MelodiousFunk

Me, before clicking the link (because kbin doesn’t handle inline thumbnails well): If that’s the entry for “twelve cloaking warbirds” I swear…

This is about as coherent an argument as you’re gonna find on the topic.

I got bit by this earlier in the year. I needed a smaller TV for the bedroom. I narrowed down the line I wanted. Target and Best Buy were the only two local stores to carry it. BB had the 2023 model, Target had a 2022 model with a sub-designation that was $50 cheaper. I went with Target because I didn’t care if it was an older model, just needed something good enough. Well, it wasn’t good enough, not even close. The color accuracy was so bad that the tint adjustment was useless — it was both too pink and too green no matter what. I dug out my old calibration disk and tried to adjust the color by isolating red/green/blue channels. The best-effort adjustments made it better, but still awful. I even connected it to the network (hardwire only, fuck “smart” appliances) just in case a firmware update helped. It did not, so back it went. Had to wait, multiple times in line and for someone to pull from the back, for like 45 minutes because they “don’t do exchanges” so I needed to do a song and dance to get the sale price on a replacement purchase. Got the replacement home, same deal. At that point I suspected it was leftover Black Friday junk.

Took it back and went to Best Buy. Spent the extra $50. Perfect color out of the box. Lesson(s) learned.

Me before reading the article: It’s got to be dates. Excel thinks everything is a date.

Me after reading the article: Even the workaround is halfhearted. Jeebus.

American here. My ISP blackholes certain sites at the DNS level. Easy enough to work around, but it’s there.

Netflix, what are you trying to do? I can’t cancel my subscription in protest if it’s still cancelled from the last time you did something boneheaded.

Til all are one.

Indeed. In my case, I fought through managerial malaise and turned the entire process on its ear. But even after the approach proved its worth, they refused to put a dev resource on it. It became my problem 24/7.

Remember kids, being good at something outside of your job description means it’s now your job. If the boss refuses to compensate you for it, slap it on your resume and find someone who will.

I have seen critical enterprise applications run in VBA in excel.

I wrote one of them. It replaced periodically writing down application outputs on paper and sounding the alarm if something went pear-shaped. It wasn’t my job to develop software but I didn’t want hand cramps to be my job, either. I had vague ideas about how to do what I wanted to do with Excel so I poked at it and googled until it worked. More than a decade later, I’m no longer there but that freakin spreadsheet is still running 24/7, being proudly showed off during tours of the facility.

I will cackle if MS ever pulls the plug on VBA.

Thank you, CaptObvious.

…you know, your username makes it difficult to sound sincere when addressing you.

You can make rules network-wide, per-app, or per-incident. The latter is useful for getting a handle on app behavior. Like if you see it contacting ‘updates.somedev.com’ weekly, you can choose to allow or disallow permanently based on how benign you think the app is. But more likely, anything trying to phone home has a dozen CDNs it’s trying to hit rather than an easily identifiable URL. Block one, it tries to hit the other. Maybe today, maybe next week. It gets overwhelming (which IMO is a feature for the dev, not a bug).

As a longtime Little Snitch user, it’s freakin exhausting.

you shouldn’t be able to bottle and resell it.

Dasani and Aquafina in shambles

I never would have guessed that Musk is a billion times worse than Lex Luthor, but the math is right there. Terrible.

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I bet at one time they had a functional threshold alerting system. Then someone missed something (because they’re human) and management ordered more alerts “so it doesn’t happen again.” Wash, rinse, repeat over the course of years (combined with VM sprawl and acquiring competitors) until there’s no semblance of sanity left, having gone far past notification fatigue and well into “my job is just checking email and updating tickets now.” But management insists that all of those alerts are needed because Joe Bob missed an email… which there are now exponentially more of… and the board is permanently half red anyway because the CTO (bless his sociopathic heart) decreed that 80% is the company standard for alerts and a bunch of stuff just lives there happily so good luck seeing something new.

…I was not expecting to process that particular trauma this evening.

When my fiancé was shopping for a car a few years ago, I asked the salesperson “so how do you turn off connectivity?” while they were showing off the whiz-bang infotainment systems. Nobody could answer the question, and most didn’t understand why anyone would want to turn it off.

Gotta give them points for snake oil creativity though. Their nonsense is much more entertaining than hearing “invisible sky wizard did it” as the answer to every question for millennia.