thelastknowngod

Do people from Acre even exist though?

Dispersal of liability if something goes wrong?

It's not the ground-based targeting system so that company can't be sued. It's not the onboard nav so that company can't be sued. It's not the software so that company can't be sued. It's not communication latency or interference so we can't blame it on a bad command decision to push forward without more reliable data points.

The only thing that will ultimately result in a nuclear weapon being dropped is if the guy with human eyes is looking at the target, makes a judgement call, and pushes the button.

All that being said, we should not be building more nukes regardless. This is dumb.

A practical jet pack.

Why don't you find something that fits well, from a large, established company, and just buy the same thing again when it wears out?

Literally everything I own comes from American Eagle (jeans only), Uniqlo, or Muji. When I need something new, I just buy it online because I know neither their sizes nor my ass has changed significantly enough that I would be required to try something on.

If you are being a minimalist about things, you could break down your entire wardrobe to 2-3 pants, 10 shirts, 2-3 shorts, socks and underwear. If you can replace them all at the same time, all of the shopping you would do in 12-18 months can be finished in 10 minutes.

I've been doing this personally for something like 15 years.

distro hopping is a waste of time.

Very much so. There are limitless things you can do with a computer. Installing a new OS for me falls squarely in the annoying and tedious categories.. There are so many more interesting things to put effort into.

Thing is, I had a reachable goal which made it easier for me to learn and feel good as I had a tangible result.

IMO, this exact thing is what separates the people who succeed and those who give up. If you are only approaching the code as some abstract concept then it will never work. Anyone learning this stuff needs to understand that the code is more like a hammer to a carpenter than anything else.. It's a very physical tool used for doing a real job. If you don't have any nails to hit, you're not going to get anything done.

We focus a lot more on production than the average developer. It's our job to make sure whatever devs build is run quickly, efficiently, safely, and scalably.

You will work with a lot of kubernetes, Argo, terraform, Prometheus, grafana. You'll design build pipelines and software rollout strategies. You plan for zero downtime migrations and upgrades, database maintenance.. You'll have your hands in everything from capacity planning to security to cost optimization to developer support.. User permissions, infrastructure, networking, observability.. You will write RFCs and setup POCs for new tools. You define and track error budgets and figure out how to keep your org under those projections. When there is an outage you will be involved in writing post mortems.

The days are so varied and unpredictable that it keeps things interesting. The landscape changes so often you're never really stuck doing the same thing over and over.

I genuinely love it.

EDIT: The SRE Podcast from Google is actually really great for learning about this world. The first season talks about what you'll be doing and why (based around the SRE O'Riley book). The second season talks about what to expect in different stages of your career progression.

I feel like I left arch a decade ago. 😄

It was rough going around the time of the systemd transition and needed something more consistently reliable. I've been on Mint ever since.

I have long loooooong ago given up on distro hopping because, at the end of the day, most distros are close enough to each other that it doesn't really matter which one you choose at the end of the day. These new immutable ones though.. They seem cool as hell. I need to give one a go someday.

I am like a homing pigeon. I might not know where I am or how I got there but I can sure as hell navigate a city well enough to get home safely.

I used to work for a company doing advanced screenings of movies. Usually someone who worked on the movie would be there for an interview after it finished screening. The audience questions are usually terrible. I'll never forget the time Nash Edgerton was there to talk about The Square.

The movie's plot hinged on one character missing a phone call. Someone in the audience (obvious film student/nerd) asked him if missing the call was "a social commentary on our relationship with technology."

Nash says, "I don't know man. Sometimes I just miss phone calls."

Don't program (as much). Point yourself towards DevOps, SRE, and/or Platform Engineering. You'll be designing complex systems and will have your hands in dozens of different tech stacks.

Sometimes I think a straight dev job would be interesting but I legitimately love the SRE space.