I work in a large corporate environment where AI is being heavily (and blindly) pushed onto the masses. Most management above me is non-technical. The leaders that should be technical range from “Haven’t touched code in a decade” to “My greatest achievement is my friend is a VP.”

When I present management with a technical proposal, or escalate a technical problem, they don’t understand it, so they put it through AI. Knowing this, I put all my communications through AI, because if AI agrees with me, so will they.

But AI always gives me “the core argument looks good, but here’s what can be tightened” every time. I could accept every suggestion verbatim, and each iteration run it back through the same AI, and still it comes back with more suggested changes. So it becomes this optimization heuristic where I’m running my communication through different AIs to achieve the least level of disagreement. The error margin never reaches …

About 8 months ago, I made this post about my worries in getting a promotion above senior at a large non-tech company.

I got some great advice, and I thought there might be value in talking about my experience in the 8-ish months since then, and maybe extend an invite to the other senior+ folks here to talk about how 2026 is going for them.

A lot has changed since I wrote that post. I’ll try to keep it more focused than just stream of consciousness.

A little bit of background about me to ground this post:

• I work in ML - I have a background in CS (two degrees) and became an MLE just long enough before LLMs hit the scene to really appreciate what we had after being an SDE for about a year.
• I am squarely on the edge between early and mid-career. I will have 5 total YOE in January.

The Technical

• Starting with what I think is an ice cold take: I am sick of doing AI work. I enjoy MLOPs and the intersection data science and software engineering. AI, mostly, is not that. There …

I have always heard about companies with great engineering culture, like earlier Google, or Sun. But I never experienced any in my 8+ years of tenure, anywhere. None of the people I know about experienced any, either – but I’m not a people person, so my sample size is not significant.

I’m beginning to think that it is just a myth nowadays, given the rampant of AI usage and the request of “velocity”. Only one team that I worked in had some culture that is remotely comfortable for me to recognize it as some sort of engineering culture (Thank you James in NC!), but the air is still pretty thin because the company was in chaos, and is still in chaos AFAIK.

By saying engineering culture I mostly mean:

1. Encouraging learning deeply in a topic.
2. Put quality ahead of velocity, and really meant it, not just a lip service. (Just to clarify, shipping is very important. I find it difficult to define this point so maybe ignore this one)
3. Great mentorship opportunity …

Hey all, just wanted to get your insight on this situation.

I’m a frontend developer working with React. Recently, we got a new backend developer. I had been working with our oldest backend developer, who is great to work with, but I was recently assigned to a new project where I have to work with this new developer.

She’s been with the company for about three months now, and the thing is, she doesn’t seem to know what she’s doing.

A week ago, she was taking way too long on a simple request, and she told me, “Hehe, AI isn’t able to solve this. Give me more time.” That was the first red flag for me because it was a really simple task.

A couple of days later, the same thing happened. She was taking hours on a small change, so I ended up giving her an AI prompt explaining what needed to be done. She came back five minutes later and told me she had fixed it.

The problem now is that she’s constantly coming to my office asking me if I can give her the AI prompt for whatever change I’m …

I’ve struggling at work for a year or so due to burnout and managing 2 surgeries for my medical transition. My manager told me that I have been bottom 20% of senior engineers and told me to improve.

I work at Bloomberg, C++ backend that deals with high throughput data. I have been working for 6 years. I would say that technically I am around mid level engineer.

At first, I didn’t worry too much since I thought Bloomberg and 6 yrs of experience would allow me to get a job quickly but from people here, even FAANG folks seem to have hard time getting a job.

If I get fired, how screwed am I? I am also thinking of taking sabbetical since doing 3 surgeries in a year is taking a mental toll on me.

just kidding I love self-hosting …

DKIM, DMARC, SPF, rDNS/PTR, EHLO… all correct and verified in the email “original source,” BY GOOGLE. Still goes to SPAM folder because **** you, apparently. I hate Google.

EDIT - RE: Title, for the grammar gang - No, Google will not SPAM you, as in “send you SPAM.” But I think everyone else got the idea……. so….

A while ago I saw some posts in r/homeassistant about e-ink displays used as dashboards and wanted to try the same but for my homelab. So I bought a waveshare e-ink panel and bricked it pretty quickly and didn’t want to order another one. But I still had an old Kindle lying around which I hadn’t used in years, so I tried it again with that one and this time it worked.

It shows me if something is down (Uptime Kuma), how full my media pool is, the Proxmox uptime and the weather. During the day it swaps between the dashboard and a random photo from an Immich album every 5 minutes and between 22:00 and 07:00 it only shows photos, because I don’t need monitoring at night.

The Kindle itself doesn’t render anything. A service on my server collects the data, draws a 600x800 grayscale PNG and serves it at /dash.png and the Kindle just runs a loop which downloads that image every 5 minutes and puts it on the screen. So it is really only used as a display.

The …

I just started my self-hosting journey in April after I got tired of my Xfinity modem. I ran what feels like miles of Cat 6, built a rack, bought the PCs and domain, etc etc and now I feel super accomplished. I knew practically nothing about all this back in March.

Possibly the most fun I’ve had is building this simple little homepage dashboard to give everything a face. I stole lots of inspiration from everyone here. It now serves as a true homepage with all the frequent sites and services I ever view. Just felt like sharing.

Truly appreciate everybody on r/selfhosted and r/homelab.

bookmarks.yaml: https://pastebin.com/4wwHRvSc

services.yaml: https://pastebin.com/MkeNjARK

settings.yaml: https://pastebin.com/uzXBM0Xz

I work at a big tech company as a SE, and I’m just saying that if I saw a CV that included a serious self hosted setup I would rate it highly.

Self hosting is a microcosm of sorts of many important problems SEs have to deal with.

Managing deployments, reliability/monitoring, secrets, version control, docker, security etc. is all boring (imo) ops stuff that real SE teams spend a lot of their time doing. If you’ve created a great setup that automates this stuff or makes it run smoothly, that is very good signal.
Eg I built a tool called nethera to give me a heroku like experience for my homelab deployments
https://github.com/Nethera-io/nethera

“Lifetime” Accounts converted to Lite Tier

Now converted to Limited Account.

So I’ve tried:

NinjaCentral

altHUB

NZBGeek

Usenet Crawler

Drunken Slug

So far from this I’ve concluded slug is the best by far. So I’d like to get others opions on what indexers are good for this. Also is it worth picking up Planet or Tabula Rasa since they seem to have a good amount? Im also open to any recommendations of ones I haven’t listed.

https://sabnzbd.org/downloads

Critical authentication vulnerability resolved in 5.1.1 (GHSA-xrfq-jhgh-wqch)

You are only affected if an untrusted party can reach the web interface. By default, SABnzbd is only accessible from your own device and External internet access is set to No access. If either of those is still at its default, or if you use a proxy service for authentication, you are not affected.

If the SABnzbd login page is reachable from outside your network, an attacker could obtain a valid session in version 5.1.0 and earlier, even when SABnzbd is protected with a username and password. This means that all information in SABnzbd would be exposed.

If you rely on the SABnzbd username and password to keep out other users on your network or the internet, it is recommended that you change the following sensitive information after applying the update:

• SABnzbd username and password.
• SABnzbd API-key.
• Usenet server passwords.
• API-keys from indexers used within RSS-feeds. …

I’ve been using it for years and it’s worked great, but the last couple of weeks I’ve been getting enough failures that some of my stuff just can’t be downloaded…

Which indexers are still missing 2FA support? Let’s put together a list and encourage them to add it as soon as possible, especially with everything getting pwnd left and right these days. I’d hate to lose a lifetime account.

List of indexers lacking 2FA support:

• Althub
• Drunken Slug
• Ninja Central
• Usenet Crawler

I noticed some recently added it and even coupled it with passkey support (👍), which made me go through my list of indexers again. I’ll try and add any missing indexers to the list above.

Edit: Adding a list for providers lacking 2FA (…some of these seem to be storing passwords in clear-text also, when you do a password reset they’ll send you your password in clear-text, instead of a reset URL 😲).

• Bulknews
• Eweka
• Easynews
• Newsdemon
• NewsgroupDirect
• Newshosting 

Should make some people happy, my wife included if true.

I was trying the new beta and tried to play some av1 movies just to try the transcoding and imagine my face when it started playing in direct play while supporting hdr.

I tried several movies and everything played fine in direct play.

Full post here: https://forums.plex.tv/t/navigation-updates-coming-to-preview-users/941751

Navigation

Since we launched the new Plex experience to preview users last year, we have received consistent feedback from the start regarding the navigation. Our fall update was the first step in making improvements to address those concerns, but they weren’t enough. We greatly appreciate that many of you, all across our community, have weighed in and kept providing feedback. We’ve been listening and today the release has some changes that are both new and familiar.

What’s New

Today’s release, going out to preview users on Apple TV and Roku, and beta for Android TV, will be returning the primary navigation to the lefthand side of the screen.

In additional to the collapsible side navigation panel, we’ve made a few other improvements:

• Favorite libraries are now a top level source
• Live TV & DVR sources can be favorited and re-ordered like Libraries
• Easily switch between pages within a …

Hey community. I need some help. On my Samsung TV I am getting the play back error. Was working yesterday. I set allow insecure connections, I deleted and reinstalled the app, and I installed the update for the new server. Im at my wits end.

Thanks!