I present an alternate etymology for homelab. Instead of "lab" as experimentation space, think of it as lab: place for doing work. Away back in the day we didn't have laptops to work on university CS classes.
So you had to go to the lab to find a computer beefy enough to do your work on.
The title of the original article is a little misleading. It's _website_ visitor tracking and it looks like it's really just advertising analytics... That's maybe bad but it's also the same as like... 98% of all other websites.
That's really pretty much everything, google knows you may think you have breast cancer -- email, gender, age, visit pages, etc. Certain sites and information classes/types are not just like the rest of 98%.
The title is totally misleading. It very much implies that hospitals are giving data about visitors to the hospital, which would be incredibly egregious.
Tracking website visitors is bad, but is something I 100% expect. If others aren't expecting this, that's a serious problem. People should absolutely be warned when it happens (or, better, laws should exist to prevent it from happening).
But web visitor tracking is not nearly as sensitive as tracking visitors to the hospitals (or any other health care provider premises) themselves.
I avoid the data leakage for sensitive things like health care by never using websites related to those things. I know that people often forget this, but at least in the US, using a website to interact with health care providers is not actually mandatory.
> I avoid the data leakage for sensitive things like health care by never using websites related to those things. I know that people often forget this, but at least in the US, using a website to interact with health care providers is not actually mandatory.
It is not mandatory but is made extremely onerous. I can get on the web site, authenticate while tracked, enter my request, or I can call an automated maze, get repeatedly dropped, talked to a ChatGPT knock-off, get dropped again, and maybe I get a human to answer my request. Then, I get an email asking if I am satisified with the service.
Interesting. I have to admit, I've never had a problem talking to doctor's offices or the hospitals in my area by phone. No onerous phone trees (just a simple initial menu), no voice robots, and usually only a short wait to talk to a human.
I need to stop complaining about my hospital. Apparently, this is one area where they're above the grade. But even if my phone experience was like yours, I'd still use the phone instead of the web site due to privacy concerns.
In the end, as with all privacy/security issues, there's an inherent tradeoff between convenience and security. Everyone has a different place on that spectrum where they're most comfortable. But at least we can choose how much of a tradeoff we're willing to engage in.
Imagine you stated online that you don't like the fact that your Uber ride data is being sold to Facebook. Then imagine someone said, "If you don't like theZuck or Googs knowing where whereabouts and who you are visiting, just walk when you need to go somewhere." Hopefully you'll realize why you are being down-voted.
Just because you think it is okay to continue to feed the beast is not my issue. I can spare the -4 points to engage the discussion.
I also don't use Uber because I don't support their history even if they might no longer behave that way now. You don't have to walk just because you don't use Uber. There are other ways to get around. The fact that you feel this way just means to me that you've drunk too much of the Kool-aid.
Society has become lazy/complacent with the status quo, and does not want to put forth the effort to fight for the rights that they so freely complain about on web forums. Yes, things can be more convenient if you are willing to accept the true costs. Things can be more difficult when you choose to not accept the true costs. Just because they are more difficult does not mean it is impossible.
Your reply is not only a non sequitur, the claims you make about me are factually wrong. I have never had a facebook account, nor instagram, nor twitter, and I've never taken an uber. But you claim I've overdosed on the kool-aid.
My point was you are very cavalier about how easy it is for people avoid what is structurally difficult to avoid. For instance, rather than going to the website to look up information, one should go to the hospital and ask someone in person.
You should also have some empathy for people who have no idea that a hospital might sell their information.
About 98% of hospitals has committed some form of medical malpractice. The major problem is when people start accepting this as acceptable behavior. There are multiple places where sharing information with advertisers should be greatly restricted, including hospital, lawyers, priests and so on. Government institutions like police emergency information centers should also avoid sharing data with advertisers, especially if that information get transported over the border.
Yes, people do bad decisions all the time. Hospitals are not perfect and mistakes happens. They should however not continue doing mistakes that harms patients.
How many of these websites remember to completely disable analytics on the sensitive logged-in portions of the site? Completely disable doesn’t mean “an intern once logged in to the analytics provider’s config page and asked them to, pretty please, not log certain pages, and no one ever re-checks that config.” The analytics script should straight-up not be present on the sensitive URLs.
(Frankly, the script should not be present at all on the sensitive origin. Ever heard of fetch or service workers or any other same-origin mechanism of collecting data?)
ADHD (and many other psychological struggles) can be managed with practice and good habits and time.
You seem to have a desire to change (evidenced by posting here) which is a great signal you are in a place to make changes in life. If you want, you can learn now how to make changes in your life to work with your ADHD and learn to manage it's effects, thereby being more successful than you would have been leaving it undiagnosed and poorly understood. This is a great position to be in! You know are in a position to learn the skills you need to manage the ADHD.
Additionally, you seem to have diagnosed yourself as having a skill deficit with interviewing. This is also a great position to be in. If you want to work on interviewing, which based on your message it sounds like is your weak skill, then invest time (and maybe money) in practicing that skill with the added understanding you have (and skills you are building) about your managing your ADHD.
One way to think about this is to treat interviewing as a separate skill set; there really are lots of online resources that teach you to interview these days. Practice interviewing as a separate skill set.
You can invest in this skill with money; leetcode and other sites really package this as a service. The benefit to you is not that they will grant you a job offer; it's that they will grant you the opportunity to practice in low stakes environments. There are also places online that are pairing people for interview practice.
You can also reach out to people you have worked with previously and say: I want to practice interviewing; would you spend 30 minutes with me doing a mock interview? People love to help each other.
At the same time continue to invest in managing and understanding your ADHD by working with professionals to develop those skills. Combine the two and some time and you can do this.
You'll get this. Hang in there! Feel free to email me if you would like to talk more.
You can see it in cost explorer if you break down by one of the spend types. Went and checked it: group by usage type and then filter for service: RDS and you can see your io usage broken out in plain baa cost explorer.
Regardless of the interpretation of these maps, these do seem to show the power of a good tool built for the free market.
Here you have an app on everybody's phone that is such a useful tool that the government isn't even thinking to turn off in the middle of a war even when it's providing real time intelligence in the open about what is happening on the ground.
This seems like a great example of how openness in technology can overwhelm even one of the least Democratic governments through transparent infrastructure.
I bet when they were building Google maps back in the early/mid 2000s they never thought their tool would be used for real time tactical war reporting on civilian and troop movement.
I have been remote, working outside Silicon Valley for Silicon Valley companies for 16 years (4 companies). The difference in salary/cost-of-living was initially a greater part of my value prop to Silicon Valley companies than it is now.
I think over time (say the next 5-10 years) there will be upward pressure on remote salaries and eventually they will normalize to being approximately in the same range as the Silicon Valley ones because of economic pressure: everybody is still going to be competing for workers everywhere. The competition is simply going to get bigger as firms realize they can hire top talent from other places and they need to in order to find and keep the best people.
From the lens of the internet as means of disintermediation in society this makes sense. Using this framework to reason about the internet, we might think of different ways that the internet removes barriers to communication; recently there are several social phenomenon where the internet has removed geography as a barrier to communication enabling lots of different social changes. In this framework, salary and employment markets were just slowly going to eventually get geolocation disintermediated. The pandemic has just sped that up 5-10 years. Now instead of taking 10-20 more years it'll take 5-10.
I know this has been discussed and rediscussed but the notion of thinking about human organization blackboxes trading work with each other the same way we think about how distributed systems blackboxes trade work and communication with each other I think is a huge insight for helping software engineers understand the complexity of human organizations.
You want to avoid single points of failure, optimize bottlenecks, build in redundancy in similar ways etc. Etc. It's a great insight.
Increasing parallelism and optimising bottlenecks is the way to performance.
Put this way, be careful how much redundancy you add; as it is likely to increase complexity and reduce parallelism.
As an aside this is one of the major goals of Agile. Having smaller tasks increases the potential for parallelism. As well as the more obvious ability to change direction.
Agile's main innovation is organizing projects as a (mostly) always shippable series of iterations (i.e. "what do you want next"). But the actual "how" with cards, points, sprints, boards, workstreams leaves a lot to be desired if parallelism is the goal. Communication costs are really high when every one is micro-siloed, hand-offs, which are serial, are costly and involve a lot of relearning the same context, and there is more integration work which is also serial.
I think it's possible to have good parallelism within Agile but I don't think it's the Agile that makes it happen.
I got a Fiio M7 for Christmas or my birthday a year ago. It's amazing how awesome it is to have a device that's dedicated to music and does a great job at it. There are side loadable apps like Musicolet that also do a great job of providing all the music management you could want.
Hey! I'm trying to plan out my career a bit and I was wondering if I could pick your brain a bit. There's an email that can get to me in my profile, if you're willing to give me some advice :)
"This is the kind of magic that sometimes happens when an engineer gets to talk directly to the users to find out what they are doing"
I think this is also the kind of magic that happens when a business is operating well and it's employees have empathy for each other.
If Engineering and Product are well aligned it should be a matter of habit to be looking for and executing on regular projects like Olaf's new menu item or the auto fill of a new account form mentioned here.
As engineers and engineering management we can make sure there is room in our schedules for these kinds of small projects.
And if we develop well our relationships with our product managers we can make those conversations like the one about the form auto filler easier to happen: "this is three hours of work tomorrow that will save this team 10s of hours each week until we get the new system built, it's worth an afternoon one sprint for a developer".
But also what I think is best displayed in this report is empathy :). Organizations that show empathy for their users are ones that tend to be the best to work for because they actually care about people who are using their products and the people who are making their products. And in general, over time, I think empathy builds better customer and employment relationships which then builds better businesses.
So you had to go to the lab to find a computer beefy enough to do your work on.
It's not a home "lab for experimentation.".
It's a home "lab for getting work done."