“We will provide you with a tool to emit garbage and a platform to share content. If you put the two together, you are liable.”

Attractive nuisance much? Is it too much to ask that they should have to label it a garbage generator instead of “AI”? Why does honesty always have to take a back seat?

Exactly

Tell me you are too oblivious to implement CI/CD without telling me you’re too oblivious to to implement CI/CD. Their builds and packaging should have been fully automated if it was such a pain. If you can make a Mac version of any software, you can make a Linux version. The debate internally was likely management being dumb as rocks and overruling anyone who actually knows anything.

Thank you for that info, now that I know that, I’m gonna switch to web only.

I feel like in the future this is going to get more intense. They will have facial+ear+gait recognition combined with AI so they can detect and combine literally every instance of shoplifting, intentional or not (to say nothing of footage that only coincidentally has the appearance of shoplifting but they retain it as “proof” anyway), over decades of visits to any of their locations, and once you’ve accumulated over $1000 combined in unpaid merchandise, hit you with a felony charge.

Or they just ban you after the first incident straight up, and electronically recognize you and kick you out for the rest of your life afterward.

And you would have no affordable recourse because they have all the footage and lawyer money to oppose fighting it.

No prob! I was curious how far I could get with a low-effort decoupling from Meta, and I’m sad it turns out that that’s not very far.

I updated my post a little with some more thoughts about the situation.

I think it would be cool to root it, but the hassle then to update it would be too much for me at least. And you would want the updates too because they are still adding improvements to things like controller motion tracking and whatnot.

I’m excited for what this quest version of Steam link can do for getting more VR content on Linux. Without the need for Linux drivers for the headset, it can just be streamed and the hardware work is done. Valve is clearly talented enough to get the software side working. It would be cool as hell to have a mode that turns the Steam Deck into a WAP (easy on Linux as you undoubtedly know) and you just connect your headset and start VR gaming from it.

Thank you for the discussion by the way. You’ve inspired me to drop my unit into its own SSID now, and log what it’s doing to keep an eye on it.

Okay, so I factory reset the thing, and to use the headset at all, the setup requires that you have to log in with at least a Meta account (only an email address needed, no Facebook), and you have to pair it with an app on your phone that controls things like developer mode. There’s no way around it, the first thing you are greeted with in the headset is a pairing code for the app, and you need the app to make the headset work afaict. I didn’t investigate if there’s a desktop app or web app.

Side note, apparently developer mode now requires a phone number or credit card attached to the account. Maybe a vanilla visa could work, not sure. I’ve already bought stuff through the quest store, so enabling developer mode was just a click for me. I used developer mode to install sidequest just now to see what it’s about, but neither it nor developer mode are needed for Steam link.

Mayyybe you could make a Meta account with an email address made just for the headset, maybe run the Android app in an emulator, but that would be a bit of a hassle imo. I suppose you could isolate the headset into a subnet, or it’s own SSID if you’ve got the gear for that, and keep it quarantined most of the time and just let it reach out here and there for updates, but who knows if it blurts out any collected telemetry while it gets the update. You may not have to let it out for updates at all however; when I booted into factory reset there was a “sideload updates” option, so maybe you could update it manually offline.

Honestly, as good as this headset is for the price, if I were concerned with absolute privacy, I would just cough up the dough for a competitors OLED unit. I could spend all of the hours I was frigging around with the headset doing OT at work instead, and just use that money to get something better without the pain and hassle. I get that’s not an option for everyone though.

Perhaps as an affordable compromise, if you don’t mind temporarily leaking a little data to Meta one time, you could do the normal setup but with an email just for the unit, install the app for 5 minutes on an old phone or tablet without a SIM for the setup, get Steam link on the headset, uninstall the app on the phone, and drop the headset into whatever Wi-Fi isolation you can conjure up. Maybe an isolated SSID or even easier, an affordable 5g router dedicated just to VR.

I don’t trust Meta either, but I gotta admit, it actually feels kinda neat to experience their $30 billion dollar metaverse disaster first hand while it’s still around to look at. For the record, the only protection I did was make a Meta account. I don’t use Facebook.

I’ll try it out tonight for you. I’ll see if I can sign out and go from there.

There is some kind of side loading store called sidequest that I’ve been meaning to try. Maybe I can use that somehow.

I will also try to load it on with ADB maybe.

I have a Quest 3 and tried the Steam link app out last night. It works excellently. It is amazing to not have to run Meta’s horrible and janky desktop app that uses up 2gb of video RAM just at idle.

Someone complained about the hit decals from a 25 year old game being unrealistic? I don’t blame him for the “attitude”; this was among the first games to have such a thing. That shit was cutting edge for the time and it blew our minds. Not even Quake 2 had hit decals, IIRC.

Half-life was hella immersive for the time. People take everything for granted nowadays.

Before you take the advice of anyone here, try to find out how long they have been in the business, because I think that’s going to change the kind of feedback you get. I’ve been doing this for over 20 years, and I’ve worked in all kinds of places, from small business, to large, to government, as an employee and consultant. Not bragging, just providing a reference point.

Your concerns and situation are ones I have experienced myself. You are not alone. I’ll give you advice I wish I could have given myself decades ago.

unsure if I was good enough

Every programmer starting out has this feeling generally. Please don’t take this as dismissive. I actually take this as an indicator of someone who will succeed at becoming a good programmer. The brazen ones who do not introspect and understand their inabilities are doomed to flounder perhaps forever.

I feel like I flip between I am a god and can code anything and omg I know nothing show me the nearest bridge.

In my experience this feeling can last for decades, probably forever, but as you gain more experience and hours of working on code, the bridge diminishes. If this doesn’t make you feel better, you’ll just have to take my word for it… it does get better and you will be happier over time. As you get more experience, you will be able to better estimate things, so you can know when something is way too big to go alone, or without more resources/support, or without more budget, and how to say so/no in those cases.

It took me a while to realize, that if something doesn’t work out the way you planned it, it’s not all on you, the business and how it functions (or not) has more to do with it than anything. Small businesses are, frankly, generally more stupid. It can be the blind leading the blind, so what hell were you gonna do anyway. They didn’t want to pay for a super team with mentors, so they get what they get, and that’s not on you. I’ve found that most of the time in business, failure happens and shit just moves on, because there are other fish to fry and fires to deal with. What you think matters, as an introspective person, hardly crosses the mind of business folk.

boot camps [said, in] your first role you would get lots of support

You have to keep in mind the source of these boot camps and what they are for. They are funded by silicon valley so that they can get as many (hopefully talented) bodies in the door as possible, to keep costs down. More supply, lower costs. As such, they are aimed at people who will work for those companies, and those companies are desperate (depending on the market I suppose), so they will definitely have support in order to retain folks.

I work for a small company < 10. I don’t feel I get the support I expected.

Speaking from experience, being a developer at a small company is generally fucking garbage, for some of the reasons you and I have touched on. They have anti developer and anti productivity practices, and they don’t care to improve. They generally don’t know what they don’t know. Depending on the place though, this can be an advantage: they don’t know enough to know that “you suck” (you don’t suck, by the way). They can also be desperate to hang on to anyone dumb enough to keep working for them (no offense. You are not a dummy, circumstances are just not in your favor yet).

the spec is kept in the […] (owners) head

Aha, yeah there’s your problem. The owner is a developer running this shit show, and I guarantee they’ve never run their development the way the software development industry would. They should know better than to run things this way; if you can’t have the fundamentals of your business shared with the team that are trying to make it a success, how could you ever hope to make it work? Some places hobble on in spite of this, but they will only have the fraction of the success they could have had if only they’d had a person with genuine vision (or smarts enough to hire that person) at the helm.

[when given a task I get no timeframe]. [the task is given verbally]. [confusing to understand their vision].

If you had worked at a big silicon valley place first, you’d have first hand experience with agile/scrum, and how it works to solve all of these common issues. This is not a criticism of you, I’m saying working at a place that has agile/scrum should be your next pursuit.

In A/S, tasks are written down in tickets, estimated, and prioritized. Effort and vision are made clear before the work starts, written on the ticket so everyone is clear on it and about the deliverables. If it’s too much effort, the ticket can be split into manageable chunks. It vastly reduces the people problems that come with managing development work by turning it into a process that can be refined according to how the team works, instead of a negotiation with a lead maniac.

By not doing/knowing about this kind of practice, your business is at risk from competitors who implement this correctly, are therefore more efficient, and will naturally out compete you. Not your problem though.

If wrong I’m not called out and they will spend a little more time going over what they want.

Good. As much as I am shitting on them, they are at least reasonable seeming.

The boss is always so busy that sometimes you feel like a burden asking for pointers.

That’s on them, and that’s business life. Honestly, IMO they need to get some of their shit together, but that’s not your place to advise or worry about. Also, they probably knew they were getting a greener guy, so they’d be expecting questions. There’s a balance between knowing when to ask, and just trying stuff, and newer people should bias towards asking, IMO. Your leader may feel differently, it seems like they’re reasonable enough you could just ask.

the newest will start as a copy of the last one

Having done this myself before, this is the path to hell, in my opinion. It can work, but it’s a shortcut and in my experience it’s a maintenance nightmare. This is not the practice of a company with vision, it’s a company that’s just chugging along for now. If you had the vision to be acquired one day, you wouldn’t do this. There should really be a core code base that all instances share, so even old implementations can benefit in the future, if need be. I’m sure this opinion will be controversial. Again, not your place to worry or talk with them about it.

[Existing code is] second nature to [my colleagues] and I feel stupid

20+ years in and it’s still like this for me when starting at a new place. The difference is experience lets you know not to worry. Practically nobody is a genius, and the geniuses are writing white papers, not code. My advice to you is to just delve into the code base and read as much as possible and follow along with how it works. If you want to get a leg up (which I would advise for a green person) do some of this in your spare time, as much as you can afford. Otherwise you will get experience with the code eventually through your day to day work regardless. Don’t get too invested in them though, you should move on as soon as possible (for a bunch of reasons).

is this normal

Feeling stupid in this situation is normal, you are just green and will be fine. The small business that operates like this is all too common, and you are not in the place to do anything about it, and I would not advise getting involved with trying to fix it. If you were an investor, then I would try to fix it. You should worry about you, not them. Use them as a stepping stone to your next opportunity.

to gauge how I am doing

Ask for a performance review. They may be too small to know how to do this properly, if at all, however. You know them, you will have to be the judge on if they will take kindly to that request. Any place that isn’t garbage should be happy to do that for you however. Agile/scrum would have metrics you could just look at to know how you are doing, any time, just saying.

there is no remote work and no headphones in the office

Here we are back to the dumb shit. They are leaving money and productivity on the table, and that is not the mark of a good business. Unhappy workers are not the mark of a good business. They might be smart coding wise, but they are not smart business wise, which is a real problem when the whole point is to make money. Imo you should get out ASAP, but that might involve sticking it out for at least another 6 months, so you have at least a year for the resume.

when is a good time to start looking for your second role

Always be looking. If I could go back in time and give myself one piece of career advice it would be this: always be looking, interview often, even if it’s just to say no, and never stay in one place more than a year or two. If I had done this, I would have been happier so much sooner, and would be making at least twice the money by now.

Do not be loyal to these folks, small businesses will cut you at the drop of a hat like any other business. For them it comes down to business no matter what.

In my opinion, for your career, you need to get on a real development team that does agile/scrum as soon as possible. Agile/scrum not a panacea, nor the end all be all, but it should give you a good reference for how well/things should function on a good development team.

You seem to have a good head on your shoulders, you are worried about the right things, and are asking the right questions. Good luck out there.

This finally explains the purpose of TikTok as a spy platform to me. What better way to get deep research into the sensibilities of your targets.

Wow that sucks that you had so many issues, but at least they gave you the refund. That’s lucky. What were the call issues you were having?

How can you return the Pixel 7 after such a long time? Wouldn’t most return policies limit you to a few weeks or months?

Do you keep your wallet in your back pocket when sitting?

my retirement plan is […] going to be a coffin

Is where I’m at 😂

Thank you for your post! I don’t know how many times I wrote a response on Reddit out, and then thought to myself “I don’t need the hassle” and then just deleted it; I totally relate.