Les Orchard <me@lmorchard.com>

Content warning:mental health Update: we talked about social anxiety! 😅 Also, i have been prescribed an afternoon in a coffee shop next week. Rough stuff, this therapy

Content warning:mental health (i bet we're going to talk about social anxiety)

Content warning:mental health Love to get social anxiety before talking to my therapist

The thing where I order something from a place, and I get 20 marketing emails over the next 2 weeks, but not one email about a shipping update

I'm not even mad, although I did *just* put this fountain back together after their last visit to disassemble it. I should look into something more sturdy 🤔

Double raccoons at the garden pond, last night

Oh yeah, and if I cared to check, I'd bet at least a few of those ssh-accessible devices on my home network currently are orders of magnitude more capable than that old university server Anyway, just had a moment of future shock is all.

Like, part of me is continually baffled that my computing experience over the years went from "this is the single shared Unix computer for the university that students can telnet into" to "there are dozens of devices on your home network, each running some kind of Unix (probably Linux), most of which have ssh-accessible shells" 🤯

So, I'm reading about flashing this No Longer Evil firmware to my ancient Nest thermostat so I can hook it up to Home Assistant. Apparently, it disconnects the device entirely from Google's servers and points it at my own local gear. And then I see "enable SSH access to thermostat" and a part of me is like... well, that's not a sentence various past iterations of me ever expected to read https://docs.nolongerevil.com/self-hosted/installation#ssh-password-setup-advanced

"adults have families and mortgages and need steady employment. They did not want to sign up for a job they might not get to continue after 3 to 6 months" "if a sizable slice of the skilled-labor pool ends up “between gigs” at the same time, there may be no elsewhere for them to go" "try-before-you-buy is no longer an insult that you’d never dare float to a senior engineer. It’s a foot in the door that they’ll be glad to have." Translation: you're all fucked, so suck it up. fuck your mortgage

I think I'd be more favorable to "provisional employment" if we already had universal healthcare, universal basic income, and employers who didn't feel free to discard workers by the thousands on a spreadsheet whim. But it's pretty shitty to conclude that since everyone's laid off now, this is a great time to make everyone a temporary gig worker to smooth out the interview process. https://yegge.ai/essays/the-last-technical-interview/