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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Sorry friend.

    If your data was occupationally-sensitive or renders you vulnerable to financial ruination, it’s time to move to a recovery phase and see if modern data recovery specialists can work their voodoo.

    Remember: never run experimental commands (you or a GenAI) in a live environment. See how it breaks things in a test environment first - if it shits itself, you may even get to learn how to fix it before running the instruction on live data.

    Anecdote time! A good friend of mine drove his car to a mutual colleague’s place once because the wipers were about as much use as two chicken breasts on metal poles. He says to our colleague “Hey Foxy, I hear you’re good with cars, can you fix these wipers for me? The rubber seems to be in good nick but it’s not clearing anything”.

    “Sure thing,” Foxy proudly announces, “I’ll get to work”.

    Foxy strips the wipers down, one component at a time, before dusting his hands off and walking away.

    “What’s going on, Foxy? The thing’s still in bits!” my pal says.

    “No idea,” says Foxy, “not a fucking Scooby mate” and goes back inside, leaving his wipers and actuating motor in about fourteen pieces on the roadside.

    So much for being good with cars.



  • You can generally tell how well a push has gone by looking at your phone at 9pm on the Friday nights.

    If there’s no missed calls, it’s gone well.

    If there’s two or three figures worth of missed calls, then it’s gone really well and it’s just been people wanting to congratulate you on how well it’s gone.

    Either way, a Monday task.



  • I fucking love AI.

    I’ll qualify that with a small personal story on it: I have a colleague in a nearby office the other side of the city, who steps into supervise his team when the actual manager isn’t there. Nice bloke, not much banter, but pleasant enough.

    You can fucking guarantee though that when a division-wide email has gone out, or a change of plan comes in… he’s right on the phone to me asking what to do.

    The first few times it was cute. A guy must really love his job or hate himself to go into junior management, so walking him through routine tasks he may not have been exposed to may be beneficial to him in the long run.

    The problem is, it’s near constant. Every single time something changes, he calls - not for advice, not for opinion, but “can you do this for my team too?”. What really pulls a hair out of my arse is that there’s a 50/50 chance of it being something I’ve already showed him. I’ve spoken to his actual manager at exasperated length but it’s just a can kicked down the road with a “well he’s still learning, isn’t he?”

    I suppose he is, and I’m no teacher. When he phones now, I just tell him “mate our org has access to that fancy new Microsoft Copilot, it’s fuckin’ mint bro, solves all your problems”, knowing fine well the disaster that’s about to happen - partly to expose him to new technologies, but mainly to be a smug cunt.

    Invariably, he gets solutions that don’t quite work, or ideas that don’t quite fit the brief… and it’s satisfying as fuck getting the follow-up call and saying “sorry bruv, Copilot is smarter than me, which isn’t hard” or “nah sorry dude, it gives you a personalised response so that’ll be outside of my domain, making my suggestions worthless”.

    Fucking love it. It has reduced my workload immensely.








  • nice

    Specifically, process niceness - a very basic view is how “nice” a process is at handing over control to the CPU scheduler when asked to.

    It’s a similar situation as when your mam (the scheduler) tells you to give up the SNES (the process) because you (the CPU) need to do the homework (another process), the dishwasher (another process) and the bins (another process) - but the SNES is saying “just thirty more seconds bro, and the boss will be done”.

    edit: in context, these function keys manually force the niceness value up or down, determining whether the process allows you to finish the boss and give up the CPU at a more appropriate time, or whether the scheduler is like “nah absolutely not, homework, now”.

    edit edit: my assumption is that this is a process manager app anyway, else the rest of the above is bollocks





  • Sorry, maybe I wasn’t clear.

    I’m assuming the 16 digit card number, start and expiry dates, and CVV are printed on the reverse - whereas it used to only have the CVV on the reverse and the rest of the details on the front.

    What’s stopping someone with a picture of the rear of the card visiting an online retailer and going wild with a picture of just one side of the card these days - aside from multi-factor authentication at the point of authorising the payment?