Digital Ocean basically lets you run something called a droplet in the cloud. It’s a general purpose server more or less. Put nginx on it, start the server process, configure the DNS rules, and congrats you have a site that says hello world.

A droplet is similar to an EC2 on Amazon Web Services. I found DOCN to be cheaper than AWS when I hosted my site there. I was going to also suggest proton and DOCN might work for your use case. You get the redundancy and uptime without needing to use your own hardware, electricity, or bandwidth.

Similar trajectory for me, but I’m now being micromanaged on the daily. We got a new CIO recently who is micromanaging his direct reports and our culture has evaporated overnight. The shit is indeed rolling down hill and the writing is on the wall to leave. I know it’s not just me either. There will be an exodus when rates get cut and hiring picks up again. This place is fucked.

But that’s the key. If you can find something and lay low with minimal annoyance, hang onto that for as long as you can.

For me it’s the “Stop responding” button. Sometimes I’ll neglect something in my prompt, such as the fact that I’m stuck on ES5 javascript in my job (ServiceNow). It’ll spit out ES6+ with let declarations or something like that, and I have to go back and qualify my limitations. So I click stop responding. What used to happen was that it would stop and allow for additional prompting. Now it’s just like a client side trick. It hides the output but the server is still returning shit in the background, so if I try to re-prompt or add context it finishes what it was originally saying first, then tacks the new answer onto the old one without pause, separation, or human readable formatting that would indicate that there is a new output. It’s an awful experience.

I’ve been using perplexity.ai but my company thinks its agreements will stop Microsoft from training their AIs on our proprietary data, so I have to be more careful with perplexity than Copilot.

Chuck Palahniuk leaking into my writing like the carrot out of the protagonist’s ass in Guts.

Lmao my job announced layoffs a few months back. They continue to parade their corporate restructuring plan in front of us like we give a fuck if shareholders make money. My output has dropped significantly as I search for another role. Whatever code I do write now is always just copy pasted from AI (which is getting harder to use…fuck you Copilot). I give zero fucks about this place anymore. Maybe if people had some small semblance of investment in their company’s success (i.e.: not milked by shareholders and beaten to dust by shitty profit driven metrics that take away from the core business), the employees might give enough fucks to not copy paste shitty third party code.

Additionally, this is a training issue. Don’t offload the training of your people onto the universities (which then trap the students into an insurmountable debt load leading them to take jobs they otherwise wouldn’t want to take just to eat and have a roof over their heads). The modern corporate landscape has created a perfect shitstorm of disincentives for genuine effort and diligence. Then you expect us to give a shit about your company even though the days of 40 years and a pension are now gone. We’re stuck with 401k plans and social security and the luck of the draw as to whether we can retire or not. Work your whole life for what? Fuck you. I’m gonna generate that AI code and enjoy my 30s and 40s.

A workforce trapped by debt, forced to prioritize job security and paycheck size over passion or purpose. People end up in roles they don’t care about, working for companies they have no investment in, simply to keep up with loan payments and the ever increasing cost of living.

“Why is my organization falling apart!?” Fucking look up from the stupid fucking metrics that don’t actually tell you anything you dumb fucks. Make an actual human decision and fix the wealth inequality. It’s literally always wealth inequality.