in terms of visual fidelity and lean on gameplay that is captivating. AAA is not a label for the quality of game, more of a style/level of execution.
Both Minecraft and Factorio started indie to my knowledge which is a separate path and approach from AAA games. Unrelated to good/bad.
AAA requires not just using but creating the latest visual and audio innovations, creating a huge surface area prone to bugs which all need to be polished out and creating tools to manage your version of that complexity, optimize everything so it runs smoothly and doesn't take an unreasonable amount of disk space.
Even with AI, anything an individual could do, hundreds to thousands of people are also doing at AAA studios. An individual might innovate in a few aspect, but never clear the AAA bar as AAA is a constantly moving goalpost, and most tools the individual can use are likely contributed back by AAA studios to popular AAA game engines like Unreal.
It's like racing in a hamster wheel against the person making the wheels...
Both factorio and minecraft used their own proprietary engine, built in-house, ad-hoc for their game, as far as I remember? Minecraft was pioneering voxels, while factorio was the first one dealing with that massive amount of objects running at all time.
So by definition, they did not use modern tools.
To be clear, there are plenty of games that do that, I just think those 2 are terrible examples.
Same here. My first programming job was a "crossover" from a hardware technician job. It both got me into software, and introduced me to the title of "Engineer." (I was originally a Technician, then, an Electrical Engineer, even though I mostly did software, but in those days, I also designed the hardware the software ran on).
I got my first Apple programming job, because I had a Mac Plus at home, and learned to program it in ASM and Pascal.
I've only taken some non-matriculated math courses. All the rest was pretty much OJT and home study (and a lot of seminars and short classes). My original education was High School Dropout/GED.
pretty much my personal experience in a newer generation, just without the Atari, IBM, and basic
a lot of employers actually like engineers who come from a personal hacking background more than traditional paths, because we're truly passionate and care deeply. we're not in for 8-5 and a paycheck.
I am from "traditional background" but I do lots of programming in my free time, so I think it is fair to say I care deeply as well. Please tell me how to find such an employer.
> When the need for juniors comes back around, I’m sure we’ll start to see it again.
Man, I'm skeptical, at least in the US. Since the pandemic, I've seen an absolute explosion in offshoring, which makes perfect sense when so many people are working remotely anyway. I've worked with lots of excellent engineers from Argentina to Poland and many places in between. It's tough for me to see how an American "tinkerer" will be able to find a job in that world if he wants an American-level salary.
Also, I know the adage about "this time it's different" being the most dangerous phrase in language, but, at least in one example, something really is different. In the early 00s, after the dot com bust, there was a ton of fear about outsourcing the bulk of software work to India. That turned out not to happen, of course, because (a) remote meeting software was nowhere close to where it is today, (b) remote work in general wasn't common, and (c) the timezones issues between US and India were an absolute productivity killer. These days, though, everyone is used to remote work, and US companies have realized there are enough lower cost locales with plenty of timezone overlap to make offshoring the norm these days.
I hope this is still true. There are certainly lots of opportunities for self-taught software and hardware development. And university lectures and course material (much of which is very good) that used to be locked inside physical campuses with expensive tuition fees are often freely available to anyone on the internet.
You can definitely build a nice portfolio of open source software (and even hardware) on github. I would hope that is enough to get a job, but it might not be, especially in the current era of AI-fueled employment pressure.
Prisons need to be run by the government and aim for rehabilitation. For-profit prisons shouldn't exist. What's the incentive for a company to rehabilitate prisoners? It'd ruin repeat business and eat into profits. :/
Not all states have private prisons. Oregon, or example, prohibits them (and prohibits sending Oregon inmates to a private prison in another state). But we still have 9 cents a minute for phone calls. I think it's paid by the outside caller, though, not the inmate.
I generally support prison being a less-than-lavish experience, but charging for phone calls seems over the top. Inhumane, if it prevents inmates from talking with their loved ones. They're still humans, and most of them will get out of prison someday, we should keep that in mind.
You're not thinking big enough. Why do we even need so many people in prison?
The staff in prisons are never motivated to run any kind of real rehabilitation programs, and worthwhile ones are incredibly rare. They get the press when you see a prisoner learning AutoCAD or something, but there are so few slots for something like that, while everyone else does bullshit classes where they ask you what you should do when you find a wallet in the street and then make you color some pages with crayons (really).
> The staff in prisons are never motivated to run any kind of real rehabilitation programs
We used to. I have an ancestor who worked for the prison system in Southern California, ~1920s - 1950s. I don't know what they called his role, but for most of his career he was in charge of the re-integration wing, a set of low-security barracks that prisoners moved to for the last six months of their sentences. During that time they did job interviews (maybe even had work release?), lined up housing, received what sounds like "life coaching", and otherwise prepared for their release. Visiting rules were much relaxed.
I never met the man, but have been told by my relatives who knew him that he was intensely proud of his work, and protective of the men for whom he cared. He was regularly stopped on the street to be thanked by former inmates; he was godfather to some of their children. I am proud to have been named for him.
I've become interested in reading about the Progressive Era of American history. We've lost a lot of what was built (physically and socially) ~100 years ago. I'd like to get it back.
(Personal note: Qingcharles, I really appreciate your comments on this site. Thank you for being here.)
The sad thing is, that sort of excellent rehabilitation does exist in other countries, it's just now an endangered species in the USA.
The only "rehabilitation services" I received in prison was the day before my release they asked if I wanted to sign up for Medicaid lol.
After prison you'll often be shipped to a halfway house, and this was an even bigger eye-opener because I got to spend a couple of months in very close quarters to newly-released parolees to see what happens next. (I was only there a very short time because I was about 8 or 9 years past the end of my sentence when they finally did the paperwork to release me and so they cut my parole very short)
I think 90% of the people I was with at the halfway house with were returned to prison within three months. Many of them were put on a track that locks them up for two years until they can apply for parole again.
Of the ten percent left, I would say nine percent were homeless and with warrants out that the police didn't have the time to execute on. So my anecdotal data is that about 1% stayed out for a year. Of that 1% I know two of the guys I was with as they live nearby and are now indentured slaves. They work 7 days a week for zero money, just for a roof over their heads, and if they try to take a breather at all their boss picks up his cell phone and starts to call their parole agent to have them returned to prison.
I wonder what was different in the 20s? There were definitely drugs, but I don't know what the addiction rate was back then? Was there only opium? Drug addiction is by far the greatest reason for recidivism in my experience. Community and family support might have been stronger? Sentences were likely a lot shorter too, so less likely to lose touch with your support network. Probably a criminal record mattered less. Manual labor was more prevalent. The only place I saw parolees getting jobs was at the local abattoir.
> (Personal note: Qingcharles, I really appreciate your comments on this site. Thank you for being here.)
Haha, thank you. I don't know how much help I am. I'm just a loser who got to see the criminal justice system from the inside :)
I genuinely don't know. I have a history degree, but have mostly read European early-modern, not American or 20th c. history. I think you're right about manual / un-trained labor jobs being more prevalent / available. The 20s were a decade of full employment, too, so that had to have had an effect. To your list I'll add a few speculative ideas:
1) Housing was easier to come by. Not nice housing, mind you, but there were boarding houses and "SRO" accommodation, at achievable prices, more available than there are today. There were also (this goes to your social support suggestion) nation-wide organizations, like the YMCA and the Salvation Army, who were committed to sheltering people living on the margins of society. They were more successful, and more economical, than localized "homeless shelters" seem to be today. Many people start using substances because they're on the street, and I'd guess that many of them wouldn't if they were in more comfortable circumstances. You'd know more about this than I: what do you think?
2) Along the same lines: drugs, as we have them now certainly weren't the same thing - no fentanyl, no crack; marginal weed, opium, cocaine; all of them relatively more expensive than they are today. People can, however, just as surely ruin their lives just with alcohol. Maybe the fact that booze was illegal during the 20s made it enough harder to get fucked up that that had a marginal effect?
3) The surveillance state wasn't a thing. If you didn't choose to disclose it there was no way for a prospective employer to know that you were a felon and disqualify you for a job on that basis. Heck, if you wanted to change your name and move somewhere else to start an entirely new life there were many fewer obstacles to that than there are today.
4) Mental hospitals. For all of their much-publicized abuses, they kept obviously unstable people off the streets and out of the penal system. I don't know what to think about them overall, but there's nothing like that anymore.
But, we should be wary of overstating our case. The US in the 1920s was a much poorer country, and in general its penal system was harsher than it is today. We shouldn't be eager bring back chain gangs, or early 20th c. execution rates. They did, however, have an enthusiastic constituency for reform, and at least local successes, like the system with which my relative was involved. I don't see either today, when even "Progressives" seem to propose only modest, marginal reforms.
A question I keep thinking about. My position at this point is that prison should be considerably less used than it is today. I am certain we can devise non-prison punishments for most crimes. I would like to see prison reserved strictly for people who need to be separated from society.
Even if we do use prison as punishment, I don't know that there is all that much difference in most cases between a few months and a few years. I'd guess it takes less than a day to decide this is the worst thing to happen to you, and it quickly reaches a point where it can't really get a lot more convincing. Maybe I'm wrong. But it seems kinda meaningless to differentiate between 1 year, 10 years, 25 years.
We cannot really expect to send someone away for a few years and have them just slip back into society and continue to be successful. Not with all the non-judicial punishments we inflict on convicts. That is another thing I keep thinking we need to figure out a better answer for. A criminal record is a huge hinderance to gainful employment, maybe we should be a lot more circumspect about who is allowed to see it, or require it for employment or housing.
Prison removes people from society. That should be the only time it is needed -- when someone can't be reintegrated. And then in that case, we need to try to understand why we've made that decision. Is it a mental problem? If so, they're not to blame and should be housed at a non-punitive facility that can (maybe) make them well enough to be free.
Also agree that we need to rethink criminal records in a major way, although the Internet is the arbiter of your background now. It doesn't matter if we sealed something up legally when it is already out there. "It's like trying to take the piss out of a swimming pool."
> Prison removes people from society. That should be the only time it is needed -- when someone can't be reintegrated.
I'd argue that once we've hit that point, why bother with keeping the person alive at all? If they truly cannot be reintegrated into society, there is a simpler solution than indefinitely locking them into a facility.
That is pretty cold, but I understand the sentiment. I do not think I would go so far as to make capital punishment quick and easy, but I have sometimes wondered if it would not be humane to offer people who are in prison for life-without-parole an option to check out early. Here, have a big overdose of heroin, night night. (along those lines, I wonder why we try so hard to contrive chemical cocktails to execute people -- is it because we need some way to make potassium chloride painless, so we can say we executed them? Why not just a huge overdose of fentanyl or heroin. Almost certainly painless, reliable, and inexpensive.)
For some people simply being alive is worthwhile even in prison, but other people commit suicide rather than face a lifetime of that.
I speak to some people with life-without-parole cases from time-to-time. I think the one thing that keeps all of them alive is that they all have an optimistic viewpoint that their case or sentence will be overturned.
One guy I knew very, very well. I say this about almost all the murderers I spent time with though: they were by-and-large some of the nicest people I've met. I rarely met a murderer I didn't like. This particular guy was convicted of a double murder at 19. It is likely if he can find the right lawyer that he'll get the sentence reduced to something where he'll one day see the outside world again.
FYI McDonalds uses the Federal slave labor corporation (aka UNICOR https://www.unicor.gov/ ) to do the CAD work for McDonalds remodels. Now it makes more sense why McDonald's all feel miserable now.
I’m all for government-run rehabilitation focus. I had an entire message about a capitalist stopgap, but every idea I have creates some perverse incentives.
The only impactful difference I've noticed so far is that the company is moving to an artifact repository that requires authentication, and mounting secrets using --mount doesn't support the env= parameter -- that's really it.
I treat podman like I did docker all day long and it works great.
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