I fucking love AI.

I’ll qualify that with a small personal story on it: I have a colleague in a nearby office the other side of the city, who steps into supervise his team when the actual manager isn’t there. Nice bloke, not much banter, but pleasant enough.

You can fucking guarantee though that when a division-wide email has gone out, or a change of plan comes in… he’s right on the phone to me asking what to do.

The first few times it was cute. A guy must really love his job or hate himself to go into junior management, so walking him through routine tasks he may not have been exposed to may be beneficial to him in the long run.

The problem is, it’s near constant. Every single time something changes, he calls - not for advice, not for opinion, but “can you do this for my team too?”. What really pulls a hair out of my arse is that there’s a 50/50 chance of it being something I’ve already showed him. I’ve spoken to his actual manager at exasperated length but it’s just a can kicked down the road with a “well he’s still learning, isn’t he?”

I suppose he is, and I’m no teacher. When he phones now, I just tell him “mate our org has access to that fancy new Microsoft Copilot, it’s fuckin’ mint bro, solves all your problems”, knowing fine well the disaster that’s about to happen - partly to expose him to new technologies, but mainly to be a smug cunt.

Invariably, he gets solutions that don’t quite work, or ideas that don’t quite fit the brief… and it’s satisfying as fuck getting the follow-up call and saying “sorry bruv, Copilot is smarter than me, which isn’t hard” or “nah sorry dude, it gives you a personalised response so that’ll be outside of my domain, making my suggestions worthless”.

Fucking love it. It has reduced my workload immensely.

I think it’s brilliant that people publicise their political affiliations - it’s like a big red flag to either avoid certain topics… or just avoid them altogether.

It’s like Social Interaction for Dummies.

That single long-tone before the discharge roughly translates to “Bonsoir, motherfucker”.

I’m pretty sure a more natural translation would throw in a couple of putains but I’m neither qualified enough nor French enough to comment with any authority.

Just for the lols, I voted on the “Is Trump mentally fit for president?” question. It just asks for an email address and a couple of validation questions.

what the fuck is that though? Automatically enrolling someone in a string of “update” mailing lists is a dick move.

I only hope their reporting attitude is better than their data management policy is.

Patience is the key - I hate Denuvo, you (probably) hate Denuvo, and most devs hate Denuvo… once the magic first week or two are done, the new trend seems to be devs patching out Denuvo once their release sales have peaked so fingers crossed this will continue.

A cheaper, patched, DRM-less game a few months behind release. Winner.

That’s not the problematic metric though. It’s the 70-80% (link) install base of the Windows OS on desktop computers that Edge is installed with that’s the basis of the anti-competitive allegation.

The fact that it still only takes 5% of the browser usage is more of a happy accident.

This is how you get shot for the silliest of reasons.

Unless it’s the initial outreach team or on-premises staff, sales would be one of the few roles totally suited to remote working.

Some of the more creative or collaborative roles I can see the argument for hybrid working - even if it’s just one day a week or month in the office - but sales, customer service, or first line support seems to be the last area you’d impose a return to work mandate on.

That said, I haven’t got extortionate office rents to justify 😂

I get it - I think at this point Trump could empty an AK47 magazine into an orphanage and his core voters wouldn’t give a fuck.

I’d imagine there is a good chunk of silent “left-of-Republican” market though - people who have voted red because that’s what they’ve always done, maybe because their household is overwhelmingly Republican but they’re ready to break ranks, or even those who boarded the meme train in 2013 or 14 but are ready to get off.

I suppose an awkward analogy is being in a group of twenty people trying to get in to a bar with one or two cunts who are beyond mangled - the sensible ones looking at them and thinking “yeah I’ve stuck with them this far, but maybe I can make a change and enjoy the rest of the night with people who are largely sensible”.

Outsider view from across the pond:

It appears from the outset that the Trump camp is tripping over it’s own feet and stepping on landmine after landmine. Literally all Harris seems to have to do is stay on message, bat off anything too controversial, and let the opposition’s trousers fall down by themselves.

It’ll be interesting either way. The only real surprise to me will be whether I’ll learn about key moments from news outlets or from mad memez first.

Do a credit card next!

Reminds me of the mid2000’s era of British journalist Gary Cutlack trying to post every instance of a spiral in the real world, linking it to the upcoming announcement of a Dreamcast 2.

I miss that sort of journalism.

Oh I like a pessimistic view - partly because it makes a discussion spicier, but also because it’s important for a user to understand the power that an instance owner wields!

Oh man, this is awesome - it’s wonderful hearing from the practitioners of the art!

I’m just trying to figure out what driver establishing the tipping point for breaking or the ban hammer - is there any empirical data to drive these decisions, or is the fediverse user base small enough that you act on “feel” or “professional instinct”?

Managing emerging technologies fascinates me so any input - including the germs you’ve already volunteered - is very much appreciated 👍

That’s a strong viewpoint and I appreciate where you’re coming from, but how many votedicks does it take to derail a post? I appreciate the fediverse is reasonably small in comparison to othe headline social media sites, but does banning one or two bots or people do enough to save posts from getting bombed?

Thamk you for the insight, instance administrator views are valuable and unique.

At the risk of sounding like I’m presenting a bad faith argument, why ban them? I don’t like the whole “free market” analogy but surely it’s one of the liberating features of federated servers, being able to to largely express your votes or content as you see fit within the legal framework of the host nation. Wouldn’t the odd one or two mass downvoters/upvoters/theyvoters ultimately be a statistical abberation or is the fediverse still small enough for this sort of shit to carry weight?

Open criticism of my view welcome, as always!

Same as the Unihertz Titan. I ran with that for two years and it was decent, if underpowered.

The dream is all but dead for all fourteen and a half of us QWERTY phone enthusiasts I think. A surprising number went to the Samsung Galaxy Flip models, though having used this for two years or so, I wouldn’t recommend it either.

Maybe one day…

#NotMyCollective

It sounds amazing in principle for the rest of us.

I’m across the pond, but if the right wing Muppets suddenly started boycotting Costa or Cafe Nero, I’d be spending far more of my time there.

Purely a subjective opinion (and I apologise if the artist shows up in this thread) but is it me or does it look like the person who made the background took a step back after it was done, marvelled at how pretty it was, and enjoyed the moment before thinking “…fuck I forgot about O’Brien”?

It’s a great bit of artwork but poor Miles looks like an afterthought!