Yeah, lots of FOSS projects end up with horrible documentation. Because programmers usually make really bad manuals. They tend to overestimate the average user’s level of experience, so lots of the documentation ends up vague or outright misleading.

Also, since programmers tend to want to focus on actually programming, the documentation rarely gets updated.

Out of the big three captains, Janeway would likely make the most capable president. Kirk would constantly be trying to fist fight politicians, Picard would quickly be bored with the day-to-day and would vanish to go work on an archeological site somewhere.

Sisko would throw Mitch McConnell off the roof of the White House, then fall off of it himself.

Spock would likely make a terrible president, purely because he’d be surrounded by illogical politicians who are constantly trying to backstab him. You need a president who is capable of not only being level-headed, but also capable of playing politics when it matters. The unfortunate truth is that politics often requires playing the long game, instead of simply finding consensus and getting shit done right away.

The funny part is that $250/hr isn’t even that crazy for freelance work, depending on where you live and what field you work in. Freelancers frequently charge anywhere from 2-5x their normal hourly rate, to account for the fact that they’re not getting full time benefits. They’re paying for their own liability insurance, their own healthcare, their own equipment, their non-billable hours, etc… The higher rate is to cover all of the things that an employer would typically cover.

And lots of managers don’t even mind paying it, because it comes out of a different budget than their payroll. I’ve seen some orgs where they don’t even bother following up on contractor invoices unless they’re at least 5 digits. $9000 bill for a contractor? Psh, that’s a drop in the bucket. Hell, that $9000 wouldn’t even cover a full 40 hour work week in some fields.

Source: Was a freelancer for nearly a decade. I worked with several companies that would sign off on my $8000 invoices without even double checking them.

This is the way. I’m happy to do take home projects; I have a portfolio of past projects that I’d be happy to let you review before signing me as a contractor. Once we discuss the project’s scope, I can put together a bid for it.

Oh, you didn’t want to pay for the projects? You just wanted me to do them for free, so you could steal them and ghost? Well I’m not interested in expanding my portfolio, (as I mentioned previously, I already have a robust portfolio that I can give to prospective clients), so I’m glad this conversation has saved both of us some time. Please feel free to reach back out in the future, if you ever have any projects worth paying for.

And some of us even didn’t like it, because those places could often blur the lines between a place of business and a place for socializing

To be clear, this was always the goal. If an employer could have you work 80 hours a week and sleep under your desk, they would. The goal is to give employees things to do around the office, so they don’t feel the need to actually leave work. Because if you’re playing ping pong in the break room, you’re immediately available for your manager to go “hey, we have a project for you.” Even if you’re not clocked in while playing ping pong, you’re essentially on call.

This is unfortunately the only real answer. “Install an aux port in your car, or get a different player that will play via USB” isn’t a good answer to hear, but it’s the correct one. Maybe use one of those FM transmitters instead. Reception will entirely depend on where you are, (and the FCC severely limits how powerful a non-licensed radio broadcast can be,) but at least it would get music to your car. Or if your car has Bluetooth, you can get one that takes the audio in via aux and outputs to Bluetooth.

But if you don’t have an aux port, I’m guessing you don’t have Bluetooth either.

I used to do the same every year or two on Reddit, for similar reasons. Mostly to prevent the accidental accumulation of PII that could be compiled to dox me. Just nuke the old account, start fresh with a brand new account, and import subscriptions so my home page didn’t drastically change. I even had a dedicated lurking account for browsing the NSFW subs.

It’s technically possible, if the drives were binned. Not likely, but possible.

Binning is a process where manufacturers take large drives and artificially reduce their size. Let’s say a company makes 1TB drives, but their manufacturing process only reliably works for 2/10 drives. They test each drive, and 8 have a bad sector. Rather than just throwing those drives out, they disable that bad sector. Now you have two 1TB drives, and eight drives that are a lower capacity. Maybe they test the remaining sectors, and another 2 test fine. So now they have two 1TB drives, two 512GB drives, and six lower capacity. They disable another sector on the remaining 6, and try again. They have three test good, and the rest test fine after disabling another sector.

So by trying to manufacture ten 1TB drives, they actually got two 1TB, two 512GB, three 256GB, and three 128GB drives. They’ll sell the 128GB drives at (or even slightly below) cost, just to recoup some of their expenses. They simply don’t want to write them off as a total loss. The 256GB drives get sold slightly above cost, to make a slight profit. The 512GB’s have more markup,!and the 1TB drives will have a high amount of markup to cover future R&D costs. So the 1TB drives are more expensive, not only because the company wants to cover future R&D, but also because they can’t be made reliably.

But then tech improves, and 1TB drives become easier to make. Reliability improves. Now the company is able to reliably make 9/10 functioning drives, and only 1/10 have a bad sector. But this introduces a new problem for the company… Their market research has found that 512GB drives sell the best, while 1TB drives tend to sit on shelves for a while. So if they just ship 9/10 drives as 1TB, the company will actually lose money as stores end up overstocked.

Instead, they bin the drives according to what will sell the best. They know 512GB’s sell the best, so they take 6 of those perfectly functional 1TB drives, and disable a sector to turn them into 512’s instead. Now they’re selling three 1TB drives, and seven (six of the functional 1TB drives, plus the one from earlier that had a bad sector) 512GB drives. To be clear, those six drives would be perfectly functional as 1TB drives, but they have been artificially limited by the manufacturer to boost sales.

So maybe a generic company buys those 512’s, re-enables the disabled sectors, and resells them as 1TB. It’s a gamble, because 1 of those drives for sure has a bad sector and will fail as soon as the user crosses past the 512GB mark. But the scammer doesn’t care about that, because they’re still making a profit on the remaining six. That’s likely what is happening here, with the seller buying binned drives and re-enabling disabled sectors. But the issue is that the 4TB drives are still likely difficult to make. They’re still in that 2/10 range, not the 9/10 range. So there’s a very good chance that all of the drives will fail before the 4TB mark. It’s not 100% certain… It’s possible you get extremely lucky and actually get a good drive that was artificially binned for sales. But the chances are much much better that you just bought a drive that will fail at 2TB, or 1TB, or even 512GB.

People saw “scraped Discord messages” and immediately jumped to “oh shit fuck my private chats have been leaked everybody panic”.

Similarly, the federal Do Not Call list, used to stop domestic spammers from calling you, is used by international spammers as a source of known active phone numbers to call. Because you need to actively add yourself to the list, so it’s a pretty solid list of active phone numbers. And the list is only enforced domestically, so all of the callers from overseas know they’ll never be prosecuted for using it.

I use a Windows XP machine for work nearly every day. And yeah, it’s because it runs some of the most expensive equipment in the company.

Also, there’s an app called Prologue that adds audiobook support to Plex’s libraries. Or rather, it parses the metadata that Plex refuses to parse.

Basically, Plex doesn’t read audiobook metadata. It just refuses to. It can still play audiobooks, but it treats them like 250 hour long albums. Which is… Well… Not great. Especially when a single chapter can be 10-20 minutes long. But Prologue does parse metadata.

You log into Prologue with Plex, then it uses Plex’s remote access to actually read the audiobook files. Then it does its own metadata parsing directly on your phone. So the Plex server isn’t doing any extra work to serve the file, and no config changes are required on Plex’s end. But on your phone, you get nice pretty chapters, bookmarks, speed controls, etc…

I tried to get Audiobookshelf to work for a day or two. It just refused to read or write anything to my NAS. Everything was configured properly on the surface, and it appeared to work… But then it would lose my added audiobooks every time it restarted. After throwing myself at it for about two days, I gave up and found Prologue.

It definitely should be a copypasta, if it isn’t already. It has all of the right makings of a copypasta.

My best guess is that the judge was more annoyed by the fact that the briefs were all printed out on a shitty black and white laser printer, and the watermark was just wasting toner and making it harder to read without glasses. It could also be a complaint about the file size, because watermarking every page means you’re sending that image on every single page of the pdf. No reason to turn a 150KB text file into a 30MB file, especially when the latter is too large to attach to an email.

There are also some judges that just have a stick up their ass about respecting the sanctity of the court. But there are valid arguments besides “respect mah authoritah”.

Because many people still don’t understand that AI isn’t a reliable source of info. I have seen people use it to fact-check things in arguments before, as if it would actually give them a factual answer.

It’s the best app for Lemmy, honestly. It feels like a spiritual successor to Apollo, which was a successor to AlienBlue. There are certain gripes I have about it, but those are small nitpicks that I rarely encounter, and would be true for virtually any Lemmy app.

I actually recommend against dual booting, because Windows is not a friendly neighbor. It has a bad habit of fucking with boot loaders and insisting that it be the first priority every time it updates.

My VPN kills RCS for some reason. Not a huge issue for single messages, cuz those will default to SMS if RCS fails. But it’s awful for group texts, which don’t automatically fall back to SMS. I simply don’t get group RCS messages that are sent while my VPN is enabled.

I missed a group text that my stepfather was in the ICU, and didn’t see anything until I left work and disabled my VPN. The first thing I saw in the group chat was my mom going “he’s out of surgery now” and I had so many questions.

Yeah, old DVR boxes were pretty fantastic when you just needed a lot of storage. They were one of the few places you could reliably find 1TB drives, back when those were still fairly new and expensive.