Yeah, my entire project lives on AWS. Fortunately, it’s not my problem to keep things going, so I guess we’ll just roll with whatever punches come.

Exactly. We weren’t using the other services much (we watched a handful of shows on Prime, but that’s it), so our only reason was the faster shipping.

So we cancelled Prime and now have to wait a few more days for our package to arrive. The impact was… pretty much non-existent and we’ve since moved a lot of our shopping elsewhere since shipping times aren’t a big draw anymore. I do kind of miss the occasional same-day or next-day deliveries (we live right next to a warehouse), but not enough to justify what we were spending on it.

Yeah, I think they want to reduce headcount, and this is the cheapest way to do it. I’m guessing they’re getting some flack for investing so much in AI w/o enough return to justify it, so they’re culling a lot of the workforce to juice the numbers a bit until that investment starts to make sense. They’ll probably just reshuffle people around as needed within the org to fill the gaps.

And returning to the office probably doesn’t count as an unreasonable change to the agreement, so you probably won’t win if you sue, and the unemployment office probably won’t help.

So yeah, sucks all around.

Yup, I waste way more time in the office than at home, and I waste plenty of time at home. Also, the time I don’t waste is more productive at home than in the office.

I still value going to the office, but doing it everyday would just kill my soul. I need some time to myself to get stuff done.

Exactly, which is why I really like my current setup, which is 2x in office, 3x WFH. I think being in-person has advantages, but I also feel much more productive when I WFH because I don’t have all of the little interactions at the office (i.e. coworker wanting to get coffee together, quick question from a team member about something irrelevant, etc). I get into better flow at home, but being available is also important for others on the team.

Honestly, I would hesitate to take a full-remote position, but I am definitely not interested in full-on-prem either. I need at least 1-2 days at home to get actual work done, ideally 3.

Yeah, it certainly looks nice, but my problems are:

• everything runs in a docker container locally, so I don’t think the caching is going to be a huge win
• we have a half-dozen teams and a dozen repositories or so, across three time zones, so big changes require a fair amount of effort
• we just got through porting to poetry to split into dependency groups, and going back to not having that is a tough sell

So for me, it needs to at least have feature parity w/ poetry to seriously consider.

Looks like it has basic support:

• required-python = "..."
• dependencies = [ ... ]

Once it gets dependency groups, I’ll try it out. I’m currently using poetry, which works, but I’m always interested in better perf.

We’re using poetry and it solves our problems. I’ll have to look into uv, but I don’t feel in any rush to switch away from poetry.

They should have made it a bit more broad.

Yeah, game preservation is important, but there are so many other services that have similar issues. What happens when your phone drops out of support? Should you be able to find an alternative OS instead of just tossing it out as e-waste? What about your car’s cloud services? Farming equipment repair for older equipment? Digital purchases when the provider goes bankrupt?

There’s a broader movement here, and they can probably keep the focus pretty narrow, but they do need to appeal to that broader market so they can demonstrate that this is a foot in the door for future legislation. Right to Repair is a very related movement in the US, and they’ve been targeting medical and farming devices because those have broader appeal than laptops and phones, and the important thing is to get that foot in the door.

That said, it’s very close to other, higher-ticket items. For example:

• cloud service support for older cars
• digital purchases on platforms that go bankrupt (e.g. Redbox)

A mechanism for transitioning a service to user/community support when a company is no longer commercially interested is a common issue across sectors.

At least it’s not like Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls 6 “announcement.” They didn’t even confirm they’re working on it, just that they plan to build it at some point. According to Wikipedia:

The game entered pre-production by 2018, formally being announced during Bethesda’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) 2018 conference. The game entered active production in 2023 following Starfield’s completion and launch.

So they announced it 6 years ago, but nobody was actively working on it until last year. Yet for some reason they decided to release a teaser for it.

Yeah, I only mark a meeting room if I’ll be in that meeting room, and I’ll only do that on the 2x/week when we’re expected to be in the office.

That’s… incredibly dumb.

When people say “DRM,” they almost always mean the check when the game launches, not the one-time license check when you download a game. Whether they use their Steam platform or a webpage, I honestly don’t see much of a difference, provided you end up with a DRM-free product at the end.

But yes, technically Valve is verifying that you own the game, but it’s not really what is meant when the average person says “DRM.”

Exactly. Don’t use Manjaro, I argue that it’s less stable than Arch due to how updates are managed.

That’ll be… quite the Leap. I haven’t done an Arch install, but the last time I did, it required a fair amount of reading since the installer doesn’t walk you through everything. It’s not hard per se, but it does take some time for the first install.

If you’re not super familiar with Linux, I recommend holding off on Arch. This isn’t coming from any form of elitism (I don’t use Arch anymore) or lack of experience (I used Arch for > 5 years), just from reading between the lines of what you said, which indicates that you’re probably not super familiar with Linux.

If you really want to do it, go for it! I think Arch is an absolutely fine distro, and I think there are a lot of good reasons to use it. I just don’t want someone who may be new to Linux to get frustrated and end up not having fun. So don’t let me discourage you, but also know what you’re jumping into: probably a couple hours of getting the base system installed, and maybe another hour or two of installing packages to get to a usable system.

Exactly. I ran Arch for over 5 years, and the only “instability” I had was:

• Nvidia drivers not matching kernel drivers - also happened on openSUSE Tumbleweed, and has more to do with Nvidia’s driver being closed-source than anything Arch is doing
• systemd and usr merge - this was many years ago, and the only reason I messed it up was because I didn’t actually follow the instructions; and this was an absolutely massive change
• I did something stupid - sometimes this is uninstalling the display manager or some other critical component

That’s really it. I’ve since moved to openSUSE Tumbleweed and an AMD GPU, largely because of built-in snapper support and their server-oriented distros (Leap and MicroOS), and it wasn’t because Arch was “unstable” or anything like that. In fact, I had far fewer issues with Arch than I did with the other distros I used before: Ubuntu and Fedora. It turns out, as you understand Linux better, you tend to mess things up less.

And even if they had a monopoly (which I agree that they don’t), they have to actually abuse that monopoly to be a problem. Last I checked, the only requirement Valve has for games distributed on Steam is the devs can’t sell Steam keys for less elsewhere, but they can sell as many Steam keys as they want outside of Steam w/o paying Valve anything. They can also generate keys for other distribution platforms and price them however they want.

That’s extremely fair, and the fact that they’re able to maintain a dominant position in the PC games distribution market without any exclusivity agreements or anything of that nature speaks volumes to the level of service they provide for both users and publishers/developers.

even free games on steam require the steam client to install

That’s not exactly DRM though, that’s just only supporting one distribution method.

You have to use GOG’s servers to get games you purchased from them as well, that doesn’t make that DRM, it just means that’s the only distribution method they support.

To me, DRM has absolutely nothing to do with delivery, it’s all about use once you have it.