That is only for people who volunteer to receive our custom hardware and we need the name and address to ship them the unit. For most units we have no name, address or any PII whatsoever.
Thank you for the clarification. The descriptions I'm seeing imply that your telemetry code is embedded in network enabled devices. It's good to know that this data collection only applies to your whitebox.
I can understand your concern. Thankfully we have no way of accessing any PII from within an embedded context - all the agent knows is its own MAC/IP addresses etc.
SamKnows is not surveillance, we generate synthetic traffic for our tests from our test agents. We do monitor byte counters for the WAN interface to tell if someone else is using the connection before we run our tests, but otherwise we can't see any ongoing traffic.
I have negotiated a four day week twice. I would recommend a four day week to anyone who can afford it. Don't forget that because of tax bands the effective pay cut is less than 20%.
The first time I just straight up asked my boss in a conversation and with a request in writing. I said I was unhappy in my life in general and wanted more time to spend on other things than work. There is legislation in the UK that means that employers must consider these requests and reply with an answer and explanation in a fixed time frame. They accepted and I worked it for about 4 months before other circumstances meant I had to relocate and leave that company.
The job I moved to was a start-up. After a string of executive resignations and engineering team redundancies I was left as the most experienced team member. I had another job offer in hand that I didn't really want but took it to the only remaining senior lead and asked for 4 days (at full pay this time) or I'd leave. They accepted in an informal way rather than modify my contract in this case and just called it "taking a day off when you need it". I would not recommend accepting this in general as it puts you in a vulnerable position for being punished for doing what you thought was the agreed deal. In any case, working 4 days at this job was a disaster because the company was such a mess and I had so little support that I spent my day off and my weekends obsessing about work unhealthily. I ultimately went back to 5 days in a more senior role to try to help right the ship but couldn't take the stress then either so ended up leaving.
I'm now at 5 days again. If I stick my new job out I plan to request 4 days after my probation period ends.
The decision for an employer comes down to retention - do they want to keep you enough to accept 4 days instead of the risk of you leaving? So if you have a manager who can understand your value and represent that to internal decision makers then that's the main key.
I'm reminded of a quote from Seneca's letters to Lucilius, also circa 1st century CE:
> Thank you for writing so often. By doing so you give me a glimpse of yourself in the only way you can. I never get a letter from you without instantly feeling we’re together. If pictures of absent friends are a source of pleasure to us, refreshing the memory and relieving the sense of void with a solace however insubstantial and unreal, how much more so are letters, which carry marks and signs of an absent friend that are real. For the handwriting of a friend affords us what is so delightful about seeing him again, the sense of recognition.
It certainly is poetic. I don't know how much of that comes from the translation which will have been done by someone who already "knows" that these letters are important classical texts. If I knew Ancient Greek then maybe I could read it and it would seem like reading people's Facebook messages today.
But if you like that kind of writing, then try writing like that! If you keep at it, your friends will at least to recognise that style of writing as part of you. :-)
There are almost 7.9 billion living people. There are more literate people on the planet than any other time in history. The corpus of private correspondence produced daily is huge, and you will never see more than a tiny sliver of it. There could be a thousand Senecae (in terms of the quality of their private letters) living alongside you, and you would never know it.
Keep in mind, too, that that text is a translation. Seneca didn't write that. A translator named Robin Campbell did. I trust Campbell captured the essence of what Seneca meant, and I'm willing to believe its beauty in English is analogous to the beauty of Seneca's Latin, but who writes like that nowadays? Robin Campbell did in 1969, pretty close to nowadays!
Right about private correspondence however i follow many intellectual blogs on the rationalist diaspora (lesswrong, substack) + reddit and HN and I have never quite seen a blog showing this level. One would have thought internet would make discovering such talents order of magnitudes easier..
I recently read heard some Molière and the verbal virtuoseness is unmatched to anything else I know of.
I didn't knew about Robin Campbell, will give it a try :)
In a small team, I have found that a simple spreadsheet of tests can go a long way. Give it a fancy name like "Subcomponent X Functional Test Specification" and have one row per requirement. Give them IDs (e.g. FNTEST0001).
What sort of tests you want depends a lot on your system. If you're working on some data processing system where you can easily generate many examples of test input then you'll probably get lots of ROI from setting up lots of regression tests that cover loads of behaviour. If it's a complex system involving hardware or lots of clicking in the UI then it can be very good to invest in that setup but it can be expensive in time and cost. In that case, focus on edge or corner cases.
Then in terms of how you use it, you have a few options depending of the types of test:
- you can run through the tests manually every time you do a release (i.e. manual QA) - just make a copy of the spreadsheet and record the results as you go and BAM you have a test report
- if you have some automated tests like pytest going on, then you could use the mark decorator and tag your tests with the functional test ID(s) that they correspond to, and even generate a HTML report at the end with a pass/fail/skip for your requirements
I know it doesn't get much love on here, but a feature per requirement is a good level to start at. I'd recommend using `Examples` tables for testing each combination.
Having your features run on every PR is worth its weight in gold, and being able to deal with variations in branches relieves most of the headaches from having your requirements outside of the repo.
This sounds great, I will try and read it. I recently read a science-fiction novel with similarly strongly-consistent timelines which was very enjoyable (if a bit slow to start).
