I did consultancy work as part of renewing and replacing ancient software systems for an insurance company, and it’s amazing how little people actually know about how their own business processes are actually supposed to work.

Orgs are in the position where everyone who built a system is gone, and all the current people who work there defer to the system for how the processes work, without actually properly understanding the rules. And so the system itself becomes the arbiter of correctness.

This is obviously horrible because it ends up where nobody dares to touch the current system in case they break it in some way nobody understands.

We ended up speaking to people across the whole business to painstakingly work out what the rules really were, putting together a new system and effectively “dual running” that side-by-side with the old system, so we could compare outputs and make sure they were the same. In some case they were different, and in some of those cases it was actually because the old system was actually wrong, but nobody noticed!

It’s a mess.

They are pursuing “realism” but the pursuit of realism also means that you must sacrifice strong artistic style, because style is - by very definition - deviation from realism.

In 2025, things staying the same as they are rather than getting worse counts as a ‘big win’ :|

Thanks :)

Well that would be weird because

1. Andor is not for children

2. Andor is the least star-wars-like Star Wars

3. Andor is actually good

When I am interviewing people, I always appreciate when the candidate is honest about their experience - or lack of experience.

If I ask about something and they openly say they never did that, that’s a green flag. I want to see people are honest about where they don’t have experience, because being honest about gaps is an important trait for when they are actually on the job.

On the other hand, if the candidate has something literally written on their CV/resume as a “strong skill” but then when I ask about it they struggle and try to bullshit their way through it, that’s the opposite. If someone is happy to lie to get the job, they’ll probably lie when they’re on the job too.

I can write a basic regex independently, but as soon as capture groups or positive/negative lookahead or lookbehind start popping up I’m back to the docs every time.

I remember reading a story a while back about someone who owned a legit CS version with a proper serial and activation.

They had to change computer, and in doing so had to reactivate Photoshop, but it wasn’t working. They contacted Adobe support and explained the situation but support basically told him nope, not a chance, we aren’t helping you. You need to subscribe to new Photoshop.

So Adobe accepted that yes, he bought a perpetual licence for Photoshop and that yes, the reason it isn’t working is the online activation, but they still refused to help.

Scumbags.

It’s both. Linux mostly just works, but when it breaks, it breaks in a way which is sometimes difficult for the average person to recover from.

I’ve had a couple of times in the past where something has gone horribly, outrageously wrong, and I decided to just reinstall and start again from fresh, because that was way less time investment than fixing what broke.

Nowadays I’m using Timeshift backups, and I think that’s a positive move.

Exactly this.

I’m a software dev and also a Linux user, but that doesn’t mean I want to spend my precious time messing around with the OS trying to solve problems.

I see the operating system as a tool I use to accomplish the things I actually want to do, which is writing my code for my projects, just the same as I see a car as a tool to get me from point A to point B.

If Linux was complicated to set up, or always broken, or requiring constant work then I wouldn’t use it, no more than I’d tolerate a car which is broken down and in the shop every other week. But fortunately, Linux is none of those things.

Modern Linux mostly “just works”, and it’s really counterproductive to talk about Linux like it’s hard or you need to be a deeply invested techie to use it.

Back in my days working as .NET developer on Windows 7, I came into work one morning to find a colleague fuming that his machine had died on him.

He spent the whole morning reinstalling Windows and getting his environment set back up, and then pulled the branch he was working on, happy to finally be done with setup and get back to work. Ran his test suite and bam, machine crashes!

It was only at that point the penny dropped. We took a look at his branch, and sure enough he’d accidentally written a test that, when ran, deleted his entire C: drive!

That particular lesson made me very careful when writing any code that does things with the filesystem.

Yep, that’s specifically the meaning :)

Golden = Made of gold

Gilded = Covered in a thin layer of gold

The gold and the thin layer was the 1%-ers, with rampant corruption and harsh conditions for everyone else.

This is mostly the fault of what people search for.

90% of your average buyers don’t go on shopping sites and search “20W USB-C PD Charger” they go on and search “Samsung S22 charger” or whatever they’ve got.

Sellers are incentivised to design the listings around that, or they simply won’t get the clicks.

I mean, the title of the post beat you both…

Given the free and open source nature of Lemmy, I’d suggest that creating an account to raise a feature suggestion - and in that way contribute - would not be an unreasonable expectation at all, rather than the expectation of having other people who are themselves only volunteers jump through all the hoops for you.

Same logic, the bra itself as a whole is a chest covering.

Not that there always has to be logic in these things, etymology sometimes defies that.

A bra does have a “pair of cups”, though!

For some items like glasses it’s very clear why they are pairs; if you can have a reading glass (which is an antiquated way to refer to a handheld magnifying lens, for example) then you can certainly have a pair of reading glasses because it’s the two pieces of glass which are plural.

For trousers there are no certain answers, but I’d suggest it’s very much with with how we conceptualise their function. For 90% of their height trousers are split and cover the legs, of which we have two, only joining right at the top.

For shirts you might think it’s the same (two arms right?) but it’s a completely different story because the primary function of a shirt isn’t to cover the arms but to cover the torso. So it’s singular. And gloves of course are distinct, so it’s back to pairs.

It’s just not fun anymore.

It used to be kinda humorous in an irreverent way back in the 2000s when Google used April Fools to announce things like the Google Romance search engine, or a facility to archive all your Gmails on printed paper. It was tech making fun of itself.

But these days when the mask is fully off, and we recognise that big tech and social media has been one of the greatest problems the world has ever faced, we’re not laughing any longer.

Those few days between jobs are moments of pure joy.

You’re finished with all the bullshit of the previous job, and are blissfully unaware of whatever fresh bullshit is waiting for you at the new one.

Oh no!

Anyway…