I honestly didn’t expect AI to blur the line between actual competence and just looking competent this much.

Few days ago I got a PR to review and the code looks like it was put through every AI tool under the sun from start to finish. There’s literally no way the guy who submitted it wrote it himself, or even pieced it together from smaller parts. The task requires a pretty deep understanding of the hardware and the codebase, and I know his work because I’ve reviewed his PRs plenty of times before.

You can also kind of see it in the code. One part is written in a very polished and profesional way, and then a small debugging section uses an incredibly naive solution. The kind of thing I’ve never seen an experienced dev do, but absolutely have seen from juniors writing basic stuff for the first time.

So what am I even supposed to do here??

To make things worse… AI tools are completely banned in this particular repo because of IP concerns…

I could ask him if he used …

Principal eng at a large company, just went through calibration. Watched something happen that’s been bugging me enough to write it up.

For context on the scale of this: this is basically a month-long exercise. A week to write your own self-assessment, then more time writing feedback for peers, then your manager writes a narrative for each report factoring all of that in, and then every single person gets discussed for real time (not a rubber stamp) in calibration sessions with other managers and senior engineers comparing people across teams, taking anywhere from an hour to multiple hour for each candidate across the calibrations. It’s a genuinely enormous amount of org-wide effort. Which is exactly why it bugs me that the thing all that effort converges on can be this backwards.

Short version: two teams hit the same landmine on a cross-team project, a critical dependency that got left out of the plan. One team caught it before shipping and flagged it. The other team …

13YoE, FE DEV in EU.

I have a teamlead-manager who’s widely known across the whole company to be very toxic. For 2.5 years everything was going really well. I had always been receiving either “Meets expectations” or “Exceeds expectations”.

Suddenly one Sunday morning at 1:15 AM I receive a slack message with a RTO5 mandate just for me. Since then I go to the office or coffee badge every day. There’s almost no one at the office on most days - it’s like a ghost town. Also, my boss has never even set foot in the office and says he will never do it.

I asked him multiple times why only I was returned and he said “to get experience from other devs”. When I told him there’s no one at the office and insisted to know more, he responded “You are 30% higher paid than other workers on your position” and then cut my yearly bonus and annual raise since. My BE colleagues are 20%+ higher paid then me though.

One time I …

Came across a conversation yesterday where the CTO asked one of our engineers why they didn’t ask Claude to create their plan and mock the several hundred commits they’d need to deliver on something I will not name while also delivering on their existing initiatives

I didn’t say anything, but wanted to… Given the industry I’m in, this seems very ridiculous to me and I hate that this is the expectation… As though somehow that work should have already been done and could have been delivered on the whim of an idea by handing all work to Claude

I’ve been in this industry for 25 years now, and I want to confirm a suspicion of mine.

I’ve been employed pretty much continuously since I graduated college, other than 2 weeks after a layoff at a failed startup and then starting a new job. I’ve done well in all of my jobs, climbing the ranks with promotions and contributing more and more over time. Sure I’ve had some dust-ups with leadership, but nothing that really seemed to hinder my career.

Two of the companies I worked at I did so for over 10 years each. In all of those companies, there was talk of “if you cross (insert threshold here) you can take a paid sabbatical”. In both companies, I saw people take these sabbaticals.

However each time I would ask about them and the rules regarding them, I always got a “ooooh, sorry” and some excuse. Sometimes “we can’t do it right now, it’s a critical time for the business” or “you’re juuuust below the …

I’m lowkey on stage 4

When we all know it was really Claude that built it.

Remember to always set version numbers in your docker containers, or an unexpected update will creep up on you.

Now can you guess which popular service got a breaking change?

This is your reminder to check on your backups, setup backups and test your backups. 🙌

I’m currently using Duplicati with 2 local backup sites and hetzner/Google drive for remote. What are you using?

The back cover of my phone detached. Is it safe to use it in this condition? I plan to use this phone as a Minecraft server.

• 1TB Prime + 1TB XSNews | $20
• 2TB Prime + 2TB XSNews | $35
• Prime is a reseller of UsenetExpress
• XSNews is with Abavia
• US/EU Server Locations
• 50 connections

Back to School - Combo Block Party (click here)

Just a few combo block deals to hopefully help out as classes resume here soon!! Thanks for all the support. Welcome emails, etc have been corrected. Please PM me if you have any issues. Also, these blocks do NOT expire and can be stacked with previous purchases.

Hi everyone,

I’m relatively new to Usenet and would appreciate some advice about improving the reliability of my setup.

My current setup is:

• Indexer: NZBGeek & DrunkenSlug (just got)
• Provider: UsenetServer
• Downloader: SABnzbd
• Indexer manager: Prowlarr

Recently, SABnzbd has reported missing articles on several downloads. I’m trying to determine which upgrade would provide the biggest improvement:

• A second indexer
• A block account or second provider on a different backbone
• Both

Which indexer would complement NZBGeek well?

Also, which block account or provider would complement UsenetServer while providing access to a meaningfully different backbone? I would prefer a block account rather than paying for a second unlimited subscription unless the difference is substantial.

Thanks for any recommendations.

ATM Easynews is $2/mo but last BF Newshosting had a deal where you get Newshosting + Easynews + Tweaknews at $1.67/mo.

Is it worth waiting to get a deal similar to that again? Even though they are all on the same backbone? I am US based and this is my first entry to Usenet, I am waiting for Ninja to open up as well.

I guess the real question is whether getting Easynews on top of Newshosting is something worth waiting for.

I’m currently using NZBGeek with Sonarr and Radarr. It works well overall, but lately I’ve come across several things that I haven’t been able to find.

I’m therefore looking for a second indexer that genuinely complements NZBGeek, rather than mostly returning the same releases.

ities are:

• Good coverage
• Older or less popular releases
• Reliable integration with Sonarr, and Radarr

Which indexer is currently the best addition to NZBGeek? I’d also be interested to hear how much the available content differs between these indexers.

What combination are you using, and does paying for a second indexer noticeably improve your results?

Hey, I started using Newsgroups in about 2002 and have ever since, and my MO hasn’t really changed.

I have an Eweka account, I manually search Geek and Planet for what I want, and then download it with SAB.

Works for me and always has, but am I missing out on any new fantastic things?

Thanks.

Yep… that’s right, and probably explains a lot.

Source: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elanfeingold/

Kind of sad. I remember the beginnings of Plex and the first couple of years, when Elan was everywhere. He used to be the visionary, public face of the company.

Oh well… I guess venture capital and everything it entails killed his passion. Who knows.

Thought it was nice to see some Remux streams at 2am

If you use Plex on a Fire Stick and you still have the older app, do yourself a favour and turn off automatic app updates immediately.

The new Plex update is honestly brutal. I know some people may like the direction they’re going, but for my setup it completely wrecked the experience. The layout is worse, the usability is worse, and it feels like Plex took something that worked and decided to make it hostile to actually use.

I’m not posting this to debate every design choice. I’m posting it because if your Fire Stick updates automatically, you may not realize what happened until the app is already changed.

On Fire TV / Fire Stick, go to:

Settings → Applications → Appstore → Automatic Updates → Off

That should stop Amazon from automatically updating installed apps.

If you already got the update, you may be looking at sideloading an older APK, but that’s obviously more annoying than just preventing the update in the first place.

Maybe Plex fixes this. Maybe they don’t. But if you …

Is it just me?

It seems like every major update of Plex seems to make it worse.

More bloat, more stuff that nobody asked for and nobody wants, more clicks to do the same things, things get slower, things move to places nobody seems to like, even small graphical changes look worse and are less intuitive, hell even the main website now takes extra clicks to get your content because after sign in you still have to go to “open app” which is of course a small and petty complaint, but its just the same thing everywhere it seems..

The small, in the background updates are great! Nice QOL fixes and added file supports and little power user tweaks. All seem to be on point.

but whoever is in charge of UI, and marketing, is just THE WORST.

It seemed like they were on a good path for awhile there, adding new isolated apps for photos, plexamp, dashboard app, etc. Were amazing! Plexamp is still my most used app, and I’d love to use the photos app as my main photo source.

Then …

First, apologies.

I also hate seeing the same topic posted over and over.

However I think it’s important the volume of unhappy users is clear. This update, that UI… What the hell.

I won’t go in to details, it’s covered everywhere.

Fire stick user.

It’s horrible, slow, very unintuitive.

I honestly can’t keep telling people to use Plex over alternatives anymore…

Please think about reversing this.