technofiend

The last thing I did yesterday before leaving for the day was make my employee open a change record for the weekend. Why? Because between in-person and virtual interruptions I literally could not get my work done. Tomorrow, I'll make my employer pay CBRE hundreds of dollars for off-hour cooling so I can sit (hopefully) undisturbed and finish.

Nobody is winning in this scenario; I'm losing weekend time to play catch-up, my employer is spending money on AC that could have been saved if people took "no meeting Fridays" seriously, and "no meetings" needs to include teams, symphony, slack, whatever. Like having an office would be grand, but having solid time to concentrate and work is the real issue.

I wish I knew what you're doing to make to make it work.

I recently discovered that my jetkvm won't work on chrome, firefox or safari in macos, even after trying various workarounds to enable webrtc. The fix was to boot up Fedora in parallels and use Firefox there. In fact I'm thinking about shifting all my browsing to that combination just for further isolation.

Explicitly banned by policy at my employer. Possibly due to concerns around data leaks, possibly due to not wanting to create a haves / have not situation. Policy is always enforced but rarely explained.

A childhood favorite and warm, nostalgic memory as an adult. A good friend of mine and I taped a spoof of Copacabana by Barry Manilow and got a really lovely letter back from the good doctor saying he'd done his best but couldn't play our tape. My friend had gotten a tape splicing kit from Radio Shack and insisted we cut the tape down to just our demo. Somehow we botched it and sent Dr. Demento a blank tape. He said he repaired our splice job and even tried flipping the tape in case we'd done the same by accident. Which was a really kind and probably time consuming gesture for a random tape sent in by two fifth graders. The man is a gem.

The only lyrics I remember from our spoof are how it starts: Her name was Lola, she was a show bot, but that was many years ago, when her neon used to glow. Oh well. Time to download an MP3 or two and subject my wife to Fish heads and I'm looking over my dead dog Rover.

Mike Myers put into words what I'd been thinking since watching Star Trek, where every outdoor scene on an "alien planet" looked similar: "You know what's remarkable? Is how much England looks in no way like Southern California." - Just my way of agreeing with you.

Depends on whether you mean damaged or destroyed. Ukraine reports 41 damaged, 12 destroyed.

"Duty to the shareholders": if you aren't the CEO growing revenue quarter over quarter, then your mostly stock compensation is worthless and the board is interviewing replacements.

Absolutely! I plan to buy a mini split, and efficiency is the biggest driver after properly sizing the unit for my space. Energy costs add up when you live where your air conditioner can run non-stop for months at a time.

They also rotate their points system making what seem like contradictory choices when the system changes every couple of years. In contrast taking Wegovy simply shut down any desire to snack and drastically reduced the desire for all but the smallest portions. You don't have to think about or apply a system: your body will do it for you.

You still need to establish good habits of eating sensibly and maybe that's the narrow wedge for Weight watchers now, but the blunt instrument is the medicine, not the process. WW needs to go back to teaching people to eat well.

Particularly after Citizens United, money has squelched voter influence in favor of a few large donors. People don't seem to realize however imperfect the choices are, actively voting against this agenda instead of giving up and hoping it'll somehow work out will fail.

You spin off a company with all those obligations and pay it a pittance to take them on as supposed assets, soon after it declares bankruptcy. Now your new megacorp is free of all those pesky contracts.

Oh man NYC taxis. I swore them off after one too many "Oh the cardreader is broken" lines. I just explain I'm traveling for work and my company card is they only way they'll get paid et voila the card reader is magically working again! Whereas not only do Uber and Lyft only take digital payment, but both offer direct integration into my corporate expense system. Bring on the robo taxis: one less scammer in the loop.

This is exactly what Comcast does with their Xfinity service if you use one of their devices.

You really want 6e or 7 these days so you can shift to 6GHz. There are many more channels available, adoption is limited so there's less congestion and the signal attenuates more quickly and has higher free-space path loss as well. Sounds like you may already know all that but for anyone thinking about investing in an upgrade, the reasons listed above are why you'd want to invest in the latest tech.

A mac mini is cheap if it's worth in investing in a platform to buy an app ala buying an Apple II to run Visicalc.

Isn't that what a DMCA takedown is for?

My gaming PC has four NVME slots. Currently it hosts Windows 10 and Fedora, but since a new update was released it's also about to host SteamOS. When W 10 support ends later this year, I'll use Windows 11 ARM in a VM on my MacBook and that'll be that.

The only thing I really needed Windows for was gaming, tax preparation and running Scrivener. You can get native versions of Taxcut and Scrivener for MacOS and SteamOS is good enough for me 99% of the time. If I really must play something that's Windows-only there's always GeForce Now which has the added benefit of only tying a Windows instance to my Steam account and no other online identities.

Sayonara, Windows.

That's been my experience: it's good at basic tasks. It can be prompted to write idiomatic code in very small amounts. Anything beyond that and it's just as likely to either write non-optimal code or silently delete code while trying to satisfy your ask.

I agree the need for troubleshooting can be born from poor decisions, but it's still a marketable skill for places that need it at scale. One of my roles was head of Linux Engineering for a Fortune 50. Sure there's the pets vs cattle thing and we all prefer cattle, but particularly in places with lots of legacy apps and infrastructure there are plenty of both that need more nuance than turning it off and back on again.

There's value in fixing things in the moment and then feeding them back to your engineer and architecture functions to address endemic issues so that everyone benefits.

I hear you: would love to see a RISC-V-based system without all the downsides to using ARM. Perhaps in another 3-5 years we'll see performance parity and it'll be viable. If we get close it certainly seems like we'll see a laptop from Framework using such a chip.

I have a friend who spent a few years skydiving. He thinks he's a fantastic driver but well let's just say opinions vary. He will happily speed on the freeway and dive between cars like a maniac. What's funny is his pre and post attitude towards seatbelts after skydiving. He's now all about safety equipment and using it every time, probably because a backup chute saved his life. Even so, he's a skeptic about Automatic Activation Devices (AADs) since they came after his time. It's funny how being personally impacted changes your attitude, and then the next safety device comes along and people are back to not trusting it.

Legislation was tightened after the S & L crisis and at least according to Investopedia was the itself was due in part to lax oversight:

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/sl-crisis.asp

*What Could Regulators Have Done Better to Solve the Savings and Loan Crisis?*

"Regulators failed to stop savings and loans from using federally insured deposits to make risky loans. Reagan also cut the budget of the regulatory staff at the FHLBB, removing its ability to investigate high-risk loans. Certain states also passed laws that allowed savings and loans to invest in speculative real estate."

Remains to be see if the current administration's views on oversight and regulation allow a repeat.

Yes, exactly.

Do you mean Chip the Wolf is actually a human who wears a wolf costume? Because he looks like a cartoon character to me, so he doesn't qualify as a "furry" in my mind.

Not sure how mainstream furries are. Sure, they have conventions and whatnot but do you expect to see one on a box of cereal anytime soon? Probably not.

I bought a cheap Blu Ray burner from Microcenter for less than $50. Flashed with an image I found online and it rips DVDs and Blu-rays no problem. I did all that because I'm in the same boat you are: I have a ton of media and it's too much trouble to dig it out and move it around when my wife wants to watch something.

Will there really be a mac mini wirh Max or Ultra CPUs? This feels like somewhat of an overlap with the Mac Studio.

It's a portmanteau but we call all the little sort of Starbucks "fauxbucks". You know the ones in gas stations, Target stores, etc.

>I sincerely doubt most people who are in the workforce have ever handled a 40 person raid.

Managing 25+ people across multiple time zones ends up overlapping quite a bit with raids! Particularly the need to stay calm when things inevitably wobble a bit, dispute resolution, clear, concise and often repeated communication as well as a mental model of what everyone else understands about the situation and being able to quickly deduce what they don't understand and correct it.

I'm not refuting what you said; I'm agreeing with your implication they'd benefit from the experience.