I mean I’m sure it was a mix. There are a lot of stories out there about how if you didn’t stay on top of your outsourced factory they would look everywhere to cut corners to save a few extra cents here and there.

You (used to?) have to constantly check production quality and make sure nothing was changed out for a low cost part or lower cost source material. Otherwise your product quality falls off and you’re losing money on warranties and repairs and losing customer goodwill.

The other thing that happened is these factories, once they had your design, would make the same thing with lower cost parts / materials as a knockoff and sell it unbranded, as they don’t care about US or European IP Laws. Word might get around that “hey you can get the same brand X product as brand Y or from Aliexpress and save 50%”. Now they’re undercutting you, and you lose customer goodwill because people think your product is overpriced. Then the knockoff fails and they are happy they never bought your product in the first place because they think yours would have failed too. Through word of mouth people say “oh that broke after a month” not realizing the offbrand was made with shoddy materials, less screws, cheaper batteries, an inferior screen, literally anything they can do to save money.

Now include the womens leagues.

spice satellites

The spice must flow.

Is it beta now? I tried alpha 8 or alpha 9 and ran into a lot of issues (3 or 4 independent ones) with my multimonitor setup and eventually just gave up because of the frustration of having to reconfigure all 3 monitors every reboot.

Bazzite never had a problem, but locked down some dev stuff I wanted to do.

CachyOS has been solid but every once in a while I will experience one of the multi monitor issues I had on Cosmic Alpha. But I can live with that.

Netflix charges me, a single guy, for 4 simultaneous streams if I want 4k. So I shared with my parents.

Then they had the audacity to stop people from password sharing or to charge even more if you want to share. I set up an automatic email forward so my parents get every sign in related email.

Oh yeah that was when they announced you’d get copilot credits or whatever as part of Office 365 and bumped up the price.

For Microsoft 365 / Office 365.

This guy did just that:

https://youtu.be/qy_9w_c2ub0

Thought it was a really cool idea / project. Essentially a modified Z Flip.

This was an interesting video / project I quite enjoyed.

https://youtu.be/qy_9w_c2ub0

Watched a guy using an air horn on his bike riding around a European city using it on people walking in the bike lanes. So many people had no idea they were in a dedicated bike lane. Either blocking it or walking in it or crossing over it right in front of him.

There’s a rather long documentary on it. I want to say by NoClip but not totally sure.

Short version is they came up with the idea in the 90s I want to say, playing tabletop with a friend group. Two main designers. Helped set up a company to make a computer RPG version and designed and built the game with a team. Outsider investing came in and bought up some amount of the company.

Once game was built and shipped and they were looking into what to do next they were effectively ousted from the company. So the two original designers of the game now get nothing and lost control of their passion project.

Edit: while. NoClip is making one, the one I’m thinking of was done by People Make Games. At least I think it’s this one? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JGIGA8taN-M

I actually looked up the source for this and couldn’t find it.

That being said I agree with the sentiment.

With a built in game pad. And saying a game is SteamDeck supported means it supports SteamInput which means it supports the gamepad natively.

Oh absolutely having an aggressive manager and skip will help you with bonuses and promotions. But they don’t force managers to give people low scores anymore.

While the management tool had a weird slider and score system (you could give a number between 0 and 1000 IIRC), the general terminology was you could get between 0 and 200, indicative of how you compared to the average person at your level. 100 meaning you did average per-say or completed about 100% of the work an average person could complete.

While not unheard of it was basically impossible to get 200% (required at least your skip/M2 and maybe your M3 to agree).

Last I heard (keep in mind this was 2023 or so) managers got around 105% or 110% of their bonus allocated for their team. Generally that meant you could give everyone “100” if you wanted, but practically it never worked out that way.

Also there were strict rules you couldn’t take from a more junior budget to give a more senior person a higher bonus. You could however take from a more senior budget and give it to a junior.

I. E. I couldn’t give two SWE1s 80 to give a SWE2 a 120. The reverse was allowed though.

Layoffs are generally done algorithmically. I’m not kidding. They don’t want to be sued. They follow all the legal rules otherwise (can’t layoff a US citizen without laying off a Visa employee first, etc).

Source: I worked there for 11 years, I was an IC but have many friends who are managers who would tell me how the system works, and have been laid off twice. The first time I found another position within MSFT but the most recent time, in December, I opted to take some time off and find something else.

Edit/addendum: when the managers get in the room for people discussions a lot of that is around promotions. Very little is bonuses. Bonuses are determined by your manager, then go up the chain. So your manager sets and signs off on your score. Then your M2 checks it and either sends it back if they don’t agree or signs off and sends it up. Then your M3. At the M3 and higher levels I suspect they don’t look too close but just make sure everything makes sense and the budgets balance.

Microsoft got rid of that in 2014 or so, when Nadella took over.

Depending on what I needed I remember using AltaVista, AskJeeves, Dogpile, and I feel like later on MetaCrawler or something like that (would search multiple search engines for you and ordered them scored based on platform and relevancy iirc?)

All UK machines, phones, and servers should just remove all root certificates. Can’t trust encryption right?

X509Brexit.

Then they wouldn’t have to interact with any part of the encrypted internet.

My understanding is 32-bit PhysX games are broken.

64-bit compiled games are fine.

It’s not that seamless depending on the content you usually consume.

I feel like I keep seeing the same single livestream trying to sell me a phone charger, and then roughly the same 5 or 6 videos trying to sell me a specific product over and over again.

As long as I don’t report or say “I keep seeing this ad” it will show me the same ones so they are easy to skip.

Usually it’s something I started watching until I realized it was an ad, but because I started watching it one time it thinks I’m interested so it will continually show it to me.

Once you spot them they are easy to skip. (at least, until they get better at masking then and then it will get harder).

From Alberta but not working there anymore. Found out somewhat recently, specifically in regards to Software, APEGA lost their protection on the word Engineer. Again, specifically in regards to Software.

https://www.apega.ca/news/2023/11/06/notification-of-changes-to-the-engineering-and-geoscience-professions-act-regarding-the-title-of-software-engineer