ThePowerOfGeek

Dell announced a new return-to-office initiative earlier this year. In the new plan, workers had to classify themselves as remote or hybrid.

Those who classified themselves as hybrid are subject to a tracking system that ensures they are in a physical office 39 days a quarter, which works out to close to three days per work week.

Alternatively, by classifying themselves as remote, workers agree they can no longer be promoted or hired into new roles within the company.

Holy corporate oppression, Batman! That’s a shitty deal no matter which option you choose.

I’m glad they’ve got themselves into a sticky situation.

Also, this observation was funny (in a sad way):

One person said they’d spoken with colleagues who had chosen to go hybrid, and those colleagues reported doing work in mostly empty offices punctuated with video calls with people who were in other mostly empty offices.

Oh there’s still far too much adulation. All those Tesla bros, for example. Given what an insufferable turd Musk is, and the crumby reputation Teslas have, I don’t understand it. And I don’t think I ever will.

Nope, he can’t manage that. Because he’s an attention-whoring malignant narcissist.

I can’t wait for the bubble of mystique to pop on this arsehole, if only so we don’t have to ever hear from or about him again. Sadly, there are still plenty of rubes in his cult of personality and greedy investors willing to ride his coattails. So I’m not holding my breath.

I only discovered Krita recently, but holy shit does it fill the Photoshop void very well. The UI isn’t the same as PS, obviously. But I find it much easier to navigate than Gimp’s UI. And Krita is surprisingly feature-rich.

Sounds fun. Someone should have that baby Trump blimp join the party.

I don’t have a direct answer to your question. But I advise caution in putting your creative works online in the way you are planning. Between people plagiarizing it (either word for word or just the broader concepts) and AIs doing similar things, you could find that your work gets stolen.

Self-publishing might at least give you a bit of inherent copyright protection. Then at least you will have an ISBN associated to it, and you can always host your stories somewhere (WordPress, Medium, etc.).

If you want to self-publish your stories a free service like Smash Words would work.

Hah, I was going to say, that means asking for programming advice from Chat GPT will now result either in a response of “Why are you even trying to do that? You are stupid!” or dismissively pointing to another (mostly unrelated) chat session that has already been closed without a suitable answer.

I don’t think the vast majority of American Christians are anywhere near ready to accept a Christian denomination founded by and led by women. Which is a shame. I think such a denomination would have some interesting and probably beneficial perspectives to share.

But given how Christianity has been male-led from the very beginning, how it stemmed from another male-led religion, and how engrained into American Christian society it is for women to be docile, obedient child production machines… Yeah, that ain’t happening for a looong time!

Yeah I was lumping them into that same category. But you’re right, they probably do deserve their own category.

So they are labeling a brand new (and obviously flawed) AI as a priest, but women (who are human beings) still can’t be priests?

Sorry ladies, you’ve now fallen further down the ladder.

• Regular straight Catholic men - acceptable priest
• Gay Catholic men - acceptable priest (as long as they don’t get caught)
• Male converted Anglican priests - acceptable priest (in some scenarios)
• Catholic men with gross sexual habits - acceptable priest
• Flawed AIs - acceptable priest
• Corporations - soon to be priests?
• Catholic women - ABSOLUTELY NOT!

If Arctic Blitz isn’t one of them, there will be a backlash that makes Vatican II look like a mild disagreement.

Every couple of years for the last 20 years I would download the most popular Linux distro of the day, install it, and play around with it. And it’s mind-blowing to me how far Linux has come with UIs, usability, troubleshooting and customizing stuff.

Back in the day I spent many hours compiling obscure and dependent code bases just to get my sound card working. Now it’s pretty rare for me to need to do even a fraction of that.

Also, if you want to play around with Linux you can just download a VM solution like VirtualBox on Windows and then spin up as many virtual machines as you like and install a different iso on each one. Not to mention tinkering with Docker containers via the Docker app.

In short, it’s a great time to play with and possibly adopt Linux.

I’m going to hold my excitement in check until January of next year. Because if a certain former president gets reelected then any hopes of net neutrality will end for another 4 years.

“As a very rich person I was just unlucky to hit some health problems in this experiment. But all those yucky poor people? Nah, that’s morning to do with bad luck. That’s just bootstraps and laziness.” -Douchebag clueless millionaire experimenter

Despite falling short of his financial goal, Black said his journey showcased the power of determination and the importance of health and family

So he learned absolutely nothing about the plight of countless millions of people. Got it.

Yeah me too. It was annoying.

Didn’t they already do this? I thought I remember after a Windows 11 update a couple of months ago I had that copilot shit on the taskbar and auto-enabled.

Not to mention that from a visual perspective the icon ‘x’ is synonymous with closing or exiting a window. It’s a horrible choice on so many levels.

And based on my experience with Dell computers, they are the machine producing absolutely shitty machines.

This sounds like my old place, but much worse.

We used to have laptops we had to lock in a cabinet (yeah, one of those cabinets with a really puny lock that’s easy to pick). And we had to log into n old mainframe system that had numerous environment instances which each required a unique password that had to be changed every 90 days.

We (the software devs) basically rebelled on the laptop situation and insisted they find a better solution. Thankfully they changed policy and of allowed the laptops to be locked into our docking stations, which in turn were locked to our desks.

As for the mainframe system credential management, I tried using a standard third party password manager, but a) it wasn’t a good fit for the credentials, and b) the sys admins or security team forcibly uninstalled it because it wasn’t sanctioned software (even though it was a well-respected and actively maintained one). And our security group refused to go out and find one.

So being a dev, I wrote my own desktop password manager for the mainframe credentials. It was decently secure, but nowhere near as secure as a retail password manager. But it fit the quirks of the mainframe credentials requirements. And after my colleagues and manager did a code review of it, it was considered internal software, and thus fit for use.

As I was leaving they were in the process of removing all our local admin rights (without a clear path on how to accommodate for us developers debugging code - fun times ahead!).

But all of those annoyances pale in comparison to the shit you are having to deal with! Holy hell, that sounds like pure misery! I’m sorry.