Jesus Christ this blight has been around that long?

I get that per Wikipedia, the source of these is:

In the Spring 2003 issue of the secular humanist magazine Free Inquiry, Laurence W. Britt, who is described as “a retired international businessperson, writer, and commentator” published “Fascism Anyone?”, which included a list of 14 defining characteristics of fascism.

But you have to get that a random unsourced image of white text on a black background is some real “trust me bro” Facebook shares from Grandma type shit.

Getting tired of “it’s okay when our side does it because we’re right, but we’ll clown on it when the bad people do it because they’re wrong”. Just be better.

And while I’m complaining, the source of these is a fucking editorial by someone with no actual credentials or qualifications to declare this shit. Now it’s being passed around online like it’s certifiable fact because it sounds accurate.

All of those are problems. All of those are bad. What is happening in the USA is bad. But muddying the waters by taking random bullshit like this as certified fucking fact only makes talking about shit harder, as everyone has their own set of things they think are truth, most of which have been latched on to for no reason more than “it sounds right and reinforced my beliefs”.

Grumble grumble grumble

Blu-ray drives can be expensive, but USB DVD drives are only ~$20.

I’d also expect anyone who would care about the “physical” edition of the next GTA only being a download code in the box would have a disc drive on the device they wanted to install it on.

It helped that there were used and rental markets for relatively “modern” titles that are now almost entirely non-existent.

You worked places with style guides? Did… Did you have a real testing environment that wasn’t prod too?

I got taken off a project recently for being too direct about how the rest of the team was just spray and praying entirely AI generated code with no standards or review whatsoever, and they were charging ahead like it was a race to implement features we hadn’t even discussed if we wanted/needed.

If you can’t tell me how it works, you can’t confirm that we actually need it, you can’t tell me the upstream and downstream effects (or confirm they don’t exist), and you can’t even confirm that we even want it to do the thing it only supposedly does, then we have better things to do than go on a wild goose chase trying to debug it when there’s a looming deadline for things that legitimately do not work that we need. Stop vibe coding and actually review the existing shit for fucks sake. If the requirements have never been clear, solve that instead of generating more slop. Maybe update some of the existing documentation instead of having AI wholesale hallucinate entirely new not quite right ones over and over.

Anyway, please tell me more happy development bedtime stories. I need to chase away the nightmares.

Trump’s too dumb to even consider wearing a mask to hide his racism, and his real face is far more grotesque than this drawing.

I struggle to even understand the point of this as an image, let alone as a meme. Just feels like pointless “preaching to the choir” shit to me.

Updoots on the left I guess? You’re so brave?

Hooray seaman! Have a se-

Until some regulation is passed and enforced that they have to be closed loop, it’s cheaper for them to fuck up the local ecosystem by using evaporative cooling or local water sources as a heat sink.

Don’t need classes to make functions (depending on the language of course).

I’ll openly admit that I’ve made comments that could be interpreted as this comic. That said, I don’t hate Linux or look to “dunk on” people, I just see a lot of really uninformed takes about Windows being tossed around and can’t help but try to correct people.

Like someone said something abysmally wrong and very confidently, I asked them when the last time they used Windows, and they said it had been over a decade. I get that people pull that sort of thing online all the time, but when I see it it bothers me.

So I end up making the occasional comment defending Windows from blatant misinformation in a Linux thread, or insisting that the Linux experience still isn’t as smooth as it needs to be for non-tinkerers.

Usually someone will pop up and call me uninformed or something, which is rich given I’ve been casually messing with Linux since before USB thumb drives were ubiquitous, and I have a little more than a decade of career experience in IT support and systems admin/engineering/architecture neck deep in a Microsoft environment.

I love Linux and open source software. I want it all to succeed. But Windows does have its place, it is valid for certain use cases, and is not anywhere as awful as it’s made out to be. Especially if you have the tech chops to switch to Linux, de-crappify-ing Windows is of comparable difficulty and I have not had any of the supposedly unavoidable Windows issues people regularly cite in around a decade.

Switching to Linux is a more than valid choice, but I hate to see it happen only because someone isn’t getting good troubleshooting information for a Windows issue.

I also have a seriously hard time keeping my mouth shut when Linux users claim daily driving a Linux Distro as a smooth process. It is leagues better than it used to be. Mind bogglingly so, and getting smoother every day. But it is still inevitable that you will hit a point of major friction and have to get deep into tinkering, and you will still likely need to make concessions in terms of hardware feature support.

I’m no stranger to tinkering. No stranger to compiling things myself, or even troubleshooting an error all the way down to a specific line of source code and making a PR to correct it.

But I’ve reached a point in my life where I don’t want to be spending hours troubleshooting things that in my mind should “just work”. I want more control than Apple offers, and less tinkering than Linux tends to expect.

So I keep up with the Linux space, use it on VMs personally semi-regularly, and maybe once a year give it a serious try as a daily driver. For now, stripped down/customized Windows installs on my gear is more than good enough.

I legitimately have not had virus issues with Windows in over a decade. Using uBlock Origin for ad blocking and the built in Microsoft antivirus. Every few months for the first few years I’d put it through the wringer of a bunch of USB-bootable antivirus scanners. They kept finding nothing, so I slowed and eventually stopped bothering.

Common sense and an ad blocker do wonders.

It’s one of the better ones, and basic functionality is braindead, but I’ve definitely found some pain points.

• My work requires us to use company branded video chat backgrounds 🤮. Whatever way my co-worker deployed them, they aren’t available through the mobile app.
• There’s a feature to create unified groups (Teams groups) with membership lists hidden from non-members. It is only available through PowerShell.
• Got users that want to use their group like a distribution list? They all have to personally choose to subscribe to incoming email. You can set the group to auto-subscribe new members, but subscribing existing members requires some basic PowerShell fuckery.
• Sharepoint backend for file sharing. Less said about that shit the better.
• If a user’s display name updates, how it syncs to different places that display their name in Teams and how long that takes is inconsistent as all hell.
• Better hope you never get a ticket from your legal team to pull chat history. Pain in the ass to do, horrid fucking output format.
• No way I’ve found to disable the damn upsell “Get Premium” button. Granted I haven’t checked in a while.

Paywall. What is visible indicates cuts to arts and languages degrees.

Lol, are you kidding? IT gets to experience the suck of using it, and of administrating it. For as bad as the front end of Microsoft stuff is, the back end is usually worse.

Only 6?

Elias Thorne, goblins and ghouls, is there somewhere all these “sticky topics” have been aggregated?

“no, I prefer my brain to stay asleep thank you. asleep, smooth, and pristinely unwrinkled.”

Statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged

Yeah, why would you ever hang those upside down unless that’s what you were going for? Or you could just cut or snap off the handles.

Or you’re a fan of good music.

… who can also tell the incoming weather with their knee

God, I was just enjoying some cyberpunk-adjacent media yesterday and laughed at the satire of an in universe news outlet complaining about “anticonsumerist terrorism”.

Something something torment nexus