I think anon has it 100% correct. The instant Gabe is out of the picture, I expect to hear talk about how “you don’t understand, we have to fuck out users, won’t someone please think of the IPO?!”

Now what if we went even more granular all the way down to the individual? Like, each person is their own electoral college vote?

I’ve really been waiting for gas stations to jump in on this. Tying it to vehicle manufacturers just doesn’t make that much sense to me, not nearly as much sense as using the companies whose mission is already to deliver energy to vehicles. You need a tiny fraction of the infra for electric charging that you need to supply gas. Shell or Chevron could EASILY ink deals with, say, Starbucks, to put one or two chargers in every Starbucks parking lot in the country and just sit back and laugh as the money rolls in. And yet, they just keep pushing for exclusively fossil fuels.

AFAICT, the charger network is a huge part of Tesla’s value proposition. Laying off the entire 500 person team like this is going to be a massive, massive disruption no matter what anyone says, you can’t just patch it with [checks notes] an entirely different team. It’s going to take that new team months to get up to date, put out fires, find their bearings, etc. and by that point, issues are already snowballing. The rapport and contacts problem is also going to be enormous; basically shit canning all of the company’s industry/logistics ambassadors is what, in any other light, would be called a disaster. This is going to be a clusterfuck, and that’s before any competitors interested in starting their own charger network start scooping these newly available specialists up.

It’s incredible to see this man still idolized, even by bosses and other execs, as he tanks not just one but two household name businesses AT THE SAME TIME.

Are expenses exceeding revenues? I feel like a lot of the big companies that have laid people off are nowhere even remotely close to going into the red in absolute terms, and if they were, there would have been a five alarm panic. I mean, I can’t even imagine the kind of epic shit storm that would sweep wall St if Microsoft or Google only made, say, a million dollars in profit (not revenue, mind) in the last quarter.

Been there. Senior dev told me not to write comments, but write self-documenting code instead.

Maybe I’m out of the loop, but I think tragedy is a really strong word here.

I love that the end of this episode implies that everyone on lower decks is just really drunk all the time.

Oh boy, I can’t wait to wild shape into Thomas the Tank Engine

Yeah, the devs did say server costs were killing them, IIRC. Probably some of the reason for the relatively minor updates since launch has been putting out the fire of ballooning cloud expenses.

I tried to convince my small company to put an account on Mastodon instead of X. Our social media person opened a Mastodon account, but decided it wouldn’t be run until Mastodon was a little more, well, relevant.

I don’t get why all these game companies are suddenly so worried about cheats (and in Capcom’s case, mods) for games that aren’t even multiplayer. I’m old enough to remember when it was common that cheat codes were left in as little extras for the player, and I always thought they added a lot of replay value to the games that had them. I would have played 10,000% less Tomb Raider / GTA / etc without the cheat codes. I bought the damn game to have fun, let me have fun with it!

I’d like you to meet windows 11. Windows 11 bricked my Alienware computer for two weeks until I said fuck it and installed Linux. They pushed an update that triggered the Bitlocker secure boot policy, which is annoying but not a problem. Except that the Bitlocker recovery key page on Microsoft’s website has been down for over a month. There’s other users like me who’ve had their machines bricked because Microsoft fucked up a webpage and can’t be assed to do a git revert. It took me hours of navigating Microsoft’s intentionally terrible support pages to figure out how to talk to a person (over IM, phone support is not a thing anymore), another 40 minutes to get a support tech on the chat, and then they told me that basically my options are to wait or wipe the drives and re-install windows 11.

I didn’t want to wipe my drives, I liked my drives, but I’m not going to just let a machine sit there and be bricked for three months until Microsoft can be assed to un-brick it. So, I wiped the drives and installed mint. I can’t play all the games I used to (I can access probably 75% of my game library) but the performance is WAY better, like, obviously and shockingly better. Turns out that Bitlocker throttles your SSD performance significantly, and it also helps when your OS isn’t trying to both run a game and send your delicious, delicious data to ad servers or whatever.

And windows wants even more live service dependencies with 12? Fuck that. I’ve been with them since '95, but I won’t follow them there. 11’s live service dependencies have been a disaster, and I can’t see myself getting excited about even more of that.

Probably because it’s leet.

Good to know, thanks!

Okay, I guess. This isn’t really a hill I’m prepared to die on. The point is that it’s still a cost that’s real to the user, even if it’s not a direct financial one.

Well, it’s mastodon. You’ve got a little over 400 characters to say what you’re going to say in the most shocking, attention-getting way possible. Yes, it’s not a perfect analogy, but no metaphor is perfect or else it wouldn’t really be a metaphor, would it?

Anyway, it’s a time and convenience cost that becomes extremely significant as your IT proficiency decreases, and you’ve got another think coming if you think those costs don’t matter to people.

This is basically what he was saying. Open source tends to be a much less plug-and-play out-of-the-box experience, and usually requires at least some IT know-how for it to not be an infuriating experience. A lot of FOSS advocates compensate for that by kind of being that over explaining bro meme and get kinda pushy about getting people over the technical barriers because they want FOSS to be widely adopted and be a real alternative, and for good reasons. But most people don’t have the time or patience to stumblefuck their way through IT issues, they just want the shit to work.

It’s a fair criticism, accessibility is a big problem in FOSS. We’ve come a long way, but there’s still a long way to go.

VS Code. It’s dead easy to use, has a ton of useful plugins, and it’s customizable while also being enjoyable to use right out of the box.

For AI assisted coding, I use Cody or GPT-4 data analysis on my personal projects. I tried copilot and found that it actually made my productivity worse. Often as not, I found myself stopping and second guessing whether I was stupid or if it was copilot, and it was usually copilot. GPT-4 is really great for problem solving a specific problem or getting some feedback on some bad smelling code, and Cody works great for helping to write my code faster.

Please drink a confirmation mountain dew to activate your air conditioner. Sorry, we didn’t hear the sound of the can opening, please open another where the microphone can hear it. Sorry, our servers are down, we apologize for any inconvenience this may be causing. Sorry, getting your family out of the vehicle is an optional feature which you have not subscribed to, please say “Do the Dew” to get temporary access to the friends and family doors. Sorry, I didn’t get that, please say “Do the Dew”. Sorry, I still didn’t get that, please call customer service at 1800-luv-cars to give your ad consumer confirmation phrase to a customer service representative.

Yeah, you know, that [checks notes] one copy of a book that the lending library was able to lend* was really eating into their profit margin. Honest to God, they probably spent more money on lawyers over this shit than they’ll ever recoup, and it just makes them look stupid, greedy, and stupidly greedy.

*I think it’s one copy per actually book that’s owned. Just like you can’t lend you friends more copies of a given book than you own.