>if you’re an executive [...] you get the big bucks for a reason
In Finland? Notably wage-compressed Finland?
No comment on the specifics of this case, I agree with you that the executive should be where the buck stops. But you would be surprised how many various execs I have met here over the years who admit behind closed doors they really do treat it as a fancy job title that barely pays above their last position, but comes with 3x the stress, and they do it simply because, well, someone has to. You can't really be surprised that most of the folks here who you might want to be in the C-suite decide it's just not worth it, that remaining a middle manager or even an IC is simply a far better value proposition.
Posting anonymously here. I was on the leadership team of a Nordic public company, reporting to the CEO, presenting to the board and representing the company at the AGM. Total comp a little under $200k.
The compensation really didn’t match what you take on in terms of responsibility and legal liability. The stress was significant too. That said, as you point out, the work needs doing.
Recommended if you have an over-active sense of duty, not otherwise.
This is actually one area of research for me as a recently-minted DevSecOps engineer. Most cybersecurity attacks are relatively unsophisticated, and succeed by being scaled up so much they succeed on a few soft targets anyway - but a Ralph Wiggum loop on even a scaled up local edge model could make those kinds of techniques much, much more terrifyingly sophisticated for actors with that kind of hardware at their disposal. Abliterated models are of special interest here [1] because they make it even cheaper to do it at scale.
It almost feels like we are seeing the digital analogue of the evolution of the flighted stinging insect, i.e. mosquitoes, bees, etc. They don't have to be very smart individually to absolutely decimate the population of megafauna. A tiny bit of economic intelligence goes a really long way here.
Anecdata, but uv served as a very good packaging mechanism for a Python library I had to throw on an in extremis box, one that is not connected to the Internet in any way, and one where messing with the system Python was verboten and Docker was a four-letter word.
I keep toying with the idea of writing a cron that implements a Poisson process. Say I give it a parameter of 3600; our `pcron` would ensure the jobs occur randomly but average out to once per hour, making the timing of the next run independent of the last via the memoryless property of the exponential distribution.
The next sleep interval would be calculated probably as as t = -\lambda \ln(U) (where U is a uniform random variable). This way you ensure that the probability of the job firing in the next 10 seconds is the same whether the last job finished an hour ago or just five seconds ago. But \lambda remains the average amount of time between jobs.
It’s compelling to me because it solves thundering herd problems at the architectural level, and also because it simply seems like a lot of fun to have to code very defensively against such chaos. Switching back to a deterministic schedule after surviving such chaos probably leads to a much more robust system overall.
> making the timing of the next run independent of the last via the memoryless property of the exponential distribution
Nit: you’re not relying on the memoryless property here but just plain old independent sampling. You’re right that memorylessness means that the elapsed time since the last job provides no information on when the job fires next, but this is orthogonal to the independence of the sleep intervals.
So my understanding is, what Mullvad is to VPNs, and what Tarsnap is to S3 (kinda), Servury is to entire VMs. It's a prepaid model, you get an account identifier, and that's basically it.
This is very cool. I have wondered for a very long time why such a site does not exist. What pops to mind is that you could get better unit economics reselling really small VMs to the privacy obsessed. I know some netizens who would pay a dollar a month for, say, a tiny NetBSD VM and 64 MB of RAM to serve their tiny static demoscene website of yore. There are some real wizards of there.
Not sure if that's in your roadmap but definitely something to consider in this space.
I'm moving into a cybersecurity-focused role, and I for one would be very interested in this. A vetting process makes total sense, but complete lack of access seems like a market inefficiency in the making that the one area where we can't reliably get the frontier models to assist us in pentesting our own stuff without a lot of hedging.
I have lived in Finland for the past four years, having emigrated from the US like the other poster here, and the WHR is a common punching bag topic amongst locals here.
The odd thing however is that when I ask them whether they think the average Finn is happy, they say absolutely not, but when I ask them whether they themselves are happy, most of the time I get a "oh this place is actually pretty great for weirdos like me, I just mean like, normal people would hate it here". But that's the thing: No one normal chooses to live in Finland!
I'm brazillian, moved to Finland 2 years ago to work here, and can confirm the sentiment.
If you ask a Finn, most people are actually quite harsh to the Finnish government, economy, etc - specially as of recent, since Finland now has one of the worst unemployment rate in EU. But lifestyle here is quite sober, everyone has hobbies and are quite dedicated to them. I guess the Sauna and Avanto culture are the main happiness drivers here, and tbh after experiencing it, I wouldn't change for anything else.
This is a fairly common discrepancy between how people perceive the mean/median of a property is compared to the mean/median of how they themselves are.
You see it in things like business confidence going in both directions at various times, pessimism when things are going well, optimism when things are going poorly.
It is very convenient in politics, because you can choose which figure to report to make it seem like you are saying the same thing but you can switch between them to make things look good (or bad l, depending on your attention)
Friend of mine moved from Australia to Finland, and loved it there. I can't imagine dealing with all that cold after Aussie's wonderful heat, but he loved it.
Happiness is found in different places for different people, thankfully.
Even when it is extremely cold like -50 Celsius, one can still walk outside for hours with sufficiently warm clothes. But try the same when it is +50. And then spending weeks in air-conditioned apartments was strictly worse for me than in a heated home during the winter. Plus there is no insects when it is cold. So my preference is for colder climate.
The thing is, in cold places, it is possible for the temperature to remain consistently cold for several days on end, day and night. In hot places, even if day time temperatures approach 50 degrees, at night the temperature will almost certainly be below 35 degrees. So you can always go out at night and be fairly comfortable temperature wise.
I've lived in both, and my face hurts in the cold. There's nothing quite like that amazing feeling of walking through warm air, feels like the atmosphere is hugging me :) I prefer the warm :)
Played hockey with several Finns. They always seemed grumpy about something. The Norwegians and Swedes I played soccer with always had a more cheerful disposition. They always made fun of the Northern Finns, saying, "You'd be grumpy AF too if you had to deal with Winter for 7 months every year!"
I'm Norwegian, and the Norwegian stereotype of Finnish people used to be that they are dour and introvert. And we're by and large culturally a lot less outwardly cheerful to people we don't know than the Danes.
Sometimes Norwegian TV would show Finnish dramas while I was growing up in the '80s, and the standing joke was that the typical Finnish drama had two guys hiking through the forest, one of them saying something, and then half an hour more of hiking before the other would reply. I don't remember whether that was accurate (it's not as if I'd have kept watching), but I suspect not.
Unrelated, but this reminds me of Americans' opinions of their congresscritters: Congresscritters as a whole are a terrible, corrupt bunch, but your own congresscritter is amazing!
A similar thing was recently reported for Germany as well. When asked how they believe the average German is doing, most people answered something along "worse than me".
In Finland? Notably wage-compressed Finland?
No comment on the specifics of this case, I agree with you that the executive should be where the buck stops. But you would be surprised how many various execs I have met here over the years who admit behind closed doors they really do treat it as a fancy job title that barely pays above their last position, but comes with 3x the stress, and they do it simply because, well, someone has to. You can't really be surprised that most of the folks here who you might want to be in the C-suite decide it's just not worth it, that remaining a middle manager or even an IC is simply a far better value proposition.
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