I really like the genre, I am mostly sad it’s mainly very short ones with a single season. Would love something longer again like SAO. But I also don’t watch a lot to begin with

I mean, they’re profitable for the first time since 2018. Not least thanks to a huge amount of cost cutting the past two or three years. This is more of that.

3 Abrams is correct, 8 Bradleys sounds about right, but I didn’t hear anything about HIMARS. It is odd that they’re not bragging about the Ukraine confirmed loss of a Patriot system (albeit not the radar but two launchers). I mean, that’s what they’ve been claiming forever. Maybe because they said they destroyed all of them already and can’t now claim destroying any actually?

Fucking weirdos. Still, compared to Russian losses in manpower and vehicles, this is nothing. For the numbers that Ukraine has, it’s not insignificant for sure. The main thing and difference between Russian losses and Ukraine losses is that the crews often survive the loss of the vehicles on the Ukrainian side, whereas Russia loses both vehicle and crew.

Article contradicts itself, who wrote this? Smells like AI. Says 10 were killed by snipers and next sentence says it was 1 and 70 something wounded that were killed and wounded by snipers. Which is it?

Bet that author totally read the “nearly 1 million word” verdict and didn’t make any translation errors as they accuse other outlets of. Totally legit.

I was donating until I got an email telling me to donate more signed by their CEO or something who earns a couple hundred thousand a year.

Mind, I wasn’t opted into communcation like that. Only updates and news this was neither. If their new CEO cleans house and refocuses as they said they will, I will consider renewing my donations again.

Just checked, it’s enabled for me by default.

Possibly. It’s entirely opaque where I work. I have no clue how they’re compensated whatsoever. We managed to fix it for the most part. I like the customer satisfaction approach via renewals as a target. Especially since you can basically give that to everyone involved on the project. Then again, some customers are dissatisfied as a policy. Worked with some miserable folk who always communicated in a horrible, horrible way but kept renewing and never balked at the cost. It was simply a “you’re a service provider, you’re beneath us” thing. Some people truly suck.

I once had a sales-bro tell the client we’d “monitor the internet for X”. That has remained one of the most important hammers for me to wield when discussions even start coming up. How the fuck does one “monitor the internet” to a degree that fits the clients interpretation of this phrase. Sales guy is still with us and a good lad, he owns that mistake. But fuck was it ever crazy.

We’ve decoupled timelines from estimates almost entirely and to the ire of all our sales and C-Level only give out Quarter based estimates anymore. “End of Q3 or early Q4”. When we deliver mid Q3, everyone is happy. The funny bit is that since we’ve made these changes, we’ve not noticed any drop in client interest at all. What we do notice is that we actually ship what we promise (sometimes even more). We also don’t have clients who think we’ll do 10 hours of work for free anymore, because we’ve anchored the value of every little bit we do properly. We also filter the stingy clients who are completely pointless and are just wasting our time, while engaged with our competitors.

There’s a lot, a looooot of FOMO in sales on the side of our own sales people. So they lowball their shit to make sure we close. Then we can’t keep what’s promised and nobody is happy and contracts that would only be profitable after like 3 years don’t get renewed and we lose a client. Great stuff. Then try and get them back after a shitty experience like that.

The mind boggles.

Thank you, I’m sure trying. I got a good 30-35 years left in this, I’d rather not be miserable or make people miserable for the duration.

Hate this. I work as a PO. Praise my devs every chance I get both internally and towards our clients. Always pass on positive feedback and use negative feedback only translated into priority weights.

I see my job as keeping stakeholders at bay and let them do their job. I bundle requests into feature requests that cover as many current and future needs as possible, but never without internal meetings first.

Just getting sales to stop making deals on feature requirements with clients was a very long uphill battle that we have mostly won. Now it all goes through my team first and we always do estimates with our development teams. Takes a bit of time, takes a bit longer, but never have I seen a client get back to us with the same urgency as they request a quote anyway. If they can not wait a week, they won’t be a good fit for what we are doing and how we do things.

Posts like these make me feel accomplished :D

Awesome, thanks for the pointers! I’ll look into it.

How are you digitizing BluRays? I’ve not found a way yet due to the DRM on those fuckers.

This is modern alchemy trying to turn lead into gold. Just change the meaning of the magic words et voilá you make gold while the other party is robbed blind and can’t do anything about it after the fact.

And of course, it’s totally legal and totally cool.

You’re correct, Australia played a big role in it, and the EU was passing regulation around 2015 on that issue as well. So they got slapped around in Australia and changed it up before getting slapped around in the EU.

Their refund policy is due to getting slapped around in EU courts, not because valve is benevolent or anything. I do like steam a lot, but it is a near monopoly which acts as DRM to a degree. They did and would abuse that power unless regulated.

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I sure hope the courts toss that thing. It would be the single worst violation of peoples privacy since the internet became a thing. It’s incredible that lobbyists and police unions have this much impact on policy creation.

Germany introduced some digital ID functionality so you can do certain things online rather than having to go talk to someone in person, but that means that your ID isn’t just a card anymore but has some digital elements to it as well. And apparently the apps to use that stuff are Windows based.