Posts by TaabuTheCat 247 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Jul 2010
Notepad++ is one of the most *useful* tools I've worked with over the years. Powerful, fast editing (column mode FTW!), great search and replace, plug-in support, continuous save, remembering everything you had open the last time you closed it, and on and on. One of the first apps I install on a new machine, and I would gladly pay for it if it wasn't free. Congrats on turning 20!
Principles? She's heard of them. I'm actually surprised she survived even this mild level of criticism. Being a "yes man" (or woman) who pledges loyalty to these psychopaths is table stakes these days if you want to hold onto that sweet, sweet paycheck. Corrupt from the top down.
"the overnight staffing at the site did not include an experienced operations or electrical expert — the overnight shift consisted of security and an unaccompanied technician who had only been on the job for a week."
For what I assume is a Tier 4 DC hosting critical services? Flexential have some 'splaining to do.
"...its distributed nature and "fediverses" appear to represent a needless barrier " - Needless barrier? Hardly. Yes, it's not as simple as just logging into Twatter, but the whole point of Mastodon and the fediverse is to make sure another Twitter shitfest can never happen again. It's the very distributed nature of the fediverse that prevents any single person or entity from owning the platform, and ultimately hitting the enshitification phase that we're seeing now with all these monolithic, psycho-owned platforms. So maybe an additional barrier, but desperately needed.
And users in environments without the Microsoft Defense Budget to play whack-a-mole with MS every time an update adds something new to turn off? Hell, even knowing in a timely manner you need to get ready to turn something off is becoming a challenge. And that's for orgs that try to keep up with this stuff.
It's all backwards. We have to defend ourselves against these on-by-default "features" when they shouldn't be on by default to begin with. But then how are you going to boost the stock price if you can't claim BILLIONS of users are using CoPilot??
I can't tell you the number of times I've had two or three bars of signal, tried to use the browser and.... nothing. Look at the icon and it's 5G. Every. Damned. Time. On 4G if I have any signal at all pages load. Maybe slowly, but they load.
Please oh please phone makers give us a way to force the radio back to 4G. I'm so tired of marketing driving the experience in reverse.
I will leave you with this, by Naomi Klein, from an article very much worth reading:
"Because what we are witnessing is the wealthiest companies in history (Microsoft, Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon …) unilaterally seizing the sum total of human knowledge that exists in digital, scrapable form and walling it off inside proprietary products, many of which will take direct aim at the humans whose lifetime of labor trained the machines without giving permission or consent."
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/may/08/ai-machines-hallucinating-naomi-klein
I had the pleasure of meeting Bob at a conference may years ago. Walked up, said hi, started to chat and 30 minutes later the conversation was still going on with him telling stories about 3Com, USR, etc. Genuinely nice guy, not the least bit full of himself. Fair few people can claim an engineering achievement with such reach and longevity. Very happy to see him recognized.
If those coming in are complaining it's a "ghost town", here's a thought for you. Try practice-sharing one of the many empty desks with another one of the complainers. and do it right next to another pair of desk-sharing complainers, ad nauseam, until none of you have a single moment of peace. It will be good practice for what's coming.
I had a similar experience at my last gig - Teams pretty much working as advertised, with the occasional glitch now and then. I've moved on to an org that uses G-Suite so I'm stuck with Google Meet. All the things people complain about with Teams? Multiply them by about 100 and you have some idea how much fun it is to use Meet all day long. Audio issues, crap video, crap screenshare with progressive build so it takes 10 seconds to see anything readable on the screen if the presenter doesn't have a perfect connection, no remote control, stupid low paste limits in the chat window (~200 characters of text and no files of any sort), and on and on. It's horrible. Despite all the bitching about Teams, I'd go back to it in an instant.
Been doing the same - using Chat for basic questions about stuff. It's interesting to think about using it in this context: When I search for something on Google I don't want a list of links, I want an answer. Chat cuts out the middleman a gives me that. Now whether it's the right answer is the million-dollar question, but so far in testing I'm finding its accuracy with things I'd normally search for with Google is quite remarkable. As you mentioned, even when not 100% correct Chat provides a better starting point than a random algorithmically-biased list of links. Sundar is right to be very, very worried.
Not sure about the "never hold it forever" part. If I had bought Berkshire-Hathaway stock in the 70s and kept it "forever" - as in still owned it today - I don't think I'd have any complaints.
The crypto bros aren't worthy of the comparison, but the difference is Warren accumulates real assets with long-term value. Crypto bros? Get rich quick baby, and leave the suckers by the side of the road.
Having owned a Tesla for three years and been through many versions of FSD (and in all fairness, usually improving with each release), there is zero chance I'd ever be using FSD in a tunnel. Your options if something goes wrong are less than zero. I also encountered the phantom braking many times over those three years and learned to immediately hit the accelerator when it happens to tell FSD to get its head out of its ass. Still, it's very easy for someone behind you to think you're brake-checking them and I'm kind of surprised there haven't been more road rage incidents reported based on this behavior. I lived in Texas when I owned my Tesla. You can guess the popularity of being brake-checked.
The only way to know if ChatGPT is giving you the right answer is to know the right answer. But I agree it can be convincing and it's not just Stack Overflow where it's starting to make an appearance. Good news is, you can usually recognize it's Chat giving the answer because bloviation, and lazy people are just cutting/pasting entire "answers". I wonder if the word diarrhea is intentional - heard something about the eventual paid version being charged by the characters of output.
What a load of BS. The fastest part of the whole "TSA experience" (it's like a bad Disney ride) is getting your ID checked. And what about your boarding pass - are we scanning that too? This is guaranteed to cause even more misery at TSA checkpoints, so it's clearly about eliminating staff. Besides, I thought one of the supposed benefits of the ID check was forcing interaction with a human being who might spot nervousness, evasiveness, etc.
Is this how sales teams normally work?
Sadly, yes. So much of sales is just a numbers game - you get x number of leads from cold calls, you get x number of opportunities to quote from those calls, you get to x number of serious negotiations after you've quoted and then you get to actually close some percentage of those.
Honestly, some of the most successful sales people I've known get that way by doing massive numbers of contacts, with the full understanding you need to get through x number of "fuck offs" before you get to a "yes". The really good sales people also have a keen knack for not wasting time on those who will never buy from them, no matter how far along in the sales process they get. As one of my very successful sales buddies used to say, "No practice quoting."
I spent most of my career trying to keep all flavors of Windows up and running, dealing with dodgy patches, functionality that simply didn't work as advertised and the whims of Microsoft's UI team. A year ago I said enough of this and moved to a totally different role that has zero to do with Windows. I've got to admit that reading a story like this spikes my angst for just a moment, and then I remind myself this self-inflicted mess is now someone else's problem. The relief that brings is hard to put into words.
"Enterprise", "large-scale" - those words make we wonder again who the target customers will be after the acquisition. Would have been been really simple for him to throw in a one-liner that says the SMB market is still important to Broadcom, especially given all the angst. Sometimes it's what they don't say...
"... Windows running natively."
Just curious, do you not count Windows 11 (ARM version) running via Parallels "native", or are you looking for it to boot(camp) into Windows? 11 under Parallels actually runs decently on my lowly M1 mini for those times when I need Windows-only apps.
"They sit down and spend possibly days thinking about any ideas they might have, and I don't think anybody ever gets paid for that input. People will work far beyond any contractual requirements to make it work."
I fear those days are coming to an end. There seems to be so much animosity between workers and orgs these days that the "investment" one used to make in a company and its mission is disappearing. Not really that hard to understand when the "mission" now is only about the money, and who gets to keep it.
They got that part right. They'll be having relationships with you from the day you own it until the day you sell it. Gives new meaning to the dealer's "free lifetime lube jobs included" promo. You're going to need them.
I am absolutely torn by this one. As an oldster who spent my entire life in an office, with all the unproductive distractions, I have really enjoyed working from home the last two years and just getting things done. But having recently changed jobs and working the 3/2 schedule, I'm around a team of less experienced guys and can speak to the benefit of overhearing conversations about troubleshooting an issue, new designs, etc. that were just so wackadoo that the experienced me had to say something to get the juniors back on track. If I was full-time WFH I wouldn't hear those conversations and the team wouldn't benefit from my experience, so score one for being in the office. I also feel some payback is due for the mentoring I was lucky enough to receive when I started my career. Still, working from home was great, so color me conflicted.
One major difference. Florida can import power from other states. Texas being Texas (no commy Feds will regulate us!) has next to no import capability so when Texas has a generation problem like they did last winter, they are completely screwed. By choice, despite what the Governor would like you to believe (it was all ERCOT's fault).
What Elon is fighting for in the US is for providers like you to be able to join the energy market and trade along with all the other producers - at market rates. So when demand is high, you'll get paid accordingly. An extreme example is what happened in Texas last year during the freeze. Power that would normally sell for $40-$60 MwH was going for the ERCOT market cap - $9,999 MwH. Now that's an extreme example likely (hopefully) never to be repeated, but I've been watching spot prices this summer and seeing peak times where power is going for $400-$800MwH, so there's money to be made if you're allowed to participate in the market.
And that was my biggest surprise when I started trying to use Tesla's FSD - how poor it was (or choose not to) look far enough ahead to anticipate and react to what's coming. And that also explains why it drives like a 16-year-old. One of things I constantly had to remind my daughter when she was learning to drive was to look way beyond the car in front of you.
Diess simply couldn't ignore the fact that Toyota produces more cars each year that all of the Group, with HALF the employees. He pissed off the unions with the hard truth and was done. The problem won't go away. VW needs to address the disparity, with or without Diess.
According to Musk, employees only have about three years of good ideas and then they're an impediment to change. Lots of turnover? That's a feature, not a bug. So if people quit instead of going back to the office I suspect he really won't care. Just accelerates the search for new grist for the mill. Can't imagine working for a company that thinks so little of its employees.
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