Ah, I forgot about that one. Definitely better.

In the beginning the Universe was created. This had made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.

I wish I could have more hope that Android will ever decouple itself enough from Google to be useful/practical as free software. Unfortunately, it looks like it’ll end up going the other way, and freedom-respecting Android ROMs will likely be niche and only supported on a narrow range of hardware.

I imagine the Linux phone has better long-term potential, as it’s not tied to a proprietary ecosystem.

Canadian/American. The counterpart here is unemployment insurance, which your company has to pay if you’re laid off until you get another job.

To be fair, it’s not terribly engaging (compared to the other games in the series). But if you’re into dungeon crawls, it’s fun.

What country are you in? I’m not aware of any with any legally mandated notice time (mine is explicitly opposite–employment is “at-will”)

I’ve been working at the same place for over a decade, had the same boss for many years. I respect him, so I’ll give him at least two weeks when I leave. But if he leaves before me, I’ll be giving no notice at all.

My company has experienced a lot of enshittification over the last decade. In the last few years, the company has begun firing people with no notice. That is, you get a meeting notice for a one-on-one with your supervisor (which is a common enough thing), and security is there to walk you out. Someone else is sent to your desk to get your shit for you. Do not pass go, do not collect $200. Want to say goodbye to your coworkers? Fuck you.

In the last round of firings, they gathered a hundred or so people in the training center and told them there that they were all fired. Because apparently we’re cattle or something.

So yeah, if my boss leaves before I do, I’ll be following company policy and give my two-seconds notice with my laptop and badge on a Friday around lunch time.

I live near a river that has a lot of freighters that go through it. Boat watching is pretty common here. And there are a handful of people who watch for the different trucks that go over the bridge there (literally thousands go over every day).

The game would attempt to render the thousands of corpses all at once, which presumably would overload the game engine and cause it to crash.

I picked up Icewind Dale again. It’s one of my comfort games, along with several of the other Infinity Engine games. Still holds up.

Can confirm, I have an EQ12 I’m using as an HTPC. Performance is great and sound is minimal (aside from coming out of suspend, the fans fire up for a moment).

I see Google is amply funding their fun-ruiner division.

• Low coupling, high cohesion
• Sometimes it’s better to use a less optimized solution for clarity or simplicity
• A simple solution is usually better than a “clever” one
• Allot time for refactoring during development, don’t assume it will be done later (spoiler: it won’t)

Tuxedo

If only I could remove OneDrive… IT expects us to use it for everything.

When I was getting a PC upgrade, I explicitly told them that I had already handled backing everything up (as they repeatedly said I needed to do). Most of my projects are synced with our version control, so I have a projects folder with a few hundred GB in it that I didn’t need to explicitly transfer to my new PC (I would check out projects as I needed them). I wrote in the ticket that they didn’t need to transfer any files, I had already handled it. And I told the IT person who took my old PC. They said my new PC would be ready the next morning.

Lo and behold, it wasn’t. I called and asked, they said they were still working on it. The following day, I went to pick it up and the IT person explained that it took so long because they had to transfer over hundreds of GB of files. And they reminded me that if I had been using OneDrive, I could have had it a day sooner.

You know, because they had to copy over my files. That were already in version control. A system they admin. And that I told them about like 5 times. After they said they wouldn’t be responsible for file transfers.

Ah well, guess I got paid for their ineptitude. I wish this was the worst they’ve done, though.

• waiting 20 minutes for your PC to boot all the corporate bloatware before it’s usable
• quarterly 4-hour-long all-department meeting that could have been an email
• “incorporating” the latest tech buzzword into your process because that one manager has nothing better to do
• “celebrating” things like Company Culture Week™ and other BS stuff imagined up by people with nothing better to do

As the other commenter mentioned, it will always go that way for profit.

With social media, the users aren’t the customers–the advertisers (and whoever is buying the data) are. Social media platforms often start out with a focus on the users, because they can’t be profitable without a large user base. But once that point is reached, everything is subject to the will of the customers. At that point, your experience doesn’t matter anymore. And it will always go this way.

There are a handful of ways to avoid this trend. One way is to ensure there is always a breadth of competition–that way, providers have to focus on a good user experience, otherwise their users will switch to a competitor. But this is nearly impossible with social media, because it’s non-trivial to “move” to another service.

Another way is to remove the profit motive. But the challenge then is finding some way to fund and build something like a social media platform. The Fediverse does this by distributing the cost and work among thousands of volunteers. In theory, a non-profit organization could do something similar, if they could secure funding, but even those are subject to shittifying themselves (see recent developments with Mozilla).

The distributed model has its challenges–one of the big ones is resisting those who would try to take the space and exploit it for those profits (for example, read about XMPP and Google Chat, and the “embrace, expand, extinguish” strategy). But it seems to have a very good chance to avoid those pitfalls–largely because running your own instance of these services is relatively accessible to many.

Most used? Probably…

• ls
• cd
• nano
• cat
• ssh
• ping
• grep

Favourite? Probably one of…

• yt-dlp_linux (for getting… stuff…)
• ffmpeg (for modifying a/v files)
• rsync (for pushing files to my media server)

I’m fortunate enough to not have anyone that close to me become part of the cult. Those who have, I’ve just stopped reaching out. Though that may not be an option for you in this case.

The best advice I can offer is to try to understand what a cult is, and how to work with that situation. A cult like MAGA is inherently irrational, so trying to win people over with rational arguments doesn’t work. Here’s one resource for how to talk with people like this.

Ah, that makes sense. I’m from Utica.