ChickenLadyLovesLife
@ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world
- Comment on Washington DC to be renamed to St Donaldsburg 1 week ago:
Thedonaldgrad.
- Comment on HP ditches 15-minute wait time policy due to 'feedback' 1 week ago:
Well, I was WFH at the time and they didn’t give me anything to do so it was effectively that anyway. And really they had given me almost no work to do for the four months prior to that - which of course is why I was not even the least bit surprised by the layoff. My severance was to the penny exactly what I would have gotten from unemployment, so it effectively meant I got unemployment benefits without having to pretend to look for work. Also, they randomly sent me a check for $6K that I have no idea what for (not PTO or sick time compensation) and I used it to buy a school bus. So overall I can’t really hate them too much. Years later I found out my mother had thought I was working for Sysco (the food supply conglomerate) instead of Cisco.
- Comment on HP ditches 15-minute wait time policy due to 'feedback' 1 week ago:
I worked briefly for Cisco because they acquired my company (a much smaller competitor) to help eliminate competition. The only good thing I can say about them is they gave me (and everybody else from this smaller company) two months’ notice of the layoff and didn’t have us escorted out of the building or anything.
- Comment on HP ditches 15-minute wait time policy due to 'feedback' 1 week ago:
“… so we can be sure to avoid ever actually implementing them.”
- Comment on BlackBerry's iconic keyboard patent has expired 1 week ago:
Damn, I wish I’d thought of that back then.
- Comment on BlackBerry's iconic keyboard patent has expired 1 week ago:
I used to be a mobile developer (mainly Windows CE, Android and iOS) but once in 2010 I got put onto a project producing a TV-guide-like app for Blackberry. I was absolutely blown away by how fucking awful the developer tools were. Even during the development phase, an app had to be fully signed before it could be deployed to a device and tested and the signing servers were almost always down or operating under a severe delay. Even worse was that the framework code was divided up into umpteen billion different modules, each of which had to be separately signed, so the more modules you made use of the longer your app took to be signed (I often found myself writing custom functions that should logically have been handled by the framework, just to avoid the inclusion of one more module). Some days, even a one-line change to your code took 30 to 40 minutes to get onto your device - or else it was impossible because the signing servers were completely down. They did have emulators but they were worse than the physical devices and everything still had to be signed anyway.
The built-in UI tools were horrible and there wasn’t anything that could be used for a TV guide, so I ended up having to do literally everything with Graphics primitives - although that was actually the fun part of the project. The most annoying thing was the 16-bit graphics, which probably made a bit of sense in 2003 but certainly not in 2010. And of course Blackberry was crashing and dying at that point anyway, so my work was pretty much useless.
The scroll wheel was awesome, though. It allowed for a super-precise UI controlling aspect that just isn’t possible with touchscreens.
- Comment on I miss myspace 1 week ago:
How could you miss “MeinSpace”?
- Comment on Jeep Introduces Pop-Up Ads That Appear Every Time You Stop 2 weeks ago:
then proceeds to recklessly dismantle
huge parts ofthe US governmentJust give him a few more weeks.
- Comment on Jeep Introduces Pop-Up Ads That Appear Every Time You Stop 2 weeks ago:
When I was young, you (supposedly) could still buy WWII-era original Jeeps disassembled and packed into crates in cosmoline. I always wanted one of those but never had any desire to own a modern one.
- Comment on Teslas turn toxic as sales crash in Europe and the UK | EV sales in the region are growing, but not for Tesla 3 weeks ago:
Doing a nazi salute while making the Mussolini face, no less!
- Comment on Teslas turn toxic as sales crash in Europe and the UK | EV sales in the region are growing, but not for Tesla 3 weeks ago:
the white flag stereotype for France comes from 2003
It actually comes (unfairly) from the French army mutinies of 1917 and (also unfairly) from France’s surrender to Hitler in 1940, in addition to their not joining in the fun in Iraq. All of which obscures a prior thousand-year history of kicking the shit out of people.
- Comment on Study of 8k Posts Suggests 40+% of Facebook Posts are AI-Generated 3 weeks ago:
That laptop lol.
- Comment on Study of 8k Posts Suggests 40+% of Facebook Posts are AI-Generated 3 weeks ago:
My brother gave me his Facebook credentials so I could use marketplace without bothering him all the time. He’s been a liberal left-winger all his life but for the past few years he’s taken to ranting about how awful Democrats are (“Genocide Joe” etc.) while mocking people who believe that there’s a connection between Trump and Putin. Sure enough, his Facebook is filled with posts about how awful Democrats are and how there’s no connection between Trump and Putin - like, that’s literally all that’s on there. I’ve tried to get him to see that his worldview is entirely created by Facebook but he just won’t accept it.
In my mind, this is really what sets social media apart from past mechanisms of social control. In the days of mass media, the propaganda was necessarily a one-size-fits-all sort of thing. Now, the pipeline of bullshit can be custom-tailored for each individual. So my brother, who would never support Trump and the Republicans, can nevertheless be fed a line of bullshit that he will accept and help Trump by not voting (he actually voted Green).
- Comment on Uber Eats undercover: Delivering your food for $1.74 an hour 1 month ago:
Where can you take a $3 Uber? If I took an Uber to my next door neighbor’s house it would be more than $3.
- Comment on I think we might be leaving the "boring" part of this dystopia 1 month ago:
I must not be to that episode yet
Only 10,000 or so to go lol
- Comment on same as it ever was 3 months ago:
Our ancestors’ brains went from chimpanzee-sized to modern-sized (actually slightly bigger than today) between two million and one million years ago, and more importantly the language-governing areas increased in size during that stretch. So human beings a million years ago were very much like us today, just without the advanced technology.
- Comment on same as it ever was 3 months ago:
My favorite was “a sucking chest wound is Nature’s Way of telling you you’ve been in a firefight”.
- Comment on same as it ever was 3 months ago:
Galluspetat
- Comment on same as it ever was 3 months ago:
I always liked how archaeologists would dig up ancients statues of big-breasted and big-butted women and call them evidence of a “cult of fertility”. I guess that sounds better than “porn”.
- Comment on Know thy enemy 3 months ago:
Fun fact: through the 1800s coal-powered steamships mostly replaced sailing vessels for the transportation of people and time-sensitive cargo around the world. But steamships were highly inefficient and required frequent re-coaling, and locally available coal was dirtier and contained less thermal energy than the good stuff that Britain (who was doing by far most of the shipping) got from Wales and other places on their island. Because steamships could not efficiently and cheaply haul the coal that they needed around the world to restock the coaling stations, this was done instead by an enormous fleet of sailing colliers. So the “steam revolution” of the 1800s was actually a steam/wind-power hybrid. It wasn’t until the advent of triple- and quadruple-expansion steam engines, turbines, and greatly improved boilers in the early 1900s that steam-powered vessels could efficiently and economically haul their own fuel. And even with that, wind-powered cargo vessels remained economically viable and operating in significant numbers right up until the start of WWII (that’s II, not I).
- Comment on Fitness app Strava gives away location of Biden, Trump and other leaders, French newspaper says. 3 months ago:
Would you think those guys would know to do something about a dude on a roof with a rifle?
- Comment on The Genesis of a joke. 3 months ago:
Should’ve put “John” above the “Holmes” logo and made fun of your boss’ small-dick energy when he complained.
- Comment on The Genesis of a joke. 3 months ago:
people mistakenly associate Trick of the Tail and Wind & Wuthering with Gabriel despite being voiced by Phil Collins
Just saw an interview with Peter Gabriel where he said people come up to him almost daily and tell him how they much they loved Trick of the Tail. He just had this defeated look on his face when he said he had to keep telling them that was Phil and not him.
- Comment on Microsoft CEO's pay rises 63% to $79m, despite devastating year for layoffs: 2550 jobs lost in 2024 4 months ago:
At my last company, they usually gave end-of-the-year bonuses instead of raises. They were pretty generous, usually amounting to about half of our annual salaries, but it of course prevented us from being guaranteed that level of compensation the following year. That’s why I always describe bonuses as raises followed by pay cuts.
- Comment on Microsoft CEO's pay rises 63% to $79m, despite devastating year for layoffs: 2550 jobs lost in 2024 4 months ago:
I once quit my job at a software company I really hated. They were desperate to keep me around for the projects I was leading so they asked if I would work hourly for a while. I quoted them a go-fuck-yourselves hourly rate which they immediately agreed to, which made me even more angry about my prior years of poor compensation. I worked under this agreement for about half a year and further improved my effective hourly rate by not working very hard.
- Comment on Not allowed to work from home 4 months ago:
I’ve traveled in India - there’s no way that would produce anything but piles of dead children. My money’s on being replaced by AI first.
- Comment on Not allowed to work from home 4 months ago:
At my last job I managed a team of developers in India (while residing in the US). It was pretty much necessary for me to be available outside of my company’s normal work hours. I always compensated myself for middle-of-the-night activity with time off during the day and nobody ever mentioned having a problem with it. I was eventually rewarded by being laid off with everybody else when my company was acquired by a west coast tech giant.
- Comment on Not allowed to work from home 4 months ago:
I’m not allowed to work from home and it seriously pisses me off. Whenever I complain about this to my boss, she always gives me shit like “you’re a school bus driver”.
- Comment on placebo F 4 months ago:
I wish I could remember what product this was, but many years ago there was some bullshit new age supplement that had “Guaranteed Placebo Effect” on the packaging.
- Comment on Don't fret, check your spam folder 4 months ago:
Back when I was working on my (never completed) dissertation, I would sometimes call up televangelists’ hotlines and talk about my research. It was pretty amusing how they would initially try to steer the conversation to the God stuff but then give up as I kept relentlessly returning to my subject. Eventually they were reduced to “uh huh … uh huh” but they couldn’t just hang up on me because they weren’t allowed to. I actually worked through some problems this way.