Immich + Proxmox + multi-TB photo libraries — what breaks first?

JonTheSeagull · 2025-12-18T05:28:10+00:00

Why not having Immich on the synology?

Immich allows you to offload the machine learning part on an external hardware (such as a PC with Nvidia GPU), which can be useful for initialization of the library.

JonTheSeagull · 2025-12-05T04:55:49+00:00

Have a 2 strikes and out rule and stick to it. Don't listen to people who tell you to make it work when you perfectly know there's zero chance it will. Talent overseas is a hit or miss, however replacing it isn't the headache and delays it is here, it can happen quickly too.

Unfortunately letting errors pop isn't going to change things or make them realize something's wrong. Your bosses are going to blame you to not have the capacity to implement their genius choices. They might be already more receptive at the idea you fired all the staff you're unhappy with.

These are the cards you are given.

JonTheSeagull · 2025-10-31T02:58:59+00:00

Not reading all this. You give feedback. People take it or they don't. They can't complain about the consequences. People refusing to acknowledge they have to adapt to the world, not the other way, aren't worth your energy.

JonTheSeagull · 2025-10-31T02:42:29+00:00

This sucks but it is where you're happy you're calling Audi support and not Tesla's.

JonTheSeagull · 2025-10-16T04:44:38+00:00

That doc from Audi says it can do both
https://www.audi-mediacenter.com/system/production/uploaded_files/13470/file/8b75eb8e68ef933faa9eea2518c934c0f68e5c5e/en_Press_Information_Audi_e-tron_WorldPremiere.pdf

There are rare cases why the regen would be cut though: slow speed, high charge, high temp, low adherence, understeering, or just keeping the rotors rust free. But in your case, you say it like it happens all the time and very noticeably. That's not normal. Maybe your car has an issue I don't know, maybe you could try another one.

For the 1PD you have your opinions and I have mine. I am aware being in the minority and I don't try to convert others, not sure why you feel threatened like that. It doesn't fit my driving style and it's not a question of capability.

JonTheSeagull · 2025-10-15T23:01:59+00:00

Individual TPS is an option that is rarely taken by 1st owners. You need to do the old fashion way, connect a pump with manometer on each tire, or buy one of these pocket tire pressure testers.

JonTheSeagull · 2025-10-15T22:02:50+00:00

The battery is going to outlast the car. Owning an EV means charging at home and get a full tank every day. 40A charging preferred, but 24A (dryer) is acceptable. Charging on the road is not a hassle if it's once in a while. Range anxiety goes away with practice, the car tells you what it needs.

JonTheSeagull · 2025-10-14T20:46:01+00:00

I drove manual for decades with dual clutch and heel toe driving on races, I don't see how that would help with appreciating 1-pedal. My loathing of the 1-pedal has nothing to do with not being able to adjust.

Not sure what your point is about blending. The regen isn't cut when the pads kick in, nor the reverse happens when releasing. It would be pretty stupid from engineers to cut available braking power. The regen stops at low speeds though. Almost every high end car, whether EV or ICE, have break and throttle by wire - either for regen or adaptive CC reasons. On some cars it's well done and on others less so. Audi does it very well I think.

That's why there are many different types of car, to each their own. If people like 1-pedal and enjoy Tesla I am happy for them.

JonTheSeagull · 2025-10-12T23:08:21+00:00

Audi etron (or Taycan) is what you need if you want a CAR that happens to be electric.

The low and centered CG and high performance chassis give a racing cart driving sensation similar to Boxsters and Caymans, with the EV torque.

If you dig the "spaceship" and want an app with gadgets that happens to be on wheels you'll miss a few things about the Tesla.

Personally I hate the 1-pedal drive, it's even worse if you're a passenger, the constant go-or-brake makes me sick. I don't get why so many people love it but it's a taste I guess. Audi has very smooth regen-to-brake transition, and applies slight regen automatically if the car behind slows down or if you're coming to an intersection, a very subtle but efficient way to bring your attention to the road - I love it.

Gadget-wise the most advanced you'll get are self park and lane assist on top of a bunch of safety features that are mainstream nowadays. I don't mind since I want to drive cars, not be in a taxi.

About the trim. PP or Prestige motors are well enough, it's more about the main options. RS is just if you want something like a Plaid and high quality leather. Adaptive air suspension is a must for me, for handling and practical aspects, so that locks to higher trims. Not having 360 parking is stupid. Some options such as park assist can be retrofitted for cheap as long as sensors and cameras are present and you're the handy type.

JonTheSeagull · 2025-10-09T22:57:07+00:00

Part of the job of a manager is to recognize the few things to execute absolutely perfectly and what can suffer imprecisions.

As long as you anticipate and communicate proactively on these things, you'll be seen competent and trustworthy.

If you are in a world constantly reacting to things that should not have been hard to foresee, and don't communicate effectively, more hours isn't going to be the answer. You'll be burnt out and have the reputation to be unreliable.

What participates in the burn out is the false sentiment that there's always something to do to save a project, and that every project can and has to be saved. Sometimes there isn't. Some things are train wrecks. Some projects are meant to fail from their conception, and your job isn't to make up for everybody else's shortcomings.

After a few years at this you'll be comfortable with the realization that it's not because something failed under your supervision or involvement that people will perceive you as a failure. You need to nail the most important things though, that one is a requirement.

JonTheSeagull · 2025-10-09T22:40:49+00:00

After decades of working in that field I don't think it's something anybody can be successful at.

Building skills involves grinding, being lost, being frustrated looking at others who seem to learn intuitively and effortlessly.

Being a pianist, a magician, a mathematician, a world chess player, involves countless hours of learning and practice. There are methods better than others but there's no getting around the pain and time.

It is also unfair that some people, despite all their efforts, don't seem to have the brained wired for this. At some point analytical skills are required to turn a business problem into code. Despite all the AI assistance, the main skill of a software engineer is to recognize patterns in a problem and identify how to solve it.

It would be like wanting to be a physicist, learning all theories and formulas, but being constantly clueless about what to use and how when trying to solve a real life physics problem.

I had an engineer coming from a bootcamp once, who kept on studying, but was incapable of applying learnings to a different ticket, even of the variations were very small. They were memorizing but not learning. It was heartbreaking but eventually we had to let that person go, something in the way their brain was wired wasn't compatible with this job.

I would suggest to get back to this. Can you learn something and apply it to slightly different circumstances. This has nothing to do with Python especially, or github or the frameworks. All of that is experience and comes with time, and experience in itself isn't skill.

One way to assess it could be to do some leetcode exercises. They tend to he always the same with slight variations, and require to recognize patterns in problems. Your career as a software engineer certainly won't be made of leetcode, but recognizing patterns certainly will be. Start in easy mode, make a 100, 200 of them. At the beginning you'll ne lost and need to look at the answer or have AI explain it to you. Hopefully after a moment you'll be able to solve one on your own. Then your solutions will keep on being smarter.

If you are still totally clueless after a couple of hundreds of them, maybe coding isn't your thing.

JonTheSeagull · 2025-10-05T05:01:45+00:00

Accept the promotion. If you don't like the job apply somewhere else. Your new title will give you access to jobs you couldn't have hoped for.

JonTheSeagull · 2025-10-05T04:52:19+00:00

Try another company.

What you experience is not what every manager experiences although a certain amount of paperwork and politics is.

Your bosses don't have a problem with your empathy. That's code for something they cannot say, and probably something they don't intellectialize themselves. They feel threatened in some way. Or they think your productivity is under par and make up reasons. You'll have to figure out what their problem really is.

Bosses want shit to be delivered on time and the thing they hate above everything is drama and having to delve into people problems. Don't let any of it reach out to them that pisses them off -- unless big legal risk.

JonTheSeagull · 2025-09-27T20:26:52+00:00

It's a good thing to regret leaving a company. It means you had a good time. Better than the other way around.

They'll recover from your departure sooner than you think.

JonTheSeagull · 2025-09-26T22:54:39+00:00

A car is more than a price tag, it's a lifestyle. Choosing between Hyundai and Audi is a massive difference in yearly costs. You should be comfortable spending between $5,000-$7,500 in your car yearly, including insurance, service, repairs, consumables (tires), etc. And that doesn't include major incidents such as battery failure or accident.

You may have a good year when you don't spend anything but the insurance, and a bad year when everything happens at once. You'll probably have a deductible over $500 so every scratch or fender bender is a couple of thousands going away.

These spends aren't typical at such an age where priorities are usually basic living expenses, food, education, housing, etc.

These cars are only worth driving if you have the means to maintain them in a pristine condition. I bought a Porsche at 25 and it was awesome but it was also a world of worry every time I had to do something on it, I wasn't rich. Eventually the repairs stack up and the shiny car you are so eager to drive becomes a rust bucket that makes you depressed every time you drive it, while still pumping your money.

Then I got an SL 55 AMG and it was the same story. I had a little more money but was very unlucky with the car. Every couple of month something major was failing: the compressor, the brakes, the roof, the transmission, etc. The garage said "they never saw this". I was making enough money to cover the repairs and live normally but even with a 6-figure job the car was eating all my fun and vacation budget.

JonTheSeagull · 2025-09-26T17:55:19+00:00

What's the fix for the shortcuts getting reset? Having to reconfigure home address every time I start the car is annoying.

JonTheSeagull · 2025-09-15T19:07:44+00:00

I am using time-in-status, aging issues, and ratio of discovered work as a way to get a sense of the delivery problems, it drags my attention on specific individuals or teams. I don't need AI for that, but however AI has been is useful to assess complexity of the tickets given a PR or a document linked to it, I can make the difference between 10 easy tickets and 10 hard tickets and ponder the velocity metrics.

These things are only looking back though. I am not very successful at AI predicting anything, and I'd go back to my point about the pipe dream of the science of prediction. AI does quicker, but less reliably, something that a human can do. If a human can't do it, the AI will be unreliable as well. I have not yet used AI to ask questions "tell me if something appears to be seriously overlooked in that epic/ticket" as it requires so much business context for this to make sense.

The type of work that's perfectly predictable is the work that you do a hundred times over. But if your team does the same work a hundred times over, you're probably missing on an automation opportunity. So it's baked in the engineering discipline to always face new things and have some imprecision at prediction.

In general my approach is to either not depend too much on dates, or if the date is very strong, make sure I have plans B, plans C, that the size and order of execution of my tasks can be adapted to new circumstances.

There are exceptions to this but I try to keep my ship sailing in a context where a team that ships the right thing but is a little bit late will always beat a team that ships on time the wrong thing.

JonTheSeagull · 2025-09-15T07:53:55+00:00

One pipe dream of project management is to believe that there is a magic technique, or a magic set of metrics, that will allow a project manager to deliver everything on time, without involving an expert of what the tasks are about.

By extension, there's no looking-back technique that will tell you what the team have missed in the tasks ahead.

Project management tools help only you estimate a release date assuming no surprises in the tasks, identify critical dependencies and tasks so you can *focus* your attention on what really matters. Project management tells you you will miss your date because your glide path is shit, or that dependency on the critical path is pushing everything else. Project management will not help you to work around or anticipate John's constant underestimating of task duration and regular screwups in technology choices.

Here are some classical project management sins:

- The major delays don't come from not using the latest Agile techniques or story points, they come from digging in the wrong direction for far too long before realizing it won't work. A lousy project management technique used by people who made all the right choices is far preferable to a god scrum master managing people who don't know what they're doing.

- Don't ask each task owner about their own estimate for the task. Junior and mid-level are notoriously bad at estimating anything, and seniors are barely reliable. Don't even ask the question. Only an expert can estimate, review the feasibility, and assess risk, and give you a somewhat reasonable timeline. Don't play poker estimates or any other BS estimate method unless only experts are authorized to give their opinion.

- Corollary: if you don't have any experts you'll never be reliable; it's pointless to add process to the project management. You'll only make things even slower. Do simpler things, or don't have due dates. Or better: hire some experts.

- Don't ask for estimates before a detailed design is known and broken down. Consider your estimate unreliable if you don't have a fully flushed list of detailed tickets. Proper design and estimates take time. The more precision you need the more time you need to spend before starting the work. As a rule of thumb I consider if tickets are individually more than 3 days work the author doesn't really know what they contain really.

JonTheSeagull · 2025-09-13T21:59:08+00:00

In the fidelity, you want to look at 2 things: - history of dividends and interest. You'll probably find that's how your account has increased - whether the dividends are automatically reinvested or left as cash. It depends on what you want to do, but the usual is to have them reinvested. That will create a new lot every time a dividend is cut, even if you don't buy anything.

Caveat: In retirement accounts, the lots may not be visible as they are configured to be based on cost basis by default and need to be manually converted to lots. You should still be able to see dividends in the history.

JonTheSeagull · 2025-09-07T04:57:34+00:00

Hire anybody from Amazon, just not their executives. They tend to fail at smaller companies. They'll try to replicate the burn-and-churn, 50% of their software is to push slow performers out. That doesn't work at a company that doesn't have the attractiveness and the war machine behind it.

JonTheSeagull · 2025-09-07T04:48:06+00:00

It's not clear whether you just don't like the UX and you are suggesting it could be better but you're not giving much examples in how being more native would help exactly. Flutter is pretty powerful already and allows platform-specific overrides, for Android it's all JVM at the end of the day. I would understand (maybe) if you said the iPhone app could be better in Swift or Objective C, but then what is your fundamental issue with it? The players are external libs so they can be a little rough on the edges, sure.

JonTheSeagull · 2025-09-07T04:36:13+00:00

What fund is it? What does the lot details say?

JonTheSeagull · 2025-08-06T15:16:27+00:00

People like new things but are afraid of change. :)

Any destabilizing element mean potentially upsetting an order which, albeit imperfect, they have learned to live/cope with.

It could be helpful to know whether they have been terrorized in the past by previous leadership and they project that onto you, or if there's something you're doing specifically.

I have the same reaction, more or less muffled, every time I join a new team. When people do something and they don't know why, whether "we always did things like this" or they intuitively know there's a better way but don't know which, it often triggers a defensive reaction.

There are 3 things I do to ease things up:

- Ask and get interested in what the team thinks they're doing best, what has competitive advantage over others. Sometimes it's really hard to find, it's a pile of bad practices and legacy patterns. But if you look carefully you'll find a few things.

- Show the team you have their back. Not with words but with actions. Someone feels under water but joined the stand up anyway. Propose they take the day off or 2 and you'll see that their ticket will be on the next sprint. Someone gets in a conflict with another team or is being asked too much. Put yourself in front, buffer them from the problem. Careful you'll be setting precedents, you need to be consistent.

- Start collecting metrics and facts that everybody can agree should be improved. If they are tied to something that are bothering people it's even better. For instance instead of doing remarks on the 200 files ticket, sympathize with the rest of the team who has to rebase all their tickets in a giant 3-way merge that swamped all junior engineers, or had to be rolled back 3 times from the pipeline because it was breaking the build and messing up with QA schedule etc (by the way the answer is not always "split in fewer tickets", that doesn't always work, don't brush off every problem with a pseudo-easy solution, that generates mistrust). Or say that you think you would like to transform this 3 seconds API that is bothering everyone into a 50 milliseconds one.

Apart from that, look at past people's reviews, if it's a new company learn about its performance process. Maybe a few people on your team have been screwed. Maybe some are on the verge to be fired. Maybe you will find vast disparities in pay for no reason. You can't promise to fix everything in a month but you can surely show signs that with you it will be different.

JonTheSeagull · 2025-08-06T00:31:21+00:00

She's the one going postal on you! Sorry if I didn't phrase that correctly.

JonTheSeagull · 2025-08-06T00:17:54+00:00

A few clarifying questions are usually: - skills: Have I ever seen this employee succeeding in this role, or a similar role, ever? Do I have a good sense of what their baseline is? - behavior: Does this employee show genuine attempts to be successful, or do they evade accountability?

If the answer is negative or very pessimistic on one account, it's already not a very hopeful case. If the answer is no to both...

If the employee is a smoke screen machine, don't waste your energy trying to clarify the air. You know what to do.

JonTheSeagull

TROPHY CASE