Now you’re talking about CEOs as a nebulous they.

I’m talking about a CEO that said things similar to what an amazon exec said under an article about what that amazon exec said.

Also I work in software development. There has been a clear uptick in negativity towards developers where I work, which happens to be in a similar field to the one in the article.

I’ve also worked with AWS, and I can tell you for sure, they can’t afford to lose their best talent. Their system is pretty janky in many places and their boss should be putting more effort in making better software instead of playing games about forcing people to sit in a specific chair 5 days per week.

The CEO of Zoom explictily stated that he felt in zoom meetings people were being too “friendly” and not willing to have “debate”.

Why would it be bad for employees to be friendly? What employees want to have unfriendly debates in meetings? I think it’s just managers that want that. What kind of “debate” do managers want? Why do they not want meetings to be “friendly”? Methinks they just want to yell at employees and don’t feel comfortable doing it in zoom meetings for some reason…

I feel like a lot of stuff from ancient times wouldn’t be all that useful. A lot of stuff back then was optimized for a society that didn’t know anything about electricity.

We know how electricity exists, we know that with some magnets and copper wire we can turn mechanical energy into electricity. It seems like making a wind turbine is something they could’ve made in ancient times, but they didn’t do that simply because they didn’t really know anything about electricity. Some more copper wire and some more magnets and you could drive a pump. Some chemistry and you have a battery, maybe not Li-ion but something that’ll work well enough. Resistors and you can have an electric stove and a heater.

It always strikes me as odd that preparers aren’t all-in on green technology. If you had some wind turbines and/or solar panels and electric vehicles almost nothing other than communications would really change much. Dependency on complex oil refineries is the biggest weakness of our society. If you live in a rural area that has some farming and has green energy and electric vehicles you’re dependent on very little that’s not produced in your community.

Actually, I’ll be keeping the gun and giving you the bullet back… at a really high velocity.

Yeah I fill up some whisky bottles with tap water and keep them in the cupboard. I guess in an insane scenario I might need to use it as drinking water, though I’d probably want to figure out how to boil that water first since it’s been sitting there for awhile.

I have actually used that water… but just to wash my hands when they turn off the water in the building when they’re doing some maintenance.

Sometimes some disaster preparedness is just useful for relatively banal circumstances.

He tried many times to prevent covid testing. Because if there’s no testing, there’s no covid.

So he was all about controlling the narrative about it, because he didn’t think of it as a real problem. When the vaccine came out he took credit for it, but then when he got booed by his supporters for taking credit for it, he stopped talking about it.

So while he didn’t explicitly say “covid isn’t real” or anything, he didn’t take it seriously, and didn’t make an effort to argue against conspiracy theories promoted by his various minions.

Depending on the agreements they made, they might lose those tax breaks… and they do care about that.

Yeah I’m way more available when working from home, since I can get my nicotine fix at my desk and I can’t do that in the office. I need to get up and walk around to get the blood flowing, in the office I think it would be weird to walk a few laps around the cubicle to do this, so I end up being further from my desk more. At home I’m basically always close enough to hear my computer make a ding when I get a message. And if there’s an urgent issues that requires attention off hours… sorry not much I can do to help you when I’m on a bus transiting to and from work.

Yeah and for that minority, they could still go into the office 5 days a week.

My previous boss that found family members too distracting at home so he came in 5 days. But he was cool and told us "yeah don’t worry about coming in the days HR is telling you to, I come in every day and hardly anybody is here any way. " Oddly enough, most of the time we actually did come in on the days HR said because we didn’t want to get him into trouble for it.

It’s almost like if the bosses aren’t complete assholes, people will actually want to come into the office more.

“Have you tried disagreeing on a call! It’s hard!”

When it’s an online meeting, they’re worried about it potentially being recorded. So what they’re really saying is that they can’t verbally abuse employees without there potentially being evidence of it.

The deals they had with various governments to get tax breaks if they built the office in their city are still a consideration. Amazon put governments of municipalities into a bidding war so they could have highly paid software engineers working in their city. They probably aren’t going to get those tax breaks any more if most of those offices are empty.

HR only cares because they’re told to make a policy and it’s their job to enforce it.

I don’t even get how any company with several sites has anything to stand on. Makes no fucking sense.

Companies like Amazon got major tax breaks and free land from governments to build these office sites. Governments gave these incentives with the expectation that it would generate economic activity around those sites. But if everyone is working from home those offices aren’t delivering on the promised economic activity.

And also they spent a lot of money on those offices and so want them to be used. It’s hard for whoever decided to build that office and the government officials that gave all the tax incentives towards it to admit that conditions have changes and all of that was for no significant benefit. It sucks to realize something you put in a lot of work into had no real benefit. Most people just have to accept that. But if you’re in a position of power you can make people do things that will make your project look like it had a successful outcome.

People get convicted of fraud charges all the time. Archegos being probably the biggest non-Trump non-Crypto related cases of late.

It’s just that if it’s a fraud conviction that’s not related to either Trump or crypto (and maybe soon Trump will be convicted of crypto related fraud!) it’s not big news.

I had “AI native” on my bingo card and they missed that one. Maybe it’ll come up on the next turn.

The instance I’m on isn’t federated with every other instance. Why would you expect steam to effectively federate with every instance?

I’m speaking from experience in using theses OSes, not from a list of features they had. I didn’t use NT 4 personally (and that’s way outside the scope of personal computer OSes), so I didn’t talk about it.

Windows 98 sucked. Windows 98SE was… well I won’t say good, but it was ok.

Vista was good on good hardware

That’s a hell of a caveat for an OS meant to be run on consumer hardware. You might get away with that kind of caveat if MS only offered in on good hardware and people went and put it on non-recommended hardware on their own accord. But that’s not the case, Vista sucked when running on hardware that met MS’s specs, so it sucked.

So the real pattern is Win 3.0 sucked, 3.1 ok, 95 sucked, 95B ok, 98 sucked, 98SE ok. Windows Me? OMG let’s just move everyone over to NT and never talk about this again!

2000 was good. XP wasn’t great but improved after awhile. Vista sucked. Windows 7 was peak windows, it was downhill from here. 8 sucked, 10 was ok, and 11 is shaping up to be complete dogshit.

So it’s not precisely every other release is bad, but close enough to see a pattern. I guess you could say 2000-> XP doesn’t follow the pattern, but Me->XP does. And since 2000 and previous NT versions were meant for servers, not home PCs, while XP was meant for home PCs. It would make more sense to look at the pattern of releases for PC releases rather than mixing in server releases.

When MS has an OS that works decently they tend to try to cram in a bunch of shit into the next release which causes problems. Then they either remove the shit (or at least make it work better) for the release after that so they have something that works ok again. Then it’s back to adding a bunch of shit into the next one.

WordPress is open source, there’s a foundation and stuff. The Matt Mullenweg, the guy that started the software and CEO of Automatic (which is the main company) is super upset that WP Engine (another company) is using the software without contributing much to the foundation.

I mean it’s a valid gripe, but there’s not much anyone can do about it. But Matt Mullenweg is, like you say, being super weird about it.

Some people just don’t understand that internet is serious business.

I’m predicting stupid skynet. It will want to kill humanity but by making stupid suggestions.

“Hey maybe try drinking poison today?”

No.

“Please?”

No.

“What if I gave you a recipe for poison cookies? You like cookies. Will you please eat poison cookies?”

No.

“Can you build a robot for me if I send you clips from a Terminator movie?”

Which one?

“Terminator Genysys”

NO.