SnotFlickerman

SnotFlickerman, 1 year ago

You know the Hedge Fund Fuckies are just fucking salivating at the thought of Valve being available to buy.

SnotFlickerman, 1 year ago

I would rather hope that he legalizes and codifies the “flat” management structure, disallowing any one figure head from taking over and fucking things up.

Valve annoys people because it can be slow to choose to do something, because everyone works on what they want to work on, but it means average workers have a lot more agency in how they’re involved in the company.

I’m sure there’s till unofficial cliques and leaders, but having it in legalese for the employees post-Gabe would be nice.

SnotFlickerman, 1 year ago (edited 10 months ago)

Because nepotism just works out gangbusters, every time. /s

Seriously, this is worse news than him not having a plan.

SnotFlickerman, 1 year ago

That would be the best outcome, legal framework for the “flat” management structure, making it an employee owned company.

SnotFlickerman, 1 year ago (edited 10 months ago)

I guess you’ve never had a “new boss” come in, huh? Even in a private company?

Man, new bosses love to shake things up, to “make the workplace theirs.” It’s literally one of the most common things to happen when new bosses come, and very often it results in a deep change in company interpersonal politics.

Barry used to be your go-to guy, but the new boss has decided they just don’t like Barry. Why? They couldn’t tell you, but Barry gets under their skin, so it doesn’t matter how he’s the best guy on the team who can handle whatever is thrown at him, his role is going to be dilluted and minimized and he’s going to be pushed and prodded by negative management to try to get him to just quit. Eventually, Barry will just quit because who wants to work under those conditions. Barry found a better job, and now he’s replaced by your new bosses 20-something nephew who doesn’t know what the fuck he is doing at all and everyone can’t stand. He’s a fucking loser who keeps getting promoted by the new boss.

I’ve been through that too many times to pretend it’s just “that easy.” No, generally the kind of people drawn to that role are controlling dickheads who have their own dickhead “vision” of being the biggest dickhead to ever dickhead.

SnotFlickerman, 1 year ago (edited 10 months ago)

Look, despite Musk’s PR, I never read a story about Musk like this:

In 2004, Wolpaw was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis. Expecting his condition to require a departure from the company, he spoke with managing director Gabe Newell, who surprised him by offering an extended leave with pay. “Your job is to get better,” Newell said. “That is your job description at Valve. So go home to your wife and come back when you are better.”

Gabe Newell isn’t some kind of saint, but he does at least treat his employees like human beings, unlike Musk who famously berates his employees and treats them incredibly badly, especially if they have to (gasp!) miss work for any reason.

So while people shouldn’t be praising Valve as some kind of panacea in the world, because they’re still just a company, the reality is things like this have endeared Newell to the gaming community and made them believe he did care about a quality work environment.

A reminder, 2004 was before Wolpaw had written for multiple hit games from Valve. Portal came out in 2007 with Wolpaw as one half of the writing team. A few years later he would be head writer on Portal 2.

Those games would not have been the same if he had been let go from Valve when he was sick with ulcerative colitis.

Just a different perspective, I think it’s unfair to compare Newell to a fucking slave drive apartheid fuckhead like Musk.

SnotFlickerman, 1 year ago

I think that’s a valid take, and I think Valve has sort of re-evaluated it, because if I recall correctly, they kind of had to “put on hold” the “do whatever you want” bit to get Half Life: Alyx out of the door. So, imho, it seems like they’re capable of doing both. They managed to produce a high quality VR game by putting the “flat” on the backburner, and them coming back to it later.

Although, to be fair, I hadn’t heard anything similar about the SteamDeck or any Valve hardware, really. So if they can make a SteamDeck from scratch, an entire new product category, with the flat management structure, I bet it’s not holding them back half as much as some folks at GlassDoor seem to think.

SnotFlickerman, 1 year ago (edited 10 months ago)

Not necessarily in this order:

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1. Learn the OSI and TCP/IP layer models.
2. Learn the fundamentals of IPv4 and IPv6. (Absolutely learn to count bits for IPv4)
3. Learn and understand the use-cases for routers, switches, and firewalls.
4. Learn about DNS. (Domain Name System)
5. Learn about DHCP. (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol)
6. Learn important Port Numbers for important Services. (SSH is Port 22, for example. The range of port numbers from 1024 to 49151 are “registered ports” that are generally always the same)
7. Learn about address classes. (A, B, C are the main ones)
8. Learn about hardware addresses (MAC address) and how to use ARP to find them.

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And more! This is just off the top of my head. Until you’ve studied a lot more, please, for your own sake, don’t open your selfhosted ervices to the wider internet and just keep them local.

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And just for fun, a poem:

The inventor of the spanning tree protocol, Radia Perlman, wrote a poem to describe how it works. When reading the poem it helps to know that in math terms, a network can be represented as a type of graph called a mesh, and that the goal of the spanning tree protocol is to turn any given network mesh into a tree structure with no loops that spans the entire set of network segments.

I think that I shall never see

A graph more lovely than a tree.

A tree whose crucial property

Is loop-free connectivity.

A tree that must be sure to span

So packets can reach every LAN.

First, the root must be selected.

By ID, it is elected.

Least cost paths from root are traced.

In the tree, these paths are placed.

A mesh is made by folks like me,

Then bridges find a spanning tree.

— Radia Perlman Algorhyme

SnotFlickerman, 1 year ago (edited 10 months ago)

I mean, isn’t it important to understand the fundamentals so you can understand VLSM better?

Like math, a lot of this knowledge works better when you know the fundamentals and basics, which help you conceptualize the bigger ideas.

On a personal level, I would have had a lot harder time understanding VLSM if I hadn’t had the basic fundamentals of traditional subnetting and classful networking under my belt.

SnotFlickerman, 1 year ago

How are you “restricting” yourself by learning that it exists? Nobody is saying “learn about it and use it and never consider anything else.” They asked what fundamentals they should know for networking, and I dumped what I considered the “fundamentals.”

SnotFlickerman, 1 year ago

What a millennium, huh?