More like “sales teams are the reason middle managers think ALL employees slack off when not watched.”

I get that sales is a SUPER depressing culture, a ridiculously antiquated work environment, and full of some utterly soul-sucking mandates from above, but I have never seen, in any workplace, a team that needs someone constantly riding herd on them like the sales team.

Every place I’ve worked, every place that a place I’ve worked has had as a client, and every business I’ve ever visited had the same problem – sales people are largely unmotivated because their job has a much higher chance to SUCK OUT LOUD than most of the other jobs at a given company.

When five figure quarterly bonuses, daily friendly team competitions for gift cards, more paid-for-by-the-company outings than the c suites get and pickle ball on company time twice a week aren’t enough to hype people up to do their actual job, something is really fucking wrong with the job expectations.

Some of it is about the "Why"s.

Netflix nearly stamped out piracy for a while there by being a vastly more attractive alternative. Between them and Hulu, and to a lesser extent prime(at the time) if it was streaming, you could watch it somewhere at a reasonable price for a marginally reasonable viewing experience that was at least as good as most TPB downloads.

Then the IP owners got greedier and decided to strike out on their own with the “everyone has a streaming service” model, which would be GREAT if they largely shared content, but they don’t.

The greed continues, not in order to adequately compensate creators, but to make a few handfuls of people not just rich but filthy rich. Every action they take suddenly becomes more penny pinching for more greed. At this point lots of the CONTENT CREATORS wish they had a better choice (how often do they say ‘please watch it this way, that’s just how they rank stuff, sorry’?)

Why is it the opposite with AI?

Because in comparison with stuff like streaming video or music platforms, AI is BARELY pretending to offer a functional service in exchange for the greed that’s behind all of the money they’re trying to force it to make for them.

And that’s just for one side of the debate.

Why isn’t the fact that AI is largely garnering the same responses even from DIAMETRICALLY OPPOSED GROUPS telling you something about how bad of an idea it is in it’s current incarnation?

The kicker there is … Nobody I know is going to think “wow, playback on this video sucks, I should disable my ad blocker”.

Like, it wouldn’t occur to ANYONE I know that a piece of software we consider necessary could be the problem, ESPECIALLY if everything else is working fine.

That’s not even number ten on the list of troubleshooting steps and most people don’t make it past one or two before giving up.

WTF were they thinking?

Vertical tabs I could maybe buy someone wanting but MORE AI? Not based on what I’m reading, even in surveys.

If they want to make Firefox more popular, make it so I can close 54 of my 55 open tabs in task manager with “end task” without the whole app crashing (read:fix memory). Add in greater stack trace visibility into what parts of what add-ons are increasing load time at first launch (you can currently kinda see which add-ons, but it’s barely even bare bones info) (read: fix speed issues. Basic stuff like ad block and no script shouldn’t sesquiseptuple load times (that’s two orders of magnitude)

Do stuff the other browsers WON’T do, because their paradigm forbids proper optimization.

For those wondering about the upswing here:

If the age verification movement goes unchecked, it’s possible that you could be forced to tie your government ID to much of your online activity, Gillmor says. Some civil rights groups fear it could usher in a new era of state and corporate surveillance that would transform our online behaviour.

“This is the canary in the coalmine, it isn’t just about porn,” says Evan Greer, director of Fight for the Future, a digital rights advocacy group. Greer says age verification laws are a thinly veiled ploy to impose censorship across the web. A host of campaigners warn that these measures could be used to limit access not just to pornography, but to art, literature and basic facts about sex education and LGBTQ+ life.

Aside from one (seemingly very out of place at the time) early mention that the author used Bitcoin, there was no hint of it being pro-bitcoin until the very, very end.

I found it to be a very worthwhile article right up until that point and even slightly intriguing from an academic perspective after that point.

I despise the endless blind parroting of the typical cryptobro refrains elsewhere on the Internet when crypto is brought up and I still liked the article, so I wouldn’t write it off just because one guy with a cryptohammer inevitably sees the very real SMTP problem as a cryptonail in the end. It’s natural when you have a “solution in search of a problem” situation like we do with crypto (and block chain, and for that matter SharePoint. People with knowledge of a thing often try to use it to solve problems it probably wasn’t meant for.)

But they’re almost all using it STUPIDLY, aren’t they?

How many people who purport to have Bitcoin actually hold their own private key?

What do you use now?

I work in IT and between the Advent of “agile” methodologies meaning lots of documentation is out of date as soon as it’s approved for release and AI results more likely to be invented instead of regurgitated from forum posts, it’s getting progressively more difficult to find relevant answers to weird one-off questions than it used to be. This would be less of a problem if everything was open source and we could just look at the code but most of the vendors corporate America uses don’t ascribe to that set of values, because “Mah intellectual properties” and stuff.

Couple that with tech sector cuts and outsourcing of vendor support and things are getting hairy in ways AI can’t do anything about.

Except for the #reddit-sysadmin IRC channel. Gibby’s always shilling his “fart in a jar” NFT.

Yeah, I’m no marketing guru, but I feel their actual point would have been better conveyed by a pile of all of the things the iPad replaced slowly gathering dust, spider webs, and eventually archaeologists.

And while it hurts now, it’s REALLY going to hurt when large swaths of useful answers that don’t exist anywhere else are gone and there’s nothing replacing them.

Noone writes hundreds of pages of documentation for their stuff anymore. Without the collected knowledge learned from experience there, what do we have?

Unless we have source code to read, very little.

I’m still feeling the pain of google search results sucking combined with most of the large coding forums being gone and reddit slowly going to garbage. Stack Overflow was the last bastion of collected knowledge of it’s type… and it’s not like it was 25 years ago where we still had phonebook-sized manuals for almost all major software because agile has killed the concept of exhaustive definitive documentation for a given version of something.

I used to sorta roll my eyes at people shouting about federating everything, but at this point I’m scared and agreeing with them.

There’s no way Microsoft would purposefully disable VPNs from working

No, but they’ve done it accidentally before.

One time a few years ago it broke all LT2P VPN’s unless you removed a specific KB########.

IIRC, six months later there was still no fix.

I think it’s been fixed now, though.

What? Where? What’s it called?

If they make one of them look and speak like Morbo the Annihilator, I might actually watch.

Like, with the anti-human sentiment and everything.

First Anchor: And today, a local law firm files the first lawsuit in a series over a deadly salmonella outbreak linked to cantaloupe.

Morbo: Next time, we will put the salmonella in more than just the canteloupe.

or maybe:

Morbo: Canteloupe tonight, Bridegroom has the runs!

IT Sysadmin from the non-profit circle checking in. It’s actually unseasonably warm right now.

I can’t speak for the pharmaceutical IT, Medical IT, metal fabrication IT, bakery IT, education IT, or embedded systems IT circles, though. Might be getting nippy over thereabouts.