I am British born, with Trinidadian and Guyanese parents. I've had a very similar experience, not just in tech but throughout all areas of my life. I look Indian, but culturally it's very different.
Everyone always (perhaps South Asians more commonly) asks where I'm from. I say I'm British. They ask "no, really". I say Trinidadian and Guyanese heritage. They say "you look like you are from India, your family must be from India". It does get a bit tiresome.
The only time it actually _really_ annoys me is when I have to fill out forms with ethnicity. There is never Asian-Caribbean, but always Black-Caribbean, so I always feel that I am never being represented.
Out of curiosity, what kind of forms ask for your ethnicity? Maybe it's because I'm living in Europe, but I've never been asked for that in my entire life, and if I would, I would find it very strange ..
It's very common in the U.S. It's ostensibly done to gather evidence of discrimination. Most government forms require it, and large employers are required to report the racial/ethnic makeup of their staff to the government, along with gender, past military service, and persons with disabilities. California recently added a requirement for VCs to ask the founders they fund their sexual orientation.
People have written entire books on the politics behind how the government comes up with the sometimes-illogical categories into which folks are divided.
In the US, governmental departments and large employers frequently ask for ethnicity on all sorts of forms to help the organization ensure that it is meeting its DEI goals.
I used to work with a carpenter from Trinidad. This was in the southern US, and at an employer where I was probably the only college educated person. I recall them as being very professional but able to socialize easily with everyone else, and they were also insanely good at chess.
Despite externally-incited ethnic conflict, Guyana was a comparatively post-tribal melting pot of cultures and social classes. e.g. kids stack-ranked nationally into peer-group schools around age 10, based on standardized test. Outside Guyana:
Are you from India?
West Indies | South America | Guyana
Where are your parents from?
A couple hundred years ago, my ancestors left India
Oh <disappointed>
[every time: wait, what if I had said yes? nevermind]
It has become so exhausting doing this dialogue tree with Indian folks - particularly true for the older population. it's their opener for small talk...
Allegedly, the Conservatives are against calling a winter election, as their largest cohort of voters (OAPs) are less likely to turn out to vote due to cold weather, darkness etc.
I moved to Maryland from the UK. I was shocked by the standard of the driving test. Literally just going around the block and doing a reverse bay parking. In fact whilst driving the instructor asked me what the speed limit was on two separate occasions and I answered incorrectly both times! Still passed somehow. This would probably be an immediate fail in the UK.
Also cameras. Not sure about other countries but UK as cameras for EVERYTHING. Speed cameras, average speed cameras, box junction cameras, bus lane cameras, smart motorway cameras, low traffic neighbourhood cameras. When I moved back to the UK from MD I got hit with about 3 tickets in the first few weeks. Definitely changes the way you drive.
Owning one of these cars I can tell you it's not worth the money. Drops out of hands free mode every few minutes.
The only way I'm paying a goddamn subscription for something like this is when it gets me from A to B without me needing to pay any attention beyond setting the destination and watching a movie.
I live in the US but disagree entirely. Works solid where I’m driving, rarely dropping out. I bet I get an average of 55min hands free per hour of interstate driving and it is very smooth. Would definitely pay monthly for the convenience, but so far it’s still free from purchase for me.
If it doesn't work, under the Consumer Rights Act you need to ask for your money back, paying for stuff that doesn't work encourages companies to half-arse things.
Everyone would rather pay $0/month rather than $18/month, but those aren't the choices actually being offered. Realistically it's either $x/month or $y upfront. Seeing tesla's track record of selling "full self driving" as an upfront charge, I prefer the subscription model more because it allows me to stop paying if the feature ends up being a dud.
Actually I think they're onto something, the company being required to get insurance [too] means they have more financial skin in the game. A crash when the car is being driven by the company's algorithm should be paid for by the company and not the driver. Same as if any other engineering defect causes an accident.
> Actually I think they're onto something, the company being required to get insurance [too] means they have more financial skin in the game.
No, a company that is liable has skin in the game, insurance mitigates rather than enhances that—its the whole point of insurance, swapping out risk for a fixed cost.
In the UK fixed speed cameras are actually painted bright yellow, for the sole purpose of making them more visible to drivers. The reason being is they are positioned in places where you want to force the traffic to slow down for specific safety reasons (merging of two lanes, exits etc). They are not meant to change the behaviour of drivers on the road as a whole.
Uptrace looks really pretty interesting. I particularly like the query language that you can use to query your distributed trace data. This is the biggest limitation I have found with jaeger, lots valuable data is stored in storage, but it's very hard to analyze in aggregate.
For example, a question I want to be able to answer with a query against the distributed trace data: show me the (mean, median) time between a parent http request and a child http request in the same trace tree. As far as I understand, this requires the query language to be able to group by trace id, then be able to identify parent/child relations.
Does the Uptrace query language allow you to do something like this?
So far my experience is that it is best to avoid trying to solve such problems with a query language and instead provide a much simpler UI to achieve the same. Solving such problems with SQL is tedious enough and learning another custom language is not fun / too much to ask from users.
Sometimes using a UI is not possible, for example, if you want to automate such checks. In that case, I would build a custom metric or two and would use that metric for monitoring purposes. That requires some programming / instrumentation, but it still looks like a better solution to me.
It seems to be a regular occurrence these days. I recently did a take home test for GitHub and got completely ghosted by the recruiter after submitting the test.
Here is a segment that The One Show did on the University in Sheffield one, for anyone who is interested in seeing it in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAjYAfb_HPk
We want to use Jaeger as a datasource and show traces in Grafana - its all a bit early right now, but come see us at KubeCon and we'll have something to show!
