Thoughts on tech

The sequel to panicking-led-to-losing-my-desktop — this time the monitoring actually caught the disk dying, and nothing was lost. What happened # is my replica pool — a 10.9T mirror (2x 12TB) that receives syncoid snapshots from. One side of the mirror, a Seagate Exos (serial,), went FAULTED with 14 read + 22 checksum errors. The IronWolf mirror side carried the pool —. ZFS redundancy did exactly its job. The difference from last time # Last failure: no monitoring, found out by accident months later, desktop died. This failure: SigNoz + node-exporter’s ZFS collector → → alert rule → Gotify → my phone. The gotify notification fired before I knew anything was wrong. Diagnosis # Before or replace — check SMART. already scrapes all disks into SigNoz, so I didn’t even need sudo: raw = 3024 and counting value/worst still 100 but raw errors climbing SMART overall: still PASS (SMART’s overall bit is conservative until threshold) 3k+ remapped sectors is a platter going bad — not a cable blip. V…

Recently I was given a raise at work after I broached the subject with my manager. I wasn’t sure what the outcome would be but I have learned two things in nearly a decade in corporate America: No one will fight for you harder than yourself The worst they can say is no The Raise # So I talked with my manager about my workload and compensation, and to my surprise he took me seriously. He went up the chain with some accomplishments of the year that I wrote up for him (it’s his job to advocate for me, but it’s certainly my job to give him the ammunition to take into battle). Before much time had passed, a big wig put some time on my calendar. I had a good relationship with my (then) manager, and even with the big wig, so there was always some amount of personal connection amidst the money-talk. The Reorg # Cue a managerial change and reorganization of the team. The dust settled, and my manager wasn’t my manager and the big wig wasn’t a big wig over my team anymore. The details aren’t that…

I thought I had backups handled... can you imagine how the rest of this post is going to go with that intro?

The Setup # Work has been crazy for months, and I haven’t written too much about it, a few notes here and there but nothing substantial. The craziness is sourced in a pretty cliched-scenario where we have lofty goals and important things to build but the foundation on which we are building, like architectural decisions, is basically wet sand. So as I’ve been trying to find my footing in the mud I feel like I end up spinning my wheels moreso than making any progress. The chaos led me eventually to approach my manager about my compensation - I make a nice living but for the stress I’d been feeling I could certainly go make more. My manager successfully fought for me up the chain and I was given a slightly bigger carrot, but that’s not the point of this post. I started to feel even more anxiety after I was told about the raise because, just like with AI and agentic coding, now I was sure the expectations would be even higher. I didn’t think anything would actually come from me asking my b…

Problem: Firefox installed but missing from KDE/Plasma app menu Root cause: No.desktop launcher file — Firefox only worked from terminal Solution: Created desktop entry with standard KDE fields Location: ~/.local/share/applications/firefox.desktop (user-local, no sudo needed) Discovery step: Checked /usr/share/applications/ — empty for Firefox Applied fix: Ran kbuildsycoca5 to rebuild Plasma’s menu cache Result: Firefox now appears in app menu (Network category) and Alt+F2 autocomplete

I've been thinking about the work I am doing and have to do in my role at Cat, in Cat Autonomy, building Forge (see forge-ahead). I feel like I have little...

I’m finding lately that I wish we could go back to pre-ChatGPT… A world without a code-gen easy button, where “easy” was LSP autocomplete, where tools were at my fingertips rather than remote inference endpoints, and where I and everyone I worked with, was paid and judged based on what we could produce with our own 2 hands, even if and was sometimes a common set of keys… it sure beat answering “yes” to a robot every 38 seconds.