No, I’m the fucking chump that has to do the work while they’re out!!

Do any of you have jobs? You really think a big company is going to eat shit when this stuff happens?!

Here’s a fucking hint: they don’t. They just squeeze the remaining employees harder. Every company. You can go get a new job and it will happen there too.

When they do mass layoffs, did you think that the people who didn’t get cut just carry on like normal? The worst time to be at a company is after the cuts because there is the same amount of work and just fewer people to do it.

Wake the fuck up.

You really don’t think this will ever be a problem. Just can’t see that eh?

Well enjoy your particular version of the world. I’ve had shit like this happen at work MANY times. Someone is “sick” and takes FMLA. Abuses it. Comes back just long enough to reset the clock then gone again for another 12 weeks. There are a good number of people who do nothing but find ways to do shit like this. Now they have another round in the clip.

If you’ve never had to deal with this shit, consider yourself lucky.

Well now this whole thing is worse.

So now, employees can pick which software they have a religious exemption from? So I can say that I my religion does not permit me to use spreadsheets. Now I don’t have to use them?

I don’t care if people don’t want to use ai, but this precedent is not sustainable. One person on the team decides that their religion does not permit use of a computer. What the hell do you do? You can’t fire them for observing a religious practice (according to the ai thing) so what? They just sit there picking their nose while I have to cover all the work they aren’t doing? Work has to make accomodations? Give this person a typewriter and some carbon paper?

Maybe I have a religious exemption from thinking about anything but god.

All this does is makes work difficult for anyone else without an exemption. Now everyone gets one. Now companies just say, “fuck this, we will find new ways to fire people and bake them into law”.

None of this ends well.

This seems utterly silly. It’s like saying “I don’t believe we should use the internet it’s against my religion” and then trying to work a tech job without it.

Maybe I can go to work in a tech company and object to computers. I only use a typewriter. I also rode a horse to get here.

This only seems like it could backfire on the individual. Everyone else in the company is going to use it and come midyear review, they will have run laps around you and your pile of sticky notes and spreadsheets, using your inbox like a filing system.

My religion does not permit me to use Agile. I only track my work on a notepad I keep in my drawer. I won’t go to the daily stand, won’t participate in sprint planning nor PI planning. Hey, why is everyone getting more done than I am?

I mean, I haven’t worked at any company that doesn’t have a decade or more of tech debt all human-made.

Is this any worse such a regard?

I do not advocate for more bullshit, but I don’t really think that this will make a big difference either way.

Paul Reiser has always been an irritating twerp. Not funny, I’ve never like anything he’s done.

That is until the Kominski Method. I have no idea how he can go toe-to-toe with Michael Douglas, but he’s PERFECT as the irritating pal. I think he just needed to ripen into a crusty old man before he actually became funny.

I also love that Kathleen Turner was in it.

I liked Kubo and the Two Strings a lot.

However, Mathew McConaughey? He was a very strange choice for voice talent in that film. It did not fit the aesthetic at all, he stuck out like a sore thumb. That southern drawl thing he’s got in a movie that has primarily Asian characters? Well all right all right all right.

Your location likely is helping the cause. Any car that has live life in a big city where it might snow will eat shit every day on rough roads.

Also, I don’t know a single soul who thinks they need to replace their shocks or struts. They wear out and the car is mostly fine as long as you’re driving peacefully. However, if you ever need to brake quickly or dodge something, those worn suspension components will greet you by not responding well and you could end up having a bad day.

Remember folks, your shocks and struts are a wear item. They usually wear out around 70k. Lower for hard city life, higher for glassy roads. No matter what, they do wear out, even if you’re not aware of it.

It would be if so many companies hadn’t bought into the microsoft ecosystem so hard. My company did the usual BS of “well we have an e5 license so it’s free”. Now we are married to all their stupid shit and have no relationships with other providers. End of the month gonna be expensive. Now expect a scramble to cut master service agreements and contracts with others in a panic.

I mean, on average is it any worse than modern politicians?

Also, we’re talking about the same software that seems to do pretty well at fixing errors in spreadsheet formulas and sometimes coding. Not a huge surprise that it is not awesome at tasks with a high level of complexity. Not sure that this is at all a surprise.

I am trying to fix an issue with my car where the mount for an exhaust shield broke off. Claude told me I should drill a hole in my gas tank to attach a mounting bolt.

Everyone need to untwist their undies about AI. It’s neat, but it’s not taking over for a bit.

I would love to exit the Roku ecosystem. I don’t use any Apple products and I’m not interested in starting.

It’s amazing how there are really no open-source products in this category of devices.

As long as you don’t mind them harvesting every tiny bit of data you feed it.

I don’t like the big US players, but at least they’re doing a tiny bit to keep out of your shit. Deepseek is not pretending at all. I suppose it’s at least honest and the price point is REALLY tempting. Openclaw gets expensive fast with the number of tokens it consumes. I burned through $30 in two days with it using Claude Haiku/Sonnet. Plugging it into cheap LLM is a nice idea, but no thanks.

That is the point. Search is free. You will be paying for ai soon. If you don’t then you’ll get the low-quality results. This is nothing more than greed. They were making lots of money with search, but like everything in the modern world, businesses only exist now to extinguish what was free or a good value and sell the same thing back at an extreme markup.

Furniture was made of wood. Now it’s mostly disposable composite junk. Wood, now commands a high premium.

Household goods like toasters, irons, lamps, sofas were all at one point made to be durable. Many people would buy these things and maybe replace them every 15-20 years. Now the same stuff lasts five if you’re lucky.

That’s why I rub out a fat one first and THEN eat the cereal.

I know it is somehow the worst thing ever, but Firefox really is ok. Turn off some telemetry and it’s not a big deal.

Don’t count out us cheap bastards. I love buying used gear. I don’t play games on them, I just run my own stuff. Local llms home servers for media and such.

Of course with proxmox, my need for multiple devices has shrunk considerably. I’d be happy if I could get an old mining rig with a few midrange gpus in them. I’d rather run my own llm than pay a premium for a subscription. I can have it run my home automation and use it for filthy sexy chat bots. Could also use them for coding agents.

If you’re dumping 2-3 year old nvidia hardware, I’m buying.

Bain and/or PWC. Sometimes both.

Always same clowns.

I am hopeful that after the orange piece of shit eventually goes tits up, I’m really hoping that there will be a hard correction in the other direction.

Huh?

I think people just need to reset their expectations.

I asked one for help to interpret PCI policy application (credit card regulatory stuff). I gave it the situation and it provided me with a good answer that, when I asked our compliance team about, they agreed.

That saved me a lot of time. I don’t see how that’s a dead end. Then I had it draft a response to the person asking questions; I tuned it a little to my liking and sent it. What might have taken me an hour before took 10 minutes. This seems like a helpful thing, not a bad thing. I’m not sure what other technology would have done that.

Anger is a composite emotion that is the combination of several emotions, a blend of a brief period of time and social conditioning. It is not pure.

The root of all anger is typically sadness, or fear. It’s been well studied that in the US, boys are taught from an early age to “man up”, “quit being a sissy” and other silly things after they show an emotional response. Boys don’t cry, boys are tough. Showing sadness or fear is a sign of weakness. So boys (and girls also) are taught and the lesson is reinforced when they are made fun of for being sad or fearful. They are also taught that where sadness is weakness, anger is strength. If something bad happens to you, crying is passive, submissive and everyone hates a pussy. When you get angry, you take action, you hit things, break things, hit people, lash out verbally, curse, call them mean things. Now others are scared of you or at least unwilling to engage–this is now control and control is a means to taking power.

Anger is learned, it is taught. It is not an instinct. Anger is not required to respond under duress. In a fight or flight situation, neither require anger. You can be scared and still fight. Anger is just what we are taught by a culture that prizes power and strength to be required in order to fight.