Also, the times rats got into the networking room and ate random cables. I should add the network was built by volunteer students in the ‘90s.

I was once responsible for a student house (we don’t have dorms in the US sense, this is the closest we have) and I have similar experiences but less extreme. My favourite was when I had forgotten to configure DHCP filtering and someone plugged in a router the wrong way so it started offering DHCP (that didn’t work) to everyone in the building, in a race with our upstream ISP.

Wow. Since I’ve met so many of that kind of person online that tonight never crossed my mind.

It’s even worse than what you suggest.

Try finding:

• a solid email client: Thunderbird can’t search all my email for even things that are in the subject line
• a calendar application with support for CalDAV and Exchange
• an office suite matching the Microsoft or even Apple offerings of 2004
• reasonable cloud sync
• a decent vector graphics tool a lá Affinity Designer, a cheap tool developed by a small indie company

These are regular requirements for office work that I’ve had trouble with.

Oh and I also routinely have trouble turning off my computer, it just freezes at a black screen. This is a stationary computer with nothing weird in it.

The or part in that statement is really what kills you, as you sort of imply. You spend five hours almost getting your scanner to work, some times, unreliably.

That’s a worse outcome than the scanner refusing to work entirely in many cases.

I needed it for a printer the other day!

It really is an annoying piece of shit

They usually get a slap on the wrist; cf instigating race riots gives longer sentences than blocking a highway.

Sounds like that should be assholes without cars

Teachers are fairly decently paid where I live but the job is shit so nobody wants it. They don’t employ enough teachers so everyone is being worked to death, and they keep adding new admin tasks, reporting tools, standardised tests, etc that makes everything worse. Also they keep doing stupid reorganisations all the time.

I tried to read the linked Twitter thread from Ars and good god it’s terrible. Half of it is people complaining about the demo version without understanding that it’s the demo version. Even though people in the thread keep explaining it to them.

A lot of Americans supported the equally illegal invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, I still don’t think they deserve even how shitty their non-occupation civil government is.

Given how war works I’m almost certain there will be war crimes against the civil population here. Not as bad as what the Russians are doing in their occupied territories I sure as fuck hope and expect, but worse than anyone deserves. I can see Ukrainians getting to be a bit vindictive etc about this, they’ve earned it, but as armchair commentators online at a safe distance we should fucking show some empathy for people in a shitty situation they have very little control over.

I can’t control my government and I live in a democracy. I don’t blame Russians for most of what their state does either.

Does this happen to you often? My impression is people usually tell you after they’ve succeeded.

Kyriarchy encompasses sexism, racism, ableism, ageism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-Catholicism, homophobia, transphobia, fatphobia, classism, xenophobia, economic injustice, the prison-industrial complex, colonialism, militarism, ethnocentrism, speciesism, linguicism and other forms of dominating hierarchies

Anti-Catholicism? You mean the global formal hierarchy that’s solidly historically in support of fascism and against feminism? O…Kay. Why is that the literally only religion listed there? I get why you’d want to protect minority religious practices but why single out Catholicism?

Wow, uh, that’s uncalled for but I guess user name checks out.

It’s extremely sensible to think it’s not great for someone in a position of authority to use that authority to do the things they’re meant to do and not other things.

In this case I think the terrible code really, as they say in fashion, completes the look

My wife talked about how Grok apparently seemed promising in AI benchmarks for a while until everyone realised the way they’re winning is by absolutely blindly outspending everyone on GPUs and brute forcing the fuck out of the problem rather than having good anything.

This seems to match that approach (and, more generally, everything Musk is doing).

It’s almost a by the book buy off. You don’t get a salary that can afford anything like good food and clothes because we want salaries to be cheap in the west while we increase the profits from rents, fees etc. However, we will pay you off by externalising all the costs of getting you cheap crap on other people that you don’t have to see (and the environment in general).

It’s of course not an actual conspiracy, just a confluence of terrible impulses and motivations.

I think I you heard the wrong argument here

I’m kind of worried about Celebration, Florida now. It always seemed too much of a Stepford Wives type situation but now it’s just ridiculous.