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Ofertele de muncă false sunt din ce în ce mai frecvente. Află cum să le identifici, ce semne de alarmă să urmărești și cum te poți proteja în procesul de căutare a unui job. Un ghid practic de la echi...

Descoperă Busy Bee — platforma care facilitează căutarea unui job. Site-uri de cariere moderne, aplicare rapidă în câteva click-uri și experiență îmbunătățită.

Descoperă cum un ATS (Applicant Tracking System) poate transforma procesul de recrutare al companiei tale. Economisește timp, organizează candidații și angajează mai eficient.

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So, a bunch of my services run, or rather, _ran_ , on an old Intel NUC 8 that I bought back in 2020 and have mostly used as a “random stuff goes here” server. A year and a half ago the fan on it died, so I bought a cheap replacement fan on Amazon and all was good. And over time I started hosting more and more stuff on it, such as my owncast and PeerTube instances, and a few things for my home media streaming setup (which are also now accessible while traveling). This morning while preparing for a week-long trip I’m going on tomorrow I did a bunch of updates to things to make sure that I could access the server remotely (such as tweaking my Tailscale configuration and installing all the latest security updates). And then I rebooted it, and then… it didn’t come back up. So of course I went to see what happened, and it was in thermal shutdown, because the replacement fan had failed. Oh joy. I tried to quickly see if I could ad-hoc a temporary fan onto it while waiting for a replacement to arrive, and remembered just how much of a pain in the butt it is to do that, and I was thinking, jeeze, I’d really like my stuff to work. * * * Around 10 years ago I built a Windows gaming PC, in anticipation of being an indie game developer. I never really gamed on it much, but I did always have it set up in my home theater and used it for things like streaming and watching media on my TV. Over the years I upgraded it in anticipation of using it as a VR system, and in 2022 after I left the software industry I put in its final upgrade, an nVidia 2080Ti, so that VRChat would run better. But it never really ran _great_ , and after Furality Somna I decided it was overdue for another upgrade. Unfortunately, I’d maxed this system out to the point that doing any further upgrades for VRChat would have required building a whole new computer, so that’s exactly what I did: built a new computer specifically for VRChat. So now I had a spare decent-spec graphics workstation just sitting around doing nothing. I did a couple of experiments on it but didn’t really have much to do with it, so it was just sitting under my desk. But then when I set up my new PeerTube channel, the little NUC was struggling to import all of my videos, and so I installed Linux on it and set up a remote runner so that it could help the poor little NUC to catch up. I also temporarily ran a runner on all of my other computers (including taking a couple old Macs out of mothballs), making quick work of the transcode tasks, but when all of those transcode tasks were finished, I decided to only keep the runner on this graphics computer for the future. * * * While thinking about how to get my NUC services working again, I thought about how the easiest way to get things going would be to transplant the drive into another Linux computer, seeing as how Linux is one of the few operating systems where you can just Do That. I ran through a mental list of all of the computers I could do it on, and realized that none of my computers would be suitable… except the graphics workstation. “Oh, I guess I could just temporarily do a drive transplant,” I thought, and went about putting the NUC’s NVMe into the workstation. Upon doing that I realized that due to the change in MAC address there was a bunch of other network configuration I needed to do. Oh, but it’ll just be temporary and I’ll revert it when I get home in a week, right? So anyway, I got everything working on the workstation-become-server, and then I had a major “well, _duh_ ” moment when I realized that the workstation is much more suited to the video-encoding-heavy tasks I was running on the NUC _anyway_ , and actually running persistent stuff on this thing is an actual useful thing to do with a workstation rather than having it just be an occasional helper to a much slower, less-capable device. * * * Now I’m just wondering if there’s any point to keeping the NUC, since I do not actually have a use for it on my network anymore. When I get back I’ll probably repair it and turn it into a media center PC so that I can stop relying on the horrors of Android TV and frustrations of AppleTV for my media consumption. I guess I’ll want to investigate TV-friendly Linux distributions. I wonder if Bazzite + Waydroid is any good for this purpose. Which is kind of funny: the home theater PC becomes the server, and the server becomes the home theater PC.

In reply to: More reasons as to why I left the Fediverse I feel somewhat similarly. I use Mastodon as a not-Twitter (and don’t particularly care for Bluesky), and I have started to embrace PeerTube as a not-YouTube, but the entire architecture of ActivityPub just isn’t a good fit for me. Most of what’s being done with ActivityPub could be much better (and more easily) encapsulated in RSS/Atom feeds, and the lack of identity consolidation is a huge drag, and IndieWeb absolutely does a much better job of separating the protocol from the identity. I am so very tired of how every time I work on a thing for a specific use case, people come out of the woodwork to try to convince me that I should be building it on ActivityPub, and then they have all this hand-waving about how it gives you “instant interoperability” when some of these systems can’t even interoperate with different versions of _themselves_ , much less other ActivityPub-based applications. The FEP process is incredibly opaque and arcane and hand-wavey, the “how the fuck do I discover the ActivityPub endpoint from this user’s page” is even worse, and ActivityPub itself doesn’t feel like a very good protocol for many of the things it’s trying to cover. Heck, Mastodon (probably its biggest success story) doesn’t even do a bunch of stuff in keeping with the design of ActivityPub, like how it overloads “subject” to be a content warning, for example. Following PeerTube or PixelFed or FunkWhale or whatever from Mastodon is a giant mess, none of those platforms can follow Mastodon, and I am constantly failing to see what the supposed advantages of it are over RSS/Atom with simple `<link>` discovery. Heck, even if ActivityPub were to use `<link>` instead of whatever ad-hoc per-stack bullshit that ends up emerging, it’d be a huge improvement. But also ActivityPub implementations all seem to be _super_ devoted to the idea of Everything Is Push and Who Cares About Backfilling. Which might be fine for a Twitter-like but it’s abysmal for any of the other things people are trying to adapt it to. RSS/Atom aren’t universal either, and that’s why Chorus is its own thing. Atom _could_ be closer to being universal if people were better at implementing/acknowledging its various extensions (and if its extension process weren’t also kinda bad), but like. Sometimes it’s okay to define a format that’s specific to the needs of the protocol! And yeah I also agree with the point of how most of the ActivityPub-based things seem to be based primarily on “let’s rebel against American tech companies, fuck America and all its citizens” instead of “let’s make something that’s better for everyone all around the world.” (via Jacky Alciné)

ALT: Busy Bee Dancing Meme

Bookmarked: Men in tech #YesAllMen (via Jo Franchetti)

At this point it is super clear that I probably have ME/CFS. This has not been determined by a doctor (not for lack of trying!), but by a lifetime of experience and the fact that the issues I have match the profile pretty much exactly. I’d be tempted to blame the bad case of COVID I got back in 2024 but the precursors were there for a long, long time, so if COVID did anything it was just to push me over an edge I had been approaching for a while. Here are some of the signs that are now obvious in retrospect: * Post-exertional malaise; this is the hallmark symptom of ME/CFS and while I didn’t start experiencing it until a couple years ago, this _majorly_ affects my life these days * Alcohol intolerance; even at my peak consumption ability, having more than a couple drinks would make me feel like I was _dying_ , and nowadays having even just a little bit gives me a big pain flareup * Vertigo, especially during exertion and anxiety * Anxiety in general, which I’d always had to an extent but it got _much_ worse after my big 2011 trauma (which is also when my fibromyalgia symptoms went full-blown) * Visual snow syndrome, which I’ve had for as long as I can remember and has been getting a lot worse lately, along with its related issues like tinnitus, photophobia, and migraines A lot of literature on fibromyalgia vs ME/CFS implies that they have a lot of symptom overlap but that there’s things that distinguish them from each other. But when I look at the differential lists, I have everything from both columns. It’s also fairly common for folks to have both. Lucky me. Since ME/CFS symptoms are what are causing me the most grief these days, that’s what I’m focused on. Here’s things I’m trying: * Improve my diet For a while I’ve been having trouble with managing my blood sugar, and I thought it was helpful to switch entirely to sugar-free sodas and the like. But it turns out that low-calorie sweeteners are actually _worse_ for ME/CFS than the real thing, because it still triggers the serotonin response and decreases inflammation responses (and I’ve long had elevated inflammation markers in my blood work). ME/CFS is also characterized by a deficit of available energy (particularly ATP) due to what is theorized to be a mitochondrial disorder. And just as hummingbirds will happily consume their whole body weight in zero-calorie nectar and then die of exhaustion, the same thing happens with humans with ME/CFS. So, the big thing I’m doing is cutting out all artificial sweeteners from my diet. This includes Mio drops, SodaStream syrups, and diet tonic. I will manage my blood sugar by just reducing my sugar intake, and limiting my consumption of soda and candy and so on; I’ll treat them as emergency relief rather than a constant comfort. For hydration I’ll stick to lightly-flavored, unsweetened seltzer. Which I happen to like anyway. Apparently I should also avoid nightshades, including potatoes and tomatoes. _That_ will be hard. I love me some ‘maters and 'taters. It’s actually kinda hard to figure out what I _can_ eat since everything I like seems to be on the AMMES “avoid” list. But the Mediterranean diet seems like a pretty good starting point. Or maybe I go all the way back to my genetic roots. (Fortunately, that covers a lot of food that I like a lot!) I should also try my hand at fermentation. But yeah basically, more fish and pilaf and falafel and hummus for me. I can live with that. (As an aside, I really should share my hummus recipe. I do a sort of Israeli-Palestinian fusion version of it.) * Completely cutting out alcohol Not that I drank much to begin with, but there’s a few things that I’ve enjoyed in moderation. I’ll keep around some of my spirits for cooking (evaporating/burning off all the alcohol), but there’s no reason for me to keep around things that are purely just for drinking, including the beer in my studio fridge (which I got with the hope that it’d entice friends to come over to work on music but that’s never actually ended up happening). * Limiting caffeine even further So, this is also related to the soda thing, but also one of my favorite hobbies. I only rarely drink caffeinated coffee (and usually as a “get me out of a gravity well” measure) but as of late I’m finding that even a little caffeine makes me feel _very_ shitty, and also messes up my sleep. I have a lot of fancy coffee in my home. Someone please put it to a better use! Decaf also still has some caffeine in it and I’ve been sparing about drinking it, but I’m going to keep it around for now. But I might still end up giving up my roasting setup and beans. I’d rather not, though, as being a weird coffee person has been a big part of my life for a little while now! (But it’s also something I can live without.) * Learning to say “no” I’ve always had a pathological need to Do All The Things. That needs to change. Overdoing it on projects is _literally_ killing me. Always being the one to travel to see others is as well. I’m going to have to start insisting that socializing has to happen closer to my home. I can’t meet people halfway anymore, much less my usual “going to where they are” thing. I also can’t join in on every single VR concert that I’m invited to perform at. It’s just too much for me to keep up with anymore. * Learning to request and accept help A pathological need for self-sufficiency is just driving me to an early grave. I’ve reached out to Jewish Family Service to see if there’s any way I can get help with things I need help with (cleaning, organizing, meal prep, grocery shopping, travel, etc.), at least as an interim before I can finally get access to services that are gated by a disability determination. I’m also going to be quicker to pay for things that help me out rather than trying to stoicism myself to death. It’s not like I can take the money with me, right? * Take it slow I used to be hyperproductive when it comes to writing code and making music. Trying to push myself as hard as I used to just means I can’t do _anything_. I need to be fine with things coming out in a trickle, rather than a flood. This also means cutting down on things like game jam music, song-a-day challenges, and the like. I just can’t sustain the output anymore. So anyway, I have a bunch of stuff to give away, because I’d rather it go to people who can enjoy it: * A bunch of diet soda (mostly Safeway’s off-brand Coke Zero and Cherry Coke Zero clones, which are quite good, and also a couple of random bottles of other diet drinks that can go away) * Some tubes of water flavor drops (both Mio and offbrands) * Several bottles of SodaStream syrup (Diet Cola and Diet Dr. Pete); these can be mixed with plain seltzer and don’t require a SodaStream machine * A few pounds of pretty good coffee * A decent collection of liquor and spirits (some of which is _very_ nice) that I’ve accumulated over the years * A couple cases of beer (which I bought mostly with the hope that folks would come over and join me in the recording studio) If you’re willing to come to White Center to take some of this off of my hands, please let me know!

In reply to: Aaron Parecki: Why I'm rebuilding my IndieWeb projects with Claude Hey Aaron, thanks for all the work over all the years. I’ve been long wanting to replace webmention.io with something else out of general principles (namely wanting something that worked more purpose-built for my sites and also being concerned about how much reliance there is on a single implementation like that) but this is probably gonna give me the kick I need to build my alternative. I understand your reasoning for doing this and I appreciate your transparency, but I also can’t help but be disappointed.

A personal website run by a multifaceted weirdo

Over the past year or so my fatigue has been getting significantly worse. It’s almost always brought about by post-exertional malaise, which is one of the keystone symptoms of ME/CFS, which has no known treatment, just mitigations _at best_. And the core mitigation is to not overexert oneself. This presents a problem, as there are so many things I’d like to be doing, and even taking care of my basic day-to-day needs already puts me right up at my limit most of the time, and often pushes me over. It has me thinking quite a lot about what I need to go on. ### Things that are helpful I need to know that the things I’ve done have been worthwhile, and that there’s a reason to keep on doing the things I’m doing. Things that would make a huge impact along those lines: * Knowing that people are listening to my music, and sharing it with others * Feeling appreciated for the things that I’ve done, and anticipation (but not demand) for what’s coming next Having fatigue makes it difficult for me to do a lot of things, and I’m severely isolated. Having friends who are willing to come over and spend time with me, and help me with household chores (cleaning especially), without judgement, would help substantially. I also have so many projects that I’d like to be working on, and where having me be the sole person doing it would not be sustainable or successful. People who I can collaborate with, especially on software, would be great. At some point I’d particularly like to get back into making comics, but drawing physically hurts me to do anymore. Having someone I can work with to at least finish Lewi (and, ideally, Unity) would be amazing. But really, anything that tells me that what I’ve done has made an impact on them (especially positive impacts) would be amazing. Fanart and covers of my songs and such would be so incredibly precious to me. And, of course, learning something _I can actually do_ that would help me with my fatigue and chronic pain. Not palliative care (I can already smoke weed all day and wallow in oblivion), but like, something that would actually make a measurable positive impact on my health and ability and which I can actually access without going into bankruptcy. ### Things that are less helpful I’m not seeking financial support _per se_. I made plenty of money as a software engineer, and while my savings won’t last forever, I have enough to get by for a while. My reason for seeking disability is to gain access to helpful services that are gated by a disability determination (and where public funding drives the cost down). Having people show appreciation by buying my music and games and such would be _nice_ but it doesn’t do nearly as much for me as contributions in other ways (especially things that help things to keep going, like code contributions and help with word-of-mouth sharing and so on). Whenever I’m in a depression hole about how I’m not doing well and not able to do the things I’d like, the last thing I need is aphorisms about how okay it is that I’m not able to do things. That just makes me feel worse; at best it makes my works feel like they weren’t meaningful or worthwhile to begin with, or that the things that I’ve lost aren’t worth mourning. And being told what I can or should do in any sort of minimizing language? Remember that the word “just” can do some _heavy_ lifting. When I’m already barely treading water, burdening me with another hundred pounds is not helpful. ### Some talk about finances My overall cost of living is, at present, $4200/month. About 65% of that is housing expenses (mortgage, property taxes, insurance, utilities, etc.). Most of what remains is medical expenses (expensive medications, insurance, copays for medical appointments, and so on). At my current burn rate, I have enough savings to last quite a while, _but_ if I were to start paying out-of-pocket for the help I need, my savings would disappear pretty quickly, and they are only half-measures anyway. For example, cleaning services generally don’t do any of the hard parts, and around these parts would cost me another $1000/month for the amount of help I need. And while I can (and often do) outsource my travel to Lyft, that adds up _real_ fast, and anyway having a way to get places doesn’t help when I’m feeling too tired to even go anywhere to begin with. _Theoretically_ I could reduce my expenses significantly if I were to move somewhere cheaper and completely upend my life and lose what little social life I have already, but as I wrote about previously, a place that actually fits my access needs while also being affordable doesn’t seem to exist. I also recognize that I am in an incredibly privileged position. I don’t currently have to rely on anyone to financially support me, and I’m not at risk of losing my home. If I were in this same health situation but _didn’t_ have the good fortune I’ve experienced throughout my life, I’d be in a much more desperate position. So many of my friends _are_ in that much more desperate position, and it hurts me that I can’t help them out. I want this kind of support to exist for _everyone_. Everyone either needs help and support, or will someday. ### Some summarizing I think that at the core, my biggest issue is just the _social_ isolation. I hate that I’m experiencing life through a straw and watching it pass me by on a timeline, and that any attempt at fixing this only puts me in a worse state. I need my privacy and my own space but I also need connections with others. Some sort of cohousing situation would probably be great. Like, I’d love to be part of a village with a common creative space, and where people look out for each other and make sure they’re doing okay. And where there’s mutual support for getting places. Maybe I need to look into local cohousing groups; there’s a lot of promising-looking ones happening, although most of them seem to be either established (with no openings) or are in a “we need people to do the hard physical labor of building this thing that may or may not exist in a few years” phase. So at least in the interim, having more in-person social connections would be great, especially if it doesn’t involve me being the one to have to travel to make it happen, because that is very much off the table for me right now. (And getting help with cleaning and grocery shopping would be nice.)

I’ve had the same phone for the past five years, an iPhone 13 Pro which I bought for two reasons: * My previous phone’s (iPhone 12 Mini) battery was worn out and had become worn out super quickly * I wanted the LiDAR sensor for the work I was doing at the time Anyway, it still does everything I need in a phone (which isn’t all that much), but over the last several months the battery wasn’t lasting a full day on the rare days when I went out, which is of course when I most need the battery to last. New iPhones are stupid expensive, even decent low-end Android phones are stupid expensive (and would need me to switch out a lot of my infrastructure/ecosystem buy-in, costing even more), and so of course it’s not too expensive or difficult to replace the battery yourself. So I bought iFixIt’s battery replacement kit, and the other day I replaced the battery. The final step of replacement is to charge the phone to 100% and then allow it to discharge to 0% to finish calibrating things, and with the new battery, the dang thing lasted for over two days on a single charge. It’s also back up to its full performance, or at least it feels snappier (I didn’t think to take any benchmarks before and after, though). With any luck this phone will continue to last me for another five years. I’m so done being an enthusiast for phones. I also ended up finding my old iPhone 6S and giving it a charge, and if it weren’t for it no longer supporting the latest Apple ecosystem stuff (including my Apple Watch and my HomeKit setup), it’d still be a perfectly usable device even today. I used to buy a lot of cellphones to play with and swap between. They were generally pretty cheap and things were always evolving and fun and weird. Here’s some highlights from my phone journey: * My first cellphone was the same Nokia 3390 that everyone had in 2001. I bought it because it was cheaper to get a cellphone with a minimal plan on Voicestream (which would later be bought out by T-Mobile) than it was to get a second phone line, when the town I lived in at the time still hadn’t gotten any broadband service. * I bought the original Danger Hiptop which was the first mass-market smartphone. It had a lot of promise but had too many problems to continue on with, mostly due to service unreliability. For example, the way it handled its “always-on” connection was by always being “dialed in” to GPRS and wouldn’t allow incoming calls to interrupt that session. Also remember how original iPhone users ended up getting gigantic GPRS call logs? T-Mobile did it first! * I got the N-Gage QD, not to play games on but because it was an affordable Symbian phone. It was pretty good! Then it self-bricked on a daylight savings change and I ended up recycling it because I couldn’t figure out how to get it out of a bootloop. * Then I had a long series of Ericsson/Sony Ericsson phones. The R520m was pretty good. The T28 was even better, and I used that one for years, including as a GPRS/Bluetooth modem for getting online with my Tapwave Zodiac. The T610 was amazing although I ended up going back to the T28 for some reason. At this point I was using an iPod for music. This was normal. * Then I switched to a Palm Treo 600 which was a bit more convenient than my two-device setup, but still used the iPod for music. * And then when I worked at Sony, the W580i came out and it was incredible. Small phone that would sync all my calendars and contacts, had a pretty okay (for the time) mobile web browser, _and_ a pretty good music player! This was my daily driver for years, and I looked down on the iPhone with derision because the W580i could do pretty much everything the iPhone did, _and_ had user-installable apps and a fitness tracker and supported stereo Bluetooth headphones. Plus its T9 was actually faster and more accurate than the iPhone’s on-screen touch keyboard. * When Android came out I was definitely Team Android for a while, aside from a brief foray into the original iPhone, which I found to be clunky, annoying, and super unreliable (which was mostly AT&T’s fault, but that was the only carrier it worked on at the time). Notable phones that I tried included the HTC Magic, the Nexus One, the Galaxy Nexus, and a bunch of random crappy Android phones that were the included ones in the various cheap-ass phone plans when I was trying to minimize my telecom costs * For a while I tried going without a phone entirely, and used an iPod Touch, a mobile access point, and a shoddy Twilio setup. It was a frustrating mess and just got people making fun of me. But I thought it was a worthwhile experiment, but I ditched it when the iPhone 6 came out. * The iPhone 6 was okay, but I ended up upgrading to the 6s the next year because it wasn’t quite up to scratch even at the time. It didn’t help that I’d underestimated how much storage I’d need for both photos and music. * Since then I’ve stuck with iPhones; I’ve had the 8, XR, 12 mini, and 13 Pro. * I’ve also had a few Android phones as spare devices for mostly developer and app-access purposes. I have learned that I really do not like Android anymore. Anyway. Sometimes I get tempted by some of the ultra-lightweight/minimal “dumbphones” out there, like the Dumber Mini and Clicks Communicator and the like, but none of them actually do the handful of things I actually use my phone for, and my hot take is that the way to get a simpler mobile device without a lot of app-based distractions is to not install apps unless you really need them, and to disable immediate notifications wherever possible. It’s still not perfect but I also just don’t really find myself being hooked on my phone to begin with. Because for all the phones I’ve had, it’s always just been a passive device most of the time. Anyway. I plan on running this iPhone 13 Pro into the ground. It does everything I need, isn’t loaded with shitty AI, has a great camera and the least-bad mobile music player I’ve used, and even upgrading to a newer iPhone would mean having to replace a bunch of my accessories and it wouldn’t give me any more capabilities than what I already use. The only real limitation I have is that it’s only a 128GB model so I can’t load my whole music library onto it, but my ridiculously-complicated smart playlist setup takes care of that, and maybe someday I’ll have a better option anyway. I balked at spending $1000 on a phone in 2022, but I haven’t had to spend anything on new phones since then aside from the $50-or-so total to replace the battery, and $200/year (so far!) is the best dang value I’ve ever had in a good phone. I suppose it’s possible Apple will drop support for this phone in a few years, but even then it’ll probably be a while before it stops working with everything I need it to.

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