I once worked at an employer who performed five rounds of layoffs in the space of a few months. I cannot recommend that method.

I agree with you, the 900-wide bandaid was the only practical option.

If want to use a version of postgres other than 10.x, you can either use a different version of Ubuntu or install a custom PPA.

Apt's target audience is systems administrators. Homebrew's target audience is independent developers who might need to have four different versions of Postgresql installed simultaneously on their laptop, because they maintain Rails/Django/Node apps for four different clients who are each unwilling to upgrade for whatever reason.

IMO homebrew is "messy" because it is trying to solve a harder problem. If there is such a thing as an average enterprise software developer, I would argue that homebrew is trying to solve problems that the enterprise developer does not have.

Containerized Postgres is a real win, but running OpenLDAP (+ custom schema) as a containerized application has measurably improved my quality of life. Kudos and great gratitude to the people behind https://github.com/osixia/docker-openldap

Hypothetically I have two machines that I want to build out and give to developers. One machine arrives on Monday. My script runs "brew install postgresql" (no version), because of when I ran that script postgresql@10 gets installed. Tests pass, I hand that machine off to a new developer. The second machine arrives on Wednesday. I run the same script, but because v11 of postgres was added to homebrew on Tuesday, the second machine receives postgresql@11 even though the first machine received @10. Same script, two days apart, different major version of postgresql.

Yes, I can write my scripts carefully to avoid this. But consider this scenario: a new developer encounters a problem, tries to solve it themselves, finds a seemingly helpful blog, and ends up with postgresql@13 and node@15 when everyone else in their team is using postgresql@11 and node@12. Now tests are failing, but only for this one developer and only locally...

I learned quite a bit about ruby memory mgmt from the above. Free text, pay for video tutorials IIRC. The course was authored by Nate Berkopec.

https://www.youtube.com/user/nateberkopec

I also found "the well grounded rubyist" to be very helpful.

https://www.manning.com/books/the-well-grounded-rubyist-thir...

The other guy nodded in agreement and replied, "that's the point."

A .psd file was, for a good chunk of the past twenty years, the "de facto standard" file format for teams or entire departments of graphic artists who spent all day, every day in Photoshop. I once worked for an online ad agency and Photoshop was used more often, by more people, than MS Word and Excel combined. The Network Effect was in full force. Graphics teams at three different companies cooperating on the same campaign would assume that their counterparts were using Photoshop, and would expect to send and receive .psd files. Man, Adobe must have been printing money in those days.

If you worked in print publishing, digital publishing, advertising, marketing, there was probably a graphics department of people who spent all day in Photoshop... and an IT department that was constantly trying to add new server capacity as fast as those artists were consuming it. Back when we measured server storage in GB, not TB, fifteen different versions of the same massive PSD file could cause real heartburn.

The author asserts that GW Bush is smarter than [the typical reader]. Howard Gardner describes nine different types of intelligence. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligenc... ) Is GW Bush smarter than me in every metric? I am skeptical. Is he smarter in only some out of nine categories? If so, the the statement "is smarter than you" is missing a dependent clause.

The article relies on anecdotal evidence from biased sources. People who were invited into the administration based on loyalty and ideology all think that GW Bush is super smart? That is both unsurprising and unconvincing.

The author slams the cultural biases of the coastal elites, while indulging in his own.

"He is an intense, competitive athlete and a “guy’s guy.” His hobbies and habits reinforce a caricature of a dumb jock, in contrast to cultural sophisticates who enjoy antiquing and opera. This reinforces the other biases against him."

Bush 41 was an athlete. GW was a cheerleader. I understand that the whole point of this essay is to rewrite history but know your limits, man.

I readily concede that a group comprised entirely of smart individuals can make bad plans, or execute a good plan so badly that the outcome is the opposite of what they intended. If your best intentions regularly have calamitous results, does that matter when judging your intelligence? I would argue that it does. If you declare Iraq, Iran, and North Korea to be existential threats; let North Korea get The Bomb; dramatically strengthen the regional influence of Iran; and turn Iraq into a hellscape whose only export is terrorism, does your alleged intellectual superiority provide any solace?

The author mentions an anti-Texas bias. Having spent decades in close proximity to Texans, I would like to make an observation. There are Texans, and there are Texan Secessionists. I have found the former group to be open, generous, hospitable people more often than not, and frequent contributors to art and culture. The latter group never miss an opportunity to remind you, "Texas can secede if we want. It's in our constitution. We were a Republic before we were a state."

Want to understand the term "Ugly American?" Spend a couple of years listening to Texans act like they're doing you a favor by not seceding.

If moderation is done by humans, you could simply prove that one moderator had a worse morning than the other, or that through luck of the draw Group A went to a sympathetic moderator while group B did not. That could demonstrate individual bias, but not institutional.

If moderation is automated, how do you control for the weight of keywords, phrases, etc? Maybe Group A was full of statements that almost threw a flag but not quite, while Group B contained mostly innocuous wording but (only) one phrase that actually got flagged.

If both groups were designed to be unpleasant, but various "blacklist" words and phrases are weighted differently, Group A might have achieved "flagged" weight while group Group B was "flagged -1." One might have scored 99 pts vs 100 for the other, but the visible difference is that one remains visible while the other does not.

Thinking out loud, now... let's say that Facebook does have a political bias. How do you prove that Facebook's financial success is despite that political bias, and not because of it?

Is it possible to have a monopoly on digital socialization? If you can't declare Facebook a monopoly, and therefore subject to greater regulation, then your only lever over Facebook is social pressure, presumably in the form of bad press and boycotts, which will reduce their advertising revenue. How do you prove that the existing political bias is leading them to sub-optimal revenues?

I find it rare for people to take an opportunity with a company they don't feel good about, regardless of how much they might like the interviewing manager. IMO those who do accept such an offer are just resume surfing, and weren't going to stick around regardless.

Seeing a few months of data really helped me think differently about my diet. My mother programmed all her children to be "comfort eaters," and when I saw that the bulk of my too many calories were coming from "comfort foods," it helped me tackle the situations and stress responses that triggered non-nutritional eating.

I am not suggesting that MyFitnessPal is the only tool/process/technique that could lead one to these revelations. It is the tool that led me to those revelations, so I am a happy customer. (Also not affiliated.)

Yes, the sysadmin was clearly at fault. No, this is not a deal breaker, as seen by the longevity of Sendmail. But a config file that gets pushed through a preprocessor has a more complicated life cycle than a "static" equivalent.

If your organization has comprehensively embraced ansible/chef/puppet/etc this may be a non-issue, because all of your configs might be generated. Just food for thought.

I hesitate to comment about the relative velocities of open source vs proprietary software because I do not have enough experience with commercial, third party software. My sample size is too small, but I'm inclined to agree with you.

I don't disagree with your Machiavellian conspiracy, either, but I've worked in marketing and advertising so I know that some of the villains are on the payroll. Maybe there needs to be a third category? There's open source software, written by someone who has no particular relationship to you. There's commercial software, written by someone who has a positive economic relationship with you. And then there is ... corporate?... software, written by someone who might think they have a zero sum relationship with you.