grisBeik · HackerTrans

2 года назадdiscuss

Screw promotion. I just want a job that provides intrinsic motivation (meaningful, inspiring work; Flow), and pays enough for me to make ends meet and to save reasonably.

There are three problems:

- many companies pay like crap, so if (God forbid) you want to save some money, a promotion is required (the only way to increase benefits is to get promoted);

- meaningful work is a unicorn in its own right;

- most annoyingly, a worker that is in their comfort zone and has been delivering consistently well in their role, will inevitably be forced to "grow" and "develop their career", or will be called a "straggler", at an American corporation.

Consistent excellence at a certain level is not "stagnation", it may just as well be deliberate stability. Infinite growth (or at least, infinite perturbation), in the personal context, is an unfathomable mania of American corporations.

grisBeik

2 года назадdiscuss

> in English - a word is a word, and the individual letters that it's composed of are almost always pronounced the same way

Some context-dependent examples: "read": /ɹid/ vs. /ɹɛd/; "lead": /lid/ vs. /lɛd/ (plumbum); "desert": /ˈdɛz.ɚt/ vs. /dɪˈzɝt/.

grisBeik

2 года назадdiscuss

Sorry for being a party pooper, but it didn't take me 5 minutes to find an integer overflow in this code (which I've never seen before), as of commit 2443ff581ccd.

The public function nsfb_set_geometry() takes "width" and "height" as "int" values. Assume those are positive. Then we pass them to nsfb->surface_rtns->geometry().

Assume our surface is implemented by "surface/ram.c"; thus the call is made to ram_set_geometry(). There we store the passed-in "int" params into fields of "nsfb" (also ints). Then we do

    /* reallocate surface memory if necessary */
    endsize = (nsfb->width * nsfb->height * nsfb->bpp) / 8;

Unchecked multiplication between signed integers (nsfb->width * nsfb->height); not only can it overflow and yield a bogus result, if that happens, it's even undefined behavior.

It's naive code.

grisBeik

2 года назадdiscuss

There's this diagram, and there's David Graeber's book Bullshit Jobs.

"What you love" and "What you are good at" certainly have a non-empty intersection, but that's mostly a distinct set from "what you can be paid for". "What you are good at" and "What you can be paid for" also have a non-empty intersection, but that set is again (mostly) distinct from "what you love". In brief, you can enjoy work, but then it will pay shit, or you can make money, but you'll hate it.

The most interesting part however is the right hand side. "What you can be paid for" and "What the world needs" have a practically empty intersection. Regardless of both personal skill and drive, there is effectively zero money available for the sorest needs of society. (Public healthcare (including mental health), public education, public infrastructure, etc.)

Nice diagram, but a pipe dream.

grisBeik

2 года назадdiscuss

UEFI is required on (a subset of) ARM(64) hardware.

https://www.arm.com/architecture/system-architectures/system...

grisBeik

2 года назадdiscuss

Thanks; this is a great thought! Let me try to refine it: "create irreplaceable complexity for others".

grisBeik

2 года назадdiscuss

> The problem is that vendors of hardware [...] do not want the OS to have full control over the hardware

I agree. At least the first half of the presentation blames the sordid status quo on Linux, all the while it is actually the responsibility of the hardware vendors. Linux not being the boot loader, Linux not being the firmware, Linux not being the secure firmware, etc etc etc is all the fault of the hardware vendors. They keep everything closed; even on totally mainstream architectures. On x86, whatever runs in SMM, whatever initializes the RAM chips, etc is all highly guarded intellectual property. On the handful select boards where everything is open (Raptor Talos II?), or reverse engineered, you get LinuxBoot, Coreboot, ... Whoever owns the lowest levels of the architecture, dictates everything; for example where Linux may run.

> Meanwhile, companies like Apple who integrate everything can have full control

Yes. Conway's law. As long as your SoC "congeals" from parts from a bunch of vendors, your operating system (in the broad sense the presenter uses the term in) is going to be a hodge-podge too. At best, you will have formal interfaces / specifications between components, and open source code for each component, but the whole will still lack an overarching design.

Edited to add: systems are incredibly overcomplicated too; they're perverse. To me, they've lost all appeal. They're unapproachable. I wish I had started my professional career twenty years earlier, when C (leading up to C89) still closely matched the hardware. (But I would have had to be born twenty years earlier for that :/)

Edit#2: the suggestion to build our own hardware is completely impractical. That only makes the barrier to entry higher. (IIRC, Linus Torvalds at one point wrote that ARM64 in Linux wasn't getting many contributions becasue there were simply no ARM64 workstations and laptops for interested individuals to buy and play with.)

grisBeik

2 года назадdiscuss

> So what does all the IT optimization bring? Just more wealth for the owners [...] It is time people in IT got to understand this

I understand it alright, but I'm trapped. Closer to 50 than to 40, I've got a family to run. I could be interested in another profession, but our daily lives & savings would tank if I stopped working, for learning another profession. Also, there's no other profession that I could realistically learn that would let me take nearly the same amount of money home every month. If someone lives alone, they could adjust their standard of living (-> downwards, of course); how do you do that for a family?

Furthermore, there is no switchover between "soulless software job for $$$" and "inspiring software job for $". There are only soulless jobs, only the $ varies. Work sucks absolutely everywhere; the only variable is compensation -- at best we can get one that "sucks less".

When I was a teenager, I could have never dreamt that programming would devolve into such a cruel daily grind for me. Mid-life crisis does change how we look at things, doesn't it. We want more meaning to our work (society has extremely decoupled livelihood from meaning), but there's just no way out. Responsibilities, real or imaginary, keep us trapped. I'd love to reboot my professional life, but the risks are extreme.

FWIW, I still appreciate interesting tasks at work; diving into the details lets me forget, at least for a while, how meaningless it all is.

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