To be clear:

• If I link or otherwise attribute a source for a statistical figure, that’s the source that I’m using.

• If I blather off an estimate like 87% of all statistics are made up on the spot, that is almost certainly hyperbole.

• If I show my work on making an estimate, I am reasonably confident that my logic is consistent and my sources are not absolutely ridiculous. But it’s an estimate, and you should confirm it independently before relying on it in any serious decision-making.

As a manager, you can tell if an engineer is happy with their work if they are comfortable with giving higher-ups constructive feedback about issues at hand directly. As an engineer, you can tell if a manager is actively working for you if you see at least some action performed as a response to your feedback. When both things happen, management might see an increase in reported problems during development, but they’ll also see an increase in resolutions, instead of seeing fewer but critical issues that go unresolved.

Useful tip (for me): any time ZFS emits internal error: Invalid argument, what it probably means is that the DKMS module and the userland utilities are different versions.

sudo modinfo zfs|head will tell you what version your kernel is using; apt show -a zfsutils-linux will tell you what versions of the user commands are available. Look for a mismatch.

I had the most satisfying Eureka experience of my career while attempting to teach flight instructors that praise is more effective than punishment for promoting skill-learning. When I had finished my enthusiastic speech, one of the most seasoned instructors in the audience raised his hand and made his own short speech, which began by conceding that positive reinforcement might be good for the birds, but went on to deny that it was optimal for flight cadets. He said, “On many occasions I have praised flight cadets for clean execution of some aerobatic maneuver, and in general when they try it …

The price for using a math library developed by Foobar Corporation is $10,000 plus 1% of the sale price of your product, or whatever you negotiate with them.

The price for using a GPL’d math library is that you must license your source code under the GPL as well.

The price for using an LGPL’d math library is distributing the source for the library along with your product. If you modify the library itself, then that falls back to the GPL.

This is the end of my second year as a Google Fi subscriber.

TL;DR: I’m keeping this service and I recommend it for people who are happy with the limited phone selection.

Many people like to claim “my time is worth the $/hour I could have earned”. It’s usually bull.

If you are paid hourly, it is 95% likely that your hours are set by your employer, not you. You can’t spend a random extra hour working to get another $X. If you work on a project basis, you’re going to end up working for all the hours that the project takes, regardless of whether that happens now or next week. And if you’re an independent professional/contractor, like a therapist or a plumber, your limits are the …

• Melissa Olson, Nightshades
• Harry Connolly, The Twisted Path
• Ryk Spoor, Princess Holy Aura
• Faith Hunter, Flame in the Dark
• Mira Grant, Into The Drowning Deep
• Brandon Sanderson, Oathbound
• Jim Hines, Terminal Alliance
• James Allan Gardner, All Those Explosions Were Someone Else’s Fault
• Sebastian de Castell, Spellslinger

I liked all these books recently.

Nightshades is the beginning of a new series: FBI vs vampires. It’s well-written, has a tight plot, and is short. Gore, not sparkles.

The Twisted Path is the rebirth of Connolly’s excellent Twenty Palaces universe — it was discontinued by the publisher after the initial three …

Your company probably needs a librarian. Maybe more than one.

A modern librarian selects, installs, configures and administrates knowledge management software. They are experts in organizational methods and search techniques.

A librarian may take in paper documents and convert them to electronic formats. Everything gets stored, indexed, and made searchable and retrievable. Wikis are re-organized, old information marked for review and status updated: is it still correct? reliable? useful?

You have email that concerns a whole team, contracts with history, agreements with revisions. Librarians control the automation that keeps track of that for you. You have customer contact databases — a …

It’s not enough that Net Neutrality be enforced. That’s just a basic requirement to keep corporations from completely exploiting their customers.

What would a good long-term solution look like?

We can look at history. In 1982, the eight-year antitrust suit against AT&T was ended by the breakup of AT&T into multiple entities, seven of which had a regional infrastructure and one of which held on to long-distance, research, and computer hardware and services. In addition, the de facto monopoly was broken by requiring transport service to be available at a wholesale rate to any qualified party …

If you have a Mac and DNS resolution seems really, really slow — like, five seconds or more per lookup — check to see if you have an IPv6 address. You probably do.

Then check to see if you have an IPv6 DNS server listed. I bet you don’t, or it’s wrong.

Solution: add an IPv6 DNS server to your list.

• Google DNS IPv6: 2001:4860:4860::8888 and 8844

• OpenDNS IPv6: 2620:0:ccc::2 and ccd::2

I was a customer of RCN for seven years. The service was fine, in the really boring way that you want commodity services to be. There were occasional glitches, and a few months where the internet service was particularly bad due to our house being at the end of a cable run.

The price slowly creeped up.

Last week, the bill read over $180. Clearly time for a change.

I called up RCN before work, and the helpful customer service rep worked for about 20 minutes to eventually offer me a change of phone service that would knock $10 off …

For any given technology, there will exist at least one point in time in which people are simultaneously not trusting it for being too new and unproven, and other people are depending on it in production.

– me

Every decision involves a cost/benefit analysis. Sometimes they are formal; often they are drastically informally. Either way, people inevitable leave out costs and benefits that they are not aware of, have forgotten, or are otherwise invisible.