Malicious compliance should be the order of the day. Just approve the requests without reviewing them and wait until management blinks when Microsoft's entire tech stack is on fire. Then quit your job and become a troubleshooter on x3 the pay.
I know this is meant to sound witty or clever, but who actually wants to behave this way at their job?
I'll never understand the antagonistic "us vs. them" mentality people have with their employer's leadership, or people who think that you should be actively sabotaging things or be "maliciously compliant" when things aren't perfect or you don't agree with some decision that was made.
To each their own I guess, but I wouldn't be able to sleep well at night.
It’s worth recognizing that the tension between labor and capital historical reality, not just a modern-day bad attitude. Workers and leadership don’t automatically share goals, especially when senior management incentives often prioritize reducing labor costs which they always do now (and no, this wasn't always universally so).
Most employees want to do good work, but pretending there’s no structural divergence in interests flattens decades of labor history and ignores the power dynamics baked into modern orgs. It’s not about being antagonistic, it’s about being clear-eyed where there are differences between the motivations of your org. leadership and your personal best interests. After a few levels remove from your position, you're just headcount with loaded cost.
Great comment.. It's of course more complex than I made it out to be, I was mostly reacting to the idea of "malicious compliance" at your place of employment and how at odds that is with my own personal morals and approach.
But 100% agreed that everyone should maintain a realistic expectation and understanding of their relationship with their employer, and that job security and employment guarantees are possibly at an all-time low in our industry.
I suppose that depends on your relationship with your employer. If your goals are highly aligned (e.g. lots of equity based compensation, some degree of stability and security, interest in your role, healthy management practices that value their workforce, etc.) then I agree, it’s in your own self interest to push back because it can effect you directly.
Meanwhile a lot of folks have very unhealthy to non-existent relationships with their employers. There may be some mixture where they may be temporary hired/viewed as highly disposable or transient in nature having very little to gain from the success of the business, they may be compensated regardless of success/failure, they may have toxic management who treat them terribly (condescendingly, constantly critical, rarely positive, etc.). Bad and non-existent relationships lead to this sort of behavior. In general we’re moving towards “non-existent” relationships with employers broadly speaking for the labor force.
The counter argument is often floated here “well why work there” and the fact is money is necessary to survive, the number of positions available hiring at any given point is finite, and many almost by definition won’t ever be the top performers in their field to the point they truly choose their employers and career paths with full autonomy. So lots of people end up in lots of places that are toxic or highly misaligned with their interests as a survival mechanism. As such, watching the toxic places shoot themselves in the foot can be some level of justice people find where generally unpleasant people finally get to see consequences of their actions and take some responsibility.
People will prop others up from their own consequences so long as there’s something in it for them. As you peel that away, at some point there’s a level of poetic justice to watch the situation burn. This is why I’m not convinced having completely transactional relationships with employers is a good thing. Even having self interest and stability in mind, certain levels of toxicity in business management can fester. At some point no amount of money is worth dealing with that and some form of correction is needed there. The only mechanism is to typically assure poor decision making and action is actually held accountable.
Another great comment, thanks! Like I said elsewhere I agree things are more complicated than I made them out to be in my short and narrow response.
I agree with all your points here, the broader context of one's working conditions really matter.
I do think there's a difference between sitting back and watching things go bad (vs struggling to compensate for other people's bad decisions) and actively contributing to the problems (the "malicious compliance" part)..
Letting things fail is sometimes the right choice to make, if you feel like you can't effect change otherwise.
Being the active reason that things fail, I don't think is ever the right choice.
On the other hand: why should you accept that your employer is trying to fire you but first wants you to train the machine that will replace you? For me this is the most "them vs us" it can be.
I read some of your other comments in this thread and I'm not sure what to make of your experience. If you've never felt mistreated or exploited in a 30 year career you are profoundly lucky to have avoided that sort of workplace
I've only been working in software for half as long, but I've never had a job that didn't feel unstable in some ways, so it seems impossible to me that you have avoided it for a career twice as long as mine
I have watched my current employer cut almost half of our employees in the past two years, with multiple rounds of layoffs
Now AI is in the picture and it feels inevitable that more layoffs will eventually come if they can figure out how to replace us with it
I do not sleep well knowing my employer would happily and immediately replace me with AI if they could
I'm sorry to hear that's been your experience.. If it helps, know that it's not like that everywhere..
I have certainly been lucky in my career, I've often acknowledged that. But I do believe luck favours the prepared, and I've worked hard for my accomplishments and to get the jobs I've had.
I'm totally with you on the uncertainty that AI is bringing. I don't think anyone can dispute that change is coming because of AI.
I do think some companies will get it right, but some will get it wrong, when it comes to how best to improve the business using those new tools.
I agree. It doesn’t help that once things start breaking down, the employer will ask the employees to fix the issue themselves, and thus they’ll have to deal with so much broken code that they’ll be miserable. It’ll become a spiral.
When the issues arise because of the tool being trained explicitly to respect/fire you, then that sounds like an apt and appropriate resulting level of job security.
>I'll never understand the antagonistic "us vs. them" mentality
Your manager understands it. Their manager understands it. Department heads understand it. The execs understand it. The shareholders understand it.
Who does it benefit for the laborers to refuse to understand it?
It's not like I hate my job. It's just being realistic that if a company could make more money by firing me, they would, and if you have good managers and leadership, they will make sure you understand this in a way that respects you as a human and a professional.
What you are describing is not "antagonistic" though..
> antagonism: actively expressed opposition or hostility
I agree with you that everyone should have a clear and realistic understanding of their relationship with their employer. And that is entirely possible in a professional and constructive manner.
But that's not the same thing as being actively hostile towards your place of work.
>I'll never understand the antagonistic "us vs. them" mentality people have with their employer's leadership
Interesting because "them" very much have an antagonistic mentality vs "us". "Them" would fire you in a fucking heartbeat to save a relatively small amount (10%). "Them" also want to aggressively pay you the least amount for which they can get you to do work for them, not what they "value" you at. "Us" depends on "them" for our livelihoods and the lives of people that depend on us, but "them" doesn't doesn't have any dependency on you that can't be swapped out rather quickly.
I am a capitalist, don't get me wrong, but it is a very one-sided relationship not even-footed or rooted in two-way respect. You describe "them" as "leadership" while "Them" describe you as a "human resource" roughly equivalent to the way toilet paper and plastics for widgets are described.
If you have found a place to work where people respect you as a person, you should really cherish that job, because most are not that way.
Yep maybe I've been lucky but in my 30-year career, I've worked at over a dozen companies (big and small), and I've always been well-treated and respected, and I've never felt the kind of dynamic you describe. But that isn't to say that I don't think it exists or happens. I'm sure it does.
It's everyone's personal choice to put their own lens on how they believe other people think - like your take on how "leadership" thinks of their employees.
I guess I choose to be more positive about it - having been in leadership positions myself, including having to oversee layoffs as part of an eventual company wind-down - but I readily acknowledge that my own biases come into this based on my personal career experiences.
Respect is something humans do. A large enough company is an entity in its own right, separate from the people that comprise it, and that entity is literally incapable of respecting you (more generally, it is incapable of empathy). One can be lucky enough to never end up in a position where it is felt personally, but make no mistake, it is there.
I'm lucky currently but have been unlucky in the past and very much understand where the person you are responding to is coming from. I think you've had an exceedingly long string of luck that is very rare if you've never had upper management that was misaligned with the long term goals of the employees and the company.
You dont think its different somehow that the exact tech they are forcing all employees to use, is the same tech to reduce head count and pressure employees to work harder for less money?
Exactly this. I suspect that "us vs them" is sweet poison: it feels good in the moment ("Yeah, stick it to The Man!") but it long-term keeps you trapped in a victim mindset.
Given that the BBC has failed to offer their own solution for the many British and other people living abroad or with second homes abroad who would be interested in accessing their content, and instead driven us to consume a small subset of their content through Netflix, my sympathy is limited.
In the US and watch Britbox and Acorn at least as much as other providers now. We watch a lot of Aussie and British shows, new and old, color and B/W.
The BBC made really great shows. If they go under, it’s a shame. I would pay tax to help the BBC keep going. I’d pay the Aussies, too, if they’re not getting comp’d.
You're mixing up different bits of tech, streaming services (like BBC's iPlayer) don't care (or know) what DNS servers you're using. To get around their geo-blocking you need to change your IP address, either by using a VPN service or a proxy server.
He's probably talking about one of those "smart dns proxy" services. The way they work is that they return a proxy server IP for geoblocked domains, and the normal IP for everything else. The proxy server in turn figures out which server to connect to using the SNI header.
It's misleading to call it "change your dns to a uk server", but he's also not totally making it up either.
Yeah I'm not accusing them of lying, sure if they use a service that also includes proxying then that can bypass geo restrictions it just has nothing to do with DNS or the country the DNS server is in.
why say something if you quite clearly don't actually know anything about the thing you're saying? do you really think I'm saying this without having done this myself many times? without it being a well-known and well-publicised method?
my friend I will ask you again: why are you saying this if you haven't actually tried it? google it if you don't believe me. I have used the technique many times, and just because you think geoblocking works one way does not mean that it actually does
If it worked for you, that could be because when you changed your DNS server you also changed your public IP, or possibly because you used a service that doesn't just provide DNS but also caches content meaning you were accessing it without touching the BBC's servers.
There just isn't any aspect of BBC's geo blocking that cares what DNS servers you use, and if you go spend 5 minutes on Google looking into how geo-blocking works you won't find anyone talking about DNS servers being relevant.
I can't speak to your personal experience as I wasn't there, but I do have experience on the side of actually doing geo-blocking so I can say with confidence how that works. Apart from anything, the website / streaming service literally doesn't have any way of knowing what country your DNS server is in... the DNS server is just the thing that your computer asks "where does bbc.co.uk point to?" and it replies with the IP address for that domain. From the BBC's point of view your visit looks identical regardless of which DNS server gave that answer. There are ways of doing geo-blocking that are more complicated than just IP address (though BBC doesn't use them, it just goes on IP address), but none of them involve DNS.
I just did that search, and several pages talk about "smart DNS services" which also proxy your IP... not a single result suggesting that DNS itself is relevant.
The thing is, I'm not guessing, I'm someone who has actually spent time learning about how networking works, doing my first Cisco course when I was 17, and then in my adult career I've on multiple occasions been involved in implementing geo-blocking.
So I'm sorry if I haven't been clear, or have given the impression of being an idiot to the point that you think not worth listening to anything I say, but if you actually go and read up about how geo-blocking works you will find out that I'm not making things up when I say that BBC cannot tell the location of your DNS server, and if you've found that using a particular DNS service does bypass the restrictions then it still has nothing to do with DNS other than that the DNS provider is also offering you a proxy service.
>-- a site not being able to tell the location of your dns server, which is true
>-- your dns server not affecting how sites adjudge your location, which is not
Neither of these statements are definitively true/false.
1. Sites can most certainly tell the IP (and thus the location) of your DNS server. There are many sites that demonstrate this, just search for "dns leak test". Whether sites actually use this is another question.
2. Sites can serve different IPs (servers) depending on the DNS server, or even the client (through the edns client subnet extension). Some CDNs use this strategy to route requests to the closest server. However, this fact is a red herring when it comes to assessing whether "just change your dns to a UK server" is a viable strategy for getting bbc iplayer to work, because its geoblock checks based on IP of the http request, not through DNS.
There's also the question of "smart dns proxies"[1], which make it seem like all you're doing is "change your dns server to a UK server", but there's far more that goes under the hood than just changing your DNS server, because it's actually proxying your traffic as well. Changing your dns server to a uk server that isn't a smart dns proxy wouldn't get you pass bbc's geoblocks.
Datenschutz is about legal protections for personal information (protection of the rights of the individual). Datensicherheit is about technical measures to ensure security of information (security).
I believe that Fresh is pretty ideal for AI-paired web development since so much information about the application structure is easily parsable just by iterating through the file system (routes are folders and files). I have been using Claude Desktop MCP server with Fresh 1.0 and Claude can "read" the application pretty well.
I think two weeks is pretty much the low end of transit time for a container from China to US, so I wouldn't expect needing much modeling within that window.
Cruising speed can also be modulated, easily within some ranges. You might speed up a little if you think you can land cargo before new tariffs, and you may slow if you think tariffs may be reduced if you land later. Staff costs for the vessel are relatively small, so as long as you don't go outside the range of speeds that are fuel efficient, there's flexibility.
Some of the tariff increases are so high that they effectively spoil the cargo; there's no point in bringing it through customs at those prices, and it typically won't make sense to ship it back, and it may not be possible to ship it elsewhere from the port either, so it is most likely to be destroyed at the port. Delaying to see if tariffs go down may be worthwhile for enough of the cargo that it makes sense to slow the whole boat.
Additionally, if demand for shipping is up, going faster allows for more supply, and if demand has slowed, going slower reduces supply.
I've very briefly worked with a team that was responsible for satellites that track ships and their AIS data, including trying to identify ships spoofing AIS though various means. (It was civilian, a university group, but I'm sure states have similar and more)
Presumably by asking the Chinese authorities directly? We have near instantaneous global communication these days - that's how I'm conversing with you right now.
It happens all the time but it’s more useful to think in terms of container flows getting rerouted. Container ships sail in fixed loops so have containers on board for multiple ports. It often happens that the order in which the ports are called (the rotation) is changed, or a particular port gets skipped all together. Reasons can be congestion, delays in previous ports, etc. etc. The line can choose to transship the cargo, so pick it up with a second ship to carry it to destination, have the customer pick it up in the new location (possibly with a rebate) or truck/rail it to the final destination themselves.
There was an interview with a shipping manager somewhere (probably the 3-hour documentary by Gamers Nexus?). They said absolutely have been rerouting container ships in transit.
But that’s “same port, different route” rerouting right? Here you would have to have “different port” rerouting (or some really weird weather making the Pacific intransitable”
So if I want to use the software I just have to create a fork on my home machine for non-commercial purposes, update the license to MIT only, and then the fork is mine to do with as I want commercially? What's even the point of this license?
If companies believe today that in 4 years the tariffs will be dropped and that their investment in a manufacturing facility with 25% higher costs than the foreign competition will become effectively worthless, they will be reluctant to invest all that much.
Have you tried n8n? It allows you to build flows like that - you can run the community version in a Docker container within a few minutes and share the configurations for the flows you have built very easily.
_#_ has to be one of the worst word shortening schemes I've ever seen get widespread. It only works with a very small number of long-lived technologies, in which case they basically just get a nickname, "k8s" "i18n". It does not at all work for larger contexts. You're basically making someone solve a crossword (2 across, 10 letters with two filled in) just to parse your sentence.
I just googled it and it looks like “n8n” is the name of the service. The op wasn’t abbreviating anything so I don’t think it’s the same phenomenon as what you’re describing.
Well, the service is doing the same thing though. The part I don't understand is that I assume n8n is short for "Nation" but literally every single person I've seen talk about it on YouTube (which is quite a lot) say "En Eight En" every time.
It's just another form of any other jargon - unknown until you know it, and usually specific to the use case. I see k8s and i18n or a11y and I know exactly what they mean because at some point I learned it and it's part of the world I live in. Searching for stuff is how we learn, not solving crosswords.
I kind of get k8s and can live with i18n (at least it's a long word). But a11y just shouldn't exist. "Oh look, it looks like ally, what a cute play on words". Yeah, but for a dumb joke and 9 saved keystrokes you literally made the word accessibility less accessible. That's exactly the opposite of what accessibility is about
Right, my complaint is that it only works like jargon, where you are just giving something a context-specific nickname. As a word shortening scheme, it's terrible. A world where many projects have names like s11g is a nightmare.
No it's not just part of the world and it's fatality we have to live with like gravity. Abbreviation can in rare occasion have a net benefit, but only in very narrow highly unusual context do they bring any general benefit. Most often than not it just obfuscate the message for new comers, making artificial entry barrier higher.
I had not, but that looks awesome. Microsoft put out something called "agent flows" that also fits this category.[1] I'm working on more of an "at home" version - no "talk to sales" button.
I think the difference is between, let's say, Ricky Gervais making a joke about a little boy with cancer, and Ricky Gervais making a joke about THAT little boy with cancer right there in Seat 7G. Everyone now knows these crap towns are dying.
If someone looks a bit pale and sickly, it's often considered fair game to make fun of their appearance (eat some vegetables, get some exercise etc)... Whereas if they have severe health problems it's no longer tasteful. This fact has not changed, it's basic human decency. The situation is what's changed.
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