I know this as ‘eat your frogs’.

Scalpers are a problem that transcend Ticketmaster. Heck, they transcend the world of event tickets. Scalpers are a pain in so many areas. Fuck them.

The standalone Gwent version started sucking the moment all the competitive gamers got their hands on it. Then it was all about optimising the game to death, all the decks got streamlined. I came back to the game after a longer break and it was almost completely different, and my favourite faction had been so drastically altered that I couldn’t get back into it.

Brave is the one run by transphobes who also love crypto.

How would you drive the adoption of such a protocol in an environment that is largely hostile towards attempts at demonetising things?

Re the first part: nobody enters my house if they don’t have a key and I’m not present. Re the second part, I don’t trust any software-based technology near enough to rely on that kind of stuff without double-checking. . Turn the key, done.

To this day I don’t know what problem smart locks are supposed to solve that hasn’t already been solved by the good old lock and key combo. Requires no electricity, no internet, just works.

That means they’re not for your ears. Not that they’re designed to inflict pain. I’ve had those AirPods, they were fine for me - and my ears don’t like most earbuds that get shoved in there, and sometimes even start hurting from over-ear headphones. I now have the Airpod Pros and they’re even better, all that goes into your ear is the silicone bud, no rigid plastic in the mix.

That’s the thing. Apple has that track record already. This years iOS update will be available for phones released as far back as 2017. And that’s not a recent development - 4+ years have been the norm with iOS devices for a long time, while many Android phones have suffered from much faster obsolescence.

Google have yet to prove that they can fulfill this promise.

I’ll touch base with you in 7 years to see how that’s going.

*from the manufacturer

Does your Android phone get 5+ years of software support?

Any company with reasonably involved processes (read: more than three steps) should have clearly documented SOPs, policies and process documentation. This has nothing to do with the level people are at. I’m at senior level and sure as shit don’t remember every detail of something that was verbally communicated to me months ago unless I do it every single day, and even that’s error-prone. I write step by step instructions on processes for myself and everyone else.

Benefits of this approach:

• It’s not stuck in my or anyone else’s head, but clearly spelled out
• people can follow the process again and again, no matter how much time passes between each time - you’d be surprised how much people forget if they don’t do something on a daily basis
• clear documentation removes doubt
• clear documentation is beneficial to newly onboarded staff. Nobody gives them a half-baked version scraped together from memory fragments
• people can point out potential issues with the process, and the documentation can be amended/updated
• I myself can go back to it if I have even the slightest amount of doubt on a detail.

Drawbacks of this approach:

• someone has to write the document
• someone has to maintain it

I have one of those, it’s completely useless. It had novelty value but the eggs never came out the way I wanted them. I’ve gone back to a normal timer.

The difference is, Devops isn’t a bubble that everyone is waiting for to pop. I’ve been in that field for over ten years now, and properly implemented it is a net gain for everyone who does it. The reason companies are falling over themselves trying to hire ‘Devops’ is because they still haven’t properly cottoned on to the concept but are afraid of falling behind. And yes, I can absolutely attest to the fact that Devops is a tough market to hire in at the moment, that there are a lot of places who don’t have the first clue about what Devops really is, and - similarly to Agile - think they can add some buzzwords to their toolchain and call Bob their uncle. And there are a lot of candidates who somehow acquired a Devopsy title in all that chaos, but all their CVs have are tech buzzwords, and when you interview them they’re clueless. That doesn’t change the fact that Devops is a solid concept with high benefits for those who understand it.

AI, and more specifically GenAI and LLMs - is more like crypto, in the sense that people are trying to get rich from it without having the first clue what it is. It’s this shiny new thing that everyone is rushing to get on board with, but I have yet to see someone propose a use case that actually makes sense, couldn’t be implemented better without AI, and is a net gain for those using it. Right now it’s all this nebulous bullshit, everyone just slaps their own coat of paint onto ChatGPT and calls it a day. Useful AI-adjacent concepts like Big Data and Machine Learning have been around for much longer than the tooling underpinning the current hype, and already have a lot of very valid use cases.

By the way, I work with a bunch of high aptitude Devops engineers and none of them are thinking about adding AI to our pipelines, not even to pad their CV.

So not only do they want AI to take your job - you also won’t be able to get another job if you don’t wholesale buy into this shit.

I love the future.

Sometimes good enough is good enough.

Waltari - Yeah! Yeah! Die! Die! Death Metal Symphony in Deep C

One of the first collaborations of a metal band with a classical orchestra. That kind of stuff became more commonplace later, but this mix of death metal, classical music and all kinds of other influences remains unique to this day.

Why do minority characters have to justify their existence in a AAA game? Diversity is not political, it’s a fact of life.

I have one Lightning-to-Jack adapter that was included with my old iPhone 8, and two pairs of EarPods with Lightning plug that were included with subsequent models.

Besides that, the claim was that the headphone jack was removed to force people into buying AirPods. But that claim falls down when there clearly were other, non-Bluetooth options.