There are people at google, people with names and addresses, who have collectively made the world incalculably shittier. I hope they get what they deserve.

Ed Zitron wrote a long post about some asshole in particular who shit it all up: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

We’re not far off from The Smith Act making a comeback. That “we’re going to arrest people who attended a meeting once” stuff is in living memory. The US has never lived up to its stated ideals.

Once, I got a whole pizza pie from the place down the street, and ate it while hanging with my cat and playing some nice single player games.

Another time, a friend of mine surprise ordered me Indian food. Ate it while playing video games with the cat.

Different time, was cat sitting for a friend. She ordered me a pie, which I ate while playing games and chilling with the cat.

All were pretty good, really.

The why was “I’m not that close with my family, don’t want to travel, and I’m not seeing anyone who invited me”

• gym teacher manager. Not great at the math and science parts, but believes in his team
• checked out youth. Watches YouTube instead of working.
• checked out elder. He’s so close to retiring. He’s got stories to tell from before HR was all formalized
• checked out middle career guy. He wanted to fix things. Then he fell into the tar pit. Why bother when a ten minute fix is going to take two research spikes, a stakeholder meeting, a team meeting, a feedback meeting, a sprint planning meeting and so on. Fuck it.
• day care HR. Do they work? Who knows. They seem nice, when you can find them.
• quiet union sympathizer. Got a “talking to” about it, so now he just shit talks management in back channels. Joins meetings smoking from his back porch. Knows where some bodies are buried.

I work at a bad place.

Current system is bad. Capitalism sends profits to people who don’t work. Piracy sidesteps a lot of that, and some people send the money saved to people who do work.

A lot of Americans have shitty, immature, views on sexuality and the human body.

I remember some coworkers and I chatting about it, and two of them both said they’d rather their kid watch a movie where someone got shot in the head than one where someone received oral sex.

They’re not trying to make a good product. They’re trying to get their short term gains.

Normal capitalist bullshit where a handful of people (who probably don’t even do any work) make decisions and keep almost all the profits.

Occasionally. It’s frustrating that most free porn sites are kind of bad at search and filter. You’d think a tagging system would be easy to implement but most sites seem to just have a barely functional search.

The majority of the time you just click play in steam, heroic, or whatever. It’s no worse than windows.

I don’t do any tinkering on my desktop.

Workday also gets mad if your resume has “special characters” in it, like quotation marks. Why they can’t sanitize input themselves, I don’t know. Presumably incompetence.

This is a joke, right?

Many companies use workday for the job application process, which wants an account. Workday is a steaming pile of garbage.

At the lowest level, it is possible to pull people in your peer-group out of shitty world views. It’s slow and difficult. But like I got an old coworker to be way less homophobic through our chats at work.

At the larger level, nah, fuck em.

I was just told today that ai usage is a factor in hiring and promotion. They didn’t say the AI usage had to be smart.

My boss, to his credit, reportedly said something like “well, if someone is already good at python they might not need as much AI to do a task than someone who isn’t”. I don’t think management cared.

People are stupid emotional creatures. They don’t calmly evaluate if the thing is useful or practical. They see the in-group doing it and don’t want to be left out.

This was probably an advantage in pre-history. Our brains haven’t kept up with our changing environment.

Usually they have

• multiple approaches
• reactive world and NPCs
• the world is more interactive than decorative

So the game might say “get the laptop from the 2nd floor office”. An immersive sim will try to allow as many things as you could imagine doing in real life to achieve this

• talk your way in. Convince them you work there or something
  • maybe forge or steal some ID
  • or hack their network to give yourself creds!
• find a back entrance
• find a back entrance directly to the 2nd story
• just shoot everyone
• sneak in and take people out like a ghost
• sneak in and don’t get seen
• set off a fire alarm and go in when people are outside
• do any of the above after hours

Contrast this with a more traditional game like Mass Effect. There’s typically going to be like one path, with maybe like one choice. You go in where they want, shoot the baddies, and get the thing.

I think it was heart of stone where I found random soldiers that were like level 40, and were thus inexplicably hard to kill. Kind of sucked. (Tip: setting things on fire does percentage damage, and so scales really well)

Nothing in the game is the kind of execution challenge difficulty I enjoy. It’s not like elden ring where you really have to manage spacing and stamina, consider your weapon, spells, skills. You can mostly just level and upgrade your stuff in witcher3, and win with face rolling.

Which is fine. That’s a valid kind of game. I just lost interest when replaying it because without the story to keep me in, the moment to moment gameplay wasn’t compelling enough

I didn’t really struggle with the controls when I replayed part of it this year. I lost interest because the difficulty starts out a little rough (wolves will kill you) and then a few hours later you’re so strong that even narratively scary things just melt.

I see this sometimes from a distance, even with children. The boys are wild and loose, the girls on a tight leash.

Unfortunately, trying to address that with the sledgehammer of The State is not easy to do safely.

I have a somewhat vivid memory of sprinting through NY Penn Station around midnight to get the last train home, back before I lived in the city. Was a deciding factor in me moving. Had to leave my friend’s Halloween party at like 10 to get the last train.