Man, fuck editing the registry. The duplicate entries, the non-standard locations, the UI of regedit… I had to dig through it so much when I was supporting a corporate launcher application in a Windows facility. Did the Windows dev decide to write their data into multiple registry entries, an INI file, an environment variable… or maybe all of the above? Find out on the next episode of Fuck My Life!

I think some people want to find morels so bad they get a sort of “buck fever” and convince themselves they’ve found one. That’s all I can imagine because to my eyes they would be hard to mix up. Same with chanterelle and false chanterelle. Like… sure, I guess if you are profoundly incautious.

Condolences for your dad. 42 here, my dad is showing his age majorly now.

Looking back I know I lived every single hour but huge leaps of time are just gone. Like, entire jobs I worked for years I have maybe a half dozen memories. On top of that our work product is gone, the company is gone, the building is gone, the entire industry is changed… it’s like it was all a dream. I definitely understand the old man looking at a city and saying, “this was all orchards”. I used to think it was a wistful phrase, but it’s also an expression of disbelief. When we were embedded it all seemed so important. But it all shuffled off with zero fanfare. It really changes how you experience life, and that’s how I “feel old”.

Bought a lemur pro 9 a few years ago and have it as a daily driver since. Pop OS works great for the most part but, as other people have mentioned, PopShop is slow/buggy and I often just resort to apt instead. My spouse plays a lot of PC games so when she got sick of Windows I migrated her over, and she’s had very few problems. Every once in awhile a game won’t run but usually that gets figured out in a few weeks by the Proton community.

A few content creation linux apps only officially support Redhat, so getting them to run is a bit of a pain but that would be the case with any Debian based distro. So overall I haven’t seen the need to distro hop to Mint or something similar.

Between deer pressure and Lymantria dispar I’m worried my woods will never see a mature oak again after the current over story dies out.

Trucks can only be 80,000 pounds max and certain weight ratios per axle (varies by state and conditions). If you’re too heavy it could mean shifting the axles, obtaining a special permit, needing an escort, paying a fine, or even being stopped until you can sort it out. It has to do mostly with safety and damage to the roads AFAIK. Also it’s where they check all your paperwork and licenses.

Ohio and North Carolina have a license plate beef over the Wright Brothers. They lived and worked in Ohio (“Birthplace of Aviation”), but the first flight was in Kitty Hawk because of the steady winds (“First in Flight”).

Happens to some SE Asians in North America too, because the edible straw mushroom from SE Asia resembles one here called “death cap”. Amanita phalloides. What’s fucked up is right before it kills you your symptoms actually improve, so people get discharged from the hospital and think they are going to be ok. I forage mushrooms but I stay away from white gilled mushrooms completely.

This is true. Some things are completely outsourced to vendor companies with their own employees. You rarely interact with these people at all, or even know their names. All communication goes through a telephone game. Then the primary studio itself will have contract employees and also “permanent staff”.

Management likes to go on and on about how staff are “family”, but then treat them like shit and lay them off anyway. They also like to be subtly shitty to contract workers whenever possible, like free donuts in the break room! ~(for staff only)~

Really, management is just shitty to everyone. Having been in both positions I honestly prefer contract. At least then I’m not expected to participate in their “corporate culture”.

Wasn’t it the railroads at the end of the 19th century? Yeah… they would kick our asses.

I remember “pre-existing condition” exclusions. Insurance companies hired teams of investigators who would comb through the medical histories of patients who made expensive claims (like chemotherapy). They would find something, anything, in that person’s medical history that they could claim was “pre-existing”, from some time prior to being covered, and deny the claim. Often this was done in full knowledge that the denial could be appealed. But they also had statistics that if that patient died from their disease the family was unlikely to pursue an appeal.

Having a gap of any length of time in your insurance history could be devastating. I had to buy personal insurance once during this time (circa 2001). I was young with no medical conditions and in good health, and it was $160 a month with a deductible so high it was basically worthless except for catastrophic emergencies. I was making $8.50 an hour at the time. But it prevented me from having a gap in coverage that could be used later, perhaps many years later, to deny claims.

Of course the only solution that’s politically viable is apparently a giant subsidy to capital. Same with Section 8. Same with education loans. We’re incapable of anything else it seems.

Insurance companies still do many versions of this with a byzantine coding system, complex “out of network” exclusions, etc. Anything to deny a claim. It’s a capitalist version of a “work-to-rule” slowdown, where they can make new rules. Since it’s your health they can afford to wait forever. The asymmetry favors them. It’s about as close as you can get to directly chucking human bodies into a furnace to power a money machine and still maintain a veil of propriety. True evil. If there was any justice in the world, the food that these executives bought would turn to ash in the mouths of their children.

Speaking as someone who’s worked inside a couple “AAA” studios, sympathy to a union has definitely increased in the past decade. It’s no coincidence that bonuses and profit sharing (a major part of compensation) have plummeted over that same time. As much as fans hate unambitious and venal design choices in recent games I assure them that devs hate them just as much or even more, since they ruin years of work. We have steadily decreasing feedback into these choices and are expected more and more to stick to our corner pushing pixels and writing code. Morale is probably the lowest I’ve ever experienced and mandatory RTO adds insult to injury.

The various QA Union success stories have lots of support on the dev side. However many people believe it’s impossible somehow, or that they personally would get laid off or have their job outsourced if there is even a hint of organizing. Especially the past 12 months, the bloodbath has workers terrified. Everyone is trying to keep their heads down as much as possible. I unfortunately don’t see this ending well unless funding loosens up and people can start small studios again. There was a wave of this during Covid but those studios are all dying now. It’s seriously depressing. I’m a refugee from the VFX world and I feel like I’m watching the sequel.

That’s strange, trying a few permutations here and I can’t get it to break. But at any rate, here’s the content:

[embedded players for sound files]

About

Play the below sounds through your phone speaker and hold it next to a Gatekeeper Systems wheels to lock/unlock. Check me out on twitter @stoppingcart

How It Works

Most electronic shopping cart wheels listen for a 7.8 kHz signal from an underground wire to know when to lock and unlock. A management remote can send a different signal at 7.8 kHz to the wheel to unlock it. Since 7.8 kHz is in the audio range, you can use the parasitic EMF from your phone’s speaker to “transmit” a similar code by playing a crafted audio file. Link to my original DEFCON 29 Talk

Button to Download Audio Files

This is similar to the feeling I got a few days ago when I finally got to use the shopping cart wheel unlocker that’s been in the back of my mind since watching the Defcon talk about it. Instead of the misconfigured and disabled cart being a giant roadblock in the store I was able to take it and use it normally. Feels good.

https://www.begaydocrime.com/carts

WARNING: DO NOT PLAY SOUNDS ON THIS PAGE THROUGH HEADPHONES

Pretty happy with my Lemur Pro, 3.5 years in. I just replaced the battery, which was fairly painless. Also had to replace the wireless radio, which was as easy as popping in a new one. I wasn’t happy that it failed, but apparently that’s industry wide, not just these laptops. Replacement was like $35. Other than that I’ve only had cosmetic issues, like the System76 sticker came off, which I don’t care about.

When I worked in VFX it was mostly Scientific Linux. A few macs were around for concept artists using Photoshop, and editorial using a proprietary video codec with Final Cut. Most business folks (in vfx called “coordinators” and “producers”) used tools that were web-based and cross platform (for example, Autodesk Shotgrid, Confluence, and Jira). A lot of internal development is done in Python so no worries there, either.

In game dev unfortunately it’s exclusively Windows. If you bring up even using os.path.join, instead of hardcoding \\ into paths, devs who have never worked in another OS look at you like some sort of paranoid maniac.