I did consultancy work as part of renewing and replacing ancient software systems for an insurance company, and it’s amazing how little people actually know about how their own business processes are actually supposed to work.

Orgs are in the position where everyone who built a system is gone, and all the current people who work there defer to the system for how the processes work, without actually properly understanding the rules. And so the system itself becomes the arbiter of correctness.

This is obviously horrible because it ends up where nobody dares to touch the current system in case they break it in some way nobody understands.

We ended up speaking to people across the whole business to painstakingly work out what the rules really were, putting together a new system and effectively “dual running” that side-by-side with the old system, so we could compare outputs and make sure they were the same. In some case they were different, and in some of those cases it was actually because the old system was actually wrong, but nobody noticed!

It’s a mess.

They are pursuing “realism” but the pursuit of realism also means that you must sacrifice strong artistic style, because style is - by very definition - deviation from realism.

Thanks :)

Well that would be weird because

1. Andor is not for children

2. Andor is the least star-wars-like Star Wars

3. Andor is actually good

When I am interviewing people, I always appreciate when the candidate is honest about their experience - or lack of experience.

If I ask about something and they openly say they never did that, that’s a green flag. I want to see people are honest about where they don’t have experience, because being honest about gaps is an important trait for when they are actually on the job.

On the other hand, if the candidate has something literally written on their CV/resume as a “strong skill” but then when I ask about it they struggle and try to bullshit their way through it, that’s the opposite. If someone is happy to lie to get the job, they’ll probably lie when they’re on the job too.

I can write a basic regex independently, but as soon as capture groups or positive/negative lookahead or lookbehind start popping up I’m back to the docs every time.

This is happening because all platforms are optimising for the one single metric that matters most to them - engagement.

When you consider all users as a whole, the way to get engagement is not to have a good UX that lets you tailor what you see, and search for the specific things you are interested in. The way to get it is to shove a constantly changing and brightly coloured stream of “content” right in people’s faces where they don’t have to do any thinking or make any decisions, they just mindlessly click what is offered and consume.

From Netflix’s perspective, they want someone to go from opening the app to watching a video in 10 seconds, and if they don’t achieve that, it’s a failure which they will optimise away.

The platforms have over the years systematically stripped back every control lever you have over what you see, because control means time spent thinking, and time thinking is not time engaging.

Centralisation makes things easy.

If it takes more than 1 minute to onboard to a new service, and especially if you have to overcome any learning barrier (such as what ‘instances’ are and how to choose one) then the vast majority of people will immediately throw that option out and won’t even consider it.

People like bluesky specifically because it gives them something almost identical to what they had before.

Back in my days working as .NET developer on Windows 7, I came into work one morning to find a colleague fuming that his machine had died on him.

He spent the whole morning reinstalling Windows and getting his environment set back up, and then pulled the branch he was working on, happy to finally be done with setup and get back to work. Ran his test suite and bam, machine crashes!

It was only at that point the penny dropped. We took a look at his branch, and sure enough he’d accidentally written a test that, when ran, deleted his entire C: drive!

That particular lesson made me very careful when writing any code that does things with the filesystem.

They can hardly avoid screwing up, really.

The whole draw of Steam Deck is that it’s a carefully curated experience where everything from the OS upwards is crafted to play nicely together and “Just Work” to bring that console-like experience to PC gaming.

Whatever Microsoft are putting together isn’t going to have that end-to-end consideration. It will be nothing more than a skinned launcher on top of Windows 11, and no matter how shiny that launcher looks you won’t be able to hide from Windows for long. All the normal Windows bloat will be there, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you spend as much time messing around in actual Windows as you do playing games.

Didn’t ingest any, but it’s still there somehow

Given the free and open source nature of Lemmy, I’d suggest that creating an account to raise a feature suggestion - and in that way contribute - would not be an unreasonable expectation at all, rather than the expectation of having other people who are themselves only volunteers jump through all the hoops for you.

The UK is about to ban disposable vapes, but I fear it may achieve little.

What the legislation does is to define what “reusable” means, and demand that vapes must meet that.

In reality, I suspect that manufacturers will simply adjust their strategies to produce vapes that are “technically” reusable and rechargeable and meet the law in a bare-minimum way, but really are intended to be used exactly once, just like disposable ones were, and that’s exactly how they will continue to be treated by consumers.

Cost will probably go up 20% to cover it, but that’s all, and in the end even more material will be going in landfill.

In my opinion, what the legislation should have done is to set an absolute minimum price on the cost of a vape pen. That would be very heavy-handed, but it would actually create the strong financial motivation required to force consumers to genuinely treat the vape pen as something they will re-use.

Those few days between jobs are moments of pure joy.

You’re finished with all the bullshit of the previous job, and are blissfully unaware of whatever fresh bullshit is waiting for you at the new one.

This is exactly it. By intentionally ensuring the working class live in poverty, this creates desperation, which means people will accept even worse conditions and even less pay to do terrible jobs - and their children, too.

This is simply the next step in what has already been a decades-long strategy of exploitation.

Totally. I feel like winning Best Director is your one-time free pass to get a risky project greenlit that normally you could never.

And if those movies don’t smash the box office then maybe, in part, it’s because the director quietly never intended them to be the kind of movies that would.

Fair :)

Yes it matters. Loads of manufacturers are doing soldered wifi on some of their models. Delll, HP, they are all at it.

And even if your wifi wasn’t soldered, wouldn’t it be better to know you were buying a machine where it would just work out the box rather than needing replacement?

There plenty of other things to consider too, though, especially for laptops.

WiFi chipset, trackpad hardware, webcam, all can lead to a sad time with the wrong manufacturers and driver support

There’s a time for everything, is my personal take. Sometimes I want a film that will be original and challenge me, but I don’t want that every day.

Sometimes it’s relaxing to know there won’t be any big surprises.