https://devkitsu.net
A Linux powered fox. 23. Hardware Designer. BS in EE and CompE, MS in EE. Cleveland Fur.
PFP by Dbleki
Header by @MattsyKun
| Pronouns: | They/Them or He/Him |
| Neurology: | Anxiety ✔️ ADHD ? ASD ? |
Before the 12" MacBook, before the 11" MacBook Air, there was the 9" ASUS Eee PC hackintosh, and there were a number of new-to-macOS developers in our community who learned how to develop for iPhone on this very setup, and started their careers from it.
The Eee PC 901 netbook was priced at, you guessed it, the same $599 as the brand-new incredibly-powerful MacBook Neo
people on reddit are doing a whole lot of yapping about age verification in Linux
I would generally agree that the whole approach of these laws is total dogshit and clearly a wedge issue to enable stricter surveillance laws in the future
at the same time though, the actual implementation and potentially having a portal which exposes the users age bracket seems totally reasonable as a way to implement parental controls... I'm also not totally against holding service providers to higher standards for data processing when it comes to minors, and hey if they're doing that why shouldn't adults get the same treatment?
what im totally miffed about though is why the fuck would you get mad at systemd for adding a birthDate field to userdb, what would you have them do? Would you rather every desktop environment had its own way to store this data??
An XDG portal for this also means you can *trivially* write a stub that always identifies you as an adult or even lets you pick per-app (heck maybe per website! that might be the new cursed way of avoiding trackers under late stage capitalism)
and yeah it sure would be shit if we get real-id laws in a few years, but systemd or XDG standing on "principle" and refusing to implement this API is absolutely not going to lead to better outcomes for anyone. The last thing we want is for users in certain regions to wind up relying on implementations maintained by distros or random individuals, if we need to have this crap the least we could ask is that it's maintained by established and trusted people in the open source community!
@DeltaWye yeah I think everyone quits is not outside the realm of possibility
No one seems very happy about it - I think everyone in engineering got similar "pep talks"
We have at least one, maybe two, H1B people, who probably can't quit without risking losing their legal status, but there are also a lot of people who have families/young children who are extremely unhappy about the situation, I heard one of the accelerator physicists talking to one of the mechEs this morning about how unfair it would be for their wives in terms of childcare for them to work crazy and unpredictable hours for weeks on end.
The physicist basically said "I can work one day a week for 20 hours or I can work 5 days for 8 and they can choose"
My BF is a mechanical engineer without a masters and he makes just as much as I do currently and gets annual raises in his contract. He is expecting about a 15/20% raise in June.
I feel like even without a master's EEs often make a few percent more than MechEs and I have the master's degree.
I'm really not being paid very generously at all, so I don't see a lot of reason to put up with bullshit treatment.
My boss yesterday pulled the hardware team into an unplanned meeting (that ran past 5PM) to give a talk about how as we approach the 510K submission deadline we are going to have be prepared to work 10, 15, even 22 hour days to make sure everything is done.
We don't get overtime and I don't get paid enough to give a fuck about the deadline. I didn't make the project schedule. I don't work well under extreme stress. In my entire academic career I pulled 1 "all nighter" and it was on a group project and it was hell.
I start work early, plan the steps, work diligently and efficiently while I work and stop when it's no longer productive to push through, so I can pick it up the next morning without flaming out.
If they really try to enforce this I will just leave. I have a life outside of my job, friends who I like to spend time with. Even in this economy there are listings for embedded hardware engineers in this area that fit my skill set, and the contractor I was at before would probably take me back.
I've been working full time since Jan, I worked part time the whole time I did my Master's; 1 year as a hardware test and verification engineer at an embedded systems contractor and 6 months as an embedded hardware design engineer at a medical imaging company, that I'm at full time now.
I left the contractor because they were small so had limited potential for growth and were always chasing clients.
The medical company was larger, more directly related to my master's thesis, and promised me the ability to learn and grow from skilled engineers.
But the longer I've been here, and especially now that I am full time the more it becomes clear that management is a disaster.
All the engineering is in Cleveland, all the execs are in San Francisco. The execs have no idea what is happening, set unrealistic deadline, don't do any normal project management and are getting increasingly unhappy that no one is going to hit the unrealistic and arbitrary deadline for FDA 510K submission.
There is no middle ground.
Update 8/8/2025 – I wrote this the day before a certain post by a popular developer services company. I’ve seen some comments this is a rebuttal – it wasn’t meant to be! But…
Steve Troughton-Smith
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