That removed knows who’s in charge.

Edit: Hey, removed bot - that term is considered high praise in the LGBT community, and I’m about to report you for being homophobic.

Ironically, Robocop would have defended him from the terminators.

I really do miss the 80s/90s era anti-capitalist dystopian future movies. We have the Purge series now, which has been pretty good (at least 3 and 4), but nothing approaching the massive numbers of productions ranging from They Live to Rollerboys to Robocop to Running Man and so many others.

It feels like we’ve hit a tipping point where subconsciously at least we’ve figured out we’re actually the bad guys from Red Dawn and the Wolverines are the people we’re killing, and just decided to lean into it. I’m waiting for Handmaid’s Tale to get a Birth of a Nation makeover in the next ten years.

I already control technology with my thoughts. I just use my fingers to do it.

The summarizer could do better by just copying over the entire text of the article. This was incoherent. Its only utility is for people who can’t or don’t click through.

You know how they say an infinite amount of monkeys in an infinite amount of time could produce the works of Shakespeare?

This is five monkeys in fifteen minutes.

Oh, that’s a fun one. By the actual Y2K I think I had already transitioned into a dot-commie (where it pretty much was ignored), but the run up was interesting. I was previously in a much more Office Space kind of situation. I was the hot new talent using modern technologies like Perl and Java, but virtually everyone else was writing cobol on green screens for an IBM midrange system, with many many hours dedicated to updating code to use four digit dates. These were the days when news channels were predicting airplanes would fall out of the sky, nuclear plants would melt down, and cash registers would stop working entirely. World ending chaos.

The people around me were doing basically the same job for 30 years. I don’t even know enough cobol to write a joke in it, but we’re not talking about Donald Knuth here. I’m talking about green screen terminals connected via token ring or some kind of crap like that.

This is when Gateway Computer stores were in shopping malls and came with stickers on the front boasting about how they were “Y2K compatible” and were upgradable so that 16 MHz 386SX was the last computer you’d ever need.

Getting old is fun, other than the back pain, organ failure, and that memory thing I can’t remember the name of.

In the US, there is no law or regulation. It’s decided company by company. We usually distinguish between vacation days and sick days, and the number of hours for each accumulate throughout the year based on the number of hours worked, with more senior employees having a higher ratio (meaning they accumulate hours faster). The total number of hours are generally capped (eg, they can’t go above 240), but they do carry over year to year. Some companies (and I believe this is required in some states, like California) must pay out the remaining vacation hours when the employee leaves the company, so that if you leave with 120 hours of vacation on the books, you get three weeks vacation pay in addition to any additional severance package. That does not hold for accumulated sick leave. These are both considered “paid time off” (PTO) because employees are paid their salary/hourly pay. When I left my last position, I did so with 240 hours of vacation that they had to pay out, which was in addition to my hiring bonus and moving allowance at my new employer. It came in handy.

Other companies do what’s called “unlimited paid time off.” This means there’s no pre-existing cap and that vacation and sick time get bundled together. It’s all at the manager’s discretion. Depending on the company, though, it can be a disadvantage. Corporate culture can be such that people are discouraged from taking time off, and there’s no vacation pay out if you leave, because you don’t have set hours on the books. Americans in general take long weekend or week-long vacations, sometimes up to two weeks. Depending on the role (and the nature of the vacation), they’ll still work some hours, because that’s often the cultural expectation.

The worst jobs - and this means the majority of service jobs - allow for either zero PTO hours, or will routinely deny employee requests to use them. The above applies to corporate jobs (eg engineers and designers), union jobs, and government work. The person making your pizza or telling you where the shoe department is probably doesn’t get those “benefits,” and if they do, they have to jump through a ridiculous number of hoops (including facing the wrath of their manager) to exercise them.

I’d like the US to have legislation to force minimum levels of PTO, and I’d like to have the culture change so one can say “I’m going to be in Greece for four weeks but will call you when I get back” rather than saying “I have stage three liver cancer and will be getting my organs replaced but I can make the meeting at ten.”

Manager at a FAANG here. Three days of sick leave (per year I’m guessing) is fucking insanely low. Just a flu will take someone out for a week easily. If you force them to come in or else take unpaid time off/risk being fired you’re going to a) get someone who is marginally productive at best and b) likely to get more coworkers sick, causing a bigger slowdown and costing the company more money. You also come off like the person who writes the memo that 40% of sick time is taken on a Monday or a Friday.

You’re Colin Robinson, the energy vampire of your office.

I am an engineering manager at a FAANG company and I get that it was mostly in fun, but as a professional who does this for a living I just wanted to point out that not only were you wildly wrong, literally Elon Musk’s lived and executed experience proves you wildly wrong.

Yup. I went back into academia, then rotated between that, military, and government work. Now I’m waiting to see if the other shoe drops and I either sponge off my partner or buy a beach house in Mexico.

I’ve been working in tech in one form or another since about 1994 and even before that if you include “writing some software for some guy’s cash register.” I’ve been through a few of these. They suck, but two years from now it’ll be forgotten.

I’m not disputing their experiences - I’ve replied otherwise on this thread - but I’m going to guess that a lot of those experienced devs didn’t go through the 2000-2002 ish dot com crash, or maybe even the 2008 recession.

Sometimes the money goes away for a while. The money has currently gone away. Eventually they drop the interest rates, people decide that real estate or EVs aren’t sexy anymore because they’re overbought, and the money floods back in. Then it gets too much, to the point that some kid gets $60M for the idea of selling barbecues and charcoal over the internet, and the cycle repeats.

We thought Keynes fixed this but then decided it was more fun for a handful of people to make shitloads of money and then crash the economy every decade or two.

While you’re right that many tech companies overhired, they overhired into an increasing market. Multiple companies, including Twitter, then over-fired and ended up trying to get employees to boomerang or otherwise hire into positions that they cut. Other companies, like Apple, expanded but did not overhire, and as a result have not done mass layoffs.

I also have no idea how you come up with a 20 person IT department at every site when internet services companies live and breathe on IT services. Everything from data centers costing tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars to making sure devs can commit code and that backups get made takes IT services. I’m not sure what industry you’re in but you’re vastly under-budgeting and setting yourself up for failure, exactly the same way Elon is doing. Elon managed to crash twitter’s valuation by a whopping 90% inside of a year. If the cuts he made were justified, the line would have gone in the other direction.

Content moderators and ad sellers are literally the entire point of having a company like Twitter. Curation is the product, and the ad buyers - not the users - are the ones paying the bills.

So, yes - companies hired because they needed to hit production targets during Covid that were not sustained by continued market levels post-pandemic. That’s always going to result in cuts.

But a lot of what we’re seeing right now is upper management/c-suite types seeing how close they can cut costs to the bone without it hitting the quarterlies as production falls off and reliability tanks, and just hoping to make it out the door before that happens.

grinding, screeching noises coming from the engine room

To be fair, those are the normal TARDIS sounds.

On the other hand, Dr Who doesn’t have an engineering or SRE staff.

Send your squire to fetch the breastplate stretcher!

You should probably look into the chemistry needed to do 2 H₂O -> 2H₂ + O ₂

Obviously the biggest problem is making sure you have an even number of water molecules.

Hint: It’s not because this idea never occurred to any of the scientists and engineers involved in hydrogen power.

I cannot find the lemmy thread, but here’s an older reddit thread which itself contains a link to this video.

Not to minimize malnutrition - that’s an effect that we know will be carried epigenetically for at least two generations even if everything stopped now and we weren’t looking forward to a decade-plus of occupation - but the situation on the whole is physically rewriting the brains of both the adults and more especially the children.

I am an adult, and I chose, more or less, to put myself into the situations I ended up in. I still have PTSD to the point that I had a flashback and panic attack in a friend’s bathroom during lunar new year when they set off a brick of firecrackers and it sounded exactly like a half dozen automatic weapons firing from across the intersection. It took me about 15 minutes of breathing exercises and pushing everything back down before I could come back out. What I went through was absolutely zero compared to what these people, including children, are going through. You’re going to have everything from suicides to psychoses to radicalization and hair trigger political violence. And it’s baked in at this point. It’s done. It’s going to happen with all of the physical certainty of billiard balls hitting each other. All they can do is make it worse, which is what they’re doing every day.

There’s going to be decades of consequences, and Israel is going to find itself isolated far more than it has ever been.

Based on a recent discussion, I think it was decided that Paul Bunyan (and, one would infer, Babe) should be classified as kaiju. It feels a bit racist (or at least specie-ist) to single him out compared to the damage done by all the others.

You’re talking like a Sovereign Citizen.

I’m talking about the very specific laws that prevent people from being evicted if they’ve been residing on a property for N months without following a very deliberate and drawn out legal procedure so that landlords cannot evict a family from their home of many years because of some missed rent payments or because they want to upgrade the place so they can charge more to a new tenant. Those are the laws that keep the sheriffs from just kicking down doors, at least in some states.

I’m not taking a moral position on squatting. My friends and I squatted in an abandoned house while I was in high school, although most of us didn’t live there full time. If I noticed someone squatting tomorrow, especially in a corporate owned home, I would not have seen it. But the laws that I’m talking about were designed to protect tenants from having their lives unfairly disrupted, and I’m arguing that even if people are against squatters, we still need to protect tenants’ rights.

I would have thought that was abundantly clear.

I’m saying this as someone who has done this from both the military and three letter agency side, and as an academic researcher.

You do know that actions like this will only increase support for Hamas, right? Like, for at least the next 20 years - a full generation and probably some change. This kind of adversity - especially this over the top - drives people together in solidarity. This isn’t seen anywhere outside of Israel itself as a war on Hamas. It’s seen as the slaughter of unarmed Palestinian people - most especially by the Palestinian people. They’re going to have a generation of children growing up prepped for an ideology that will make ISIS look like the cast of Sesame Street.