Not necessarily ‘lying’, but always ‘defending their own interests’. If your country’s interests align with them, that’s little more than a nice side effect. If not, well, that’s that.

I used nsupdate for years and it worked just fine. I remember it being down, one time only, for like five minutes. For a project that depends entirely on donations, the service and availability they provide are just awesome.

I used MEGA for a while and was pretty happy because their free plan is (or was back then) very generous, and they had a BSD command line client. Out of the blue, my account got blocked, and when I logged in, something along these lines appeared on the screen:

‘You are using the same password for MEGA and other services. This is a security risk and is not allowed’.

That’s one of the shadiest fucking things a cloud company could write. First, not true, second, even if that were true, how would you know it.

You might laugh, but the first time I made Lebanese-style yoghurt (the one with mint and cucumbers), I simply added salt in the same amount I would have added sugar for a sweet yoghurt. Needless to say, I couldn’t eat it…

Depressing, but not surprising. Even before the AS hype, I had long noticed that many people I regularly talk to (including a member of my immediate family who has been a teacher for decades) make horrendous spelling and grammar mistakes that they wouldn’t make if they picked up at least one book, at least once every few months. So: people were already forgetting how to write, spell, and even read coherently way before chatbots.

Sounds familiar: didn’t the AWS outage last month also nuke 3,000+ USD ‘smart beds’?

‘They know everything anyway’

Toilet cameras. Every time I think to myself that humanity’s intellectual capacity has hit a new low, reality proves me wrong.

A (poorly written) Shell check if the process was able to write to the production database which in some, not all, cases threw the gem:

!!! SQL ERROR !!!

Speaking of unsubstantiated accusations, do we have actual, reliable information about what is really going on? Any link in either French or English appreciated.

Too lazy.

I watched it as part of a German (ZDF) documentary on unsolved deaths of the famous, including Van Gogh and Monroe. The one part about Monroe prominently displays that clip. If that’s good enough for you, I’ll try to find it again!

I never believed in conspiracy theories around deaths /murders of prominent people until I watched that video. ‘as seductively as possible’ is actually an understatement, she came short of sucking the mic. If I was JFK’s wife watching that, I would definitely have given her ‘a lesson’.

About a year ago, I read a book called The Cluetrain Manifesto, which was originally published before the big players took over the internet. Every once in a while, I had to put the book away because it was too depressing to read their original theories on how the internet would liberate people, facilitate interactions between customers and companies, connect like-minded hobbyists without any gatekeepers involved and create meaningful relationships between stakeholders. Of course all of those things did indeed happen in one way or another, but 5 companies accounting for at least 80% of internet traffic and consumers being force-fed all that absolutely obnoxious adwords crap everytime they visit any useful website is definitely not what they, or any internet idealist for that matter, had in mind.

Totally not a bubble. At all.

…though I’d like to add that, in the original post, ‘at work’ == ‘at someone else’s company’

Good point, thanks for the insights

That’s … THE one argument that (mostly) vindicates my theory. It is a friggin’ ‘requirement’ because it makes you replaceable/disposable. If you think otherwise, I’m legit interested on why you think companies have your, not their, best interests in mind.

My point is (almost) exactly the opposite: I’d argue that any of those non-specialists can be replaced at any time with other non-specialists (best case scenario), or with bootlickers, nutjobs and yay-sayers (worst case scenario). In other words, you shouldn’t aspire to be the one your boss delegates every shitty piece of ‘work’ he can think of, rather, to be THE one everyone else in the company has to wait for if they want X or Y done.

Nothing too odd about that. For example, Bose assembles some of its most successful products (such as the Soundlink revolve) in Mexico, regardless of the target market.