I agree that it’s a huge fuck up, my comment wasn’t in defence of the post office, just a related story :)
Whenever I have delivered code for a client it has always been in a way where the client has complete ownership of the code and can maintain it themselves later (or ask a different company that isn’t us to come do it) because that’s the only sustainable approach, and all companies should absolutely demand that all work done for them is done this way.
I did consultancy work as part of renewing and replacing ancient software systems for an insurance company, and it’s amazing how little people actually know about how their own business processes are actually supposed to work.
Orgs are in the position where everyone who built a system is gone, and all the current people who work there defer to the system for how the processes work, without actually properly understanding the rules. And so the system itself becomes the arbiter of correctness.
This is obviously horrible because it ends up where nobody dares to touch the current system in case they break it in some way nobody understands.
We ended up speaking to people across the whole business to painstakingly work out what the rules really were, putting together a new system and effectively “dual running” that side-by-side with the old system, so we could compare outputs and make sure they were the same. In some case they were different, and in some of those cases it was actually because the old system was actually wrong, but nobody noticed!
It’s a mess.
They are pursuing “realism” but the pursuit of realism also means that you must sacrifice strong artistic style, because style is - by very definition - deviation from realism.
When I am interviewing people, I always appreciate when the candidate is honest about their experience - or lack of experience.
If I ask about something and they openly say they never did that, that’s a green flag. I want to see people are honest about where they don’t have experience, because being honest about gaps is an important trait for when they are actually on the job.
On the other hand, if the candidate has something literally written on their CV/resume as a “strong skill” but then when I ask about it they struggle and try to bullshit their way through it, that’s the opposite. If someone is happy to lie to get the job, they’ll probably lie when they’re on the job too.
I can write a basic regex independently, but as soon as capture groups or positive/negative lookahead or lookbehind start popping up I’m back to the docs every time.
This is happening because all platforms are optimising for the one single metric that matters most to them - engagement.
When you consider all users as a whole, the way to get engagement is not to have a good UX that lets you tailor what you see, and search for the specific things you are interested in. The way to get it is to shove a constantly changing and brightly coloured stream of “content” right in people’s faces where they don’t have to do any thinking or make any decisions, they just mindlessly click what is offered and consume.
From Netflix’s perspective, they want someone to go from opening the app to watching a video in 10 seconds, and if they don’t achieve that, it’s a failure which they will optimise away.
The platforms have over the years systematically stripped back every control lever you have over what you see, because control means time spent thinking, and time thinking is not time engaging.
Centralisation makes things easy.
If it takes more than 1 minute to onboard to a new service, and especially if you have to overcome any learning barrier (such as what ‘instances’ are and how to choose one) then the vast majority of people will immediately throw that option out and won’t even consider it.
People like bluesky specifically because it gives them something almost identical to what they had before.
Back in my days working as .NET developer on Windows 7, I came into work one morning to find a colleague fuming that his machine had died on him.
He spent the whole morning reinstalling Windows and getting his environment set back up, and then pulled the branch he was working on, happy to finally be done with setup and get back to work. Ran his test suite and bam, machine crashes!
It was only at that point the penny dropped. We took a look at his branch, and sure enough he’d accidentally written a test that, when ran, deleted his entire C: drive!
That particular lesson made me very careful when writing any code that does things with the filesystem.
Given the free and open source nature of Lemmy, I’d suggest that creating an account to raise a feature suggestion - and in that way contribute - would not be an unreasonable expectation at all, rather than the expectation of having other people who are themselves only volunteers jump through all the hoops for you.
The UK is about to ban disposable vapes, but I fear it may achieve little.
What the legislation does is to define what “reusable” means, and demand that vapes must meet that.
In reality, I suspect that manufacturers will simply adjust their strategies to produce vapes that are “technically” reusable and rechargeable and meet the law in a bare-minimum way, but really are intended to be used exactly once, just like disposable ones were, and that’s exactly how they will continue to be treated by consumers.
Cost will probably go up 20% to cover it, but that’s all, and in the end even more material will be going in landfill.
In my opinion, what the legislation should have done is to set an absolute minimum price on the cost of a vape pen. That would be very heavy-handed, but it would actually create the strong financial motivation required to force consumers to genuinely treat the vape pen as something they will re-use.
Those few days between jobs are moments of pure joy.
You’re finished with all the bullshit of the previous job, and are blissfully unaware of whatever fresh bullshit is waiting for you at the new one.
This problem has become more prevalent with AI, but deceptive item listings have been part of the online shopping minefield for a long time.
The same rule applies now as it always has - if it seems too good to be true, then it is.
That, or hanging subtle dong on second hand listings is their kink
Lucky escape! It shows how good these con-artists are at what they do, when you went in fully expecting it would be a huge scam, and still got talked into it!
My strategy these days is to never commit to any significant purchase on the spot. Car, sofa, whatever it is, they will always try to lay on the pressure and make it seem like it’s urgent and if you don’t get it now you’ll miss the limited deal, or someone else will buy it or whatever the trick is, but you have to stay firm.
My go to line is “I’ll take that away and think about it”- which gets me out of loads of trouble.
Slimy sales people have plenty of psychological tricks they weave into conversations to get you invested and ready to buy. They want you yourself even to be saying “Yeah that seems like a good deal!” because once you say that, they’ve basically got you - you can’t back out because you’d be disagreeing with yourself, and it’s human nature and pride almost that we ‘stick’ with our decisions.
That’s why never making a decision on the day is the strongest defence. It means you don’t have to be a skilled conversationalist who can spot all the sweet talk and see through the tricks. You’re totally free to get suckered and say “That sounds great!” but not have that become a commitment.
If it sounds great now it will still sound great after you go home and think about it, after all.
I’m trying to swear less. Or rather, to swear only where a swear is warranted.
My Dad has a habit of interjecting constant cuss words into everything he says, like “I was at the fucking supermarket right and then I’m just trying to find a fucking tin of beans…” and it’s just so unnecessary, to the point where the swears mean nothing because they are just peppered everywhere. I have to keep reminding him, “Dad, please tone it down a little”
And that’s an easy habit to get into but its exactly what I don’t want to be doing - swearing just as punctuation.
If a situation calls for a swear then I will swear quite happily, “Ouch, my fucking toe!!” and I’ll use the proper word. There’s no need to find childish swear-alternatives.
But I don’t want to sound like I can’t even stop it.
Being straight? Not a red flag.
Being a woman? Not a red flag.
Being Christian? Not a red flag either, unless you’re the sort of Christian who wants to force your views upon others who do not share them.
The only real red flag is that you said you “don’t understand” being queer. What is there to understand about it? Person A loves person B and that’s all there is to know. If that doesn’t make sense to you, then that perhaps may be the root of the issue, because it positions queer people as something alien.
Edit: Genuine advice - the key to being a good ally is internalised acceptance. You can’t be an ally if you see queer people as a different species, because even if you are “kind” and say “nice” things, there’s still a huge wall. You need to believe, truly, that queer people are exactly the same as you, and treat them exactly as anyone else - which ironically means no special treatment at all. Special treatment, even if it is seemingly ‘positive’ and well meant, is still strange and alienating.
The theming is very realistic, I’ll give it that.
The person you replied to isn’t entirely wrong, though.
“ricing” was a term in use in the car modding scene around the 80s and 90s especially, where among certain groups it was popular to modify Japanese import cars with kits and decals etc to mimic the look of the Japanese racing scene.
Some people considered these mods to be tacky and worthless because they usually tended to focus more on aesthetics than performance, purely tricking the car up visually with no other changes. Due to the Asian origin of these mods and the stereotype that Asians eat a lot of rice, the cars were insultingly dubbed “rice burners” or " ricers" and the process of doing it “ricing”
It was intended 100% as an insult, basically meaning “Your car looks like shit because of all that Japanese crap you put on it”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_burner
Like many insults of course, the insult is often “reclaimed” by the group it targets, who begin to use it between themselves in a favourable way, without any insult or negative connotation.
Ricing in the context of computers where people are styling, theming and “tricking out” their desktop almost certainly was borrowed from the car scene.
By this point there is basically no negative intent around the term at all, and especially not racist, but the place the term came from was.
If you are in a healthy relationship, you can do this voluntarily and for free using functionality built into the OS or third party apps, without paying your network operator $10/mo