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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • So, I kinda had this problem myself at one point a decade and a half ago, only it was booze and serviio.

    I ended up taking an old tower I had, installing Ubuntu on it with no Xwindows or GUI of any kind, set up ssh, and unplugged the monitor, keyboard, and mouse and accessed the Ubuntu box only from a putty session on my windows box.

    Then, when I wanted to do anything on the Linux box I’d ssh in and command line it. And Google and try again until I got it right.

    I turned it into a domain controller for the windows boxes (well, login server via ldap) and had an irc bouncer and a bot on it, among other things.

    All while still drinking and streaming video.

    I can’t say what the magic bullet will be for anyone else, but I was able to learn by removing my “crutches” until it just… Clicked for me. YMMV but don’t stop trying.



  • More like “sales teams are the reason middle managers think ALL employees slack off when not watched.”

    I get that sales is a SUPER depressing culture, a ridiculously antiquated work environment, and full of some utterly soul-sucking mandates from above, but I have never seen, in any workplace, a team that needs someone constantly riding herd on them like the sales team.

    Every place I’ve worked, every place that a place I’ve worked has had as a client, and every business I’ve ever visited had the same problem – sales people are largely unmotivated because their job has a much higher chance to SUCK OUT LOUD than most of the other jobs at a given company.

    When five figure quarterly bonuses, daily friendly team competitions for gift cards, more paid-for-by-the-company outings than the c suites get and pickle ball on company time twice a week aren’t enough to hype people up to do their actual job, something is really fucking wrong with the job expectations.


  • Some of it is about the "Why"s.

    Netflix nearly stamped out piracy for a while there by being a vastly more attractive alternative. Between them and Hulu, and to a lesser extent prime(at the time) if it was streaming, you could watch it somewhere at a reasonable price for a marginally reasonable viewing experience that was at least as good as most TPB downloads.

    Then the IP owners got greedier and decided to strike out on their own with the “everyone has a streaming service” model, which would be GREAT if they largely shared content, but they don’t.

    The greed continues, not in order to adequately compensate creators, but to make a few handfuls of people not just rich but filthy rich. Every action they take suddenly becomes more penny pinching for more greed. At this point lots of the CONTENT CREATORS wish they had a better choice (how often do they say ‘please watch it this way, that’s just how they rank stuff, sorry’?)

    Why is it the opposite with AI?

    Because in comparison with stuff like streaming video or music platforms, AI is BARELY pretending to offer a functional service in exchange for the greed that’s behind all of the money they’re trying to force it to make for them.

    And that’s just for one side of the debate.

    Why isn’t the fact that AI is largely garnering the same responses even from DIAMETRICALLY OPPOSED GROUPS telling you something about how bad of an idea it is in it’s current incarnation?





  • What in the actual fuck are you on about?

    They genuinely believe some random guy is god incarnate so they tormented him his entire life to try and get him to kill himself,

    Nothing in wicca allows any of that, so far as I’m aware.

    That’s SO far off base with what I understand of the basic tenets of wicca that it’d be like an humanist atheist vegan suddenly signing on to work as a halal butcher and then deciding animals aren’t enough, it’s time to butcher people instead.







  • This is also why there’s such a a prevalence of flashing warning banners, fake pseudobluescreens, and other scary shit disguised in chrome notifications.

    The notifications in chrome are as close to on by default as you can get and with the right code snippets you can make it look like the FBI locked down your workstation and you need to call them.

    Firefox should start hardening against this behavior now because popularity gets targeted even more specifically.

    Make it an end user safety feature.

    Force every notification to have

    “This is a notification from a website that you elected to receive by allowing notifications. You can disable these notifications here”

    with a link to the setting on the frame of of every one, no fullscreen allowed, no flashing, double-check and prohibit the words FBI, CIA, NSA, TSA, IRS, Social Security, Microsoft, etc.


  • I’ve clicked on ads “plenty of times” on purpose.

    Probably a half dozen a year at one point.

    There was a period of time where some sites I visited hit the sweet spot of only using advertisers that were moderately relevant to the content or to similar interests that people who would be perusing that content might have.

    If the ads are for things I might be interested in, I’ll click.

    It’s utterly shocking that with as much as most service providers and companies actually know about the average person that we’ve so thoroughly failed to target ads at people.

    Couple that with ads being an occasional attack vector because nobody properly vets shit anymore and it’s not worth it to whitelist most sites in my adblocker unless I’m REALLY interested in supporting them.

    I avoid YouTube and that sort of stuff like the plague unless I need to repair an appliance or a car or something, so outside of text ads, the only ads I regularly see anymore are the occasional totally irrelevant commercial on a streaming service.

    Once upon a time Hulu let you PICK what kind of ads you wanted to see, which was the tiniest of baby steps in the right direction.

    We had the potential to drill down, do the hard work, and provide relevant, interesting, and specific ads, and the corporate fuckis at the top chose greed.

    I almost feel bad for people who work in advertising.

    A few of them.

    Maybe.


  • What do you use now?

    I work in IT and between the Advent of “agile” methodologies meaning lots of documentation is out of date as soon as it’s approved for release and AI results more likely to be invented instead of regurgitated from forum posts, it’s getting progressively more difficult to find relevant answers to weird one-off questions than it used to be. This would be less of a problem if everything was open source and we could just look at the code but most of the vendors corporate America uses don’t ascribe to that set of values, because “Mah intellectual properties” and stuff.

    Couple that with tech sector cuts and outsourcing of vendor support and things are getting hairy in ways AI can’t do anything about.


  • Nope. Realistically speaking, in more than half of the cities that have some form of public transportation in the U.S., the public transportation is so inadequate that it’s not an alternative.

    At one point, a few years ago, to go from the northwest suburbs of minneapolis (maple grove/brooklyn park) to the north central suburbs of minneapolis (eden prairie/edina) by bus, on a weekday, it took 11 hours, a trip farther south into the city proper (spoke routes coming out from a central hub) and mutiple MILES of walking between stops. For a 20-ish mile trip.

    This is FAR from uncommon for anywhere with a bus system if you get anywhere outside the absolute center of the infrastructure. The spoke methodology meant you could get from the suburbs (and farther) to downtown and back just fine, but as soon as the busses stopped running every ten to fifteen minutes, you were looking at hours of switching routes and waiting to get from anywhere not central to anywhere else not central.

    That’s not an alternative to using a car, it’s a marginally available, occasionally usable, limited choice alternative to SOME walking, SOME of the time.

    Until there are 24 hour, regularly and frequently scheduled public transportation options going everywhere there are roads to, public transportation cannot be a viable alternative to all car use.

    I’d settle for it being a viable alternative to SOME car use, but much of the time, outside of a handful of MAJOR cities, it’s not.

    …and I took the bus in Minneapolis for years, despite having a car and a license. It makes sense when you live and work downtown, but that’s about it.

    The public transportation in most cities is only functional in the sense that the ignition works in the busses and they occasionally drive between a few points in a few areas.