> The company has more than 1.5 million employees across its warehouses and offices worldwide.
> This includes around 350,000 corporate workers, which include those in executive, managerial and sales roles, according to figures that Amazon submitted to the US government last year.
So roughly 4% of jobs in Amazon's corporate division disappeared. Not to downplay that the world/economy is in a bad state, but I don't think this is very catastrophic.
there may not be an algorithm at work here as there is on Instagram or TikTok, but there's still a bubble - the name, design and discourse of HN itself works as a filter.
> At the time, I went "WTF?" and just commented it out to get it running again. I had bigger fish to fry... and just kind of forgot about it. Everything seemed fine.
You're running a database system and you just casually comment out the configuration setting the timezone?
In what way did everything "seem fine"? SELECT 1 returned something? No further investigation required??
Sometimes, over engineered approaches are necessary to make older software work with environment variables and configmaps, because said software is still designed for traditional VM deployments.
The article clearly states that the connections you mention don't make up a community:
> Many praise the myriad benefits that smartphones and social media are said to bring; online connection can give a person a sense of “community,” we are told. We can find new friends, discover just about any idea imaginable, network, and even date through our phones. We can video chat with hundreds of people simultaneously from far-flung locations. We can pursue learning largely untethered from any physical space. Based on all of this, it would be easy to assume that place doesn’t matter.
> I disagree. Physical place actually matters far more than we realize, especially as our lives become ever more placeless.