Counterpoint: just look at the Air Canada crash that recently happened where a controller let a fire truck cross in the path of a landing aircraft.

Planes may have all this technology but that only involves what’s happening in the air, not on the ground.

Now maybe all ground crew could have vehicles equipped with transponders and tracked as well, but there are also incidents of people randomly ending up on the runways / taxiways, or animals, or non airport vehicles.

Yep. Back in the day all the MUD servers ran on Linux. I wanted to set up my own. I knew my cousin used it so I asked him about it.

He never answered my questions directly. But he did show me how to look up the answer to my question using man pages and/or search for info online.

That first install was so painful… My friend and I didn’t know how to set up the network and it turns out the tulip driver wasn’t installed by default. So we’d boot to Linux, try something to get the network working, write down the error message on a sheet of paper. Boot to windows to research the fix to the error message. Rinse and repeat until we finally got it working.

Hah touche. I don’t blame you. Find a knockoff.

My friend swears by Leaf and I ordered one but haven’t tried it yet. Shortly after ordering mine they announced the new Leaf 2.

Anyway, 99%+ of people can’t consistently tell the difference between a 160kbps OGG and lossless, because of limitations in either their equipment, training, ears, or a combination thereof. This has been blind tested many times and the audiophiles that ‘swear they can tell’ are always proven wrong, they then usually blame the equipment or test. There’s tests you can run yourself too, eg here: https://abx.digitalfeed.net/list.html

Ooohhh I did that test when I got a new speaker / amp setup at my PC and as a musician I thought “I got this”. Plus I was trying to decide if Tidal was worth upgrading to from Spotify.

I did slightly better than average. Like just slightly. I might have the results somewhere.

I ended up doing Tidal’s free trial. I couldn’t tell a difference. Went back to Spotify. (though now my group of people are on an Apple Music family plan).

I mean I’m sure it was a mix. There are a lot of stories out there about how if you didn’t stay on top of your outsourced factory they would look everywhere to cut corners to save a few extra cents here and there.

You (used to?) have to constantly check production quality and make sure nothing was changed out for a low cost part or lower cost source material. Otherwise your product quality falls off and you’re losing money on warranties and repairs and losing customer goodwill.

The other thing that happened is these factories, once they had your design, would make the same thing with lower cost parts / materials as a knockoff and sell it unbranded, as they don’t care about US or European IP Laws. Word might get around that “hey you can get the same brand X product as brand Y or from Aliexpress and save 50%”. Now they’re undercutting you, and you lose customer goodwill because people think your product is overpriced. Then the knockoff fails and they are happy they never bought your product in the first place because they think yours would have failed too. Through word of mouth people say “oh that broke after a month” not realizing the offbrand was made with shoddy materials, less screws, cheaper batteries, an inferior screen, literally anything they can do to save money.

What the fuck is up with the huge “swipe for the next article”?

I can’t even read this one with that in the way why would I want to swipe for the next one?

spice satellites

The spice must flow.

Netflix charges me, a single guy, for 4 simultaneous streams if I want 4k. So I shared with my parents.

Then they had the audacity to stop people from password sharing or to charge even more if you want to share. I set up an automatic email forward so my parents get every sign in related email.

For Microsoft 365 / Office 365.

This guy did just that:

https://youtu.be/qy_9w_c2ub0

Thought it was a really cool idea / project. Essentially a modified Z Flip.

This was an interesting video / project I quite enjoyed.

https://youtu.be/qy_9w_c2ub0

Watched a guy using an air horn on his bike riding around a European city using it on people walking in the bike lanes. So many people had no idea they were in a dedicated bike lane. Either blocking it or walking in it or crossing over it right in front of him.

Talking with cyclists it’s actually the opposite. It works in the sense that if someone is turning right they will get into the right lane and essentially self block a bicycle from pulling past them on the right side (if a cyclist did that they have a high likelyhood of getting hit as they are pulling into the cars blind spot… Then traffic starts moving and the right turning car just goes and suddenly there could be a bike there).

I love that my global settings has a whole section labelled Privacy, but I can’t disable this globally for all chats my account joins.

Instead I have to disable it for each chat individually.

What awful design WhatsApp (obviously on purpose so I’ll forget with new chats).

Well maybe this is the push that those friends will need to move to Signal…

This is just going to be Berlin all over again isn’t it?

Since no one really answered you, there are generally two routes.

If you use newsgroups you can run sabnzbd, which is a service that downloads from newsgroups. I’ve been out of the loop for a while but there used to be something like CouchPotato for movies or SickBeard for TV (which migrated to SickChill, though you shouldn’t use that anymore as it installed a crypto miner last I heard). Lastly you sign up with a news indexer (look up Nzb.su or nzbgeek.info). CouchPotato could be linked to your imdb watch list.

Plug all of those together with API keys, and now movies on your imdb watch list just show up in your plex library as they become available.

Now if you use Torrents instead of newsgroups, there are similar things that all exist, I’m just less familiar with them.

Oh absolutely having an aggressive manager and skip will help you with bonuses and promotions. But they don’t force managers to give people low scores anymore.

While the management tool had a weird slider and score system (you could give a number between 0 and 1000 IIRC), the general terminology was you could get between 0 and 200, indicative of how you compared to the average person at your level. 100 meaning you did average per-say or completed about 100% of the work an average person could complete.

While not unheard of it was basically impossible to get 200% (required at least your skip/M2 and maybe your M3 to agree).

Last I heard (keep in mind this was 2023 or so) managers got around 105% or 110% of their bonus allocated for their team. Generally that meant you could give everyone “100” if you wanted, but practically it never worked out that way.

Also there were strict rules you couldn’t take from a more junior budget to give a more senior person a higher bonus. You could however take from a more senior budget and give it to a junior.

I. E. I couldn’t give two SWE1s 80 to give a SWE2 a 120. The reverse was allowed though.

Layoffs are generally done algorithmically. I’m not kidding. They don’t want to be sued. They follow all the legal rules otherwise (can’t layoff a US citizen without laying off a Visa employee first, etc).

Source: I worked there for 11 years, I was an IC but have many friends who are managers who would tell me how the system works, and have been laid off twice. The first time I found another position within MSFT but the most recent time, in December, I opted to take some time off and find something else.

Edit/addendum: when the managers get in the room for people discussions a lot of that is around promotions. Very little is bonuses. Bonuses are determined by your manager, then go up the chain. So your manager sets and signs off on your score. Then your M2 checks it and either sends it back if they don’t agree or signs off and sends it up. Then your M3. At the M3 and higher levels I suspect they don’t look too close but just make sure everything makes sense and the budgets balance.

Microsoft got rid of that in 2014 or so, when Nadella took over.

Depending on what I needed I remember using AltaVista, AskJeeves, Dogpile, and I feel like later on MetaCrawler or something like that (would search multiple search engines for you and ordered them scored based on platform and relevancy iirc?)