Kiernian

@Kiernian@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Dell Sales team told to return to office 5 days a week⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  More like “sales teams are the reason middle managers think ALL employees slack off when not watched.”

  I get that sales is a SUPER depressing culture, a ridiculously antiquated work environment, and full of some utterly soul-sucking mandates from above, but I have never seen, in any workplace, a team that needs someone constantly riding herd on them like the sales team.

  Every place I’ve worked, every place that a place I’ve worked has had as a client, and every business I’ve ever visited had the same problem – sales people are largely unmotivated because their job has a much higher chance to SUCK OUT LOUD than most of the other jobs at a given company.

  When five figure quarterly bonuses, daily friendly team competitions for gift cards, more paid-for-by-the-company outings than the c suites get and pickle ball on company time twice a week aren’t enough to hype people up to do their actual job, something is really fucking wrong with the job expectations.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ISPs tell Supreme Court they don’t want to disconnect users accused of piracy⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Some of it is about the "Why"s.

  Netflix nearly stamped out piracy for a while there by being a vastly more attractive alternative. Between them and Hulu, and to a lesser extent prime(at the time) if it was streaming, you could watch it somewhere at a reasonable price for a marginally reasonable viewing experience that was at least as good as most TPB downloads.

  Then the IP owners got greedier and decided to strike out on their own with the “everyone has a streaming service” model, which would be GREAT if they largely shared content, but they don’t.

  The greed continues, not in order to adequately compensate creators, but to make a few handfuls of people not just rich but filthy rich. Every action they take suddenly becomes more penny pinching for more greed. At this point lots of the CONTENT CREATORS wish they had a better choice (how often do they say ‘please watch it this way, that’s just how they rank stuff, sorry’?)

  Why is it the opposite with AI?

  Because in comparison with stuff like streaming video or music platforms, AI is BARELY pretending to offer a functional service in exchange for the greed that’s behind all of the money they’re trying to force it to make for them.

  And that’s just for one side of the debate.

  Why isn’t the fact that AI is largely garnering the same responses even from DIAMETRICALLY OPPOSED GROUPS telling you something about how bad of an idea it is in it’s current incarnation?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do you skip Star Trek intros when streaming?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, I actually MISS intros on shows that don’t have them. I forget when in the 2000’s or 2010’s they started that, but it aggravated me almost as much as the cutback from 20+ episodes a season to fewer.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do you skip Star Trek intros when streaming?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I ALWAYS skip enterprise, I never skip the others.

  I get that they were trying for something different, I can even appreciate using a folksy ballad that doesn’t have all is the “formality” of classical music the same way Starfleet of the time doesn’t have all the formality of later treks. I even personally find it to be a cool idea on paper, but for some reason it just didn’t land with me.

  It’s jarring when it SHOULDN’T be. Even the closing credits get a "WhoOoAawhatthefuuuuOh."reaction out of me every time the music starts. Like, it takes until almost the fourth note on the credits before I go "oh yeah, they do this.

  I still watch the credits, though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YouTube is Losing The War Against Adblockers⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The kicker there is … Nobody I know is going to think “wow, playback on this video sucks, I should disable my ad blocker”.

  Like, it wouldn’t occur to ANYONE I know that a piece of software we consider necessary could be the problem, ESPECIALLY if everything else is working fine.

  That’s not even number ten on the list of troubleshooting steps and most people don’t make it past one or two before giving up.

  WTF were they thinking?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How the American war on porn could change the way you use the internet⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  For those wondering about the upswing here:

  If the age verification movement goes unchecked, it’s possible that you could be forced to tie your government ID to much of your online activity, Gillmor says. Some civil rights groups fear it could usher in a new era of state and corporate surveillance that would transform our online behaviour.

  “This is the canary in the coalmine, it isn’t just about porn,” says Evan Greer, director of Fight for the Future, a digital rights advocacy group. Greer says age verification laws are a thinly veiled ploy to impose censorship across the web. A host of campaigners warn that these measures could be used to limit access not just to pornography, but to art, literature and basic facts about sex education and LGBTQ+ life.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Let's blame the dev who pressed "Deploy"⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.

  Corporate culture is a malicious bad actor.

  Corporate culture, from management books to magazine ads to magic quadrants is all about profits over people, short term over stability, and massaging statistics over building a trustworthy reputation.

  All of it is fully orchestrated from the top down to make the richest folks richer right now at the expense of everything else. All of it. From open floor plans to unlimited PTO to perverting every decent plan whether it be agile or ITIL or whatever, every idea it lays its hands on turns into a shell of itself with only one goal.

  Until we fix that problem, the enshittification, the golden parachutes, and the passing around of horrible execs who prove time and time again they should not be in charge of anything will continue as part of the game where we sacrifice human beings on the Altar of Record Quarterly Profits.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It throwing up means to puke, then throwing down must mean to have the shits.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I heard Jack O’Neill and Teal’c in my head on this one.

  J: Well, tell him unless he cools it, I’m going to throw down!

  T: Have you eaten something that does not agree with you, O’Neill?

  J: What?

  T: Is your digestive system experiencing discomfort?

  Daniel Jackson: Yeeeah, this is probably my fault, I explained the euphemism “throwing up” to Teal’c last night after Sam’s bout in the infirmary and I’m guessing he thinks the reverse means

  J: No!

  J: I’m perfectly… Continent.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apple crushes creativity and its reputation in new iPad ad⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, I’m no marketing guru, but I feel their actual point would have been better conveyed by a pile of all of the things the iPad replaced slowly gathering dust, spider webs, and eventually archaeologists.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Recompilation: An Incredible New Way to Keep N64 Games Alive⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  For anyone else wondering, it’s

  github.com/Mr-Wiseguy/N64Recomp

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Stack Overflow bans users en masse for rebelling against OpenAI partnership — users banned for deleting answers to prevent them being used to train ChatGPT⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  And while it hurts now, it’s REALLY going to hurt when large swaths of useful answers that don’t exist anywhere else are gone and there’s nothing replacing them.

  Noone writes hundreds of pages of documentation for their stuff anymore. Without the collected knowledge learned from experience there, what do we have?

  Unless we have source code to read, very little.

  I’m still feeling the pain of google search results sucking combined with most of the large coding forums being gone and reddit slowly going to garbage. Stack Overflow was the last bastion of collected knowledge of it’s type… and it’s not like it was 25 years ago where we still had phonebook-sized manuals for almost all major software because agile has killed the concept of exhaustive definitive documentation for a given version of something.

  I used to sorta roll my eyes at people shouting about federating everything, but at this point I’m scared and agreeing with them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft's latest Windows update breaks VPNs, and there's no fix⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s no way Microsoft would purposefully disable VPNs from working

  No, but they’ve done it accidentally before.

  One time a few years ago it broke all LT2P VPN’s unless you removed a specific KB########.

  IIRC, six months later there was still no fix.

  I think it’s been fixed now, though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tech brands are forcing AI into your gadgets—whether you asked for it or not⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  They forced cloud on us so they could do the same nickel-and-dime billing that webhosts used for cpu cycles/ram/storage…

  …because it’s lucrative as hell when taken to a grand scale.

  But there are sometimes side benefits for us.

  I, for one, am over the moon levels of happy that I will never spend another weekend patching Exchange servers.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reddit embracing all out enshittification⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Once old.reddit dies I’ll never go back

  I’m the same way, but that’s because I find the text formatting, comment layout, and page framing to be almost completely unreadable without it.

  My ten year old monitor is at a nice 1980x1020 and when I view a post on base reddit, it crams the post into the middle of the screen, displays one or two comments below it, and then displays… other posts? Or something? It’s mind-boggling, difficult to sort out what’s what, and I can’t figure out who’s needs are being met with a layout like that.

  When I click on a post, I want to see the whole post, laid out across the majority of my screen real estate, and I want all of the comments visible beneath the post, with multiple comment sorting options.

  I just realized what I’m basically asking for is a forum layout.

  You know, that thing that worked for decades.

  I’m putting up with Lemmy even though I have a few minor gripes (mostly related to sorting and search) because the community is part of what’s important to me, but the main reason I stick around anywhere is the ability to read content I’m interested in. When the on page formatting of that content sucks, I quit reading it.

  I quit subscribing to newspaper websites (and ultimately quit visiting them for news entirely) when the on page advertising squeezed out the actual journalism. I could adblock, but the formatting is still a disaster and barely resembles a news article if you print it out and hold it up to a newspaper, so screw that noise.

  I’m sometimes willing to be okay with being “the product” when it’s my choice and I know what I’m trading for it and judge the value of what I’m getting in return to be acceptable.

  When I do that, though, and major changes I don’t like get made to what I’m “getting out of it” with no way for me to go back to what I did like, it’s a rug pull and a breach of trust.

  For all of the market analysis everyone is supposedly doing, you’d think at least ONE major player would figure out that noone likes it when their routine grinds to a screeching halt because someone decided to move the user interface around and now nobody can find anything.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘What do you mean, the tower is gone?’: thieves steal 200ft structure from Alabama radio station | Alabama⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It would set a horrible precedent.

  I don’t know the exact frequency specifics, but I know the FCC is super particular about any broadcast over a certain power on most wavelengths.

  I imagine this is yet another instance where “mostly works” is in fact somewhat problematic in one way or another.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The U.S. economy is booming. So why are tech companies laying off workers?⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Except the overall hiring demand IS down and it has been since December.

  You know it’s bad when across the globe, IT systems administrators aren’t even getting hit up by RECRUITERS.

  In the U.S. at least, it’s been a continually “in demand” field since we recovered from the U.S. housing market crash of '08-'09… right up until before the New Year.

  Now I’m hearing the same thing from people in the field worldwide and that is that there’s been an uncharacteristic hiring stall in a historically consistent field of IT infrastructure.

  The same is supposedly true in other portions of infrastructure as well, likely because companies still view infrastructure as a cost center instead of a force multiplier.

  It remains to be seen if the hiring silence will extend to full stack devs/programmers if this heavy layoff follow the leader garbage goes on much longer, but if it hits “revenue generator” departments, I’m afraid we’ll start to see other companies tech stacks failing like Twitter’s current functionality has.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You're Not Imagining It: Google Search Results Are Getting Worse, Study Finds⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, so they changed it so it defaults to the “new” way where quotes and -UnwantedTerm don’t function the way they used to, but when you fill out the search box, hit “Google Search”, and it fails to perform the way you want it to, once you’re on the results page, go to “Tools” click on “All Results” and change it to “Verbatim”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Kaspersky's iShutdown Tool Detects Pegasus Spyware and Other Mawlare on iOS Devices⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Neat!

  Is there something like this for Android?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm never lonely cuz i got these little guys with me :)⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  For most people, these are harmless and just a part of getting older. You’ll get used to them.

  I’ve had these since I was in preschool.

  They’re far less pronounced (almost entirely absent, really) now in my 40’s than they were throughout my single digit years, but I still see them once in a great while

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨None of these anchors are real: Channel 1 plans for AI to generate news, broadcasters⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If they make one of them look and speak like Morbo the Annihilator, I might actually watch.

  Like, with the anti-human sentiment and everything.

  First Anchor: And today, a local law firm files the first lawsuit in a series over a deadly salmonella outbreak linked to cantaloupe. Morbo: Next time, we will put the salmonella in more than just the canteloupe. or maybe: Morbo: Canteloupe tonight, Bridegroom has the runs!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨They're all dead now, I wonder who got the last laugh?⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I was going to say, I saw the name “Lister” and wondered if there was any connection to “Listerine”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Inside the 'arms race' between YouTube and ad blockers / Against all odds, open source hackers keep outfoxing one of the wealthiest companies.⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  shrug

  I’m okay with unobtrusive ads as long as the place serving them up has a modicum of common sense sensibilities about their impact and has a rigorous enough vetting process that they’ll never be used as payloads for malicious software. Ads can be a way to find out about products I might otherwise never know about. I’m not outright against all ads as a concept. Hell, sometimes it’s an actual art form in rare cases.

  I’m just against them taking up more space than the content itself, impeding my access to the content in any way, hijacking my property, or getting hijacked by malware which then hijacks my property.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Star Trek Online and Neverwinter MMO devs Cryptic are the next Embracer-owned studio to suffer layoffs⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It is true that the pay segments aren’t required in any way shape or form, unlike some other similar games.

  Yeah, once the yearly event started including the option of either two T6 C-store ships (which will unlock those normally RL-Money-Only ship traits that are so much fun) OR a single T6 Lockbox ship (as long as it’s been out for a year) making those high-end ridiculous min-maxed builds (that aren’t even necessary to play the game’s hardest content) became a very real possibility without spending a dime.

  Add in every event giving bunches of bonus dilithium after you complete it and the fact that they got rid of the bots and you can even trade dilithium for zen in a reasonable amount of time. People were buying the 10th anniversary bundle left and right without spending any money last christmas when it went on sale.

  It takes more planning in advance than just using Attack Pattern: Credit Card, but it’s totally doable.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer files⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  HRM. I may have to try this on an old disk that got accidentally formatted years ago that I haven’t touched since.

  Thanks.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Star Trek Online and Neverwinter MMO devs Cryptic are the next Embracer-owned studio to suffer layoffs⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  They removed not only the ability to make new user made maps and scenarios but removed all content related to the function saying it would essentially require requiring the game from scratch because no one was left that knew how it worked.

  Yeah, that part sucks. I miss it.

  Many of the missions have been removed over the years, saying they no longer are good enough quality compared to new content, etc.

  I can’t think of a single mission that was removed that I miss. There’s probably one or two, but the few removals there were have been largely beneficial. And the new missions are amazing by comparison.

  Everything is a shadow of what it was.

  I disagree. I started playing when STO went free to play back around when romulans became playable.

  It’s only been in the last 2 years that I started really enjoying the game instead of forcing myself to try because I really wanted star trek SO BAD in an MMO.

  The QoL improvements are good, the events are still fun and the rewards are actually worthwhile.

  There are handfuls of people in the fleets I’m in that are playing completely f2p thanks to reward ships and event/reputation gear and holding their own, doing good damage in group content, so there ARE plenty of microtransaction options, but they’re not required – just super beneficial if you have the cash.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Star Trek Online and Neverwinter MMO devs Cryptic are the next Embracer-owned studio to suffer layoffs⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Couple of years from now when its been milked dry by the zen currency bots.

  They just banned almost all of those a few months back.

  Like, massive sweeping bans and the zen exchange has been mostly normal since.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Peanut butter and hummus are the same thing.⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Better hope your dump stat wasn’t charisma, then!

  “Intelligence is knowing a tomato is a fruit.

  Wisdom is knowing not to put a tomato in a fruit salad.

  Charisma is being able to sell a tomato based fruit salad.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Peanut butter and hummus are the same thing.⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I was under the impression that, by definition, blended chickpeas were only one ingredient in hummus.

  I thought in order to qualify as hummus it had to have blended chickpeas, tahini ( which is just blended sesame seeds, IIRC), oil, and lemon juice.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Peanut butter and hummus are the same thing.⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I literally never bought pb that isn’t 100% peanuts. Sometimes with a bit of salt. Stop buying junk.

  It’s not automatically “junk”, it’s flavored.

  It just happens to be the most popular flavor in the U.S.

  I like my spicy red pepper hummus, other people like their extra-oil-and-sugar smooth consistency non-separating peanut butter.

  It’s like the difference between corn flakes and frosted flakes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Let's move this along, future boy⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I heard the Elderly Man’s words in the voice of Kris Kristofferson’s Whistler character from the Blade movies.