sxan
@sxan@midwest.social
🅸 🅰🅼 🆃🅷🅴 🅻🅰🆆.
𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍 𝖋𝖊𝖆𝖙𝖍𝖊𝖗𝖘𝖙𝖔𝖓𝖊𝖍𝖆𝖚𝖌𝖍
- Comment on An all out nuclear war would decimate the democrats as they mostly own the larger populated cities, leaving the Republicans to rebuild from the ashes. 13 hours ago:
All of the silos are in rural areas; those are mostly known and definitely first-strike targets. Cities need very few nukes to take out individually. Nowhere will anyone be rebuilding from the ashes. If the war is limited and nuclear winter doesn’t make the entire planet uninhabitable, the only places with a chance of surviving are the undeveloped countries. No developed country will be habitable.
Nuclear fallout is a bitch.
- Comment on How screwed would one be if their email provider shuts down? 19 hours ago:
I haven’t tried it yet, and I haven’t had a reason to look into it. My experience with Fi was that you pay $10 per Gb - it didn’t come out of your normal bank - and per-minute charges. When I was traveling, I used my company phone, or if on vacation, purely data with heavy up front-caching as much as I could at the hotel. I really don’t like surprise bill sizes.
But to be honest, I haven’t tried Mint internationally, so I can’t say.
- Comment on How screwed would one be if their email provider shuts down? 20 hours ago:
Not so bad. I use gmail as a backup for some accounts in case something happens to my VPS or domain, and my Amazon account is still linked to it out of laziness, but otherwise I never use it.
Oh. Except that I have an Android phone, and that’s linked to my gmail, although I don’t use any Google apps or services beyond Play. So I suppose my phone would stop working. Everything’s backed up, though, so maybe it’d be a good thing; maybe it’d motivate me to pull the trigger on a Light Phone. I kinda want a Minimal Phone because my F&F uses Jami, but that’d still be an Android phone, so it wouldn’t work either.
- Comment on How screwed would one be if their email provider shuts down? 20 hours ago:
Fi isn’t that great. We were on Fi for years; I switched to Mint, my wife stayed on Fi until I was sure it was going to work. So far, I pay less for more, no gotchas.
It was amazing when it first came out; now it has a lot of competition that beats it.
- Comment on "Boner" is a good word for a reanimated skeleton or a decoration of such. 2 weeks ago:
“Boner” would be a fantastic name for a TV series about a grumpy orthopedist with a drug problem who’s always right. “It’s always osteoporosis” could be the tag line.
- Comment on How long do you think we'll keep seeing "formerly Twitter"? 2 weeks ago:
I never stopped calling it Twitter. X is a window manager, a letter of the alphabet, or the most algebraic variable name. It’s not a name for a company.
- Comment on Fitness app Strava gives away location of Biden, Trump and other leaders, French newspaper says 2 weeks ago:
Oh. Yeah, that makes sense.
- Comment on Fitness app Strava gives away location of Biden, Trump and other leaders, French newspaper says 2 weeks ago:
Trump? Uses a fitness app?
That makes me suspect the whole claim.
- Comment on Static site generator for an idiot who doesn't want to learn a new templating language just to have a blog? 2 weeks ago:
Seconded. OP, if you can write Markdown, Hugo will turn it into a website.
- Comment on What's the point of a long-distance friendship? 2 weeks ago:
To maximize the number of people who show up at your funeral.
- Comment on A fair proportion of the suffering in the world can be laid at the feet of binary thinking. 2 weeks ago:
There are grammar Nazis, and fashion Nazis; PC Nazis, and good ol’ fashioned fascist Nazis; but my favorite Nazis are logic Nazis!
- Comment on What I learned from 3 years of running Windows 11 on “unsupported” PCs 3 weeks ago:
Go ahead… you can whisper it to me
- Comment on Star Trek: Lower Decks cast call for more seasons: "Until we're dust in the ground" 3 weeks ago:
Who do I write?
- Comment on The Death of the Junior Developer 3 weeks ago:
Opening an office is a completely different thing; there is an enormous difference between offshore contractors and offshore employees. That much, I’ll agree with.
In the US, though, it’s usually cost-driven. When offshore mandates come down, it’s always in terms of getting more people for less cost. However, in most cases, you don’t get more quality code faster by throwing more people at it. It’s very much a case of “9 women making a baby in one month.” Rarely are software problems solved with larger teams; usually, a single, highly skilled programmer will do more for a software project than 5 junior developers.
Not an projects are the same. Sometimes what you do need is a bunch of people. But it’s by far more the exception than the rule, and yet Management (especially in companies where software isn’t the core competency) almost always assumes the opposite.
If you performed a survey in the US, I would bet good money that in the majority of cases the decision to offshore was not made by line managers, but by someone higher in the chain who did not have a software engineering degree.
- Comment on The Death of the Junior Developer 3 weeks ago:
Thing is, outsourcing never stopped. It’s still going strong, sending jobs to whichever country is cheapest.
India is losing out to Indonesia, to Mexico, and to S American countries.
It’s a really stupid drive to the bottom, and you always get what you pay for. Want a good development team in Bengaluru? It might be cheaper than in the US, but not that much cheaper. Want good developers in Mexico? You can get them, but they’re not the cheapest. And when a company outsources like this, they’ve already admitted they’re willing to sacrifice quality for cost savings, and you - as a manager - won’t be getting those good, more expensive developers. You’ll be getting whoever is cheapest.
It is among the most stupid business practices I’ve had to fight with in my long career, and one of the things I hate the most.
Developers are not cogs. You can’t swap them out like such, and any executive who thinks you can is a fool and an incompetent idiot.
- Comment on Syncthing Android app discontinued 3 weeks ago:
I think Android updates intentionally made the Pixel C slower. It was a noticeable process, up to the point they stopped supporting it. I’d downgrade to an earlier version, but there’s such poor support in Lineage, I’m barely able to run the version that’s on there now.
Such a shame, because it’s still an amazingly beautiful device.
- Comment on Syncthing Android app discontinued 3 weeks ago:
I’m 100% with you. I want a Light Phone with a changeable battery and the ability to run 4 non-standard phone apps that I need to have mobile: OSMAnd, Home Assistant, Gadget Bridge, and Jami. Assuming it has a phone, calculator, calendar, notes, and address book - the bare-bones phone functions - everything else I use on my phone is literally something I can do probably more easily on my laptop, and is nothing I need to be able to do while out and about. If it did that, I would probably never upgrade; my upgrade cycle is on the order of every 4 years or so as is, but if you took off all of the other crap, I’d use my phone less and upgrade less often.
The main issue with phones like the Light Phone is that there are those apps that need to be mobile, and they often aren’t available there.
- Comment on It's been 30 years and I still can't get over the fact that the French word for "potatoes" is "ground apples." Have The French never had an apple? 3 weeks ago:
Sounds delicious
- Comment on It's been 30 years and I still can't get over the fact that the French word for "potatoes" is "ground apples." Have The French never had an apple? 3 weeks ago:
I pronounce is Pin-eap-ples, just to avoid this very thing.
But, at least they’re fruit.
- Comment on It's been 30 years and I still can't get over the fact that the French word for "potatoes" is "ground apples." Have The French never had an apple? 3 weeks ago:
The James Nicoll quote is better - use that instead.
- Comment on It's been 30 years and I still can't get over the fact that the French word for "potatoes" is "ground apples." Have The French never had an apple? 3 weeks ago:
Whew. Thanks for the /s. That was a comprehensive list of French stereotypes, though. Bravo.
- Comment on It's been 30 years and I still can't get over the fact that the French word for "potatoes" is "ground apples." Have The French never had an apple? 3 weeks ago:
Potatoes are indeed tasty. Some varieties are even sweet-ish. I can’t say I’ve had potatoes that were as sweet as apples, without the addition of a lot of sugar.
- Comment on Syncthing Android app discontinued 3 weeks ago:
since all apps are designed to run well on budget phones from 5 years ago, there’s no reason to upgrade.
5 years, maybe, but any more is stretching it. And not getting system upgrades anymore is problematic. Unless you own a particular model of phone, de-Googled Android can be hard to come by.
For example, I have a 7-year old Pixel C. By the time Google stopped using system updates for it, I wasn’t wanting them as every release made the device slower and more unstable. After some effort, I was finally able to install a version of Lineage, which itself has problems including no updates in years. There’s a lot of software that is incompatible with my device, both from Aurora and FDroid.
Android isn’t Linux; Google doesn’t care about maintaining backward compatability on old devices, much less performance, and there’s no army of engineers making sure it is because there’s a served running in walled-up closet no one can find.
Google deprecates features and ABIs in Android, apps update and suddenly aren’t backwards compatible.
5 years, maybe. The entire industry is addicted to users upgrading their phones, and everyone gets a piece of that pie. There’s no actors, except perhaps app developers, who have any interest in keeping old phones running. Telecoms upgrade their wireless network - the internet connection in my 8 y/o car, and half its navigation features, died the day AT&T decided to stop supporting 3G; Phone makers make no money if you don’t buy new phones; and maintaining backwards compatibility costs Google money which they’d rather siphon off to shareholders.
- Comment on It's been 30 years and I still can't get over the fact that the French word for "potatoes" is "ground apples." Have The French never had an apple? 3 weeks ago:
Oh. I’ve bitten into a potato before, just not one freshly and cruelly ripped from the warm breast of mother nature. I think they’re more similar to Asian Pears, of we’re making such comparisons, also not neatly as juicy.
- Comment on It's been 30 years and I still can't get over the fact that the French word for "potatoes" is "ground apples." Have The French never had an apple? 3 weeks ago:
I meant great-grandad.
- Comment on It's been 30 years and I still can't get over the fact that the French word for "potatoes" is "ground apples." Have The French never had an apple? 3 weeks ago:
I didn’t know that. Still a little odd to consider a potato “fruit,” but then avocados and tomatoes are considered vegetables, when one’s a berry and the other’s a fruit.
- Comment on It's been 30 years and I still can't get over the fact that the French word for "potatoes" is "ground apples." Have The French never had an apple? 3 weeks ago:
Yeah, I grabbed it at random froma search results. I think it’s not real.
- Comment on It's been 30 years and I still can't get over the fact that the French word for "potatoes" is "ground apples." Have The French never had an apple? 3 weeks ago:
Really? That’s fantastic! I didn’t know that. How awesome!
- Comment on It's been 30 years and I still can't get over the fact that the French word for "potatoes" is "ground apples." Have The French never had an apple? 3 weeks ago:
Which makes more sense, in a weird way.
- Comment on It's been 30 years and I still can't get over the fact that the French word for "potatoes" is "ground apples." Have The French never had an apple? 3 weeks ago:
It’s probably the Germans living near French, who’ve had bad influences.