Spyke

Replies

Comment on

Employees Who Stay In Companies Longer Than Two Years Get Paid 50% Less

I made the mistake of becoming a manager about 4 years ago. This is one of the most frustrating parts of the job. If you have a good relationship with your team they’ll usually tell you something like “I’ve been getting contacted about other offers, here’s what they’re offering.”

It’s usually about a 20% bump. I’ve not once been able to convince the company I’m at to match it. Usually the best I’m allowed to do is something like a 5-6% raise in the next salary increase cycle.

I’ll usually know for 2-3 months a team member is leaving before it actually happens because of this. Of course, if I’m allowed to hire a replacement they’ll let me pay market value.

Job hopping is definitely the best way to get a pay increase.

Comment on

Using any DE be like:

After decades of using different window managers, fixing broken configs with major updates, fretting about multi monitor config etc I started using GNOME. It might not look as sleek but I’m a lot more productive now.

In the end I’m just glad we have so many choices.

Comment on

Anthropic has developed an AI 'brain scanner' to understand how LLMs work and it turns out the reason why chatbots are terrible at simple math and hallucinate is weirder than you thought

The research paper looks well written but I couldn’t find any information on if this paper is going to be published in a reputable journal and peer reviewed. I have little faith in private businesses who profit from AI providing an unbiased view of how AI works. I think the first question I’d like answered is did Anthropic’s marketing department review the paper and did they offer any corrections or feedback? We’ve all heard the stories about the tobacco industry paying for papers to be written about the benefits of smoking and refuting health concerns.

Comment on

Does anyone else feel like fediverse (particulary Lemmy) is getting more and more quieter?

I’ve noticed I spend less time on Lemmy than I did on Reddit. Some of that may have to do with content, but I think it’s mostly Lemmy isn’t manipulating what I’m looking at to keep the dopamine hits coming. It definitely feels like withdrawal at times.

I am learning to appreciate the joy of opening Lemmy after I checked it a few hours ago and not seeing anything new and having the freedom to close the app again.

Comment on

Nvidia overtakes Apple as the second most valuable company.

Reply in thread

To your point, when you look at both crypto and AI I see a common theme. They both need a lot of computation, call it super computing. Nvidia makes products that provide a lot of compute. Until Nvidia’s competitors catch up I think they’ll do fine as more applications that require a lot of computation are found.

Basically, I think of Nvidia as a super computer company. When I think of them this way their position makes more sense.

Comment on

Who needs stable, feature-rich desktops anyway

I’ve found GNOME a pleasure to use. From my experience many folks that use Linux like to tinker with their computers. Even those new to Linux see a world of possibilities. GNOME doesn’t really embrace this tinkerer philosophy. They have an opinion on what a desktop manager should be and they’re constantly working towards that vision.

When I introduce GNOME to new people I explain to them some the project goals, design elements and how it’s intended to be used. Then I tell them that GNOME is opinionated on how things should behave and look, and if you try to force GNOME to be something it’s not you’ll probably end up using poorly documented or unsupported third-party extensions that break things. Generally the advice is, GNOME is great, but not for everyone, take the time to learn the GNOME way of doing things and if you don’t like it you're better off switching to another desktop environment than trying to change GNOME.

memes

Comment on

Being an adult is so fun

I used to feel this way about cooking. I started trying to find joy in the repetitive parts of life, so they didn't seem so annoying. It's definitely a journey, but if you keep at it, you get to a point where cooking feels like a creative outlet. Once you have enough experience to create something new from your pantry and quit following recipes verbatim you'll have fun. It took me a few years to get there, but you're going to have to cook your entire life anyway, might as well get something out of it.

linux

Comment on

Kdenlive 24.05 is out with a huge performance boost and the usual batch of quality of life, user interface and usability improvements. It also comes with a few exciting new features like Group Effects

I’m glad to see open source video editors are still evolving. I know Davinci Resolve has become popular with Linux YouTubers for serious work.

I’d be curious to know a video editors opinion of what’s missing. Is it stability, GPU acceleration, UI or a combination of all of the above? What would be needed for you to switch to Kdenlive for example?

linux

Comment on

*Permanently Deleted*

In 2025, the package manager and frequency of updates are the only real differences between most distributions. I’ve been enjoying Flatpak for years now and hope it continues to build momentum. It offers the possibility of shared effort between distributions who depend on legions of volunteers constantly updating debs/rpms/whatever.

It feels like one of the last hurdles to eliminate so much of the duplicated effort associated with all these distributions.

linux

Comment on

I need resources and pointers on how I can write an implementation of Vulkan that supports my older Radeon card:

Hey man, I don’t want to discourage you, but this is one of those things where if you have to ask how to do something you’re probably not experienced enough to do it. That being said, as a learning opportunity even if you don’t make it far you’ll still learn a lot about how GPUs work.

I’d start by looking at any existing drivers you can find and see if you can document or find documentation for the commands fed to the GPU. From there you can look at the Mesa project for examples of converting Vulkan to instructions for specific processors and see if you can get it to all fit together for your project.

linux

Comment on

What was Linux like in the 90s

I started using Linux right in the late 90’s. The small things I recall that might be amusing.

  1. The installation process was easier than installing Arch (before Arch got an installer)
  2. I don’t recall doing any regular updates after things were working except for when a new major release came out.
  3. You needed to buy a modem to get online since none of the “winmodems” ever worked.
  4. Dependency hell was real. When you were trying to install an RPM from Fresh Meat and then it would fail with all the missing libraries.
  5. GNOME and KDE felt sincerely bloated. They seemed to always run painfully slow on modern computers. Moving a lot of people to Window Managers.
  6. it was hard to have a good web browser. Before Firefox came out you struggled along with Netscape. I recall having to use a statically compiled ancient (even for the time) version of Netscape as that was the only thing available at the time for OpenBSD.
  7. Configuring XFree86 (pre-cursor to X.org) was excruciating. I think I still have an old book that cautioned if you configured your refresh rates and monitor settings incorrectly your monitor could catch on fire.
  8. As a follow on to the last statement. I once went about 6 months without any sort of GUI because I couldn’t get X working correctly.
  9. Before PulseAudio you’d have to go into every application that used sound and pick from a giant drop down list of your current sound card drivers (ALSA and OSS) combined with whatever mixer you were using. You’d hope the combo you were using was supported.
  10. Everyone cheered when you no longer had to fight to get flash working to get a decent web browsing experience.
linux

Comment on

Fedora Linux 42 released

I really don’t agree with choosing to release with the UEFI bug they found. They describe it as cosmetic but those entries can last the lifetime of your computer, even if you wipe your hard drive. It’s bound to cause some confusion for years to come for Linux tinkerers.

Comment on

What do you just not give a single fuck about that so many people try to make you give a shit about?

Reply in thread

AI for me as well. I’ve played with it a little and it’s kinda fun. Every company is pushing AI now including in areas where it doesn’t make any sense or is many years away from being useful. I’m also seeing a lot of developers being assigned to use AI without any directions on what to use it for.

I’m far enough along in my career I don’t need to worry about being replaced by AI. If it’s ever good enough to take my job I’ll be happily retired writing software for fun and living my life without AI. I just don’t have any interest.