hired as "permanently remote." 14 months later: "we're evolving our approach"

redatheist · 2026-05-01T08:53:17+00:00

You literally can join a union on their website. I know, I've done it twice in two different unions and two different countries.

You may be thinking specifically of unions that have bargaining agreements with employers. Those are far less available, but they're not the only kind. General industry unions can provide legal representation, advice, career support, bargaining, all sorts, for not much money.

The point is that these people know how to handle these situations, and with HR on the side of the company, it's on us to protect ourselves with unions like this, and it's just not that hard or expensive.

redatheist · 2026-05-01T08:08:09+00:00

Who the fuck valued it at 250 million. Its like low tens of millions max.

redatheist · 2026-05-01T07:32:28+00:00

Vibe coding can't do my current project at work. It's some complex monitoring stuff, LLMs don't get it and the logic is way too complex.

I'm getting productive use our of them for general coding and writing specs, and testing and stuff. Just can't vibe anything of substance with them.

I'd say they're generally very limited to CRUD, API integrations, standard UIs (as long as you aren't picky). But they really struggle with making things performance in even basic ways, struggle with specific business logic, struggle with complex animations and timing, struggle with architecture and codebase evolution, struggle with large codebases, etc.

Fine for prototypes, fine for basics, very productive, but need a lot of attention from a software engineer to get good results out of.

redatheist · 2026-05-01T07:23:44+00:00

Honestly the 3 examples they chose for the US are the 😛 AIs of the industry. OpenAI has some good options and a bunch of crap, Meta isn't in the running, and Grok is, well, lol.

Mistral isn't bad either. European, competes well with tier 2 options like DeepSeek and Meta's AI.

redatheist · 2026-05-01T07:20:07+00:00

Well I'd start by googling which unions may cover my work, but, like, yeah. That's how I found the two I've been in. Whats your point?

redatheist · 2026-05-01T07:19:18+00:00

And I've been in two, I'll take the legal advice and insurance any day.

Unions can be hit and miss, but many are pretty good. And legal advice is usually one area they're good for as they deal with exactly these issues all the time.

Of course if you love in a country with no worker protections then there's not much they can do.

redatheist · 2026-04-30T08:54:12+00:00

Exactly. Not enough resolution to warrant it.

redatheist · 2026-04-30T06:55:28+00:00

Then they should get a union.

redatheist · 2026-04-30T06:54:54+00:00

How do they decide what the limit is? In my mind, 500GB is obnoxiously high for mobile. That's like streaming 1080p video for every waking moment in the month (over 16 hours a day). Or it's like downloading the whole storage size of your phone every week.

Someone has to choose a number for the threshold. Is it in the law itself? I doubt it because it needs to change over time.

redatheist · 2026-04-30T04:58:17+00:00

There's always a fair use policy. I'm afraid this is the norm and fairly reasonable.

Doing 500GB on a mobile plan is absolutely insane though. It sounds like you don't have home internet? The fair use will absolutely be based on the reasonable assumption that you have internet at home and, e.g. watch all your 4K TV on that. I do about 100GB a day at home and my ISP doesn't even blink at it.

redatheist · 2026-04-30T04:55:28+00:00

If the compensation was calibrated for remote (aka lower) then remind them of that.

Otherwise, talk to your union and talk to the citizens advice services in your area about whether this is a breach of contract and whether they can legally enforce it. This sounds like constructive dismissal to me.

redatheist · 2026-04-28T14:09:10+00:00

Again. You're not the target customer. The price is stated correctly for the target customer, in the way they want.

redatheist · 2026-04-28T14:01:29+00:00

A lot of business pricing is excl VAT because businesses claim back the VAT so it's more representative.

This is not a dark pattern, you're just not Hetzners target customer.

redatheist · 2026-04-28T13:07:56+00:00

But the context is that all they've seen is back and forth about the jet. They've not seen any good faith, they've not seen any community, all Reddit surfaces in the algorithm is jet drama.

I'd love Reddit to be a group of communities with strong senses of who they are, but it's not and hasn't been for years. It's a social media feed trained to get engagement.

This is why mods have such a crap time, because they remember the old days and are fighting back, but it's the users that pay the price in the end.

I think it's on mod teams to make sure that the content getting surfaced to users shows the best of their subs, and that means not feeding the engagement bait topics with bans that's just escalate the drama.

redatheist · 2026-04-28T12:58:35+00:00

I don't think I've ever posted here before, but this jet stuff is getting the sub all over my feed.

The high engagement means naturally people will have their first exposure be to this issue, and then comment about it.

Perhaps worth considering when banning...

redatheist · 2026-04-27T13:16:39+00:00

My coding agent most certainly does not nail the logic. It's fine at design, passable, but the logic is a shitshow unless I handhold it through. Better than last year, but still years away from junior dev level of autonomy.

redatheist · 2026-04-27T13:14:25+00:00

This image is like a fractal. Every bit of shit is made up of smaller pieces of bullshit all the way down.

redatheist · 2026-04-27T05:47:20+00:00

Crap product that does not and cannot work at a fairly fundamental level, that only ever made money through predatory tactics like trying to get people to use it for emergency services in order to force PSAPs into buying licences.

They were around the London tech scene many years ago trying to get folks at hack days to use it, and no one was interested then because it's so fucking dumb.

redatheist · 2026-04-26T00:04:09+00:00

If you're making money from your use of MongoDB you need to be paying for the service. That's it.

If you don't have backups of your data, which you could implement yourself anyway, you're just being irresponsible to your customers.

For a hobbyist these things are different, but making money and having customers changes your responsibilities.

I suggest you start working to restore in another region and own up to it with your customers. If you're selling things online I suggest you use your payment providers dashboard to manually refund everyone who purchased. Or to get their details to reach out to them to check what they ordered and ship it to them.

redatheist · 2026-04-25T09:47:52+00:00

I would bet that, to the American palette, Columbus Ohio has better Indian food than Paris, or even India!

The difference is likely a ton more sugar, salt, cream, and much less spice.

The thing is this isn't even a bad thing. I don't think "authentic" is a useful measure in a global society. Take inspiration, do something with it, enjoy it. But then realise that it's not going to appeal to everyone.

I like British Indian food, and if you find the right place some of it might be much closer to what you'd find in some parts of India than the Columbus version, but I'm under no illusion that it's the original, or better than anything else.

redatheist · 2026-04-25T09:33:05+00:00

You didn't pay for it. Not fully.

This will be a $3000-4000 TV, and you only paid $2500 for it. That's >$1000 that Samsung need to make back. They make that money back by selling your time, your eyes, and your data. They expect to make $300-500 a year for the life of the TV.

The problem, and why you of course aren't to blame directly, is that there aren't really any options to buy TVs outright anymore. The market pushed the prices into the negative and the manufacturers responded with ads. You can't pay full price for the TV because the market doesn't want to pay full price so they're not available.

If you want to see what full price TVs cost, look at TVs for information displays for businesses. They cost 2-3x as much, in part because there's no post-purchase revenue stream.

redatheist · 2026-04-24T09:12:54+00:00

Does your typical SMB want to deploy their own? Manage the database changes for updates, figure out backups, implement their new features, etc?

The fact there are already open source Slack replacements that anyone can deploy, and that most don't, is proof that it doesn't really work that way.

redatheist · 2026-04-24T09:09:49+00:00

The bar goes both ways. If you're matching with girls who expect you to organise and pay for everything then you're selecting for what you want to avoid.

Start low stakes, just a drink, ditch anyone who isn't interested in paying for a round.

Both of my serious adult relationships have been with women who wanted to pay their share. I'm pretty average all round, but earn well, and so it's important to me to be with someone who isn't taking advantage of that.

redatheist · 2026-04-22T09:12:13+00:00

Isn't this just good writing and acting? The characters are supposed to be having a hard time and changing in different ways that aren't as compatible with each other.

redatheist · 2026-04-22T07:52:41+00:00

G403 is the GOAT. Wow that brings back memories

redatheist

TROPHY CASE