ThePowerOfGeek
@ThePowerOfGeek@lemmy.world
- Comment on Dell said return to the office or else—nearly half of workers chose “or else” 1 week ago:
Dell announced a new return-to-office initiative earlier this year. In the new plan, workers had to classify themselves as remote or hybrid.
Those who classified themselves as hybrid are subject to a tracking system that ensures they are in a physical office 39 days a quarter, which works out to close to three days per work week.
Alternatively, by classifying themselves as remote, workers agree they can no longer be promoted or hired into new roles within the company.
Holy corporate oppression, Batman! That’s a shitty deal no matter which option you choose.
I’m glad they’ve got themselves into a sticky situation.
Also, this observation was funny (in a sad way):
One person said they’d spoken with colleagues who had chosen to go hybrid, and those colleagues reported doing work in mostly empty offices punctuated with video calls with people who were in other mostly empty offices.
- Comment on Elon Musk Begs Advertisers to Return as Twitter's Revenue Plunges 1 week ago:
Oh there’s still far too much adulation. All those Tesla bros, for example. Given what an insufferable turd Musk is, and the crumby reputation Teslas have, I don’t understand it. And I don’t think I ever will.
- Comment on Elon Musk Begs Advertisers to Return as Twitter's Revenue Plunges 1 week ago:
Nope, he can’t manage that. Because he’s an attention-whoring malignant narcissist.
I can’t wait for the bubble of mystique to pop on this arsehole, if only so we don’t have to ever hear from or about him again. Sadly, there are still plenty of rubes in his cult of personality and greedy investors willing to ride his coattails. So I’m not holding my breath.
- Comment on Self-hosted website for posting web novel/fiction 1 month ago:
I don’t have a direct answer to your question. But I advise caution in putting your creative works online in the way you are planning. Between people plagiarizing it (either word for word or just the broader concepts) and AIs doing similar things, you could find that your work gets stolen.
Self-publishing might at least give you a bit of inherent copyright protection. Then at least you will have an ISBN associated to it, and you can always host your stories somewhere (WordPress, Medium, etc.).
If you want to self-publish your stories a few service like Smash Words would work.
- Comment on Stack Overflow and OpenAI Partner to Strengthen the World’s Most Popular Large Language Models - Press release - Stack Overflow 1 month ago:
Hah, I was going to say, that means asking for programming advice from Chat GPT will now result either in a response of “Why are you even trying to do that? You are stupid!” or dismissively pointing to another (mostly unrelated) chat session that has already been closed without a suitable answer.
- Comment on Catholic 'media ministry' defrocks AWOL AI priest after it told faithful you can baptise babies in Gatorade and that, sure, it can totally perform your wedding 1 month ago:
I don’t think the vast majority of American Christians are anywhere near ready to accept a Christian denomination founded by and led by women. Which is a shame. I think such a denomination would have some interesting and probably beneficial perspectives to share.
But given how Christianity has been male-led from the very beginning, how it stemmed from another male-led religion, and how engrained into American Christian society it is for women to be docile, obedient child production machines… Yeah, that ain’t happening for a looong time!
- Comment on Catholic 'media ministry' defrocks AWOL AI priest after it told faithful you can baptise babies in Gatorade and that, sure, it can totally perform your wedding 1 month ago:
Yeah I was lumping them into that same category. But you’re right, they probably do deserve their own category.
- Comment on Catholic 'media ministry' defrocks AWOL AI priest after it told faithful you can baptise babies in Gatorade and that, sure, it can totally perform your wedding 1 month ago:
So they are labeling a brand new (and obviously flawed) AI as a priest, but women (who are human beings) still can’t be priests?
Sorry ladies, you’ve now fallen further down the ladder.
- Regular straight Catholic men - acceptable priest
- Gay Catholic men - acceptable priest (as long as they don’t get caught)
- Male converted Anglican priests - acceptable priest (in some scenarios)
- Catholic men with gross sexual habits - acceptable priest
- Flawed AIs - acceptable priest
- Corporations - soon to be priests?
- Catholic women - ABSOLUTELY NOT!
- Comment on Catholic 'media ministry' defrocks AWOL AI priest after it told faithful you can baptise babies in Gatorade and that, sure, it can totally perform your wedding 1 month ago:
If Arctic Blitz isn’t one of them, there will be a backlash that makes Vatican II look like a mild disagreement.
- Comment on I like this text. In which Lemmy community can I best share it ? Thanks. 2 months ago:
No, you are correct about the number of posts. But it looks like the community is only about 2 weeks old. And if they focus on quality over quantity that post count isn’t a bad thing.
- Comment on Windows 11 will reportedly display a watermark if your PC does not support AI requirements. 2 months ago:
Every couple of years for the last 20 years I would download the most popular Linux distro of the day, install it, and play around with it. And it’s mind-blowing to me how far Linux has come with UIs, usability, troubleshooting and customizing stuff.
Back in the day I spent many hours compiling obscure and dependent code bases just to get my sound card working. Now it’s pretty rare for me to need to do even a fraction of that.
Also, if you want to play around with Linux you can just download a VM solution like VirtualBox on Windows and then spin up as many virtual machines as you like and install a different iso on each one. Not to mention tinkering with Docker containers via the Docker app.
In short, it’s a great time to play with and possibly adopt Linux.
- Comment on What do companies get out of rewards programs 2 months ago:
To add to point #3, they can also sell on the customer data they collect to marketing companies for added revenue.
- Comment on Net neutrality is about to make a comeback 2 months ago:
I’m going to hold my excitement in check until January of next year. Because if a certain former president gets reelected then any hopes of net neutrality will end for another 4 years.
- Comment on They really want people to RTO 2 months ago:
This has got to be a satirical article, right?.. right???
- Comment on Eww, Copilot AI might auto-launch with Windows 11 soon 2 months ago:
Yeah me too. It was annoying.
- Comment on Eww, Copilot AI might auto-launch with Windows 11 soon 2 months ago:
Didn’t they already do this? I thought I remember after a Windows 11 update a couple of months ago I had that copilot shit on the taskbar and auto-enabled.
- Comment on Dollar stores are shutting down across America. They did this to themselves 2 months ago:
Not to mention that dollar stores in general are horrible run, and frequently burn out and mistreat their employees through understaffing and lack of support. As covered by John Oliver. So it’s really a compounding effect on these two particular chains.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
“Provide value to the world”
What value is this scumbag providing? He’s fucking over renters by removing rental properties from the market. And he’s not even providing with to buyers because he’s doing jack-shit to improve the properties when he puts them on the market.
All he’s doing is lining his own pockets at the cost of other less fortunate people. Fucking sanctimonious hypocrite.
- Comment on Dell finding ways to absolutely suck as an employer 3 months ago:
And based on my experience with Dell computers, they are the machine producing absolutely shitty machines.
- Comment on Appreciation / shock at workplace IT systems 3 months ago:
This sounds like my old place, but much worse.
We used to have laptops we had to lock in a cabinet (yeah, one of those cabinets with a really puny lock that’s easy to pick). And we had to log into n old mainframe system that had numerous environment instances which each required a unique password that had to be changed every 90 days.
We (the software devs) basically rebelled on the laptop situation and insisted they find a better solution. Thankfully they changed policy and of allowed the laptops to be locked into our docking stations, which in turn were locked to our desks.
As for the mainframe system credential management, I tried using a standard third party password manager, but a) it wasn’t a good fit for the credentials, and b) the sys admins or security team forcibly uninstalled it because it wasn’t sanctioned software (even though it was a well-respected and actively maintained one). And our security group refused to go out and find one.
So being a dev, I wrote my own desktop password manager for the mainframe credentials. It was decently secure, but nowhere near as secure as a retail password manager. But it fit the quirks of the mainframe credentials requirements. And after my colleagues and manager did a code review of it, it was considered internal software, and thus fit for use.
As I was leaving they were in the process of removing all our local admin rights (without a clear path on how to accommodate for us developers debugging code - fun times ahead!).
But all of those annoyances pale in comparison to the shit you are having to deal with! Holy hell, that sounds like pure misery! I’m sorry.
- Comment on Evangelical app 'Bless Every Home' is mapping personal information of immigrants and non-Christians in a bid to conduct door-to-door religious conversions and “prayerwalking” rituals targeting them. 3 months ago:
That’s a dark-as-fuck take. But honestly, you are probably on to something with it. Many evangelical ‘followers of Christ’ have a very different view on who he was than I and others do. Their Christ is a gun-wielding, xenophobic, intolerant, white skinned, white nationalist.
Of course, if they ever get their wish and pass some of these restrictive, oppressive federal laws against ‘non-believers’, the next phase will be ruthless infighting. Because they will inevitably turn on each other over trivial differences of opinion.
- Comment on Evangelical app 'Bless Every Home' is mapping personal information of immigrants and non-Christians in a bid to conduct door-to-door religious conversions and “prayerwalking” rituals targeting them. 3 months ago:
Damn it. We already have to deal with the Mormons and the JWs periodically bothering us. Now numerous evangelical churches will be doing it too? I wish they’d all just get lost and leave people alone.
- Comment on OpenAI introduces Sora, its text-to-video AI model 4 months ago:
YouTube is about to get flooded by the weirdest meme videos. We thought it was bad already, we ain’t seen nothing yet.
- Comment on Music Piracy Is Back, Baby 4 months ago:
"Radio plays the same 20 songs over and over and over again. "
So just like traditional radio stations then. ☹️
I swear, we are stuck in a loop where shitty solutions just get reinvented over and over again. And most times when sometime comes up with a genuine improvement, those in power say “oh no no no! That won’t do!” and kill it. I’m Gen-X and it’s been this way all my life. And probably for many generations before that too.
- Comment on Music Piracy Is Back, Baby 4 months ago:
Man, your comment reminded me of mp3.com back in the early days of digital music.
It had a lot of up and coming bands on it. And it allowed users the ability to create their own curated ‘radio stations’. You could compile hours of music from those artists and share it with the rest of the user base. And other users could recommend songs for inclusion in your station (which also helped you discover new bands).
I created a station that was getting some decent listening numbers, and I got some good recommendations from listeners (sometimes self-promotion, but that’s okay).
Then one day it was all gone. Probably related to the backlash from the record industry caused by Napster (even though, I think, mp3.com had acquired rights from those artists?). Sad times.
That’s what music streaming fused with social media should be about.
- Comment on ‘Don’t Mess With Us’: WebMD Parent Company Demands Return to Office in Bizarre Video 5 months ago:
Yeah this is bullshit. Just middle and senior management trying to justify their jobs and all the expenses they’ve made on office real estate. I’ve worked 100% from home for 3 years now, and not only is my productivity much higher, but the team dynamic is better and the worker output overall is better too.
I get some people do better face to face with colleagues, and are happier and more productive. And to those people I say: Go for it! Go into the office and be at your best!
But companies should not force the rest of us to piss time and money away commuting for zero gain and just extra frustration and unhappiness.
- Comment on Data regulator fines HelloFresh £140k for sending 80M+ spams | Messaging menace used text and email to bombard people 5 months ago:
Yeah same thing for me, though I was subscribed to their service for about 6 months. The emails aren’t a problem. It’s the snail mail crap they send every week or so that’s getting old. Haven’t been subscribed to them in about two years but yet I still regularly get those stupid “we miss you!” letters. Just be honest Hello Fresh, you miss my money and me as a potential data harvesting target; you don’t give a shit about me as a person.
- Comment on ‘Front page of the internet’: how social media’s biggest user protest rocked Reddit 5 months ago:
I totally agree.
There were definitely people who were trying to start a revolution there or proverbially burn the place to the ground. But for a lot of people who left, like me, it was just an appropriate time to move on. I had been on reddit for about 12 years by then, and I had seen the place change, especially over the last few years. And not for the better.
It happens to any organization or system that grows beyond a healthy critical mass. Quantity goes up, but quality goes down. And the atmosphere starts to get toxic.
I had been looking for an alternative to reddit for a year or so when the situation last Summer came around. I was disillusioned over on reddit, and aside from interactions with two or three of subs (and about two dozen awesome people on one of my mod teams, who I’m still in touch with thanks to other communication options), I didn’t really enjoy engaging with other users there. It was exhausting to have to frame everything to mitigate the trolls and the contrarians (who invariably still pulled that shit anyway). And the stench of hyper-partisanship was getting everywhere.
The Fediverse intrigued me, but the reddit variants of it hadn’t reached a critical mass of minimal usage (the other critical mass metric) to make it compelling to use. The June protests changed that, and regardless of whether reddit ‘won’ or not, I’m glad I found this place.
You can have multiple ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ in situations like this. Even if reddit fought off the protests and won by not seeing their traffic stats drop off (which let’s be honest is all they really care about, no matter what touchy-feely smoke their spokespeople are blowing), I feel like those of us who landed here also won.
- Comment on Steve Ballmer is set to make $1 billion a year for doing nothing | CNN Business 5 months ago:
YEEEEAAAAAAARRERRGGGGGGGHHHHH!!
- Comment on Reddit Falls Short of Ad Growth Targets Ahead of Likely 2024 IPO 5 months ago:
It’s probably more to do with using a VPN than not being logged in. If I’m searching for something on a search engine and Reddit comes up in the results with potentially useful information, then I’ll go there (the only time I go there now). I don’t use a VPN and I’m never logged in, and I’ve never seen that page come up.
Which makes sense, because those greedy bastards are trying to hyper-monetize the content. And pesky VPNs make it difficult for them to harvest useful visitors info and/or throw tons of partially targeted ads on the poor user’s screen.
Still good info on how to avoid it for the people who do encounter that annoying error page. So thanks for comparing that tidbit of knowledge.