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silveradeptLet us begin with More Joy Day 2024, which already happened earlier in the month, but it certainly something that you can still do any day. I'm having some fun with this joke about a local train, for example.
In defense of hierarchy and managers as a valuable part of self-organizing and adaptive systems. Which makes sense, as described there, and also lets me see where a significant amount of the managerial staff of my own organization don't visibly appear to be keeping themselves close enough to the actual work.
When considering work and professions, try to find, understand, and then remove the assumptions that a person working in your profession must be able-bodied. Preferably not by having someone try to do a job and run face-first into all of the problems and complain about them to you. Unless you're willing to commit up front that all of those complaints, when encountered, will be swiftly resolved with all the force that the C-suite can muster, so that the problem only ever happens once, if that. Urban planning and space design also has to avoid making the assumption that everyone who is in a space is able-bodied and healthy enough to take on additional burdens, so that when they design space, it can be used by people who have fatigue, or mobility aids, or other disabilities. And yes, that might also mean that the unhoused use those spaces, so rather than try to remove the things they use, why not work toward ensuring that there is enough housing for everyone? If there's graffiti on skyscrapers, that's a failure of having those spaces be inhabited and used as housing.
Quakers have a reputation for certain things as part of their gathering, ministry, and worship, but none of those things they are rumored for are true to that extreme of a degree.
The state of Oklahoma, continuing in their open hostility to queer people existing, hired the person behind the Libs of TikTok account to sit on the official libary censorship board of the state. She was selected, of course, because she fits the ideological agenda currently being pushed on students and teachers, and because requirements about being representative of the people to be served are for chumps and suckers when there's ideological points to be scored. Like companions in Texas, Florida, and other places who are cashing in on fears of a Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy, the students that will be harmed by these decisions are an afterthought. (After all, they're not seen as fully human, but as empty vessels that have to be filled with "right" thinking before they can be allowed to exist in society.)
More confirmation that if a USian declares themselves to be an "evangelical Christian," there's an extremely good chance what they're declaring is a political ideology in lockstep with the worst elements of the Republican Party rather than a coherent religious belief. So many people who identify this way are endorsing a man who should be anathema to many of their supposed moral beliefs and bedrocks. The only quip I take with the Salon article is the headline suggesting that this is somehow new, given how much Billy Graham, Pat Robertson, and Jerry Falwell all involved themselves in politics more than spirituality, and just about all of the megapastors that are in their vein have done the same. (Catholic clerics are not immune from this, either, but they're usually more circumspect about it.) Marcotte at least gestures at this long history, but thinking about it as "the mask is entirely off" assumes there was a mask to begin with, and that's never been true.
Learning much about the lives of the somewhat closeted gay man working in the civil service through his journals. And a book about sex education and how it was both intended to be liberating and then became a foundation for much of the nonsense we see now about gender and sexuality and the attempts to ban both of those as topics of discussion in schools and in the public sphere.
The regret rate for gender-affirming surgeries continues to be extremely well below the rate of regret for similar surgeries in cis populations, but that is unlikely to make a dent in policymakers who are unwilling to be persuaded by science that they are wrong.
Agents of the police, fire, and liquor control board conducted a high-profile inspection of two gay bars in Seattle, with citations issued for visible nipple and the presence of jockstraps. Given how much it felt like the police would have liked to have been there to issue citations to the patrons for being there, the community put pressure on the liquor control board to join the century of the fruitbat and the legislature to revoke "lewd conduct" regulations currently in the administrative code that lead to these kind of pretexts and citations. Nobody was claiming it was a raid, but at least some of the people with the power recognize that the way they did their inspection felt like one instead.
A significant amount of the emergency plans in case of school shooters or other violence were leaked when a contractor put them in unsecured, public-facing web buckets. Also in the buckets were documents on specific student behavior and other personally identifiable information about students and their family situations. When the cloud is everyone else's computers, you're trusting that everyone else's computers are always properly secured, and that they're never going to be important enough for someone to want to go hacking at.
An episode of Dragon's Den (the US equivalent of the program is Shark Tank, I believe) was pulled by the Beeb after someone came on making claims they could cure a whole mess of things, including ME/CFS. All of the investors made an offer for the product, so the pitch was clearly good enough.
Penn Jillette, the speaking member of the magic duo Penn & Teller, is interviewed in Cracked speaking about how he now wants to distance himself from libertarianism because it has become something different than what he wants it to be. Penn has often been an ardent champion of libertarianism, but when he got an e-mail from someone saying they wanted him to headline an anti-mask demonstration in Vegas because of his public Libertarianism, he realized that something was going very wrong if people thought he was the kind of person who would champion that kind of stupidity. The rest of the interview in the article is excellent as well, and suggests that "Penn" is even more a public persona than the person behind it than we thought. (I'm frankly impressed that someone of his stature and visibility is freely admitting to changing his mind, not wanting to be an asshole, and otherwise wanting to try and stay in his lane, rather than using his fame and celebrity to entrench his opinions and never budge. It's very refreshing.
Wayne LaPierre, now previous head of the National Rifle Association, resigned his position in a craven attempt to duck responsibility for allegedly skimming the organization's donations to enrich himself and his wife, leaving the organization in need of a bankruptcy declaration and having the New York Attorney General filing charges and getting to pursue them despite the organization changing its headquarters to Texas to try and avoid that responsibility. I can't say I'm sad to see the organization and Mr. LaPierre have to deal with the whirlwind they are finally reaping, but I also know that the damage in the winds they sowed will take generations to deal with, even as mass shootings continue to happen because of their work.
The super-rich of the UK say they want to stay in the UK because of all the arts and culture present, but they also think that taxes on the rich are too high and they don't want to pay more. So they don't want to go to tax haven countries because they'll get bored, but they also don't want to pay the tax so that those arts and culture things they love so much can be properly funded, along with other services. It would be nice for some of the ultra-rich to be thoroughly in favor of taxing them severely after the first little bit, so that they can be wealthy and there can still be plenty for all the things they want to experience.
While the FAA had grounded the 737MAX9 planes after the door plug incident, Alaska Airlines inspected their fleet and found several other planes with loose bolts. Which is not a happy-making anything at all. Those bolts turn out to be very important for keeping the doors and the door plugs in place, and according to an inside source, it is Boeing's people, rather than their spinoff Spirit Aerospace, that improperly installed the door plug that blew off in the flight. The source also documents several other failures and systems not talking to each other along the way that led up to the problem with the door plug blowing off. As well as the likelihood that the fuselages that are delivered to Boeing need additional inspection because they routinely have defects or non-conformities. The MAX9 was eventually allowed back into service, but I suspect the insider's laying the blame for all of these problems at the feet of the executive team that has been more interested in the profit for the company rather than in producing safe and airworthy aircraft is completely accurate.
A set of fallacies deployed by people who either don't understand or don't want to let cycling and cycling infrastructure into their area.
A meditation on how difficult it is to stay true to your principles when the entire world is pushing you to violate your ethics to achieve what would be a very good result. An aggravation that in a world that was deliberately constructed to be to the left of our reality, a callousness about disability still came through in the end, and the ways in which portraying an abusive person in fiction who has no person who willingly accepts and plays and works with that abusive self ruins the previous characterization of that person.
Macro photographs of insects and arachnids, pious artwork by a woman prisoner using her own hair as part of the cross-stitch, and the pressed flower book of Emily Dickinson, available in digital form.
In technology, what may be a compilation of many other password breaches, plus potentially new material as well, was brought to the attention of security researchers. That's just a lot of possible things and it may be worth rotating any passwords that you haven't already.
It is a major problem when there's only one major provider of a service to a library, and that provider is in the control of a company that is known for extracting value and destroying companies. With the way that the library world is quickly being consolidated and amalgamated and eaten wholesale, this situation may be happening more and more to all libraries as the choices start becoming "You can pay an arbitrary percentage increase in your fees, because our CEOs don't have enough yacht money, or you can go without this service you want to provide to your people."
Hospitals whose owners are private equity firms have worse care results, because the equity firms try to run them to make profit, rather than to provide care. Which makes something that is already bad, in a lot of ways, worse. And not just in the intangibles, but in serious medical errors and other things that threaten life and limb.
Science continues to march on, as the discovery of very large, very clustered structures together suggests that a model of the universe that contradicts the belief that the matter of the universe has been distributed mostly evenly. When you can peer into the universe with very long lenses and feed it into very powerful computers, the universe often turns out to be far weirder than we give it credit for.
HP continues to prove itself a company no person should be a customer of, with the CEO bragging about their techniques used to lock people into staying with their products. Which, naturally, there are antitrust lawsuits about, because no company should be allowed to enforce that kind of lock-in on their products.
The rental car company Hertz is selling off Tesla and other electric vehicles from the rental fleet for rather cheaply, on the problem that they can't keep them in sufficient repair to make them cost-effective. Which isn't really Hertz's problem as much as it is Tesla's inability to produce enough repair parts. And with Elon throwing a tantrum and threatening to take his ball and go home if Tesla doesn't give him more control of the company, it might be the perfect time to hit the eject button on him. One of the shareholders said the proposed and then passed compensation plan wasn't fair to them or the company, and got a judge to rule in their favor to that effect, preventing Elon Musk from getting one billion dollars per week in compensation.
Trying to write secure code with the current generation of prompt responders is not going well. Their code is often less secure.
An employee of one of the Canadian First Nations may have been the innocent victim of a triangulation fraud case, where a person orders goods on a legitimate site, and then the person they ordered it from uses fraudulently obtained payment data to buy it from somewhere else, leaving only the person whose card was hacked to unravel the problem and quite possibly with someone who is also a victim, rather than a perpetrator of the fraud. The RCMP did not acquit themselves well with the situation, and seemed pretty convinced they had the right person even when being shown evidence of things being more complex than that.
Dr. Dave Mills, creator of the Network Time Protocol and contributor to several of the other aspects of the Internet we take for granted, died at age 85. There's a lot we have to thank Dr. Mills for, especially with relation to networking and synchronization and making sure very secure transactions stay secure.
Convicted of fraud, having claimed technology that could run many tests from a single drop of blood, Elizabeth Holmes was barred from participating in U.S. federal health programs for ninety years, on top of the four hundred and fifty-two million USD in restitution she has to pay.
NASA was finally able to open a canister containing asteroid material from the OSIRIS-REx mission, with about 30 percent of the eventual sample to be sent out ant 70 percent held in reserve with the understanding that instrumentation will get better in the future and may be able to discover more than what can be discovered now. They finally got some stubborn bolts to give up, and that gave up the asteroid material.
Amazon and iRobot have agreed to terminate the agreement that would have let the consumer giant eat the robot vacuum company, and likely use the mapping data the robot would have provided about houses for their own purposes.
In other Amazon privacy things, Amazon company Ring finally decided they should at least make the police get a fig leaf of a court order to get Ring camera footage, instead of just making it available to them without any requirements to prove they needed it.
Difftastic, a syntax-aware comparison tool to show what has changed from one version of a file to another.
Taking advantage of several of the things automatically created in Rails applications to make them more secure.
Migration from Substack to a self-hosted Ghost platform, with many of the technical woes that came with it, which is not supposed to be a discouragement, but one of those things where you should know what might go into everything if you are also interested in getting away from a platform that is more than happy to take the money of Nazis and promote them.
Nitter, a tool that has allowed browsing Twitter timelines without heavy Javascript or advertisements, is shutting down because of Twitter changes regarding guest accounts. The wagons are circling, as Twitter itself is circling the drain for many.
Dell and VMware have parted ways, exercising a clause in a contract that allowed them to do so if either Dell or VMware changed hands. Since VMware was bought by Broadcom, and Broadcom has been changing the way they license the virtualization software, this could be Dell saying they no longer find the license terms good enough.
A star type throwing off matter into the universe, a smoky star, rather than a different time of star that was known to throw off heavier elements into the universe.
It turns out that the technology of self-checkout only works in a limited set of cases, and only when the technology itself isn't broken or breaking, rather than being the vaunted cost-saving technology it was likely hyped as. (It was probably hyped as a way of having more product pass through with having to pay less of those pesky humans.) Of course, when there aren't humans around, it also can make it much harder to get the best fare for any given journey.
Last for tonight, the Unified Cutlery theory, involving spoons of energy, forks of aggravation, and borrowing knives to make up shortfalls.
(Materials viaadrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
In defense of hierarchy and managers as a valuable part of self-organizing and adaptive systems. Which makes sense, as described there, and also lets me see where a significant amount of the managerial staff of my own organization don't visibly appear to be keeping themselves close enough to the actual work.
When considering work and professions, try to find, understand, and then remove the assumptions that a person working in your profession must be able-bodied. Preferably not by having someone try to do a job and run face-first into all of the problems and complain about them to you. Unless you're willing to commit up front that all of those complaints, when encountered, will be swiftly resolved with all the force that the C-suite can muster, so that the problem only ever happens once, if that. Urban planning and space design also has to avoid making the assumption that everyone who is in a space is able-bodied and healthy enough to take on additional burdens, so that when they design space, it can be used by people who have fatigue, or mobility aids, or other disabilities. And yes, that might also mean that the unhoused use those spaces, so rather than try to remove the things they use, why not work toward ensuring that there is enough housing for everyone? If there's graffiti on skyscrapers, that's a failure of having those spaces be inhabited and used as housing.
Quakers have a reputation for certain things as part of their gathering, ministry, and worship, but none of those things they are rumored for are true to that extreme of a degree.
The state of Oklahoma, continuing in their open hostility to queer people existing, hired the person behind the Libs of TikTok account to sit on the official libary censorship board of the state. She was selected, of course, because she fits the ideological agenda currently being pushed on students and teachers, and because requirements about being representative of the people to be served are for chumps and suckers when there's ideological points to be scored. Like companions in Texas, Florida, and other places who are cashing in on fears of a Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy, the students that will be harmed by these decisions are an afterthought. (After all, they're not seen as fully human, but as empty vessels that have to be filled with "right" thinking before they can be allowed to exist in society.)
More confirmation that if a USian declares themselves to be an "evangelical Christian," there's an extremely good chance what they're declaring is a political ideology in lockstep with the worst elements of the Republican Party rather than a coherent religious belief. So many people who identify this way are endorsing a man who should be anathema to many of their supposed moral beliefs and bedrocks. The only quip I take with the Salon article is the headline suggesting that this is somehow new, given how much Billy Graham, Pat Robertson, and Jerry Falwell all involved themselves in politics more than spirituality, and just about all of the megapastors that are in their vein have done the same. (Catholic clerics are not immune from this, either, but they're usually more circumspect about it.) Marcotte at least gestures at this long history, but thinking about it as "the mask is entirely off" assumes there was a mask to begin with, and that's never been true.
Learning much about the lives of the somewhat closeted gay man working in the civil service through his journals. And a book about sex education and how it was both intended to be liberating and then became a foundation for much of the nonsense we see now about gender and sexuality and the attempts to ban both of those as topics of discussion in schools and in the public sphere.
The regret rate for gender-affirming surgeries continues to be extremely well below the rate of regret for similar surgeries in cis populations, but that is unlikely to make a dent in policymakers who are unwilling to be persuaded by science that they are wrong.
Agents of the police, fire, and liquor control board conducted a high-profile inspection of two gay bars in Seattle, with citations issued for visible nipple and the presence of jockstraps. Given how much it felt like the police would have liked to have been there to issue citations to the patrons for being there, the community put pressure on the liquor control board to join the century of the fruitbat and the legislature to revoke "lewd conduct" regulations currently in the administrative code that lead to these kind of pretexts and citations. Nobody was claiming it was a raid, but at least some of the people with the power recognize that the way they did their inspection felt like one instead.
A significant amount of the emergency plans in case of school shooters or other violence were leaked when a contractor put them in unsecured, public-facing web buckets. Also in the buckets were documents on specific student behavior and other personally identifiable information about students and their family situations. When the cloud is everyone else's computers, you're trusting that everyone else's computers are always properly secured, and that they're never going to be important enough for someone to want to go hacking at.
An episode of Dragon's Den (the US equivalent of the program is Shark Tank, I believe) was pulled by the Beeb after someone came on making claims they could cure a whole mess of things, including ME/CFS. All of the investors made an offer for the product, so the pitch was clearly good enough.
Penn Jillette, the speaking member of the magic duo Penn & Teller, is interviewed in Cracked speaking about how he now wants to distance himself from libertarianism because it has become something different than what he wants it to be. Penn has often been an ardent champion of libertarianism, but when he got an e-mail from someone saying they wanted him to headline an anti-mask demonstration in Vegas because of his public Libertarianism, he realized that something was going very wrong if people thought he was the kind of person who would champion that kind of stupidity. The rest of the interview in the article is excellent as well, and suggests that "Penn" is even more a public persona than the person behind it than we thought. (I'm frankly impressed that someone of his stature and visibility is freely admitting to changing his mind, not wanting to be an asshole, and otherwise wanting to try and stay in his lane, rather than using his fame and celebrity to entrench his opinions and never budge. It's very refreshing.
Wayne LaPierre, now previous head of the National Rifle Association, resigned his position in a craven attempt to duck responsibility for allegedly skimming the organization's donations to enrich himself and his wife, leaving the organization in need of a bankruptcy declaration and having the New York Attorney General filing charges and getting to pursue them despite the organization changing its headquarters to Texas to try and avoid that responsibility. I can't say I'm sad to see the organization and Mr. LaPierre have to deal with the whirlwind they are finally reaping, but I also know that the damage in the winds they sowed will take generations to deal with, even as mass shootings continue to happen because of their work.
The super-rich of the UK say they want to stay in the UK because of all the arts and culture present, but they also think that taxes on the rich are too high and they don't want to pay more. So they don't want to go to tax haven countries because they'll get bored, but they also don't want to pay the tax so that those arts and culture things they love so much can be properly funded, along with other services. It would be nice for some of the ultra-rich to be thoroughly in favor of taxing them severely after the first little bit, so that they can be wealthy and there can still be plenty for all the things they want to experience.
While the FAA had grounded the 737MAX9 planes after the door plug incident, Alaska Airlines inspected their fleet and found several other planes with loose bolts. Which is not a happy-making anything at all. Those bolts turn out to be very important for keeping the doors and the door plugs in place, and according to an inside source, it is Boeing's people, rather than their spinoff Spirit Aerospace, that improperly installed the door plug that blew off in the flight. The source also documents several other failures and systems not talking to each other along the way that led up to the problem with the door plug blowing off. As well as the likelihood that the fuselages that are delivered to Boeing need additional inspection because they routinely have defects or non-conformities. The MAX9 was eventually allowed back into service, but I suspect the insider's laying the blame for all of these problems at the feet of the executive team that has been more interested in the profit for the company rather than in producing safe and airworthy aircraft is completely accurate.
A set of fallacies deployed by people who either don't understand or don't want to let cycling and cycling infrastructure into their area.
A meditation on how difficult it is to stay true to your principles when the entire world is pushing you to violate your ethics to achieve what would be a very good result. An aggravation that in a world that was deliberately constructed to be to the left of our reality, a callousness about disability still came through in the end, and the ways in which portraying an abusive person in fiction who has no person who willingly accepts and plays and works with that abusive self ruins the previous characterization of that person.
Macro photographs of insects and arachnids, pious artwork by a woman prisoner using her own hair as part of the cross-stitch, and the pressed flower book of Emily Dickinson, available in digital form.
In technology, what may be a compilation of many other password breaches, plus potentially new material as well, was brought to the attention of security researchers. That's just a lot of possible things and it may be worth rotating any passwords that you haven't already.
It is a major problem when there's only one major provider of a service to a library, and that provider is in the control of a company that is known for extracting value and destroying companies. With the way that the library world is quickly being consolidated and amalgamated and eaten wholesale, this situation may be happening more and more to all libraries as the choices start becoming "You can pay an arbitrary percentage increase in your fees, because our CEOs don't have enough yacht money, or you can go without this service you want to provide to your people."
Hospitals whose owners are private equity firms have worse care results, because the equity firms try to run them to make profit, rather than to provide care. Which makes something that is already bad, in a lot of ways, worse. And not just in the intangibles, but in serious medical errors and other things that threaten life and limb.
Science continues to march on, as the discovery of very large, very clustered structures together suggests that a model of the universe that contradicts the belief that the matter of the universe has been distributed mostly evenly. When you can peer into the universe with very long lenses and feed it into very powerful computers, the universe often turns out to be far weirder than we give it credit for.
HP continues to prove itself a company no person should be a customer of, with the CEO bragging about their techniques used to lock people into staying with their products. Which, naturally, there are antitrust lawsuits about, because no company should be allowed to enforce that kind of lock-in on their products.
The rental car company Hertz is selling off Tesla and other electric vehicles from the rental fleet for rather cheaply, on the problem that they can't keep them in sufficient repair to make them cost-effective. Which isn't really Hertz's problem as much as it is Tesla's inability to produce enough repair parts. And with Elon throwing a tantrum and threatening to take his ball and go home if Tesla doesn't give him more control of the company, it might be the perfect time to hit the eject button on him. One of the shareholders said the proposed and then passed compensation plan wasn't fair to them or the company, and got a judge to rule in their favor to that effect, preventing Elon Musk from getting one billion dollars per week in compensation.
Trying to write secure code with the current generation of prompt responders is not going well. Their code is often less secure.
An employee of one of the Canadian First Nations may have been the innocent victim of a triangulation fraud case, where a person orders goods on a legitimate site, and then the person they ordered it from uses fraudulently obtained payment data to buy it from somewhere else, leaving only the person whose card was hacked to unravel the problem and quite possibly with someone who is also a victim, rather than a perpetrator of the fraud. The RCMP did not acquit themselves well with the situation, and seemed pretty convinced they had the right person even when being shown evidence of things being more complex than that.
Dr. Dave Mills, creator of the Network Time Protocol and contributor to several of the other aspects of the Internet we take for granted, died at age 85. There's a lot we have to thank Dr. Mills for, especially with relation to networking and synchronization and making sure very secure transactions stay secure.
Convicted of fraud, having claimed technology that could run many tests from a single drop of blood, Elizabeth Holmes was barred from participating in U.S. federal health programs for ninety years, on top of the four hundred and fifty-two million USD in restitution she has to pay.
NASA was finally able to open a canister containing asteroid material from the OSIRIS-REx mission, with about 30 percent of the eventual sample to be sent out ant 70 percent held in reserve with the understanding that instrumentation will get better in the future and may be able to discover more than what can be discovered now. They finally got some stubborn bolts to give up, and that gave up the asteroid material.
Amazon and iRobot have agreed to terminate the agreement that would have let the consumer giant eat the robot vacuum company, and likely use the mapping data the robot would have provided about houses for their own purposes.
In other Amazon privacy things, Amazon company Ring finally decided they should at least make the police get a fig leaf of a court order to get Ring camera footage, instead of just making it available to them without any requirements to prove they needed it.
Difftastic, a syntax-aware comparison tool to show what has changed from one version of a file to another.
Taking advantage of several of the things automatically created in Rails applications to make them more secure.
Migration from Substack to a self-hosted Ghost platform, with many of the technical woes that came with it, which is not supposed to be a discouragement, but one of those things where you should know what might go into everything if you are also interested in getting away from a platform that is more than happy to take the money of Nazis and promote them.
Nitter, a tool that has allowed browsing Twitter timelines without heavy Javascript or advertisements, is shutting down because of Twitter changes regarding guest accounts. The wagons are circling, as Twitter itself is circling the drain for many.
Dell and VMware have parted ways, exercising a clause in a contract that allowed them to do so if either Dell or VMware changed hands. Since VMware was bought by Broadcom, and Broadcom has been changing the way they license the virtualization software, this could be Dell saying they no longer find the license terms good enough.
A star type throwing off matter into the universe, a smoky star, rather than a different time of star that was known to throw off heavier elements into the universe.
It turns out that the technology of self-checkout only works in a limited set of cases, and only when the technology itself isn't broken or breaking, rather than being the vaunted cost-saving technology it was likely hyped as. (It was probably hyped as a way of having more product pass through with having to pay less of those pesky humans.) Of course, when there aren't humans around, it also can make it much harder to get the best fare for any given journey.
Last for tonight, the Unified Cutlery theory, involving spoons of energy, forks of aggravation, and borrowing knives to make up shortfalls.
(Materials via
adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
no subject
Date: 2024-02-03 10:39 pm (UTC)Engineers have been departing VMware in ways that have made their managers and great-grand managers beg, but the begging has not extended to offering anything meaningful in the way of WFH.
*casually shits on Broadcom*
no subject
Date: 2024-02-03 10:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-03 11:05 pm (UTC)And am increasingly glad that I am getting the Broadcom hardware that I have off of their version of the operating system and onto something that I much prefer to run, without their quirks.
no subject
Date: 2024-02-04 12:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-04 02:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-04 05:50 pm (UTC)I'm glad to see a growing blowback against self-checkout. I hate it, and I've seen cutbacks on checkout clerks. There's a Target Store in Las Cruces that I shop at - the only Target in that city - that usually only has one peopled checkout when I'm there. I'm usually through that line and heading out while people are still queued up for the self machines!
I don't have a problem with leaving a couple self-checkouts for the people who are really phobic about interacting with people. At the same time I read about the grocery chain Kroger trialing stores in Dallas(?) that were ENTIRLY self-checkout! I would turn around and leave such a store.
Meanwhile, WalMart and H-E-B stores do not take Apple Pay or Google/Android Pay! You can use THEIR app on your phone and scan a barcode, or insert/swipe a credit card. It makes no difference on the transaction fee, that's still going to be paid by the store, makes a huge difference on the amount of data mining that they can do on you.
no subject
Date: 2024-02-04 06:18 pm (UTC)An entire store of self-check? Very bad idea, even if they're certain that it's properly accessible to everyone who might use the store.
Data mining, where the real money from just about everything gets made. *sigh*
no subject
Date: 2024-02-04 06:49 pm (UTC)I just read that article about Overdrive being owned by vampire capitalists. That's pretty tragic. I don't think we use them as that's more a public library vs university library thing. But I'm sure when Overdrive implodes, its ramifications will reverberate all over the place!
no subject
Date: 2024-02-04 07:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-04 07:43 pm (UTC)Most of our ebooks are university education-types, and other than that they're through Ebsco and Follett and they're acquired through other vendor sources. So Libby/Overdrive doesn't do much for us. Though I believe my boss has talked about acquiring an ebook vendor platform, I will need to talk to her about this.