I have no problem with my credentials being revoked everywhere before I know about a layoff. I don't really care how I learn about it, just please don't make me come in to the office.
I've never had a job with a permanent individual desk like this. The one in-person real job I had, it was only shared working space that different people used at different times of the day or on different days, and I think you were discouraged from leaving anything. The idea of there being "your desk" with a framed photo of your kids and favorite coffee mug seems like a nearly extinct piece of nostalgia. It must have been nice in a way, far preferable to the new style of open office at least.
Meh. Don't leave anything at work. Forgo the convenience and carry your things on your commute. Use a bag. If there's "too much stuff", that's a sign to pare back what you "need" at work.
God, if we're at the point where we're so paranoid about being laid off that we don't dare leave a single piece of personal property in the office then I think we're in a very dark place indeed. Can’t imagine the mental damage from considering losing your job every single day you wake up.
I never left anything valuable or personal at my desk when I worked in an office simply because I had a very nonzero number of colleagues who acted like animals. My fizzy waters, coffee, and snacks would be consumed without permission or replenishment. Chairs, monitors, and input peripherals would get swapped without asking. Desks surfaces would be sat on with chairs used as footstools. Corporate effluvia of all types would end up on my "unused desk" because I wasn't in at the exact moment some roving bandit walked by looking for a spot to dump their crates of paper and binders.
Some people simply have no regard for others and will mess with or jack your shit. Don't give them the chance.
I always thought it was weird that all of the equipment issued to me beyond the laptop was registered to me, such as the monitors and desk phone. Your comment enlightens me... That's wild to imagine folks just swiping things from other peoples desks. We even have storage rooms of office supplies where someone could drop off their crate of paper and binders if they had one for some reason.
well this did just happen to me. laid off while taking care of my father in laws estate and my personal belongings were thrown away. 7 years at the company as an EM ftr.
I had my gym stuff in a gym locker. The reason I was able to commit to a gym routine was being able to get off my desk, get down the elevator, enter the gym and change in gym clothes in literally 5 minutes. I would never be willing to commute with all that gear. And I never got that gear back.
Same, almost. When I was a student, I rented a locker near the showers so I could start my day at the school gym, shower, and go to my first class.
My workplaces have not had gyms, but I bought equipment for my home that maintains the streamline. I haven't been perfect at my routine because my work schedule isn't consistent which is annoying, but I do still get some exercise in at least twice per week with it. I doubt I'd be getting at least that otherwise.
I know this is not a good year on the job market, but if you are traveling to work with a "go bag" and not leaving coffee mugs on your desk to prepare for being laid off maybe it is time to carry that go bag to some other buildings...
The obvious middle ground is don’t leave anything valuable at your desk that you wouldn’t want to lose. You shouldn’t leave valuable stuff at your desk even if you don’t expect to be laid off. Unless you work in a very secure environment, you don’t really know who will be sniffing around your desk.
Go ahead and leave a coffee mug, who cares if you lose a coffee mug?
I'm really happy I live in a country and company sizes where you could leave your wallet on your desk and nothing happens. Glad I don't need to secure my mug to my desk.
I would be devastated if a few of my coffee mugs were eaten by a firing/layoff. (But I would also not bring those specific coffee mugs to the office, either.)
Yes, I will bag my two tree-sized plants, 4 paintings, 1 old map, 2 posters, drawings of my kids, figurines and a few more things. Ah yes, the ball I sit on.
I spend in the office more time than at home so I want a nice environment.
So this was why the FBI Director Kash Patel was in a panic when he couldn't log in one day. Revoking credentials before firing someone makes a lot of sense in security.
no, becaus the simple and pragmatic solution for ANYONE who is subject to arbitrary termination, is to litter everything they build with caltrops and dead man triggers
and then hint that they will go into "consulting" when fired.
I know of one case where this was totaly unintentional, and a machinest at a local pulp and paper plant had self delegated to
write the software that controlled tension
on the giant machines in the mill, but as it was his only real forey into sofware, nobody else could operate it, and they fired him after a manegment reshuffle, and then after the next scheduled shut down, nothing worked right, greasy dusty ancient screen with a blinking cursor was what they had, plugged into the important bits of a half sqare mile plant.
still funny to think about!
Or if you don't want to booby trap your code, buy one of those tiny devices that make a cricket noise randomly every 5-15 minutes, and hide it somewhere in the restroom.
These are too obvious - 5-15 minutes gives your victim way too many opportunities to narrow down the location.
What you really need is one that chirps once every (multiple of) 20-28 hours (with weighting towards 23-25 to keep it roughly around the time you set it going and an infrequent skipping of a day.) Also with different volumes and, ideally, different chirps. Occasionally a double chirp just for extra insanity causing.
(A Michael Jackson "hee heee" would be another good option.)
Not OC, but I tried OpenCode with Gemini, Claude and Kimi, and all of them were completely unable to solve any non-trivial problems which are not easily solved with some existing algorithm.
I understand how people use those tools if all they do is build CRUD endpoints and UIs for those endpoints (which is admittedly what most programmers probably do for their job). But for anything that requires any sort of problem solving skills, I don't understand how people use them. I feel like I live in a completely different world from some of the people who push agentic coding.
I feel the same way. In general, I prefer working on a couch with my laptop. My eyes aren't great and I end up ruining my posture at a desk, invariably.
"...the system described here does it all automatically: It proposes optimizations using LLMs, formally verifies safety properties, shadow-evaluates against real production traffic, and hot-swaps improved code into running services without human intervention or service restarts."
I had been thinking of messing around with a DOM-based ‘console’ in Tauri that could handle a lot more font manipulation for a pseudo-TUI application similar to this. It's definitely possible! It would be even simpler to do in TS.
What about the explanation presented in the next paragraph?
> Consider how an exponent affects values between 0 and 1. Numbers close to experience a strong pull towards while larger numbers experience less pull. For example 0.1^2=0.01, a 90% reduction, while 0.9^2=0.81, only a reduction of 10%.
That's exactly the reason why it works, it's even nicely visualized below. If you've dealt with similar problems before you might know this in the back of your head. Eg you may have had a problem where you wanted to measure distance from 0 but wanted to remove the sign. You may have tried absolute value and squaring, and noticed that the latter has the additional effect described above.
It's a bit like a math undergrad wondering about a proof 'I understand the argument, but how on earth do you come up with this?'. The answer is to keep doing similar problems and at some point you've developed an arsenal of tricks.
In general for analytic functions like e^x or x^n the behaviour of the function on any open interval is enough to determine its behaviour elsewhere. By extension in mathematics examining values around the fundamental additive and multiplicative units \{ 0, 1 \} is fruitful in illustrating of the quintessential behaviour of the function.
Maybe try finding a software engineering job at a place that also uses your scientific expertise. You may be able to find or create opportunities there. The position might not exist, but you can maximize your chances of something coming your way that needs both skill sets.
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