There’s a long tradition of sending candy in tech repair packages. It harkens back to Swedish Fish Theory. In big retail “GeekSquad” types of stores where many repairs are done off-site, some techs realized that repairs and RMAs were completed much faster when they included a bag of candy in the box. The idea is that if you treat the RMA receiver as a human instead of a faceless entity, you actually get prioritized service from them. They’ll expedite your shit even if you didn’t pay for it, simply because you were nice to them and they want to return the favor.

Good ol’ rentry coming in clutch again.

Cloud saves are still broken for OneDrive users, eh? Seems like it would be a simple fix, (in fact, you can even work around it relatively easily with a simple symlink) but I guess it’s not a priority.

One of the hardest parts of a veterinarian’s job is the fact that your patients can’t tell you what’s wrong. They may try to communicate in their own way, but oftentimes they’ll actually go out of their way to mask discomfort or hide pain. This is especially true for pack animals (like dogs) where standing out too far from the norm can mean being excluded; From a natural selection standpoint, downplaying discomfort means you still fit in with the pack and can continue to benefit from them. Luckily, the vet immediately knew something was wrong in this case because the patient kept exploding into piles of gold rings.

I wasn’t in IT, so my hands were tied. If I tried running a network scan, I’d have been able to hear the screeching all the way from city hall.

Source: Former IT guy here, who had to ensure that updates ran at the most convenient times possible for thousands of users.

I used to work at a theater owned by a city. So we used the city’s IT department, and their network. During COVID, live-streaming took off. The city wanted us to install a streaming video package. After a month or two of installing a full video system, we finally get around to testing the stream. Boot up AWS, and it runs fine. We’re streaming in full 4K. Great!

So the show rolls around. It’s Saturday, 7:30pm start time. We start the show… And the stream instantly shits the bed. Like we go from full gigabit upload speed, to less than a single megabit. We’re lucky to get 56kbps speeds. We’re getting one or two frames per second if we’re lucky.

Sunday, we test the stream ahead of time, and it works flawlessly. Show starts, and the upload speed drops to fucking dial up.

Monday morning rolls around, and IT strolls in to check their tickets. Sees a hundred from us, and gives us a call. They run a test on their end. No issues. They run a test on AWS. No issues. They run a test on the fiber backbone between the theater and city hall. No issues. They call the ISP. ISP said they didn’t have any issues over the weekend. IT shrugs, and marks the tickets as solved.

Next weekend, same thing. We’re wondering if IT is automatically throttling us, or if we have a malicious user on the network. We’re asking about QoS, or maybe automatic port control kicking in when the stream starts. Monday rolls around, and IT marks it as solved again.

Third weekend, same thing. This time, the city manager’s office is getting calls from angry patrons who paid for streaming and can’t watch their streams. Monday morning, IT rolls up. They run some more tests, and still can’t find anything wrong. They swear up and down that it’s nothing on their end, and it must be something on ours.

After four months of this back and forth, IT finally admits that they have all of their maintenance tasks to run at 7:30 over the weekend. Every single computer, server, and fucking toaster connected to the city network begins their updates at exactly 7:30. Thousands of city devices, all singularly focused on devouring our upload speeds. Servers run off-site backups. Those backups consume all of the upload speeds for the entire city network. IT refuses to change the time, because “this is what works for us. It’s after city hall closes, so we don’t have any users who are affected. It hasn’t been a problem in the past.”

This is dumb from a logistical standpoint. Professional lube-users mix their own using a dissolvable powder and distilled water. Because shipping water is expensive. The powder to self-mix this entire 275 gallon drum would fit in a grocery bag.

Yeah, the unfortunate part about internet security is that everyone has to start somewhere. And that means there’s always a newbie making dumb mistakes that they don’t even realize are dumb. It’s not a personal failing, unless they fail to learn from it.

Odd to think that Limewire (shut down in late 2010) and the 1070 (released in mid 2016) were separated by a smaller gap of time than the 1070 and today.

Out of curiosity, which book?

Yeah, my ratios skyrocketed when I finally got access to fiber. Went from struggling to hit 1.0, to easily hitting 150.0. My highest ratio is nearly 1000.

If you have to stoop to attacking someone’s grammar in an argument, you’ve already lost. I likely won’t be replying to this comment chain again.

Edit: Lol they edited their comment. The original was only as follows:

Only nine states have outlawed red light cameras. Your “many” statement you made earlier is, in fact, just “some.” So, fixed that for you.

That’s not how it works where I live. I had to fight a ticket from one of these once, because I live in an area where courts haven’t ruled the cameras unconstitutional.

FTFY. The rest of your comment needs to have that context in mind, because the cameras’ legality entirely depends on where the camera in question is located.

Here’s a reminder that the 40 hour work week was intended to have a partner at home, to take care of the housework, errands, bills, etc while the employee was at work. If you’re feeling overwhelmed and like you don’t have enough time in the weekend, it’s because the weekend was supposed to be free. But since wages haven’t kept up with inflation, everyone in the house needs to work, meaning nobody is available to be a homemaker.

Isn’t the accuser in that case the police or whoever is in charge of those cameras?

If it were a cop pulling you over and writing a ticket, sure. It would be that cop. They can show up in court and stand as a witness for you to cross-examine. But if the entire system is automated, which specific cop is the accuser?

If you truly want to be petty, sit until it’s a late yellow before you go. They’ll be stuck at the red. I wouldn’t do it if there’s anyone stuck behind the honker, but if it’s just the two of you then it’s an easy way to be very petty. It’ll piss some people off so badly that they’ll be liable to run the red.

Red light and/or speed cameras are banned in many parts of the US, because courts have repeatedly ruled that they’re unconstitutional. The constitution’s sixth amendment guarantees the right to argue against your accuser in court. This was originally intended to prevent secret surprise court rulings, which the British used against Americans leading up to and during the revolution; The crown would accuse people of crimes and try them without any notice. When they obviously failed to show up to court, they were found guilty in absentia and arrested.

Regional courts have repeatedly banned the cameras, by ruling that because people can’t argue against an inanimate object, the object can’t accuse people of crimes. Basically, the constitution says you have the right to get your day in court, and some courts have interpreted that to mean the automated cameras violate that right.

Even in medicine, there are big blind spots between specialties. My radiologist who did my wife’s sonogram was like “yeah I got into this because I fucking hate needles. If I wanted to go into nursing I’d need to use them a lot. So here I am, doing all of the non-invasive stuff instead.”

AI detectors don’t work reliably, and often just end up flagging autistic people as AI. And even if it is, the points can still be valid. The em dash is a big giveaway, but those are also common with people who read a lot of fanfic (cough autistics cough). Because the em dash is commonly used in fanfic dialogue, so fanfic readers and writers get used to seeing and using it.