Hi what do you do for work?

Well, I work for a healthcare company that creates electric wheelchairs and apps to use them.

Wow that is amazing, that sounds so rewarding! What specifically do you do?

Thanks! I designed the pricing structure so that each aspect of the wheelchair experience is gated behind carefully designed paywalls that are significant enough to help me my boss get a good bonus at the end of the year but not significant enough that all those poor people out there can’t afford it if they have too. Ideally the cost is always a bit more than people can afford to pay since usually people have more you can squeeze out of their social connections if the need is desperate enough (we are optimizing right now for pricing structures that most encourage customers to make gofundme’s to engage with our products which is cool to be part of a new project).

………….

Let the death of the programming industry as a respectable professional job be a warning to centrist workers in other industries what happens when you don’t unionize and just assume your personal talent will always be rewarded by the ruling class.

It won’t.

Also let the rhetoric computer programmers use to defend the intrinsic value of their livelihood be a lesson to all of us. They talk in terms of raw productivity, in terms of securing a living wage through being more savvy than people who are dumb and take manual labor jobs. They speak about the threats of automation with COMPLETE confidence it will only be used by their bosses to create more jobs for people like them.

Finally, let it be a lesson that the confidence of programmers who look at AI/LLMs and think “they can never replace me with that, it would be a disaster” totally misses the point that it doesn’t matter to the ruling class of the tech world that replacing tech worker jobs with shitty automation or vastly more underpaid workers won’t work longterm. The point is to permanently devalue and erode the pride and hard fought professionalism of programming (Coding Bootcamps have the same objective of reducing the leverage of workers vs employers).

^ Programmers make a classic person-who-is-smart-at-computers mistake here of trying to understand business like it is a series of computer programs behaving rationally to efficiently earn money

I have met a nauseating amount of programmers who truly believe that tech companies would have to come crawling back to them if they fired tech workers in the industry en masse and everything began to break. What these programmers don’t understand is yeah, they will come back, but they will employ you from the further shifted perspective that you are an alternative to a worthless algorithm or vastly underpaid human when they do. That change in perspective, that undercutting of the “prestige” of being a skilled programmer is permanent and will never revert.

Shit is dark… but also damn if I don’t have a tiny bit of schadenfreude for all the completely unfounded self confidence and sense of quiet superiority so many people who work with computers project when doing something like teaching a classroom of 20 kids or fixing someone’s plumbing problem is way fucking harder any day of the week.

Fun fact, the NYC metro moves more people daily than ALL flights in the entire continental US by a wide margin, I think it is close to twice the amount of people.

Tradwife influencers seem like people who don’t understand how having a kink works and mistakenly craft their identity around an aspect of a kink that is toxic when applied outside the bubble of consent and play with a trusted partner.

So Rockstar workers are being asked to take a major pay cut, significant decrease in quality of life, massively increased chance of death (driving is the most dangerous thing we do by far), and a huge chunk of free time removed from every work day from commuting that could be time spent with family or loved ones….

Git off discord tho for game development, it ends up causing only the types of people who are really active on discord to interact and give feedback and I have seen that really send some games off the rails as the rest of the playerbase begins to get the vibe the game is being developed for a small sliver of the game’s fans (the ones on discord and really active).

Thank you for all your hard work!

Personally I think HP is missing the point focusing on putting drm on inkjet refills, it is only half committing to the business strategy.

The existence of a finished, printed paper begins at the moment of conception when the customer conceives of wanting to print a document. Really every step after that point (including the conception step itself) is monetizable by HP and more importantly rightfully owned as intellectual property of HP that you are technically stealing if you don’t follow through with actually printing the document on an HP printer.

HP is just leaving all of that money on the table, or maybe the printer market is just too heavily regulated for HP to innovate properly in a healthy free market.

I watched this guy for a little bit and liked his Linux stuff and then in one video he started ranting about how those FOSS licenses that include a requirement to use software ethically are the worst thing in the universe because they bring politics into software and I thought “wait, this guy is ignorant asshole isn’t he?” and turns out yes, yes he is.

Not making the point to defend those licenses or not but all this guy cared about was FOSS not being political and it’s like…are you a child? Do you not understand how all of this is political?

People like this guy give FOSS a really ugly outward facing identity and it turns away soooo many potential contributors and chill people.

To your point about this guy being exactly the kind of person that shouldn’t be allowed to own a precision semiautomatic rifle with 30 round magazines of high caliber rifle rounds, I agree, I have seen that guy get so fucking angry about shit on his channel, he has no ability to control his anger and that kind of person shouldn’t be allowed to own an object that gives their temper tantrums the capacity to kill so many people so quickly before their rational control kicks back in.

If you were in a Tom Clancy novel we would know it.

All the people around you would act like wooden placeholders for character archetypes.

I honestly find even ten seconds of the Big Bang theory to be like nails on a chalkboard.

It feels written by someone who isn’t a nerd trying to write a nerd character and just missing the point utterly and completely.

If you want an example of good non neurotypical nerd characters that are on the spectrum maybe, you don’t need to look any further than Tendi and Rutherford in Lower Decks. They both have heart and feel way more fleshed out than the Big Bang theory.

The Big Bang theory just makes me want to vomit, it either feels like the most insufferable version of nerds or it feels like a high school bullies super reductive perception of nerds. Also the whole “Penny is a normal hot girl hanging out with nerds” is such a stereotypically reductive setup too.

Hi everyone, I am collecting preemptive pikachu faces for when meta inevitably attempts to screw the fediverse over. Please put them in replies to this comment so we don't clutter up the rest of the comments.

Precision Murder

Let’s please call it what it is.

I think that Neil doesn’t understand something very vital about being a science educator which if there is one thing people know about them, it’s that they are smart as hell and whether that is actually true or not the science educator must adopt a self-deprecating, disarming character to be relatable to the audience within the context they are in because of it.

You can’t play the character of a king and be relatable if people perceive you as actually being a king outside the context of the play….

"Look, I understand you say you are trying but have you just tried not hitting every single banana peel? Everybody has to deal with avoiding banana peels so you aren't special, here let me give you a suggestion when I want to avoid the banana peels I simply just drive around them, hope that helps :)"

Pretty bold to charge a t-90 with a bradley. It looked like they were moving laterally a lot to keep obscuring the hull behind cover and making tracking them difficult. I wonder if they were confident their optics were better or something so that they knew they could keep acquiring the target faster than the t-90 could . I also wonder if they knew the t-90 was in some way damaged and unable to fight back effectively.

Still, seems like a pretty quick way to die.

I think a better question to ask is whether the groups and ideologies involved in the BLM protests (which were MASSIVE) were ever allowed to have power?

If BLM failed to enact significant policy change than I don’t think it is because BLM wasn’t focused enough, had unrealistic goals or was handled badly, I think it is because in terms of law enforcement policy it really doesn’t matter what voters do or don’t want. Any kind of noise made by voters and the public about police violence and the inherent problems with police (and their vital role in maintaining economic injustice and inequality through state violence) will be aggressively pushed back in the opposite direction by the political forces of law enforcement, and because the average person has no power and their vote is useless this will result in a broad push in policy in the opposite direction of BLM’s goals.

However, the function of BLM must be seen for what it was then, to lay bare the true nature of the power relationship between voters and cops and in the minds of countless, countless people living in the US it delegitimized the authority of law enforcement to commit violence wherever and howsoever it chooses. It sent a massive crack through the entire structure of policing, jails and systematic divestment from minorities and the poor. Just because BLM didn’t create significant policy changes doesn’t mean that the battle hasn’t already been lost for the legitimacy of law enforcement in the long term in the US, and I call that a victory.