Engineers can laterally move to more prestigious or challenging projects if they prove worthy based on their skills and connections. One former staffer tells WIRED that this made the company feel like a meritocracy where the best people, and the best ideas, naturally rise to the top.

I am very interested in the culture and psychology of these supposed “meritocratic” companies. Personally, I don’t believe we have a reasonable approximation of the hyper-efficient merit-based resource allocation that is promoted by the ultra-rich.

Usually I find these so-called “meritocratic” policies do not encourage good ideas, but enable hyper-competitive environments.

These kind of environments likely do not support solid well-thought-out proposals; instead, pushes the quick implementation of mediocre ideas (a.k.a move fast and break things). A hyper-competitive environment can also discourage collaboration, which often can be crucial to “solve the hard problems”.

And the article mentions that this environment boosts employee retention, which I find extremely interesting. I wonder if the constant competitions can keep triggering a sense of “winning” and “accomplishment” in a perhaps mundane job.

Secureboot is a security measure to make sure the boot environment have not been tampered with. It would detect malwares that attempt to modify the boot environments. According to ArchWiki, it ensures “core boot components (boot manager, kernel, initramfs) have not been tampered with”, which would protect against initramfs-swap attacks like de-LUKS, however there are conflicting reports on the internet, and I have not tried myself.

I personally don’t find it makes Linux harder to install, like others suggested. Unless you use a surface device, it will happily accept the key for most common linux distro, including Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, and many more. For most custom distros, you can easily register its key via MOK (require root privilege and confirmation in the UEFI, for security purpose). In fact, Debian project is quite clear on SecureBoot not being a tool for MS to monopolize the desktop market: https://wiki.debian.org/SecureBoot#What_is_UEFI_Secure_Boot_NOT.3F .

However, if you need to load additional kernel modules, like NVIDIA drivers, secureboot can get quite annoying. I am actually quite interested in why Windows don’t have a problem loading additional drivers, yet Linux do.

In the end, I feel if you are using a distro that works with secureboot, there is no reason to leave it off; if you find it annoying, yet okay with a downgrade in security, then you might want to leave it off.

It seems like they have replied and said they won’t repel the act.

Unfortunately, even EU’s solution doesn’t support non-google-backed android.

What brand of VPN do you use to bypass it, many of my friends are there quite frequently, none of them have a mainstream solution for it.

Last time I was there, express does not work, and I heard proton also does not work. However, my mobile carrier by default routes all roaming traffic through UK, so that did work.

China blocks most IPs from foreign cloud providers like AWS or Digital Ocean. And if I am not mistaken, they can also block some VPN protocols (tor is not a VPN protocol, but it is very blocked, I don’t know if tor bridge works), but I am not sure which exactly.

Is this where pika-pika-chu came from?

What about bottles?

I think most people would use the publisher’s website first and then resort to scihub, because scihub requires a doi or publisher’s link to get the paper.

I don’t think this causes much concern, even if so, I believe a good amount of blame should still fall on the publishers and academic systems that encourages gatekeeping knowledge. Especially when these knowledges are generated by public money, then the public should rightfully have access to them.

It is also insecure with possiblity to crash your computer, the only advantage is that it is cheap.