Yeah I had convinced myself that I would only do it for a year and be able to retire much much sooner.

I once applied for a “database admin” job at one of the big credit card companies. The job description was basically “run all our Oracle databases” and the salary was in the mid 2 millions USD, but I assumed that figure was typo’ed or something ( an extra 0 maybe?)

In the interview I learned that there was no typo and it was to be one of the seven people on the planet that run the databases for this credit card processor. They said “if the database goes down then we are losing billions of dollars a minute”.

Anyways I didn’t get the job, but they’re not all underpaid.

Makes me think of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dentition#Dental_formula

Teeth can tell you a lot about an animal. Their size, shape, number etc can tell you what it eats or how it eats or how much it eats. Dental formula can give you clues for how animals are related to each other. If two different animals have the same dental formula then maybe they share a common ancestor or have a similar diet. If two animals are already very similar but have different dental formula then maybe they’re only very distantly related or there’s been some convergent evolution elsewhere.

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is my favorite movie. It’s got great characters, including three played by the same actor, is well written with some very quotable lines, and the story is both absurd and believable (even now).

I’ll be the first to admit that it’s not for everybody, but if you’re asking for movies to watch it’s probably for you. With movies I always recommend going in knowing nothing.

I could quote the whole thing probably, but I’ll spare you and just say that the way the Russian ambassador says “fresh fish” is weirdly seared into my brain.

Seedless grapes already exist, but I suppose you could now insert the gene into other plants/varieties to make those seedless as well.

I’m thinking more about how big ag companies could use this to prevent farmers from saving seeds/propagating a copyrighted variety (though I don’t know if that’s common with any crops where the seed itself isn’t the end product) or maybe more charitably, preventing their copyrighted plants from cross pollinating neighboring fields of the same species (e.g. ruining that neighbor’s non-gmo status).

Finally, this could be useful if it can be “switched on” i.e. by deliberately polluting an invasive plant’s gene pool with this gene and then switching it on to stall the invasive’s population growth. But I think most invasives are perennials, so would still need to be removed some other way.

A German once sent a dozen giant rabbits to North Korea in order to kick start a giant rabbit breeding program there. The intent was to help them overcome a famine, but instead the rabbits were all eaten at Kim il Sung’s birthday party.

I’ve never heard of k8s described as a modern implementation of a Linux distro. What makes you say that?

Do you have the questions right now? If so, ask away.

X11 because it’s what I already have installed.

When I have/want to make a change then I’ll go with Wayland :)

I at least had the cathartic experience of being told “hey we need to shut down EVERYTHING before 7pm because that’s when the email will turn off, so log into every service you know we use and delete it all.” And then I spent the next couple hours clicking every delete button I could.

K8s clusters? Delete. Prod DB? Delete. Prod DB backups? Delete. S3 buckets? Delete. Cloudflare account? Delete.

It was actually kinda fun.

Randomly got a message from one of my reports asking what this “Mandatory Team Meeting” was on his calendar. I hadn’t been invited, but it was our whole company shutting down ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

What’s wrong with ls?

I used to fill out metadata like it was a hobby. Albums were in organized folders “artist/album/disc no. - track no. . track title.mp3”. Some had release year and composer metadata lol

What do you have? Almost all computers can run docker.