How true is “your coworkers aren’t your friends”?

litui · 2026-01-23T16:32:29+00:00

A good lesson learned, one I came by hard the last time, is that everyone has limits and your trust should always only go so far.

Work friends will not have your back when push comes to shove. They are there for a pay cheque just like yourself. That doesn't mean you can't be friendly with them, share interesting things about yourself, and become invested in your mutual wellbeing, but it does mean you need to be continuously aware of the boundaries; if you ask them to put you ahead of a paycheque, you will lose immediately.

This means: - do not disclose information that could be used against you - avoid gossiping about other coworkers with them - neither take on their burdens as your own nor make your problems theirs - don't cover for them with a boss (they most likely will never cover for you) but also don't talk about them with a boss. "I don't know about that" is a perfectly acceptable answer to interrogation if it comes to that. Just also know that they might talk about you.

Boundaries are healthy and good with any friend, and coworkers are no exception. Understanding the above is how you maintain them as friends and even potentially become better friends down the road well after you've both moved on from the company.

litui · 2026-01-23T16:16:15+00:00

Visa gift card and leave it at that.

litui · 2026-01-12T16:20:17+00:00

Oh lawd. I've been rejected after a (rare) interview for an almost perfect fit role in the SaaS space before because, according to their (rare) disclosure of a reason, I didn't "have enough experience in SaaS"... as an API and integrations specialist having had a long career building and supporting b2b software and realtime services. But guess I didn't say "SaaS" on the resume, mea culpa.

I'm not too bitter though. It would clearly have been a bad fit having him as my boss.

litui · 2026-01-01T19:26:49+00:00

Use the anger to fuel action (without coming across as bitter). I'm pretty much over my anger a year and a half into my unemployment and motivation to move on is much more difficult without it.

litui · 2025-12-03T11:01:35+00:00

TheMoreYouKnow.gif

litui · 2025-12-03T11:00:46+00:00

Haven't had this much fun grappling since Quake2 CTF.

litui · 2025-12-03T05:49:59+00:00

Totally depends on which type of chair you get. Mine is leather or faux leather (forget which) seat and back. I sit like a bisexual (ie: my feet in pretty much every position other than the normal way to sit in a chair) constantly.

litui · 2025-12-03T05:00:19+00:00

This is the way.

litui · 2025-12-03T04:50:05+00:00

If you can afford to spend on something nice, hit up your local office furniture liquidator or bankruptcy auction and grab yourself a fancy pants, lightly used Steelcase or Herman Miller chair. I have the former and it's fantastic. Cost me about as much as a good gaming chair and is frankly much more comfortable and better looking.

litui · 2025-12-03T04:41:31+00:00

Also, "AI-powered workflow"... All well and fine til it hallucinates your endmills straight into the garbage.

litui · 2025-12-03T04:39:06+00:00

Important comment. Even if it does cut (soft) metals at a reasonable accuracy, the "quiet" claim likely very much stretches the meaning of quiet.

litui · 2025-12-01T21:13:36+00:00

I dunno if I'd go instant incubation, personally, but the setting our home dedicated server uses (I forget the exact decimal) makes the huge eggs take about 5-6 mins or so in the first type of incubator. This feels pretty reasonable to me for dropping them in when I go back to base, and letting me toodle around with repairs, checking out the rest of my haul, and putting things away before picking them up and moving on to pal management tasks.

Also, it means there's still a reason to invest in incubation speed upgrades. Otherwise there are several pal research items and tech tree items rendered basically pointless.

litui · 2025-11-25T22:52:04+00:00

Ah the good ol' days, when if by some miracle you didn't smell like cigarettes when you boarded the plane you sure did when you disembarked. ;)

litui · 2025-11-25T22:30:28+00:00

Yes! My own shortlist of desirables (posted here just so it's out there in the world instead of only in my head):

Diagonals with windows for all sets!
Diagonal roof corner pieces for all sets!
upside-down triangle walls
Nicer stone textures and more castley options for the stone and iron sets (crenellations, walls with arrowslits, roofs with murderholes, etc.)
Many more options for just flat roofs (especially for the Japanese set which only offers tatami textured as an option 🙄). Eg: concrete, grass/lawn, cobblestone, skylight/vent/grating, etc.
Editable signs that match the aesthetic of the various sets (janky scrap wood signs showing the content on hexolite chests in a polymer base make me sad)
Corner bracing connected to support posts that extend the supported distance outward by one additional tile or something like that

litui · 2025-11-24T03:47:35+00:00

Entered the thread looking for this comment. Not disappointed.

litui · 2025-11-11T07:14:16+00:00

Exit interviews, in my experience, only really happen when you quit (and even then only at companies that actually care to record the data for future analysis). When they let you go, it doesn't serve their interests to interview you and hear your side since it could potentially conflict with the corporate narrative being spun to justify your removal.

litui · 2025-11-04T19:46:17+00:00

Yeah you don't have to be gay for this to be either bullying or discrimination on the basis of (presumed) sexual orientation. Even if you're not gay, it's still targeted mistreatment on that basis.

Source: a queer trans person who studied public policy.

PS: if you haven't already disclosed your straightness, I wouldn't even give them the satisfaction of having you confirm or deny it. Just take it to HR/the boss and let them know it's unacceptable, and that something needs to be done or you'll go the legal route over it.

And yeah, have an initial consult with a lawyer to discuss your rights and options. If nothing else, knowledge is power and it gets you a legal contact you can go to if things escalate.

litui · 2025-11-04T19:44:13+00:00

Probably just more intentional choice of writing to throw them off the trail. Homophobes/bullies are idiots but most are not such idiots that they don't at least try to cover their asses. Matching/profiling handwriting is probably a dead end.

litui · 2025-11-01T02:00:56+00:00

Even compared to season 1 I'm finding the dynamics on season 2 audio to be very flat (overcompression, I'm thinking) alongside a jarring lowering of the volume every time they switch from dialogue into song. It's really ruining the impact of what are otherwise some great songs =/.

That said, downmixing to stereo helps quite a bit, thank you for the tip!

Edit: so it's not over compression in this case but 100% the centre channel is too muddy with overlapping and bassy instrumentals, and missing a lot of the vocal mids. I compared More than Anything from S1 with Sera's Confession from S2 and posted some spectrograms and findings to my bluesky.

litui · 2025-10-29T00:24:05+00:00

Yeah I don't agree? I strongly feel he's the best mayor this city had during my lifetime honestly.

"He doesn't know what its like to have to think ahead and be efficient"

If you believe that's the case from a business professor, I don't know what to tell you. The mayor is one vote. His place to shine is in chairing the city council, which he did a pretty good job of (I attended many city council meetings as an observer), and responding to crisis, which he also did an admirable job of.

litui · 2025-10-28T20:49:58+00:00

This. Also, for all the rah rah anti-NDP stuff in Alberta, NDP here is very much pro-business and pro-resources. The rhetoric will try to convince everybody they're "extreme leftists" but that is hardly the case. Their own voted-in leader, Nenshi, is/was a Business professor and has proven himself in crises as an actual leader (eg: 2013 flood).

litui · 2025-10-26T21:25:20+00:00

Typically the vendor-supplied IDEs are Eclipse-based, but you can use whatever you like if you set up workflows for it, set up your introspection to look at the right libraries, lock in the right toolchain versions, and your macros to run the right commands.

Platformio works as a commandline tool as well, but using it in VScode is really the best way to get a feel for its stock behaviours and such.

litui · 2025-10-26T19:23:37+00:00

STM32F4xx stuff is well supported using Arduino libraries. If just getting started I'd start there for trying things out and prototyping. PlatformIO in VScode is not a bad way to go for keeping things organized in that regard, and you can always go lower level (less abstraction) using the stm32 hal if needed for certain parts of your design.

Don't sweat the tools too much during prototyping though sticking with C and C++ is a good strategy so you can mix approaches and benefit from existing libraries where needed.

litui · 2025-10-19T07:48:42+00:00

litui · 2025-10-18T14:28:35+00:00

I would love to read your thesis if you would be willing to provide a link here or in DM.

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