Conveniently the hammer is deceptively similar to the cross in general shape.

As a non-American I agree with this. There is a whole different energy to Americans in terms of mindset compared to Europeans (not just in business). I think Europe have outstanding talent, and when it comes together it can be exceptionally good and often in a more sustainable way than the American equivalent, but it's a somewhat sad fact that many of the most successful European companies have been successful by emulating (parts of) the American culture.

LSL 1 EGA specifically is pretty much how I learned English. It was certainly much more efficient than my teachers :)

at this point you're barely the product either. You're more a passive platform for them to execute their strategy on.

Totally agreed. I was thinking about how to word it but I was giving up.

But I would consider us users to be more like an asset on their balance sheet. Not something they would care about the opinion of.

More like livestock tbh. Only instead of wool or meat or eggs being harvested, it’s mindshare and attention that they depend on

Makes me think of that scene of Neo waking up from the Matrix the first time and seeing the "battery pods"... yeah...

That's a good comparison to how I feel these days.

`constantly analyze other people's perception of you` I find this a really hard trap to escape...

Try purposely having a bad perception sometimes. I had the same problem. I couldn’t go out in public with anything less than perfect hair, or perfect clothes, or whatever. A few days of dressing in basketball shorts, shirts with holes, and unkempt hair, I noticed nobody gave a shit. Life is much more freeing when you do things the way you want (within reason) and curate a personal style.

There are so many examples of this. Processed food, sweets and so on. Cadbury, Toblerone, etc live on the brand recognition, but have come objectively worse over the years. Often they are owned by the same mega corp that have a strategy of milking the brands for as long as possible.

It's bait and switch on global, organised scale and it's almost impossible to fight except on an individual level.

Because even the UK is getting fed up with Trump? They literally started preparing to deploy on of the carriers to the Gulf and Trump basically told them to fuck off because they were "late" to the war? Now he's changed his mind again, who gives a damn? He can reap what he has sowed.

They will have an app that asks to scan you passport with your phone's NFC reader. It's pretty common for Identity Verification.

Wow, that's even worse than I imagined and I was already imagining bad things

Imagine all the things their phone app can exfiltrate. All vaguely categorised in privacy policy of course.

For a long time I self hosted Gitlab, and was always quite happy with it, but I recently moved my VPS and decided to give Forgejo a try, and I have to say it's refreshing. It's really fast and takes a fraction of the resources Gitlab does. I'm sure Gitlab have more features, but frankly, I wasn't using them. I still like Gitlab, we use it at work and it does a good job, but for my own needs I don't see myself switching back any time soon.

It's frustrating that the so-called enterprise solutions are monsters. In a former workplace we were using Gogs for a long time. It's so nice to work with software that doesn't require a ton of resources for a relatively simple task.

We are running GitLab Ultimate in three different environments. Like 2000 users each and each user pipeline runs crazy like hundreds amounts of jobs. GitLab is keeping up. But we are sized for the 40 RPS architecture

> But we are sized for the 40 RPS architecture

Just in case anyone else (like me) didn't get the reference:

> This page describes the GitLab reference architecture designed to target a peak load of 40 requests per second (RPS), the typical peak load of up to 2,000 users, both manual and automated, based on real data.

https://docs.gitlab.com/administration/reference_architectur...

We used to run Gitlab Premium for around 300 users running hundreds of jobs over some monorepos. Gitlab suggested a small architecture using Omnibus, and while it helped a bit, it didn't perform as well under load as we expected it to.

Eventually, there was no virtual scaling that could help. This, for me, is the biggest problem with Gitlab hosting: as soon as you hit a scale where a single machine with Omnibus doesn't cut it, the jump in complexity, cost, and engineering hours is significant.

Omnibus is like entry level. We paid for GitLab Professional Services and they recommended going to the larger architecture. Since then, we haven’t had issues.

They have their free fast stats tool and you can run your logs through their tool to get statistics and identify hotspots

My experience also.

I would never use Gitlab for my own needs, but at company level, it's impressive how well it behaves!

It's infuriating, the other day I had to download an app to pay for parking. What the fuck do I need the top choice to be a competing parking app? That won't do me any good when the place I'm parking need the one I searched for and who the hell goes "oh, an exciting new parking app? I'm gonna drive around until I can find a place that uses it so I can park there!"