Leon

This is too cursed for a Wednesday afternoon.

That’s reasonable. I’ve heard it’s really good.

If I were forced to see ABBA I’d welcome getting nuked.

LLMs are out there literally egging people on.

Sure, we had fires before we started refining and making accelerants, but that doesn’t mean that we should just let people throw accelerants on fires willy nilly.

There’s some money to be made in that. Try OnlyThumbs.

I’d say probably best to not trust apps at all. You could roll your own Matrix instance for example, but then who’s to say that the client applications don’t comply?

Trust no one, I suppose.

As per Wikipedia on the topic.

As of July 1, 2019, the monthly salary is of €8,932.86, or just over €107,000 per year.[15] MEPs also receive a general expenditure allowance of €4,563 per month.[15]

If I can be called in from vacation for €43k a year, these cunts can come in to vote for the fucking future of democracy for €107k.

Is it right to interrupt vacations? No. Does it matter in this case? Also the fuck no. The thing happened! They weren’t there! If they want better rights or whatever I guess they should fucking unionise or whatever. Sitting out on a vote of this magnitude is beyond reprehensible.

Ah, I see. It doesn’t seem unrealistic for this to just be AI slop that someone prompted. Could be entirely automated even.

I don’t know what this means.

Aah. That makes sense. I was trying to figure out why exactly the walls were Norwegian.

The Trump cultists walked right into the capital. Now that the regime is once again bombing innocent people in faraway countries the people just moan and go “but the files!”

Fuck the files. Do something. If what’s already been released, coupled with the despot’s history isn’t enough, nothing will ever be.

Wow. She looks like a little square apple pastry. That’s nuts!

If we were to refuse to take action because the outcome won’t be a perfect solution, we’re doomed to just never take action and continue being pissed on.

Awh, I’d have done it. Feels great to be the weird/funny adult.

I bump into kids a lot when I’m out with my dog, partially because the area I live in is very family focused, but also because one of our frequent walk paths takes us by a K-9 school. I’m really nervous around people, but I try not to be when kids want to interact. Sometimes it leads to good teaching moments, and sometimes they just want to be seen.

I was thinking that this sounds good at face value, but it could easily just be a throwaway publicity stunt.

Let’s just make up a scenario, purely for illustrative purposes. Say our baseline is in 2022, customers paid ~100 a month in electricity. Then over the years, data centres came along, they struck deals, and individual consumers electricity bills went up to 200, which we are at today.

Then, NicePowerCompanyLLC decides to hike the prices for the datacentres by 30%, and reduce the prices by 1.3% for the residentials. That’s still 98.7% higher than the baseline before the datacentres. That’s to say, they data centres are still having their costs subsidized by regular people.

Ergo, if the prices already got hiked because of the datacentres, this tiny concession is a piss in the ocean. It’s just a publicity stunt to make themselves look better while people are still buckling under the exploitation of having to carry billion dollar industries on their backs, with no real benefit to themselves.

Clout. Aura. Bargaining force. Call it whatever you want, really. Corporations are big, they have capital, capital is power. They can hire people to influence politics, pushing for people who are on their side to get elected by funding campaigns, and naturally bribe people on the down low.

Stick, along with the other people served by their provider, most likely don’t have the ability to pay people to lobby for them full time. Most people barely have the money to keep their personal economy going, and spend a significant portion of their time just making that happen. As a result, the corporations who are benefiting from this sit on all the power, because they can influence public opinion as well, painting their politics as beneficial to private individuals, even if that’s a complete lie.

That is why democracy and capitalism are fundamentally incompatible. Workers could band together and claim power, but they’re kept in situations where doing that just isn’t feasible.

Things won’t get better without some kind of revolution. The balance of power is tipped so far in favour of the corporations that no matter how much time or money workers spend (neither of which we have) trying to better things, they’ll never get even close to what the corpos can swing with.

It’s not like the company doesn’t have a say in this. They hire people closer to them, or offer WFH where a commute isn’t part of it. My company does pay for my commute. I’m WFH, but when I have to travel for work, it goes on the company credit card.

Yes, there will be cases where a commute is absolutely necessary, but you can always evaluate these things on a case by case basis.

Plus it’s ultimately time that the worker is giving up. I’ll take my current no commute over commute with reimbursement any day.

For me it’d be better to just run the stupid Teams app on my work phone, but that’s always been a hassle because it locks itself and then I don’t always get the notifications. My primary work laptop only has 16 gigs of RAM, and having Teams eagerly gobble up a significant portion of that is highly frustrating.

There’s been several occasions where I’ve been building or debugging something, RAM being tight, and the OOM killer correctly deduces that Teams has to go. Makes me laugh every time I finally check back on Teams and realise it’s been dead for a while.

The whole “two minute timeout” is a stupid thing anyway. A non-trivial portion of my job is to read and write documentation. That takes time, and you will sit “idle” for a few minutes while reading and processing. My Windows machine would kill the BT connection to my mouse and keyboard, which would sometimes require re-pairing to get working again. For the longest time I thought the problem was the mouse and keyboard, but those problems vanished once I got a Linux dev machine.

I fucking hate everything Microsoft.

This can easily be the case in Europe as well.

I live about an hour south of Stockholm. A lot of companies I’d commute to would be in Stockholm. Thus, the times I’ve gone to my office in Stockholm, my commute looks something like this

• 20 minute walk to station
• 5-15 minute wait for train
• 50-60 minute train ride
• 5 minute walk from commuter train to tubes
• ~0-5 minute wait for tube
• 10 minute walk to office

That’s usually between 1:30 to 1:50 commute, one way. All in all, 3-3½ hours of commute round-trip. It’s stressful, with a lot of moving parts. I’m glad I can work from home for now, because my commute is however long it takes me to drag myself into clothes and get in my chair.

It’s a lot more environmentally friendly, and most importantly to me, something I can handle without breaking down mentally. I’m ostensibly a functioning member of society because of the ability to work from home, and I’ll fight for the ability to continue to do so.

I’ve a friend who works as a truck driver, and does get compensation for how long he has to drive to get to work. It’s also tax credits. As someone who doesn’t drive but instead would rely on public transport, I wouldn’t get compensated.

Honestly I think that’s pretty bunk, why does the public fund people having to commute by car? It’s something the company should pay the worker for because it’s technically work they’re doing for the sake of the company.