When IT folks say devs don’t know about hardware, they’re usually talking about the forest-level overview in my experience. Stuff like how the software being developed integrates into an existing environment and how to optimize code to fit within the bounds of reality–it may be practical to dump a database directly into memory when it’s a 500 MB testing dataset on your local workstation, but it’s insane to do that with a 500+ GB database in production environment. Similarly, a program may run fine when it’s using a NVMe SSD, but lots of environments even today still depend on arrays of traditional electromechanical hard drives because they offer the most capacity per dollar, and aren’t as prone to suddenly tombstoning when it dies like flash media. Suddenly, once the program is in production, it turns out that same program’s making a bunch of random I/O calls that could be optimized into a more sequential request or batched together into a single transaction, and now it runs like dogshit and drags down every other VM, container, or service sharing that array with it. That’s not accounting for the real dumb shit I’ve read about, like “dev hard coded their local IP address and it breaks in production because of NAT” or “program crashes because it doesn’t account for network latency.”

Game dev is unique because you’re explicitly targeting a single known platform (for consoles) or targeting for an extremely wide range of performance specs (for PC), and hitting an acceptable level of performance pre-release is (somewhat) mandatory, so this kind of mindfulness is drilled into devs much more heavily than business software dev is, especially in-house dev. Business development is almost entirely focused on “does it run without failing catastrophically” and almost everything else–performance, security, cleanliness, resource optimization–is given bare lip service at best.

Why make a better UI when it’ll probably introduce a slew of new bugs?

Iirc There’s a remaster floating around that revamps the super dated CGI. It’s no SNW but if you can stand TNG & DS9 you’ll be OK.

Isn’t the entire concept behind Lower Decks is that the Cerritos isn’t a big, important ship? The California class only has 13 decks, which is the third smallest ship in the entire series–the only ships smaller than the Cerritos were the Defiant (which was an “escort ship” not intended for long missions) and the NX-01 Enterprise. It’s also slower than everything else in the 24th century–while most other ships can handle warp 9 without problems, the Cerritos flies itself apart if it goes above warp 8 for too long. It’s not all that strong either, practically every time it gets in a fight it gets its ass kicked.

🎶These horrible mooks, so different in looks, were nonetheless equally memed!🎶

The one time they purposely “backed up” a human via the transporter it took up so much space they had to dump the backup into the holosuite and it still nearly brought the entire station’s computer to its knees.

Most of the civilians present on the Enterprise fall into one of three categories:

• A non-Starfleet staff member, relative, or passenger, who would already know and respect etiquette regarding ship’s comms.

• A non-hostile foreign diplomat, envoy, or similar passenger, who doesn’t want to potentially cause a diplomatic incident by being rude.

I also recall lots of times where civilians used ship’s comms for various purposes, but it was to contact the person directly attending to them, or a friend/relative, not the ship’s captain. (It’s been years since my last rewatch though so I could be wrong here…)

As for hostile parties, IIRC it’s implied that the computer locks them out automatically, and in emergencies the captain can lock down the entire ship, which is how Data hijacked the Enterprise when he went rogue, and why it was such a big deal.

To say nothing of how Crusher looks like a RealDoll in a bad way

I think the horrible truth of the matter is that the cycle won’t stop until one side is dead, no matter how much we wish otherwise. There’s just too much bad blood for either side to trust the other, too many old grudges spawning new grudges that in turn result in more bloodshed. I legitimately, honestly, seriously don’t see a peaceful solution–the Israelis won’t give anything up because they (rightly) fear any concessions will simply be used to fuel further attacks by militants until they’re driven out or eradicated, and the Palestinians won’t give anything up because they don’t have anything left to give up, nor do they have anyone who will take them in, so they can’t even leave (which they don’t want to do anyway since they’d been living there for centuries).

The worst part is that deep down, pretty much everyone knows this, and they know that supporting one side means tacitly supporting the genocide and eradication of the other. But nobody in power wants to come out and say it, because admitting you’re supporting genocide is a surefire way to piss off literally everyone. So we get platitudes and high-minded speeches about preventing civilian casualties, and everyone hems and haws while we create our own little Hell on earth.

At the time, the idea of Brexit was still very popular, and Boris campaigned strongly on a promise to “get Brexit done.” The UK population trusting Boris to follow through on finally securing a Brexit deal that had consumed the entire UK political discussion for three years and two Tory governments, plus the opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn being insanely unpopular (which, depending on your point of view, is due to him being way too left, a political smear job by the right-wing UK media, or a combination of both), lead to Labour getting blown out in the 2019 election. So… the answer to your question is probably “sort of? Or at least they didn’t trust Labour to not muck it up even worse.”

Notably, I’m not talking about whether Brexit was actually a good idea to begin with, and the deal Boris wound up negotiating was not even the least-bad possible outcome. Since then, the UK population seem to have finally woken up to the idea that burning literally their biggest bridge for trade and shredding a sweetheart deal was perhaps not very wise. That, combined with Boris resigning in shame over flouting his own lockdown rules, followed by his successor Liz Truss tanking the economy in record time, and a steady drip-drip of scandals and Tory resignations over various “lesser” scandals, put us where we are now.

Theoretically it can happen. In practical terms, 99% of those cases are out of three things:

• A charade to get an angry customer to go away (pretending to fire an employee)

• The last straw in a series of incidents that add up to justify firing the employee (i.e. the employee has repeatedly made a mistake with no improvement over a long period of time)

• Misconduct egregious enough to warrant firing them on the spot (for example, the employee punches a customer, or shows up to a job site blackout drunk)

The remaining 1% of cases are truly shitty managers that are a nightmare to work for.

Mmmmm, I don’t think I’d go that far, no. Feminist? Very much so. Unable to decide if the Mattel executives are actually antagonistic because Mattel didn’t want to make themselves look too bad? Probably.

Honestly I was the same way going into it, and after watching it my thoughts were “I don’t regret watching it, but I wouldn’t have regretted missing out either.”

The movie is great, and there were multiple moments where I burst out laughing. It’s also a really bizarre acid trip, and I mean that in a good way! But at the end of the day, it’s a hot pink version of The Lego Movie, down to Will Farrell playing a (less evil and more well-meaning) Lord Business. It’s a movie made by women, for women, about a series of toys designed for women. That’s not a bad thing by any means, and it’s not like men cannot enjoy it, but it also means it may not interest you, and that’s fine too.

It’s free*, insanely easy to set up, you don’t have to worry about port forwarding or ddos or hosting fees, has powerful moderation tools, and there’s a plethora of easy to deploy bots that help manage permissions and automate routine tasks. Literally, if it had a proper web-accessible forum similar to phpBB, it would be perfect.

I worked graveyard shifts at a gas station for a year or two. My general experience beyond what other people have said–good commute, fucking with your social life, taking its toll on your body, all that–is that working graveyard shifts is lonely. I cannot understate how lonely it got; there were stretches of multiple hours where there were no customers at all, and it was just me and the long list of nightly chores I had to do (mopping floors, prepping food for breakfast rush, restocking shelves, etc., etc.). Not having any human contact at all fucks with your head something fierce, especially when you mix in sleep deprivation and your body rebelling against the normal sleep rhythm into the mix.

My advise is that if you’re going to be working night shift all alone, get into podcasts. Having a radio that I could use to listen to NPR was the main thing that kept me sane, because I could at least have a human voice to listen to and keep my mind somewhat engaged.

Maybe consider digitizing that cassette, or at least listening to it to make sure it’s still usable (assuming you can stomach it). Cassette mediums degrade over time and it’s quite possible that microcassete could be reaching the end of its usable life: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preservation_of_magnetic_audiotape