I don’t have the patience to keep it up for a long time but I barely get any scam calls after pushing the button to talk to someone and then just asking about the plot holes in their script. Like the one claiming there’s going to be a warrant for me, why does the guy need to ask for my name and other information? Why would revenue Canada (of anyone who isn’t a scammer of some sort) ever want any kind of payment in gift cards? I’ll use a tone of voice on the verge of laughter, too.

One time, after I asked, the guy just asked me why I even pressed the button to talk to a person and then hung up. Most of the time they just hang up. Sometimes the English option seems to only be there to make it seem more realistic for those who would pick the Chinese option because the call disconnects right after picking English.

Though more recently I’ve just been hanging up early in the recording when I do get the odd scam call. They might filter that, too, because even the volume of those calls stays low. Which makes sense because even just making the calls probably costs them something, even if it’s just pennies.

Well then you’re in luck because that might already be a feature of the model you have!

I had to spend an annoying amount of time finding all of the settings to make it so that my windows machine would never wake up on its own, spread out over an even longer period of time because some of them aren’t easy to trigger on my own so it was a matter of trying something and then trying more things if I find it awake on its own again.

Even disabling the wake on mouse movement was a pain because it doesn’t properly label mice and keyboards and doesn’t have a global setting. I wanted to keep wake on keyboard but not have it wake if my mouse moved a nm because a butterfly flapped its wings too vigorously as it flew by the closed window.

After I installed Linux, I went to do the same thing there only to find it already had sensible defaults set.

Do we really need to define things in terms of what the average person is capable of? Especially when the biggest barrier seems to be “willingness to put a small amount of effort into learning a simple process”?

A surprising number of big names on there.

And the major action item is to do some internet videos with whatever video games are popular with those millennial kids these days playing in the background. Shot in Nancy Pelosi’s beautiful home–oh nm, she doesn’t want any dirty YouTube filmographers in her home but W is willing to let them use his ranch and his copy of EA Football Game 202425. See if we can get Joe Rogan to make a guest appearance, and we’re sure to recapture the millennial under 30 crowd!

Oh good, the corporate sponsorship money arrived, let’s split that up and go home. Don’t forget to set aside the King’s fifth!

It sounds like you might have some network places set up for windows to use but that are no longer reachable (or something along those lines) because that shouldn’t be taking so long so you might have things timing out in the background.

Or your internet is slow and it’s taking a long time to communicate with one drive or send its screenshots of your document to their creep department.

Or maybe a print driver that no longer exists still has an orphaned entry in the registry and it spends some time trying to locate it.

Or malware has set up hooks for any new window that pops up but the print to pdf dialog is set up in such a way that it churns very inefficiently on that window specifically.

I joke but any one of those might actually be what’s going on.

Yeah, this is the impression I got when he talked about spending so much time training for the problems, especially the bit where he said it was all about hoping you’ve already seen and memorized the problems while pretending it’s the first time you’ve seen them. That’s the whole point of obscure problems like that: to show how you can handle a new problem.

I’ve interviewed for technical positions and I don’t even really care if you get the right answer as much as I care about how you approach the problem.

Shit like this will just make it harder to figure out who the real programmers are and separate them from the people who are only there because they know tech skills means money but didn’t actually develop any tech skills because they were too busy gaming the system. I don’t want to hire someone who spent hours memorizing things they think I want regurgitated on command. I want to hire someone who can understand the overall picture of what’s going on and what needs to be done because it’s interesting to them.

They said that in the broader context of saying they don’t think American cheese deserves the hate it gets. It was qualifying their defense of American cheese by saying they aren’t just blindly defending any criticism of America but honestly like the cheese.

I kept requesting the transportation subway travel to my stop until one day I forgot to ask and it still arrived at my stop. That’s when I understood what it felt like to fit in.

First death is friction heat as you enter the atmosphere. Avoid it with a heat resistant vehicle or suit.

Next death is from extreme vibrations from the turbulence caused by supersonic winds. Avoid it with an aerodynamic and strong vehicle body that can withstand and stabilize in incredibly high winds.

Next death is lack of oxygen. But you probably have some oxygen system on that vehicle anyway just to get there.

Next is the freezing temperatures, around -145 C. Ok add some heating to your craft.

Next is the crushing pressure, passing 1000x earth’s atmospheric pressure and it just gets higher from there. Hope you didn’t use carbon fibre for your vehicle’s main structural integrity!

Then, if you’re not crushed anyways despite whatever you used to mitigate the previous one failing, there’s extreme heat to deal with again, just more of it this time. No known substance can withstand the heat, especially considering the pressure is still just increasing.

Further down is the metallic hydrogen layer. Assuming you haven’t already been converted to plasma, you probably will at this point.

And further down is the core that includes “rock” but I use the term pretty loosely.

Some of your atoms might eventually make it there but will likely spend a long time just blowing around in the atmosphere after they were vaporized.

This is different from the old man angry at change meme. The change isn’t the problem; personally I like change and seeing evolutionary and revolutionary improvements.

The problem is that so many of these changes are for the benefit of the corporations involved in the product at the expense of anyone who ends up using it or is near enough to be affected collaterally.

The idea of a smart TV is nice. Except they put the underpowered hardware in it that struggles to display a menu. Maybe because of all the data it is gathering and sending home or the time it spends making sure the latest ads are downloaded.

Smart appliances are also a nice idea. Except most just want to connect to some proprietary web service so they can middle man every interaction to sell your data or a subscription.

A smart car also sounds cool. Except they are also designed to just make more money either via more expensive repairs, possibly even forced to go through a manufacturer approved mechanic because they use security features to protect them from competition, or by the usual selling your data and ads. Oh and also they can save money by sticking a bunch of controls into the software and not needing to make physical buttons. Also they save even more by also using underpowered hardware and probably not even bothering with UX design. Maybe even deliberately because bad experiences can be upsellers. Oh they also want to sell subscriptions to whatever they can, including to things that don’t even benefit from going through their services.

It’s all just rent seeking.

I wonder how they handle people signing up to prime for a shipping discount and then immediately cancelling it, only to do so again for their next order…