Riskable

This is crap. TikTok is just a video hosting platform with a powerful, China-controlled algorithm that keeps people addicted. If TikTok were to disappear today a new platform would rise to take it’s place within milliseconds. Seriously: Do you honestly think that everyone would just put down their phones and do something else because TikTok doesn’t work anymore‽

It’s not even being banned! Which is another reason why this article is total bullshit. ByteDance just needs to comply with the law that is meant to prevent the Chinese government from interfering in US politics (yes, that’s the real reason why that law was passed). That means they need to break ties with China or just outright sell the platform to some other company. If they let it die in the US they’d be throwing away billions of dollars which just isn’t going to happen.

Furthermore, China has absolutely no ground to stand on by complaining about TikTok bans. They ban all sorts of foreign-owned apps in China for more dubious reasons.

The biggest takeaway from this poll is that only 15% of Republicans believe in objective reality.

I’m failing to see the problem. As long as one of the languages isn’t PHP they’re still probably better off 🤷

Students can’t learn if they aren’t in school.

Do they mean physically or…? There’s plenty of kids that learn just fine outside of schools.

I’m not a fan of unregulated home schooling but statements like this really undermine the message of the article 🤷

Your level of skill with the tools is irrelevant from the perspective of the “Page of Expertise”. You’re not claiming to be a master of these things, “just have some expertise/experience” with them.

You need a “Page of Expertise” attached to the end of this resume with every technology, tool, and piece of equipment you’ve ever touched. I’m dead serious. You’ve got the standard office apps listed as well as the GIMP (which is awesome, BTW 👍) but have you ever fooled around with Access? Used Outlook? Skype? They need to be in your resume!

Think of the “Page of Expertise” as an addendum that’s just a great big list of keywords that will ensure your resume isn’t filtered out by HR people that don’t know any better. When they get a job description from a hiring manager that says something like, “Marketing Assistant: Must have experience with Excel. Nice-to-have: Experience with Outlook and Skype.” The HR person will post a similar job description (they just love to mess with it!) and then when 10,000 resumes come in they’ll pass them all through a “keyword filter” and any resume that doesn’t have “outlook” and “skype” will never see the light of day!

Always remember this: The hiring manager and the people doing the interview are only going to look at the first page and the first job or two in your work history. They might glance at everything else but it’s unlikely. The universal advice about tailoring your resume for the job you’re applying for is 100% true but the truth is that that advice really only applies to that first page and only after you’ve made it through the HR keyword filters.

So add a second page that has titles like, “Office Tools” that has every stupid little tool that counts as “office software” from Excel to Outlook to Skype to Notepad++ to silly things like Winzip and Winrar. Stuff you’d think literally anyone could figure out in five minutes still goes on that page! Always assume that every job is going to get 10,000 applicants and HR is going to keep whittling them down until they find candidates that have all the keywords they can possibly think of.

Here’s another thing: If you get past HR and in that interview and they ask you, “What’s this Page of Expertise all about?” Be honest: “That’s so I can get past the keyword filters that HR uses. HR people often have to filter thousands of resumes and I don’t want to get skipped because I didn’t put the word, ‘winzip’ somewhere in my resume even though a monkey could figure it out.” They’ll think you’re a genius and hire you! 👍

I remember when the web didn’t have JavaScript.

Honestly, though it was much worse back then. I prefer the variety and features of modern browsing over (mostly) plain text.

What I wish we could do away with on the web is videos. Let’s go back to just images and text, thanks. Animations are fine though 👍

Permissions on Windows are notoriously insecure. By default, literally everything is executable in Windows. Docker is very much the same (insecure by default; in Windows).

Your permissions problems in Linux are a feature, not a bug. You just didn’t understand what you were doing when you tried to get it set up. Otherwise you wouldn’t be complaining about permissions errors. That’s the very definition of complaining about your own ignorance.

I get that the point of this thread is something along the lines of, “running Docker images is a breeze” but I think a more relevant point would be, “Docker images run better” (in Linux).

Docker images will run much faster and more efficiently in Linux. It’s just how it was meant to work. WSL doesn’t work like WINE: it’s actually an emulator and will always be slower than native Linux.

“The only intuitive interface is the nipple.”

…but in truth even that isn’t very intuitive 🤷

The granularity of AD doesn’t scale though. I work for a huge bank and trying to get something changed in Group Policy is basically impossible. Making it even the tiniest bit bigger (e.g. adding a single new rule) will slow down every goddamned PC and VM in the entire organization. It adds up to real money lost real fast.

Not only that but some changes to GPOs can break things that you didn’t foresee so the general wisdom is, “don’t ever change it.” Rendering that whole “granularity” argument moot. What good is granularity if you can’t even use it?

Also, getting AD to scale to the size required the help of Microsoft. They had to change AD for us many times because the way it replicated certain things just does not scale past around 20,000 desktops (if memory serves). They gave us custom DLLs that run on our DCs to keep things operating reasonably smoothly but their lack of support on non-Windows platforms is a perpetual problem.

If literally every single computer in your company is Windows you’ll be fine. However, as soon as you start trying to connect your Linux servers to AD everything starts getting really fucking complicated and troublesome real fast.

Microsoft made a lot of mistakes when they were designing AD but the biggest one was making it intentionally proprietary in so many ways. It prevents us from adopting it more. If AD actually worked with everything we’d be paying Microsoft a lot more in licenses every year.

Aside: Their second biggest mistake with AD was allowing groups to be placed in other groups. This made it so that “simple” administration of your policies and access controls goes from a single lookup to a lookup to the power of n groups. It doesn’t scale at all and exponentially increases network traffic and load on domain controllers.

LDAP + Kerberos running on Linux servers doesn’t have this problem because it doesn’t allow it (intentionally, because it’s stupid).

Oh man, I’m thinking about it now and AD just makes me so upset, haha. It’s such a poorly engineered product. Don’t give it more credit than it’s due. It works fine for small organizations but that does not mean it’s a good product.

You might be suffering from the opposite of survivorship bias: When you work in IT you end up having to fix the strangest shit that reoccurs on certain categories of hardware.

I know for a fact that RHEL 7 just did not like certain appliances by vendors that used it (back in the day). They would regularly break themselves until the vendor put out an update that switched it to a Debian-based custom thing.

Also, all the (thousands of) appliances that use Windows are utter shit so it’s not really a high bar. The vendor just needs to hire people that actually know what they’re doing and if they do they won’t use Windows on an appliance!

Hah! Can someone here chime in and tell me when the slow AF (as in, it can take hours) rollback feature actually worked‽

Who TF is that patient‽ You can reinstall Windows and all your apps in half the time required.

OpenSCAD is the most robust of all CADs and it works best/fastest on Linux 🤷

I work for a huge bank that’s investing a non-trivial amount of money (billions) in single family homes. They don’t plan to rent them out. They just want to own them.

Now why would a huge, rich bank invest in something like that? Because they’re pretty sure they’re going beat inflation when they resell those properties later. It’s a very safe (if spread across the entire US and Canada) place to park money.

It’s not a big deal if one or two banks do this or even a handful of private equity firms. However, when all of them do it at once (like they are now) it can have a major impact on the prices of single family homes. It also creates something called a, “systemic risk” but that’s a very large topic that I’m not going to cover here.

The point is that yes: The big banks and big private equity firms (and 401ks!) all own way too much non-commercial real estate in general right now and their expansion into single family homes is a great big societal problem.

…but why now‽ Why haven’t they been investing in huge swaths of single family homes since forever? I mean, they’ve been appreciating faster than inflation since forever with only a few minor hiccups (e.g. 2008). The answer is: It used to be much more expensive to maintain homes that don’t have anyone living in them.

Back in the day most homes were unique. In any given neighborhood some homes might have gas heat while others had electric and some others used oil or coal! There were also more fire and flood hazards with more flammable furnishings/building materials and things like washing machine hoses would often just break after a certain amount of time (the seals were only good for like ten years).

These days you have endless amounts of cookie cutter homes in enormous neighborhoods all over the damned place. They’re also built to vastly superior building standards and come with appliances and AC that are orders of magnitude more efficient than in decades past.

This means a big bank or private equity firm can buy hundreds of houses in a region and (cheaply) hire a 3rd party to look after them. They just don’t need as much maintenance as they used to. They’re so much cheaper to maintain en mass.

So how do we fix this problem? There’s all sorts of things you can do but some quick and perhaps unexpected things are:

• Raise minimum wage and crack down on businesses hiring illegal workers doing house maintenance work (let them do construction 👍).
• Raise property taxes in general. You could try to raise them for homes without people living in them but then you just end up creating other unintended consequences/problems (which I won’t get into to stay brief)
• Force upgrades on unoccupied homes. Air conditioning system is 10 years old? You have to get a new one with improved efficiency. House has gas stoves? You have to replace those.
• Force inspections of unoccupied homes and come down hard in regards to code enforcement (every unoccupied home poses a nonzero fire risk to every neighborhood).

Basically, you have to turn unoccupied homes into expenses again. When that happens the banks and private equity will get the hell out.

There’s lots of private equity that will just convert to being slumlords but the big banks do not want to be renting out anything. It’s a huge risk for them and looks real bad on their balance sheets from a banking perspective. Also, if a bank is big enough they’re straight up forbidden (by law) from renting out properties (though there’s various loopholes which I won’t get into).

^this. Even a $200 cheap ass printer can handle printing a knob like this and it’ll even keep your toast warm forever if you want 👍

It’ll also provide endless hours of fucking around learning a new hobby and limitless conversation options to get people to leave you alone at parties!

Don’t see what the big deal is. We humans can also absorb water and other fluids through our butts. Just ask Brett Kavanaugh.

Assuming you’re in the northern hemisphere: For this winter it’s fine. It’ll gently heat your home while you game like it’s 1999. No worries 😁

However, once it starts to warm up you’ll want to send that motherboard+RAM+CPU to your local HAZMAT trash pickup/facility and get something newer. Might I suggest a nice 2020-ish desktop CPU? With a motherboard that supports Coreboot, of course!

https://doc.coreboot.org/mainboard/index.html

…and get yourself a nice Nvidia (sadly, because AMD and Intel are still far behind) GPU with at least 12GB of VRAM so you can have fun with the open source AI stuff (it’s a blast!). The more VRAM the better though so if you can pick up a 4060 Ti with 16GB cheap this spring that’ll be your best budget buy (endless uncensored fun) 👍

Seriously: If you haven’t got the hardware to run Stable Diffusion locally you’re missing out! It’s as fun and addicting as a really good game. Running it on some cloud service isn’t the same because at best they’ll be running stuff that’s weeks or months out of date (which is like a million years in AI time) and they don’t give you the same level of control/possibilities that you get when running your own stuff locally (run whatever models/LoRAs you want, whatever extensions you want, generating images without having to worry about overbearing censorship because it is that bad on public AI services–paid or not!).

No, don’t rip! Gently remove the bad RAM from the PC.

Whoosh!

That’s the joke 🤣

If we build such a wall you’ll be sorry. It will change nothing!