If you’re on-call 24/7/365 without a break, and it’s not because you have equity in the company, then find a new job.
If you don’t, then your health (physical and mental) will eventually force you to leave anyway. I did it at a startup where I was employee #1 (no equity for me), just me and the founders, and I nearly had a nervous breakdown from it, and ended up quitting from stress. Afterwards I decided I would do no more than 1 week in 3, and life got better after that.
What? Tech companies the world over have people on 24/7 on-call rotas, and it’s usually voluntary.
Depending on the company, you might typically do 1 week in 4 on-call, get a nice little retainer bonus for having to have not much of a social life for 1 week in 4, and then get an additional payment for each call you take, plus time worked at x1.5 or x2 the usual rate, plus time off in lieu during the normal workday if the call out takes a long time. If you do on-call for tech and the conditions are worse than this, then your company’s on-call policies suck.
I used to do it regularly. Over the years, it paid for the deposit on my first house, plus some nice trips abroad. I enjoyed it - I get a buzz out of being in the middle of a crisis and fixing it. But eventually my family got bored of it, and I got more senior jobs where it wasn’t considered a good use of my energies.
Your internet connection, the websites and apps you use, your utilities - they don’t fix themselves when they break at 0300.
If TSMC’s approach to on-call is bad, then yeah, screw that. I don’t see anything in the article that says that one way or the other. But doing an on-call rota at all is a perfectly normal thing to do in tech.
Do we have to bring this up again? It’s just boring.
systemd is here and it isn’t going anywhere soon. It’s an improvement over SysV, but the core init system is arguably less well-designed than some of the other options that were on the table 10 years ago when its adoption started. The systemd userspace ecosystem has significantly stifled development of alternatives that provide equivalent functionality, which has led to less experimentation and innovation in those areas. In many cases those systemd add-on services provide less functionality than what they have replaced, but are adopted simply because they are part of the systemd ecosystem. The core unit file format is verbose and somewhat awkward, and the *ctl utilities are messy and sometimes unfriendly.
Like most Red Hat-originated software written in the last 15 years, it valiantly attempts to solve real problems with Linux, and mostly achieves that, but there are enough corner cases and short-sighted design decisions that it ends up being mediocre and somewhat annoying.
Personally I hope that someone comes along and takes the lessons learned and rewrites it, much like Pulseaudio has been replaced by Pipewire. Perhaps if someone decides it needs rewriting in Rust?
The WiFi card is probably a Realtek 8852AE, which has become very common in laptops since 2021. Unfortunately Realtek driver support tends to lag quite a bit.
If you want to run Ubuntu Desktop 22.04, then you’re probably best off waiting a few weeks for the Ubuntu Desktop 22.04.4 point release. It’s due sometime this month. It will boot and install an “HWE” (Hardware Enablement) kernel and drivers, that are based on the kernel from Ubuntu 23.04, and therefore should work out of the box with your WiFi card.
While it’s possible to upgrade an existing Ubuntu 22.04 installation with the latest HWE kernel, doing it by downloading the relevant packages on another machine and moving them across using a USB stick is going to be somewhat frustrating if you’ve not done it before. You’ll certainly learn a few things, but it may not be an enjoyable experience. I’m a grizzled Linux veteran, and I’m pretty sure I’d end up forgetting to download one or more packages and having to swap back and forth between machines.
In the meantime, I would just continue to use Ubuntu 23.04. In fact, if it was me, I would probably just stick with 23.04, upgrade to 23.10 and then subsequently 24.04 when they become available. What you do once you’re on the 24.04 LTS release is up to you. By that time, other distros will probably also work out of the box too.
I can only imagine they’re shutting it down to replace it with something with different branding, based on an LLM. Microsoft has gone all-in on LLMs and I’m sure they’d love some of that virtual assistant action if they were able to differentiate themselves.
Nice to see Google doing the responsible thing here, because Apple certainly didn’t when AirTags were launched.
I still think having cheap, socially acceptable, easily-accessible, highly effective tracking devices with months or more of battery life is something out of dystopian fiction though. It’s not good for society in the long run.
Apple users have been sending text messages interchangeably between their phones and computers/tablets for years.
As have Android users. Microsoft Phone Link/My Phone Companion and KDE Connect have supported this for years on their relevant PC platforms. The Phone Link Android app is even preinstalled on Samsung devices. There’s a teensy bit of setup but nothing complicated. KDE Connect even supports stuff like using the phone as a touchpad, remote keyboard, or media/presentation controller.
If your PC is a Chromebook then you don’t even need these. If you sign into the phone and Chromebook with the same Google account, the integration just works, much as it does on Apple devices.
Most of your arguments can be boiled down to “everything is really slick if you use an all-Apple ecosystem”. Which is fine, but the same can be said about Android - if you use an all-Google ecosystem with Pixels, Chromebooks and Google Workspace then most, if not all of your complaints about Android go away. Pixel Android is more consistent and less buggy than most vendor versions of Android. Integration with Chromebooks works out of the box. Google Workspace MDM is simple and straightforward, and you don’t really need to buy a separate MDM solution.
The difference is that Android at least makes a decent effort to cater for a heterogeneous ecosystem. With Apple, if you’re not entirely onboard with an all-Apple ecosystem then it starts getting messy quickly.
At least for me, there is a big difference between naming things at home and naming things for work.
Work “pet” machines get systematic names based on function, location, ownership and/or serial/asset numbers. There aren’t very many of them these days. If they are “cattle” then they get random names, and their build is ephemeral. If they go wrong or need an upgrade, they get rebuilt and their replacement build gets a new random name. Whether they are pets or cattle, the hostnames are secondary to tags and other metadata, and in most cases the tags are used to identify the machines in the first instance, because tags are far more flexible and descriptive than a hostname.
At home, where the number of machines is limited, I know all of them like the back of my hand, and it’s mostly just me touching them, whimsical names are where it’s at.
Ungulates. Because who doesn’t like a hoofed animal?
My client machines are even-toed ungulates (order Artiodactyla) and my servers/IoT machines are odd-toed (order Perissodactyla). I’m typing this on Gazelle. My router is called Quagga, both after the extinct zebra subspecies and the routing protocol software (I don’t use it any more but hey, it’s a router).
Biological taxonomy is a great source of a huge number of systematic (and colloquial) names.
That’s only true if China gets no further than attempting an amphibious landing on Taiwan. If China succeeds in creating a bridgehead on the island, then many of the same land-based weapons and systems that the US is currently supplying to Ukraine, or that Ukraine would like to have, come into play, including 155mm artillery, rocket artillery, tanks, air defence missiles, and land-based multirole aircraft like the F-16.
From a war planning point of view, unfortunately you can’t assume that China’s amphibious landing would fail. In fact, I think it’s more likely that China would succeed in establishing some kind of foothold on the island in the early stages of a future Taiwan war than not. If the amphibious force is large enough, it would be very difficult to eliminate all the landing craft, especially if there is a successful misdirection.
This is without considering that North Korea could also simultaneously launch a land-based attack on South Korea to dilute any US response in either theatre.
The real meat shields in the war in Ukraine are Russian conscripts. At least Ukrainian conscripts have the conviction that they are defending their country’s internationally recognised borders.
The US (and the rest of NATO) is being cautious for a reason, and it’s not because they’re using Ukrainians as “meat shields.”
NATO stocks of war materiel were at historically low levels before February 2022, and it’s difficult for the US to commit fully when China is sabre-rattling over Taiwan. That’s Xi’s (and Kim Jong-Un’s, to a lesser extent) gift to Putin. Sabre-rattling keeps the US from engaging fully in Ukraine, even though China won’t be ready to invade Taiwan for several years yet.
Unfortunately for Ukraine, it’ll be several years before NATO materiel stocks start to grow above 2022 levels, but they will grow.
The question is, will they grow fast enough?
Personally I’m predicting world war in 2027-28 unless the West pulls its finger out.
I pulled them from the table at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Russo-Ukrainian_War#Total_casualties which seems to be kept fairly up-to-date with the reasonably credible claims, including the Meduza estimates. Original references are in the Wikipedia article.
I added the 30000 upper bound as a fudge for the Ukrainian military deaths because the one somewhat credible estimate from the US that table lists only covers up to May 2023. While Ukraine has been on the offensive since then, I don’t think increasing the KIA numbers by more than 50% in 2 months is credible even under the circumstances.
Most Fediverse users are Western. The Western world has plenty of media diversity, and you can find virtually every viewpoint you can imagine represented there. Open criticism of government, all the way to the top, is a normal part of everyday life, and media outlets regularly criticise each other, and themselves, for bad takes and poor journalism.
Because of the diversity of media opinion, it is harder to push an agenda, so mainstream Western media does it, by and large, with substantial subtlety, building trust first, and seeding ideas over long periods of time.
Russian and Chinese media aimed at a Western audience seems brash and full of bad takes by comparison. It is rarely, if ever, critical of itself or of its own government, and also rarely provides any independently verifiable evidence for its claims. To a Western audience used to Western media, it appears so one-sided that it is laughable. That is why it is easy for people in the West to dismiss it as propaganda.
You could probably write a PhD thesis on why media outlets in China and Russia find it difficult to play the Western media game, but I think the main issue is this: If you live in a society that doesn’t itself value diversity of opinion and thought, it is difficult to produce media for a society that does value that without it seeming off-kilter. It’s a bit like the difference between being fluent in another language and “feeling” the language. To a native speaker listening to it, the difference is really obvious.
If pro-Russian media come up with a decent methodology to independently estimate Ukrainian losses, then I’m sure some discussion can be had around that.
Don’t expect the opposition to do the work for you.
Somewhere between 9000 and 42000 civilians depending on estimates, and probably 20000-30000 military, again depending on estimates.
I doubt they’d have to retire the phone - digital radio power levels are normally pretty easy to change in the radio firmware. Which also means it’s pretty easy to change, intentionally or unintentionally, in a later OS version.
Perhaps Apple chose to cheat to improve reception after mandatory testing was complete and the phone was available to buy, figuring they’d never get caught out. Perhaps Apple didn’t retest with later OS versions and it was unintentional. We will probably never know.