The credit agencies just exist, I have no choice but to deal with them if I don't want to live like Ted Kaczynski. In fact, I wager that the credit reporting agencies and there relentless scheming to use non-financial information in all-too-opaque credit scoring systems actually ends up raising borrowing costs for most people by adding some margin of "risk" to the credit scores unrelated to their historical performance as borrowers. Not only due I not trust them, I think they're actively engaged in ways to create premiums for lenders that no good credit use can erase.
The medical industry? Who trusts them? At best they want to keep me alive on maintenance doses of an entire pharmacy's worth of drugs since a maintained illness is worth more than a cure. The medical insurance people are constantly looking for ways to not pay off on insurance claims. The doctors may be the most well-intentioned of this lot, but they're not above engaging in their own shenanigans -- adding in an "out of network" partner to a medical procedure without your knowledge so you can get a full-rate bill your insurance won't pay (don't worry, they'll negotiate down but it'll still be thousands which will offset the discount they were forced to eat from your insurer). I literally laugh at the nurse entering information for my physical when she asks if I use any illegal drugs -- does anyone actually say "Yes, I do!" when that information gets plugged into the computer? I even took the doctor to task for even bothering with that question -- what a waste of time.
As for the banks, again, see "not living like Ted Kaczynski." I bank with credit unions, but there's only so much you can do if you want to participate in the economy.
No offense, but you're one of the Slashdot types who:
1) Values "control" over their device more than ease of use, performance or other utility markers other people like. You devalue a smartphone because of vendor practices designed to limit how you use the device.
2) Price matters to you in spite of "making a good income" which presumably means sufficient disposable income that a high-cost smartphone isn't sacrificing your other economic choices.
3) You see buying recent model smartphones as a moral flaw, that someone who buys them is indulging in status signaling and other similar kinds of flaunting behavior.
Individually, if these are your personal values I don't think there's anything wrong with them. #3 I might be somewhat critical of, since it requires you to negate other people's utility values in their smartphone choices -- they may actually think that some feature or other makes it worthwhile and thus flaunting/status may not actually be a conscious decision on their part.
Although it may actually be in some places a current smartphone is a beneficial status marker. I can see at least business situations where you may want to signal some kind of current-model smartphone status to people who may see it as a signal of sophistication in marketing or social media.
For me, I owned all the Apple smartphones from 3G to 6 Plus because they actually were better (speed, features) from model to model. I also passed my year-old ones to my wife and her 2 year old ones went to my kid and/or for me to use in testing email connectivity, so they got 3 years of use out of them. I stopped this at 6 Plus because it stayed reasonably fast, my wife got a new phone out of cycle due problems with hers. I would still be using the 6 Plus if the battery hadn't quit and I don't see that any new feature my 8 Plus (FaceID, etc) was worth the premium for the X.
Control hasn't ever been an issue for me. I think there are some dumb decisions made that restrict certain use cases, but they're not show stoppers because the phone does what I want it to well enough that it doesn't matter. That I can't run a Perl interpreter, sideload software or other stuff makes no difference to me.
Price is an annoyance, but I'm willing to accept what I paid for it with a 3-ish year use out of it, plus I bought it direct from Apple so it is unlocked and I can use alternate SIMs without an issue overseas.
Well at least you were a legitimate crime victim, I was just trying to beat the system. I legitimately didn't have the stickers on the car, although I had bought them before mine expired. I was just hoping my material proof of purchase was enough evidence to convince the referee the cop made a mistake.
I think they just give the cops every benefit of the doubt, but I was kind of hoping that the referee would at least see I had been in keeping with the spirit of the law (buying the new stickers before the old ones actually expired) and cut me some slack.
I stuck with my dishonest "he must have made a mistake" argument, though, and I'm guessing she just called me on my bullshit. Maybe if I had been honest and admitted I had forgotten to put them on she would have cut the fine even more or waived it but the best I got was a small reduction and the offer to forward the complaint to the city attorney for a trial.
In retrospect, maybe I should have done that with the idea that the city attorney would have dropped the citation, knowing it would have required the cop to attend court to testify and that it was a waste of their time to fight a citation. But it's a suburban city and maybe that's exactly the kind of case they stick with, plus the cop gets paid for showing up to court.
Either way, I was happy enough to take the reduced fine and no more BS than to potentially risk even more of my time, have to commit perjury(!) and potentially pay the full fine.
Education in the US is a train wreck for many reasons, but funding is a major one, and funding based on property taxes is a big part of it. Fund K-12 at the state level and eliminate the property funding mechanism completely. This equalizes funding per student between districts and ends the gross disparities enabled by richer suburbs being able to pay higher property taxes.
Higher education needs help, too. One, it needs to go on a diet. It's costs have outstripped inflation because they can jack up costs without much limit because attendees will just borrow more.
To fix that, I would propose that the Federal government underwrite all tuition as a loan to students. Payments would be amortized over 30 years, half paid by an employer-paid payroll tax and sliding scale tax paid by employees. In some cases, low paid employees wouldn't fully make their amortized payments but the obligation would follow them until age 65, when it would eliminated.
The goal would be to shift education funding burdens onto employers. They get a free ride on escalating education requirements to ridiculous and unnecessary levels now, and this would cause them to decide whether a position actually required an advanced degree or even any degree at all vs. some form of cheaper and more specific internal vocational training.
Employees would share half the burden, so they don't get off easily but because their portion is tied to their earning power, hyped degrees that don't really have any earning power wouldn't punish them nor would inflated education costs. But they keep paying for it until 65 (or the debt is settled), so they have some reason to choose cheaper schools or education paths.
You'd probably have to cap how much the government would guarantee to control costs, but this would just help cap tuition and increases, inhibit "never ending college" and so forth.
Economists don't want to take the good-new side of this issue because the last few times they gave the thumbs up and the good news about macroeconomic shifts, entire towns got hollowed out when their jobs went overseas and we got stories about how 50 year old factory workers would be re-training to deploy Juniper border routers and writing software and everything would be OK.
Instead, we got opioid epidemics, mass unemployment and regional economic destruction and employers bulk imported workers from overseas to deploy routers and write software. The overwhelming majority didn't relocate to Silicon Valley, buy skinny jeans and write software in open office plans.
Yes, the economists were able to back to their covens and cauldrons and return with all the evidence about how much better we all were collectively -- and it's probably true. But we're also left with economic gains that mostly went to major owners of capital and sociological toxic waste dumps that capital owners didn't want to clean up.
Economists love to trumpet collective gains from macroeconomic shifts but treat the displaced as just mere externalities rather than real people. It's high time they were more than just cheerleaders for the policies of the capital class, no matter how successful they might be when averaged over an entire population.
No lie, I bought the new sticker and forgot to put it on (I think it was pouring rain when I bought the sticker, otherwise I do it in the city hall parking lot).
A month later I get a ticket for expired tabs parked in a city-owned lot. I tried to fight it -- I had the registration date-stamped by the registrar with the tabs bought before expiration, and I claimed the tabs were on the car. Since I didn't get tagged in person, I thought it was worth a try.
The "referee" who handles these things wasn't buying it, although she did cut the fine to $100. I could have taken it to actual trial -- this was 10 years ago and I don't think the cops actually had photographic evidence then, although I'd be worried now, but $100 wasn't worth *another* day screwing around with the legal system.
I'm curious how their audience finds them? If you setup a pirate radio station, do you always use a specific frequency even if you're forced to abandon your transmitter or gets seized?
Is the transmission equipment so cheap that pirate stations essentially don't care if it gets seized? They're probably more worried about finding another choice rooftop location with power than the transmitter itself?
How do they manage backhaul? My guess is that you would have the "studio" and the transmitter at different locations.
Guy was hired for a networking-related position, "worked" for the better part of the week before the termination/resignation on a Friday. The party line was he had started, been given some small-scale assignments which got botched badly, and then went radio silent for 2 days before resigning via email when they were trying to get ahold of him to fire him.
My interpretation was that the position was talked up as "networking" (switching, firewall, some small-scale routing) during job interviews. When the guy was hired, the supervisor was so busy doing billable work the guy had no actual work to do and was just slammed into small-client crises (which are the worst, since the small clients operate as semi-broken on a good day, and little substantial documentation exists).
I think the guy genuinely screwed up, but for reasons that are beyond his control and just decided that he wasn't going to take ownership of a 10 gallon bucket of shit beyond redemption. Some of these clients *are* badly broken but because the checks keep rolling in, nobody is willing to dump the clients as huge risks or call them to heel for their own good.
Generally speaking I think there are a lot of small businesses like this that operate at the margins of sanity and organization. If you've worked there long enough and/or are lucky when you're hired, it has the aura of organization. But if you walk in the door on the wrong week, it's like an asylum run by the lunatics. The owners/principals live "the vision", perhaps by necessity, but its often quite disconnected from reality. Trouble is, they sell the vision to new employees, and not the reality because no one would take the job for the reality.
We had a high level manager hired with a similar outcome. It went on for months with him, though. There was no ghosting, but he basically kept holding management to the job description until they canned him for being ineffective because he was basically doing "the job" and not what they wanted him too (which was all the shit work a principal didn't want to do, minus the management authority the principal didn't want to give up).
IMHO, the big picture lesson is to get a written description of day to day job responsibilities and activities, not just an HR job title/description, in the written offer letter. Any company that refuses to do this is either badly managed and looking for triage or outright lying about the position. If the work assignments deviate greatly from the work description, you've got a leg to stand on.
My gripe is that all this near-quantum physics in timekeeping doesn't really seem to be about fundamental economics, only about who or how gets to benefit from increasingly high speed trading. Too much of modern finance seems to be about how to manipulate the financial market itself to obtain profits vs. the actual fundamentals of business economics, i.e. the productivity of a given firm.
I guess I'm not that worried about off-shore dark pools. The US and its dollar remain a major force in world economics not just because of the US domestic economy and in spite of the occasionally ugly behavior of the US government. Why? Because the US regulatory and legal system is mostly fair and mostly transparent, and it's judgements and rules are backed by the full force of the United States.
No other nation can provide this and ultimately most capital will not choose to operate in an environment where the fairness and enforcement of contracts isn't guaranteed.
I think part of the problem is that the "that's not AI" camp uses human-like intelligence as the normative standard for what "AI" should be, without considering whether there might be other models of intelligence that aren't human like.
I think it's possible that we might create an unusually powerful AI and not realize it because we're stuck in a paradigm that says it has to mimic human behaviors and thought patterns.
It's almost a kind of cultural bias, like assuming a society has to be organized like ours when the world itself suggests that there are many kinds of social organizations using varying levels of technology.
We know about "foreign" civilizations because we have a lot of information about them, but if you'd had zero knowledge of anything but present-day western civilizations could you even imagine an African tribal village or a nomadic Arab one? And if someone suggested using camels and tents to travel around the desert as a method of social organization, would you even believe it was possible?
when they could just use what literally every other company does and contribute their ideas back to the whole to improve them?
Last I remember, technology is a competitive business, not a hippie co-op. Once you're dependent on someone else's products they suck the life out of you like the mafia.
I've never understood why if RDP can do panning and downscaling why those features aren't part of the basic UI/screen resolution.
Plenty of times I've defined RDP sessions with a remote desktop larger in resolution than my physical screen but scaled down. Much of the time it's useful, even if for monitoring or reference purposes.
The stupidity of modern UIs really is a problem, especially web ones and their pointlessly excess whitespace.
I'm actually kind of puzzled why this isn't an obvious display adapter/driver feature. It seems like presenting Windows with 4 virtual monitors shouldn't be that big a deal because each one just represents a slice of a larger memory buffer and I'd wager there's some kind of MMU on the graphics card that could manage virtualizing a virtual display's space without a problem.
It used to be a feature back in the old days of going the other way around -- telling Windows your monitor was much *bigger* than it really was and having a 1600x1200 desktop when you could only physically display 1024x768 or something.
I guess it could also be a monitor feature, since I think at least DisplayPort can daisy chain displays, but it would be less flexible and annoying to setup than a GUI configuration and I don't know that HDMI has that kind of pass-thru feature.
Display splitting is the feature we need for 4k displays.
I have a 43" 4k display (which is basically the display size where 4k has a useful native dot pitch) and while that much screen real estate is useful for some visual applications (drawing, etc), most of the time it's not efficient for single windows. Manual sizing and moving is a nuisance.
I use "Display Fusion" which can do basic monitor splitting (so zoom/minimize, etc) treat split regions as separate displays. But things that want to go "full screen" (like web video) still go full physical screen.
It'd be nice to have Windows itself split the displays, perhaps using the existing multi-monitor interface so that Windows itself treated unique display regions as if they were distinct physical monitors to override the "full screen" behavior of other apps.
It might also be that the real place to do this is in the display driver -- split your display up in that, and then it presents Windows with your logical displays as if they were actually physical displays, but I haven't seen that ability in a display driver.
It's been an official Windows 10 feature since its release and I think there was a MS PowerToy for it going back maybe as far as XP and who knows how many third party implementations.
I've used all of them from time to time, but I always wonder why people find it so compelling. I kind of find myself with a blended set of virtual desktops over a period of time, losing whatever logical distinction I made between them originally.
Most malware doesn't immediately destroy your computer, it cripples it over days or weeks. I can't tell you the number of people who told me "Yeah, I noticed something last week and it's been flaky since then."
Meanwhile, you've been syncing your infection up to the cloud the whole time so now your cloud storage is infected, too. You may get some of it back, but I've also seen people just re-infect themselves, too.
Some cloud storage often at higher tiers will offer some kind of versioning and let you restore pre-infected files, but for most people this isn't the default or isn't even a feature they have.
The only way cloud sync really works as a backup is if you have a spare computer you only bring online periodically that syncs itself and that you then take offline again, but now all you've done is add a complex network transaction to what amounts to a local backup.
Why wouldn't people accept water in an aluminum can? Is it just that most people are stupid? I mean, people drink tons of beverages in aluminum, especially beer and soda, but also energy drinks, and even wine lately. Hell, in some disaster scenarios Budweiser has switched their canning lines to just can water.
I'm kind of curious what the economics are of aluminum versus plastic bottles. Most convenience-type stores have plastic bottles of soda in 16 or 20 oz sizes, but I've seen a few places with "tall boy" 16 oz aluminum cans and have always wondered why they're not more common.
My guess is plastic is cheaper than aluminum, but given the sheer volume of aluminum can usage I'd wager it's not that much cheaper.
I love single stream, I don't care how inefficient it is. I follow the recycling guidelines closely. Everything that is recyclable per our regulations get recycled.
With pre-sort, I only bothered with the newspapers and aluminum because my kitchen didn't have enough room for 4-5 separate bins for different kinds of containers, and I didn't generate enough glass for it to be worth it.
What I don't get is, why don't we have more packaging regulations? Why can't we get rid of all plastic bottles and make beverage makers use aluminum or glass exclusively? Aluminum seems superior in every way, even to glass -- non-breakable, there's only one kind, easy to recycle, both light *and* it blocks light.
We just had a story where airlines could save "big. big, money, huge money" using satellite comms to reroute planes. How the fuck are they supposed to get the satellites up there if they can't launch them on rockets?
Once that sat net is up, airlines will just route around the rocket plume like a road closure.
Is the idea that flight routes aren't already optimally planned? That existing weather systems that might impact a specific flight aren't built into the flight plan, with fine adjustments made by pilots to alter course based on actual flight path conditions?
The summary makes it sound like planes aren't already flying the shortest possible path already. I mean, airspace over the open ocean is pretty goddamn empty, it's not like they're trying to avoid a jam-up on the 405.
How many hundreds of times have YOU personally made the decision to fill your vehicle with fuel?
1500 times I think, but it's kind of squishy because there were those years where I didn't have a car, the years with only a motorcycle, but then there are those years where I may have done it more than once a week, long road trips, and then there's the boat, but "fill your vehicle with fuel" is an operation which takes on around 125 gallons at a fill, which is about 9x what my car takes.
There was an op-ed in the local paper yesterday written by a former cop and police chief that said pretty much this.
It was in response to the city aborting a police sting operation that was busting small time pot dealers (some as low as 1-2 grams) selling on the street downtown.
It turned out that they only busted black people, but the apparent 100% racism isn't entirely clear since the chief *and* the downtown precinct commander are both black and at least one (if not both) of them would have approved of the sting program and known of the outcomes.
I work with people who proudly complain about "working until 2 am" or willingly take on all kinds of client work at ridiculous times because it burnishes their reputation.
Some after hours work is unavoidable in IT, but I just refuse to work those kinds of hours regularly without added compensation of some kind (added vacation days without strings and/or more money).
As a more skilled/experienced/older worker, I think I can get away with it but I'm not gonna lie, the people who do it seem to have more street cred in the organization because they are willing to bend over.
I think it's highly organization dependent and sometimes individually dependent (ie, can you get done what needs doing in normal work hours). And I think there are definitely orgs where if you're not doing that, you might as well resign now because you will get shuffled to the shit work.
Could you do this if you somehow flipped around the CPU trends? What if instead of two-socket servers with 16 cores per socket, we had 8 sockets with 4 cores per socket?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't trust any of them by choice.
The credit agencies just exist, I have no choice but to deal with them if I don't want to live like Ted Kaczynski. In fact, I wager that the credit reporting agencies and there relentless scheming to use non-financial information in all-too-opaque credit scoring systems actually ends up raising borrowing costs for most people by adding some margin of "risk" to the credit scores unrelated to their historical performance as borrowers. Not only due I not trust them, I think they're actively engaged in ways to create premiums for lenders that no good credit use can erase.
The medical industry? Who trusts them? At best they want to keep me alive on maintenance doses of an entire pharmacy's worth of drugs since a maintained illness is worth more than a cure. The medical insurance people are constantly looking for ways to not pay off on insurance claims. The doctors may be the most well-intentioned of this lot, but they're not above engaging in their own shenanigans -- adding in an "out of network" partner to a medical procedure without your knowledge so you can get a full-rate bill your insurance won't pay (don't worry, they'll negotiate down but it'll still be thousands which will offset the discount they were forced to eat from your insurer). I literally laugh at the nurse entering information for my physical when she asks if I use any illegal drugs -- does anyone actually say "Yes, I do!" when that information gets plugged into the computer? I even took the doctor to task for even bothering with that question -- what a waste of time.
As for the banks, again, see "not living like Ted Kaczynski." I bank with credit unions, but there's only so much you can do if you want to participate in the economy.
No offense, but you're one of the Slashdot types who:
1) Values "control" over their device more than ease of use, performance or other utility markers other people like. You devalue a smartphone because of vendor practices designed to limit how you use the device.
2) Price matters to you in spite of "making a good income" which presumably means sufficient disposable income that a high-cost smartphone isn't sacrificing your other economic choices.
3) You see buying recent model smartphones as a moral flaw, that someone who buys them is indulging in status signaling and other similar kinds of flaunting behavior.
Individually, if these are your personal values I don't think there's anything wrong with them. #3 I might be somewhat critical of, since it requires you to negate other people's utility values in their smartphone choices -- they may actually think that some feature or other makes it worthwhile and thus flaunting/status may not actually be a conscious decision on their part.
Although it may actually be in some places a current smartphone is a beneficial status marker. I can see at least business situations where you may want to signal some kind of current-model smartphone status to people who may see it as a signal of sophistication in marketing or social media.
For me, I owned all the Apple smartphones from 3G to 6 Plus because they actually were better (speed, features) from model to model. I also passed my year-old ones to my wife and her 2 year old ones went to my kid and/or for me to use in testing email connectivity, so they got 3 years of use out of them. I stopped this at 6 Plus because it stayed reasonably fast, my wife got a new phone out of cycle due problems with hers. I would still be using the 6 Plus if the battery hadn't quit and I don't see that any new feature my 8 Plus (FaceID, etc) was worth the premium for the X.
Control hasn't ever been an issue for me. I think there are some dumb decisions made that restrict certain use cases, but they're not show stoppers because the phone does what I want it to well enough that it doesn't matter. That I can't run a Perl interpreter, sideload software or other stuff makes no difference to me.
Price is an annoyance, but I'm willing to accept what I paid for it with a 3-ish year use out of it, plus I bought it direct from Apple so it is unlocked and I can use alternate SIMs without an issue overseas.
Well at least you were a legitimate crime victim, I was just trying to beat the system. I legitimately didn't have the stickers on the car, although I had bought them before mine expired. I was just hoping my material proof of purchase was enough evidence to convince the referee the cop made a mistake.
I think they just give the cops every benefit of the doubt, but I was kind of hoping that the referee would at least see I had been in keeping with the spirit of the law (buying the new stickers before the old ones actually expired) and cut me some slack.
I stuck with my dishonest "he must have made a mistake" argument, though, and I'm guessing she just called me on my bullshit. Maybe if I had been honest and admitted I had forgotten to put them on she would have cut the fine even more or waived it but the best I got was a small reduction and the offer to forward the complaint to the city attorney for a trial.
In retrospect, maybe I should have done that with the idea that the city attorney would have dropped the citation, knowing it would have required the cop to attend court to testify and that it was a waste of their time to fight a citation. But it's a suburban city and maybe that's exactly the kind of case they stick with, plus the cop gets paid for showing up to court.
Either way, I was happy enough to take the reduced fine and no more BS than to potentially risk even more of my time, have to commit perjury(!) and potentially pay the full fine.
Education in the US is a train wreck for many reasons, but funding is a major one, and funding based on property taxes is a big part of it. Fund K-12 at the state level and eliminate the property funding mechanism completely. This equalizes funding per student between districts and ends the gross disparities enabled by richer suburbs being able to pay higher property taxes.
Higher education needs help, too. One, it needs to go on a diet. It's costs have outstripped inflation because they can jack up costs without much limit because attendees will just borrow more.
To fix that, I would propose that the Federal government underwrite all tuition as a loan to students. Payments would be amortized over 30 years, half paid by an employer-paid payroll tax and sliding scale tax paid by employees. In some cases, low paid employees wouldn't fully make their amortized payments but the obligation would follow them until age 65, when it would eliminated.
The goal would be to shift education funding burdens onto employers. They get a free ride on escalating education requirements to ridiculous and unnecessary levels now, and this would cause them to decide whether a position actually required an advanced degree or even any degree at all vs. some form of cheaper and more specific internal vocational training.
Employees would share half the burden, so they don't get off easily but because their portion is tied to their earning power, hyped degrees that don't really have any earning power wouldn't punish them nor would inflated education costs. But they keep paying for it until 65 (or the debt is settled), so they have some reason to choose cheaper schools or education paths.
You'd probably have to cap how much the government would guarantee to control costs, but this would just help cap tuition and increases, inhibit "never ending college" and so forth.
Economists don't want to take the good-new side of this issue because the last few times they gave the thumbs up and the good news about macroeconomic shifts, entire towns got hollowed out when their jobs went overseas and we got stories about how 50 year old factory workers would be re-training to deploy Juniper border routers and writing software and everything would be OK.
Instead, we got opioid epidemics, mass unemployment and regional economic destruction and employers bulk imported workers from overseas to deploy routers and write software. The overwhelming majority didn't relocate to Silicon Valley, buy skinny jeans and write software in open office plans.
Yes, the economists were able to back to their covens and cauldrons and return with all the evidence about how much better we all were collectively -- and it's probably true. But we're also left with economic gains that mostly went to major owners of capital and sociological toxic waste dumps that capital owners didn't want to clean up.
Economists love to trumpet collective gains from macroeconomic shifts but treat the displaced as just mere externalities rather than real people. It's high time they were more than just cheerleaders for the policies of the capital class, no matter how successful they might be when averaged over an entire population.
No lie, I bought the new sticker and forgot to put it on (I think it was pouring rain when I bought the sticker, otherwise I do it in the city hall parking lot).
A month later I get a ticket for expired tabs parked in a city-owned lot. I tried to fight it -- I had the registration date-stamped by the registrar with the tabs bought before expiration, and I claimed the tabs were on the car. Since I didn't get tagged in person, I thought it was worth a try.
The "referee" who handles these things wasn't buying it, although she did cut the fine to $100. I could have taken it to actual trial -- this was 10 years ago and I don't think the cops actually had photographic evidence then, although I'd be worried now, but $100 wasn't worth *another* day screwing around with the legal system.
I'm curious how their audience finds them? If you setup a pirate radio station, do you always use a specific frequency even if you're forced to abandon your transmitter or gets seized?
Is the transmission equipment so cheap that pirate stations essentially don't care if it gets seized? They're probably more worried about finding another choice rooftop location with power than the transmitter itself?
How do they manage backhaul? My guess is that you would have the "studio" and the transmitter at different locations.
Guy was hired for a networking-related position, "worked" for the better part of the week before the termination/resignation on a Friday. The party line was he had started, been given some small-scale assignments which got botched badly, and then went radio silent for 2 days before resigning via email when they were trying to get ahold of him to fire him.
My interpretation was that the position was talked up as "networking" (switching, firewall, some small-scale routing) during job interviews. When the guy was hired, the supervisor was so busy doing billable work the guy had no actual work to do and was just slammed into small-client crises (which are the worst, since the small clients operate as semi-broken on a good day, and little substantial documentation exists).
I think the guy genuinely screwed up, but for reasons that are beyond his control and just decided that he wasn't going to take ownership of a 10 gallon bucket of shit beyond redemption. Some of these clients *are* badly broken but because the checks keep rolling in, nobody is willing to dump the clients as huge risks or call them to heel for their own good.
Generally speaking I think there are a lot of small businesses like this that operate at the margins of sanity and organization. If you've worked there long enough and/or are lucky when you're hired, it has the aura of organization. But if you walk in the door on the wrong week, it's like an asylum run by the lunatics. The owners/principals live "the vision", perhaps by necessity, but its often quite disconnected from reality. Trouble is, they sell the vision to new employees, and not the reality because no one would take the job for the reality.
We had a high level manager hired with a similar outcome. It went on for months with him, though. There was no ghosting, but he basically kept holding management to the job description until they canned him for being ineffective because he was basically doing "the job" and not what they wanted him too (which was all the shit work a principal didn't want to do, minus the management authority the principal didn't want to give up).
IMHO, the big picture lesson is to get a written description of day to day job responsibilities and activities, not just an HR job title/description, in the written offer letter. Any company that refuses to do this is either badly managed and looking for triage or outright lying about the position. If the work assignments deviate greatly from the work description, you've got a leg to stand on.
My gripe is that all this near-quantum physics in timekeeping doesn't really seem to be about fundamental economics, only about who or how gets to benefit from increasingly high speed trading. Too much of modern finance seems to be about how to manipulate the financial market itself to obtain profits vs. the actual fundamentals of business economics, i.e. the productivity of a given firm.
I guess I'm not that worried about off-shore dark pools. The US and its dollar remain a major force in world economics not just because of the US domestic economy and in spite of the occasionally ugly behavior of the US government. Why? Because the US regulatory and legal system is mostly fair and mostly transparent, and it's judgements and rules are backed by the full force of the United States.
No other nation can provide this and ultimately most capital will not choose to operate in an environment where the fairness and enforcement of contracts isn't guaranteed.
I think part of the problem is that the "that's not AI" camp uses human-like intelligence as the normative standard for what "AI" should be, without considering whether there might be other models of intelligence that aren't human like.
I think it's possible that we might create an unusually powerful AI and not realize it because we're stuck in a paradigm that says it has to mimic human behaviors and thought patterns.
It's almost a kind of cultural bias, like assuming a society has to be organized like ours when the world itself suggests that there are many kinds of social organizations using varying levels of technology.
We know about "foreign" civilizations because we have a lot of information about them, but if you'd had zero knowledge of anything but present-day western civilizations could you even imagine an African tribal village or a nomadic Arab one? And if someone suggested using camels and tents to travel around the desert as a method of social organization, would you even believe it was possible?
when they could just use what literally every other company does and contribute their ideas back to the whole to improve them?
Last I remember, technology is a competitive business, not a hippie co-op. Once you're dependent on someone else's products they suck the life out of you like the mafia.
I've never understood why if RDP can do panning and downscaling why those features aren't part of the basic UI/screen resolution.
Plenty of times I've defined RDP sessions with a remote desktop larger in resolution than my physical screen but scaled down. Much of the time it's useful, even if for monitoring or reference purposes.
The stupidity of modern UIs really is a problem, especially web ones and their pointlessly excess whitespace.
I'm actually kind of puzzled why this isn't an obvious display adapter/driver feature. It seems like presenting Windows with 4 virtual monitors shouldn't be that big a deal because each one just represents a slice of a larger memory buffer and I'd wager there's some kind of MMU on the graphics card that could manage virtualizing a virtual display's space without a problem.
It used to be a feature back in the old days of going the other way around -- telling Windows your monitor was much *bigger* than it really was and having a 1600x1200 desktop when you could only physically display 1024x768 or something.
I guess it could also be a monitor feature, since I think at least DisplayPort can daisy chain displays, but it would be less flexible and annoying to setup than a GUI configuration and I don't know that HDMI has that kind of pass-thru feature.
Display splitting is the feature we need for 4k displays.
I have a 43" 4k display (which is basically the display size where 4k has a useful native dot pitch) and while that much screen real estate is useful for some visual applications (drawing, etc), most of the time it's not efficient for single windows. Manual sizing and moving is a nuisance.
I use "Display Fusion" which can do basic monitor splitting (so zoom/minimize, etc) treat split regions as separate displays. But things that want to go "full screen" (like web video) still go full physical screen.
It'd be nice to have Windows itself split the displays, perhaps using the existing multi-monitor interface so that Windows itself treated unique display regions as if they were distinct physical monitors to override the "full screen" behavior of other apps.
It might also be that the real place to do this is in the display driver -- split your display up in that, and then it presents Windows with your logical displays as if they were actually physical displays, but I haven't seen that ability in a display driver.
It's been an official Windows 10 feature since its release and I think there was a MS PowerToy for it going back maybe as far as XP and who knows how many third party implementations.
I've used all of them from time to time, but I always wonder why people find it so compelling. I kind of find myself with a blended set of virtual desktops over a period of time, losing whatever logical distinction I made between them originally.
Sync to OneDrive, et al, isn't backup.
Most malware doesn't immediately destroy your computer, it cripples it over days or weeks. I can't tell you the number of people who told me "Yeah, I noticed something last week and it's been flaky since then."
Meanwhile, you've been syncing your infection up to the cloud the whole time so now your cloud storage is infected, too. You may get some of it back, but I've also seen people just re-infect themselves, too.
Some cloud storage often at higher tiers will offer some kind of versioning and let you restore pre-infected files, but for most people this isn't the default or isn't even a feature they have.
The only way cloud sync really works as a backup is if you have a spare computer you only bring online periodically that syncs itself and that you then take offline again, but now all you've done is add a complex network transaction to what amounts to a local backup.
Why wouldn't people accept water in an aluminum can? Is it just that most people are stupid? I mean, people drink tons of beverages in aluminum, especially beer and soda, but also energy drinks, and even wine lately. Hell, in some disaster scenarios Budweiser has switched their canning lines to just can water.
I'm kind of curious what the economics are of aluminum versus plastic bottles. Most convenience-type stores have plastic bottles of soda in 16 or 20 oz sizes, but I've seen a few places with "tall boy" 16 oz aluminum cans and have always wondered why they're not more common.
My guess is plastic is cheaper than aluminum, but given the sheer volume of aluminum can usage I'd wager it's not that much cheaper.
I love single stream, I don't care how inefficient it is. I follow the recycling guidelines closely. Everything that is recyclable per our regulations get recycled.
With pre-sort, I only bothered with the newspapers and aluminum because my kitchen didn't have enough room for 4-5 separate bins for different kinds of containers, and I didn't generate enough glass for it to be worth it.
What I don't get is, why don't we have more packaging regulations? Why can't we get rid of all plastic bottles and make beverage makers use aluminum or glass exclusively? Aluminum seems superior in every way, even to glass -- non-breakable, there's only one kind, easy to recycle, both light *and* it blocks light.
We just had a story where airlines could save "big. big, money, huge money" using satellite comms to reroute planes. How the fuck are they supposed to get the satellites up there if they can't launch them on rockets?
Once that sat net is up, airlines will just route around the rocket plume like a road closure.
Is the idea that flight routes aren't already optimally planned? That existing weather systems that might impact a specific flight aren't built into the flight plan, with fine adjustments made by pilots to alter course based on actual flight path conditions?
The summary makes it sound like planes aren't already flying the shortest possible path already. I mean, airspace over the open ocean is pretty goddamn empty, it's not like they're trying to avoid a jam-up on the 405.
As a reaction mass or some kind of raw material?
How many hundreds of times have YOU personally made the decision to fill your vehicle with fuel?
1500 times I think, but it's kind of squishy because there were those years where I didn't have a car, the years with only a motorcycle, but then there are those years where I may have done it more than once a week, long road trips, and then there's the boat, but "fill your vehicle with fuel" is an operation which takes on around 125 gallons at a fill, which is about 9x what my car takes.
There was an op-ed in the local paper yesterday written by a former cop and police chief that said pretty much this.
It was in response to the city aborting a police sting operation that was busting small time pot dealers (some as low as 1-2 grams) selling on the street downtown.
It turned out that they only busted black people, but the apparent 100% racism isn't entirely clear since the chief *and* the downtown precinct commander are both black and at least one (if not both) of them would have approved of the sting program and known of the outcomes.
I work with people who proudly complain about "working until 2 am" or willingly take on all kinds of client work at ridiculous times because it burnishes their reputation.
Some after hours work is unavoidable in IT, but I just refuse to work those kinds of hours regularly without added compensation of some kind (added vacation days without strings and/or more money).
As a more skilled/experienced/older worker, I think I can get away with it but I'm not gonna lie, the people who do it seem to have more street cred in the organization because they are willing to bend over.
I think it's highly organization dependent and sometimes individually dependent (ie, can you get done what needs doing in normal work hours). And I think there are definitely orgs where if you're not doing that, you might as well resign now because you will get shuffled to the shit work.
Could you do this if you somehow flipped around the CPU trends? What if instead of two-socket servers with 16 cores per socket, we had 8 sockets with 4 cores per socket?