Every SWE says: “Standups aren’t status reports, they’re for unblocking”. And that’s true in theory, that’s the textbook. The whole idea in agile is a quick daily sync where people share progress, surface blockers, and get help before issues snowball. It’s supposed to be lightweight, team-driven, and focused on collaboration rather than accountability to a manager.

But in the 9 companies I’ve worked at, standups have always been status reports. Every single one of them. People go around the room listing what they did yesterday and what they’ll do today, often phrased more to sound productive than to actually solve problems. Managers (and people who don’t contribute to the standup) are always present. Rarely does anyone bring up a blocker, and when they do, it usually gets handled later in chat or a side conversation. The ritual ends up feeling more about reporting up than working together.

So I wonder: has anyone here …

Team lead with 10+ YOE here, been working for a small startup for the last 18 months or so. I lead a team of 3 other engineers, plus 4 contractors we picked up while we’re interviewing other potential candidates.

Last week, it dawned on me just how much AI is impacting our standards of quality as engineers. I’m starting to see a drastic decline in critical thinking skills all over the place - it’s like folks no longer care to challenge themselves. Instead of using AI to help them understand a problem and get to a solution, they’re letting the tool do their thinking for them. And it’s completely obvious.

Here’s an example: the other day I was interviewing a potential candidate who looked very promising on paper. Ex-FAANG employee, strong background in python/java, plus some tangential experience to our industry. Our tech stack is mostly node/typescript, so to show his technical prowess in an unfamiliar stack, he demo’d an app he made for a client using a React frontend and express for …

I’ve been at my present company (US based, non-tech industry with a large tech component) for nearly 6 years now and I noticed a trend that seems to have been getting worse in the last year.

Originally we would have people with different specializations: front-end developers, back-end developers, database engineers, dev ops engineers, prod support, ect. You get the idea. Across the company, we would either have them in separate teams or across a team, depending on the project needs. For example, we had a dedicated team of dev ops engineers that teams could rely on to set up deployment pipelines.

Now all of those roles are now a single title and the developer is expected to do all of them. A developer who previously would work on UI projects is now expected to also spend time doing production support, setting up pipelines and new environments, creating database tables, ect. The teams of dedicated dev ops engineers are gone, the dba’s are gone, the dedicated teams for tech support are …

I see a lot of suggestions that Amazon folks pick up toxic habits. I get a lot of apps from FAANG folks, but given all the Amazon negativity I second guess Amazon employees, particularly for management roles. I’ve also never encountered a happy Amazon person.

Anyone have anecdotes on concrete examples of toxic traits I should look out for? I don’t want to avoid all Amazon folks, I’m sure some percentage are good.

edit: Thanks everyone, got some great thoughts and anecdotes, and also ruffled some feathers of people who seem to have taken this question personally. Really appreciate the input.

As in, rather than devs estimating, management asks AI how hard things should be and sets deadlines accordingly. If you take “too long”, you get blamed.

Hey folks 👋

I built a simple tool: compress.lol You can also see the source here: https://github.com/anhostfr/compress.lol

It lets you compress videos directly in your browser — no installs, no uploads. Everything runs locally using ffmpeg.wasm.

Some benefits:

🔒 Privacy: your video never leaves your computer

⚡ Convenience: works in-browser

🎥 Practical: reduces file size so sharing is easier

It’s quite minimal right now, but functional. I’d appreciate any feedback or thoughts for improvements!

Thanks /u/LeftBus3319 + /u/FnnKnn

1. Reset your Plex account password immediately, making sure to check “Sign out connected devices after password change”

2. To reclaim your server you can use SSH Tunneling to get access to your server’s localhost:32400 on your personal host with ssh -L 32400:localhost:32400 serverUser@serverHost - link

Announcement page: https://links.plex.tv/s/vb/Vn7XtnwDSSaqqDUYoHu1P57ZgZ1FsHgTO2PTIBl6jEOUiHBH3LGmI3nLdDfopQa54PatUwZQhT0Bz8rKAi–jTM4ATdsBHpe4c1Yljr89VkoCOavEGH5wn5Fi_filLNeOMo-lnNqLSLpJpI/lOe98S8UWKdmPnp9StQz9R1-kOSTpWhr/12

Announcement screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/0PMRvVY.png

Dear Plex User,

We have recently experienced a security incident that may potentially involve your Plex account information. We believe the actual impact of this incident is limited; however, action is required from you to ensure your account remains secure.

What happened

An unauthorized third party accessed a limited subset of customer data from …

Yesterday I used my weekend to set up local, self-hosted AI. I started out by installing Ollama on my Fedora (KDE Plasma DE) workstation with a Ryzen 7 5800X CPU, Radeon 6700XT GPU, and 32GB of RAM.

Initially, I had to add the following to the systemd ollama.service file to get GPU compute working properly:

[Service]
Environment="HSA_OVERRIDE_GFX_VERSION=10.3.0"

Once I got that solved I was able to run the Deepseek-r1:latest model with 8-billion parameters with a pretty high level of performance. I was honestly quite surprised!

Next, I spun up an instance of Open WebUI in a podman container, and setup was very minimal. It even automatically found the local models running with Ollama.

Finally, the open-source Android app, Conduit gives me access from my smartphone.

As long as my workstation is powered on I can use my self-hosted AI from anywhere. Unfortunately, my NAS server doesn’t have a GPU, so running it there is not an option for me. I think the privacy …

I’m trying to set up a VM.Standard.A1.FlexAlways Free-eligible shape which i believe these are the right setting for but the montly estimate isn’t 0. is this correct or have i done something wrong?

*Update*
It works fine and is free. as some recommended/mentioned, you can’t get any capacity from teh free version.
I upgraded to PAYG which took $100 from my account then got immediately refunded. it also took an hour or so for my account to be upgraded adn everything worked fine. no charge (freecredit is given so i had that if there was any issue with charges).

I have it to run palword which ARM processor for this specific shape is not compatible with so It took a while to get it to work using FEX, steamcmd then forcedownloading and runnig using linux.

No issues so far

Notesnook is a great notes app that rivals the stock Google and iOS note taking apps.

Both the app and the sync server are open source and can be self hosted.

I created a repo with a basic config to self host the web app and sync server using traefik as a reverse proxy.

https://github.com/beardedtek/notesnook-docker

Proivders Indexers Someting else

UzantoReto.com has been moved to another server and is up and running again.

Apologies for the unannounced downtime.

--
^(Edit: See the comments for extra info.)

I finally switched from google groups to direct usenet access when google finally shut groups down and I started to use Thunderbird.

So for the last few years I have been using paganini,bofh.team.

SUDDENLY I get an nntp error message; NO VALID NEWSGROUPS IN PAGANINI.BOFH.TEAM when I try to post/followup

DOES anybody know what has suddenly changed please?

Hey All

I had a strange request to download a file for someone off Usenet this morning, I guess they got my name from here?

Anyways - It was some files from 2016, some kind of Medical Software - Three in total, one rar and two exe’s.

They wanted me to download them, then upload them to some cloud for them to download.

Said they didn’t have a Usenet account to do it themselves, they sent links from NZBKing, so they obviously had some knowledge about it all.

I ignored the request as it sent up a red flag immediately, but - Can’t work out what the end game would be for it?

Anyone come across this before, or… ?

Anything I can think of seems elaborate though.

Best guess I can come up with is some kind of social engineering “hack” to see if I’d do it, or if I’d get curious and try and infect myself with a 10 year old virus.

Or, maybe they just really needed 10 year old software - I don’t know.

Anyways. Thought I’d ask to …

Does anyone know of a guide for unifi specific setups and usenet?

I have a unifi gateway and cybersecure, but it seems to block newshosting and some indexers. I think it has something to do with the DNS but I am not technical enough to figure it out. I am very good at following directions though, so if anyone knows of a website that shows setup, firewall config and how to setup cybersecure so that it does not block usenet that would be awesome!

u/Plex staff:

It’s your second data breach in 3 years, exposing our personal data to the open internet. Most people will not follow best practices and will reuse passwords. Hackers will try to get what they obtained from you to gain access to other services. Hashing passwords is great, but it can be defeated.

Seriously. You owe your users, paying customers or not, an implementation of a local authentication, preferably with OIDC support, so that we no longer depend on your cloud services for it, and so we can use your product 100% offline. You can leave your cloud powered authentication baked in, but give us the choice. You can’t argue not implementing it is for security reasons anymore. You clearly failed at it, twice.

Respectfully,

One of your many pissed off users.

Edit:

I’ve read most of the replies so far, and I’d like to address some of recurring themes.

- Switch to Jellyfin / Emby

While this is indeed a solution, I love Plex for the functionality …

https://forums.plex.tv/t/important-notice-of-security-incident/930523

We have recently experienced a security incident that may potentially involve your Plex account information. We believe the actual impact of this incident is limited; however, action is required from you to ensure your account remains secure.

What happened

An unauthorized third party accessed a limited subset of customer data from one of our databases. While we quickly contained the incident, information that was accessed included emails, usernames, securely hashed passwords and authentication data.

Any account passwords that may have been accessed were securely hashed, in accordance with best practices, meaning they cannot be read by a third party. Out of an abundance of caution, we recommend you take some additional steps to secure your account (see details below). Rest assured that we do not store credit card data on our servers, so this information was not compromised in this incident.

What we’re doing …

Personally, I think it’s a good move, but I’m also not affected by this since I already updated on day 1 when the vulnerability was made public. How much havoc would this cause for people, do you think?

If you are affected and are forced to update, what are your thoughts?

If you reset your password, and checked the log out of all devices (which is good practice IMO), you will have also lost access to your server. You have to re-claim, easy right? Not so it seems. Many, including myself had a lot of difficulty tonight re-claiming server. I tried it all….I mean everryyyyything, even an SSH tunnel

The only way that I got my server back was following “Claiming your server Manually” here https://www.plexopedia.com/plex-media-server/general/claim-server/#:~:text=Open%20a%20Web%20browser%20and,Copy%20this%20token.&text=Replace%20%7Bprocessed_machine_identifier%7D%20with%20the%20value,token%20from%20the%20Web%20page

The “advanced/hidden settings” mentioned are within the preferences.xml file.

For those that are lost, I hope with this you are found. Cheers.

Edit: clarification

Edit 2: things I tried before, without success, before doing the above linked method - the normal navigate to http://localhostip:32400/web in …