philpem

Reminds me of furries, and a lot of other fandoms actually.

A: "Hey I had a problem at the con this weekend"

B: "How dare you talk about that, that's DRAMA! Take your DRAMA elsewhere, LLAMA. I'll have you know the guy who runs ConWeekend is my best friend! You're Banned for life! Long live ConWeekend! And here's that Japanese BANNED meme video to play you out! HAHA I SAVED THE FANDOM!"

Some communities (fandom is probably a better word) are more like cults of personality than actual communities.

Given the fannish nature of Twitch and its audience in general, this level of almost religious fanboying and "how dare you question the Gods" mentality is very familiar (my teens and 20s were spent in fandoms - first anime, then comics, then furry).

I've seen this in every single one of them to some extent, but especially furry and Twitch. It's sad, because -- as they, sunlight is the best disinfectant -- and all this does is block the sunlight and discourage people from talking about issues.

The overwhelming majority of tweets are probably hot takes, food photos or arguments. While they might be interesting to sociologists in the future, looking at the tone and conversation in aggregate, some things should just be allowed to wither away.

There are certainly things I believed in 2009 when I got my first Twitter account which I don't believe now. People change over time, and perhaps everyone's tweets going away forever might be a step in the right direction.

Some notable people or notable tweets might be worth keeping, but the overwhelming majority will be utterly pointless, irrelevant, or trivial.

Thankfully these days there's emulation to help soften the blow - it's not the same as the physical workstation, but at least it's easier on the wallet.

As for the shareware site, was it perhaps Sunsite or Metalab?

Because they know you'll do the work you're doing -- and the tenfold increase -- for what they're paying you.

They exist to make money, not to enrich their workers. The optimisation strategy is to pay as little as possible for as much productivity and labour as possible, then charge as much as possible for it to customers as a package item. Everything trickles up to the top of the pyramid.

Sadly the only way to reliably increase your pay is to dust off your CV and change jobs.

You might get a counter-offer from your current employer if they feel you're particularly valuable -- but I'd never accept one. At best, you'll end up being higher paid than some or all of your colleagues, and if they find out or suspect that (they certainly will if you flip from "I'm leaving" to "I'm staying") then you should expect resentment from them.

It's really better to walk away and start with a clean slate in another place. I've never regretted moving jobs -- but I've definitely regretted staying at a bad one, or one which didn't value my input.

Most of Stalin's subjects didn't really get a choice in the matter...

Indeed, a periodical subscription (say $10) with a number of posts or comments included would serve the same purpose.

Gee this sounds like telephone billing...

Link without the paywall: https://archive.ph/y1lcE

If only more people were able to 'agree to disagree'.

It certainly seems worst in the UK.

I expect the answer is very little -- except they'd have to re-purchase Minecraft on the new account.

Sadly not an option - Atlassian have stopped selling on-prem licences.

Sadly speaking up about it only really helps if someone is listening.

I'm grateful for the service Gitlab has provided to date, but this seems ludicrous.

My use-case for Gitlab is to support the internal tools and some bespoke development for a fan-run non-profit event. In a typical year we might have about $8,000 to run the whole event (ticket sales, less venue hire and other costs). Non-profit pricing is only available to registered charities in my country, so we're forced into paying full price for most of the SaaS services. That puts most of them out of our budget -- and it seems like Gitlab is joining that list.

So Gitlab are asking us to pony up $19 per user *per month* -- which is a cool $2300 a year. That's five times our current total IT spend (which benefits everyone), for a service which serves ten users. It's nearly a quarter of what we have to run the event.

Fair enough it unlocks extra features, but the only one I can see us using is Epics.

To compare prices -- Github is currently charging $48 per user, per year. That's $480 for the whole 10-person team. It's still going to be a tough sell for our Finance guy, but not as bad as $2300 (he'd ask if I hit my head if I asked for that).

The team picked Gitlab over Github because of the really good feature set on the free tier, and the availability of the bronze/starter tier for when we needed more. With Bronze going away last year, and now a 5-user cap, the message I'm getting from Gitlab is "we're a premium provider and we don't want your custom".

As @eslaught said -- it really feels like they're killing the golden goose.

If they added the option of buying more user seats for the Free tier and threw in a premium feature or two (Epics would win me over), I'd absolutely pitch that to my finance guy -- especially if the price was the same as Github.

Heck, I wouldn't even care if they cut the number of CI minutes... I can spin up a VPS if I need that.

Sometimes, but fools' never differ :)

To be fair, the majority of bread-and-butter semiconductor manufacturing probably doesn't need EUV process nodes. You only really need that level of technology if you want to make cutting-edge (10nm or so) devices like microprocessors.

The majority of semiconductor manufacturing is still in the 200nm range -- better yields, cheaper processes, more resilient chips. Some of it is still in the 1um (1 micron) range.

It is pretty much how policing works in the UK. Declare it a civil matter, get it off the books as soon as possible... and that's not mentioning the mountain of police misconduct court cases that have popped up recently.

Sadly the only chance of getting anything out of them is if the media get involved and hold their feet in the fire a bit.

"But the automated bot is infallible, sir! We don't know how it works, but we know it's perfect!"

I'd like to see this picked up by a more reputable source.

Metro is an offshoot of the Daily Mail, and largely known for its 'free' newspaper which is distributed on UK public transport. Its online operation is well known for clickbait and a similar level of "journalistic integrity" that the DM is famed for (i.e. they'll print anything that will get clicks or sell papers).

Retail shops have to deal with similar. Basically they used you as a rental service, but used ebay's policies to force it through.

When I worked retail, we used to get people buying cameras or lenses and using them for a weekend, then returning them under the 7-day "no quibble" refund policy.

It wasn't uncommon for a camera or lens to come back with 10,000 shots taken. Best we could do with them is clean them up and sell them on as refurbished. A few went back to the manufacturer and came back as "factory refurbished".

It's not exclusive to the Amiga - the same applies to the Acorn / RISC OS community too (to an extent).

There's a font organiser which used to be sold by its author for £10, but was bought up by another company and is now being sold at £45. A personal accounts package that was £30 is now £95. A long outdated word processor, £60. Oh, and the tool to format SD cards - that's £15.

Who really pays that kind of money for a retro 'toy'?

Wow, this got my attention. I use Python for web application development. A 2-3x speedup would be very interesting for higher-load deployments.

I was talking to A&A about speeds when I upgraded to FTTP. The upgrade was mostly for reliability -- my FTTC line suffered badly from local interference.

They currently do an 80Mbps down, 20Mbps up service on both fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) and fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP).

When I asked about gigabit (which is available on the BT FTTP platform) - the answer I got gave me the impression they want to make sure their backbone network can deal with that kind of traffic before they launch anything like that.

The other thing they mentioned was that the high-bandwidth services most people use (I guess Netflix and the like) have an upper limit to the data rate -- and it's nowhere near gigabit.

I'm not entirely convinced that the difference between 80Mbps and gigabit would be noticeable on anything but heavily-seeded torrents (e.g. Linux ISOs) or backups being sent to providers with similarly fat pipes. It's a great marketing strapline though, and clearly many customers see the headline "up to a gigabit, only from XYZCo!" and decide based on that.

I had an interview with a company a few years ago -- on paper it looked like a perfect match. During the interview things seemed to go well, but things took a turn for the worse with the technical lead's interrogation.

He asked five or six questions related to C and C++ undefined behaviour, a very open-ended one about a technology I'd never used. I answered as best I can, but always opened with "I'd be referring back to the C standard and opening a JIRA task to fix the code". We got on to how I'd fix the code -- remove the UB, but only if there's a unit test covering it. What if there are no unit tests? What if there's no JIRA? Lots of what-if-maybes.

A few days later I was on a 3-way call with the recruiter and one of the guys that interviewed me. They spent the whole thing telling me how "any decent developer" should have known what the UB would result in, shouldn't have to refer to standards or books... and on and on. But as a courtesy, they'd be happy to make an offer.

Half the minimum posted salary, no benefits. It was right in the middle of the minimum wage and the "living wage" lines.

I declined politely, and the recruiter hung on the call...

"Wow. I don't know what to say. That's never happened before... do you mind if I share the recording of that call with my manager?"

They were still advertising to fill several positions when I last stumbled across them on Glassdoor a few months ago...

Very nice. I'm up to part 2 (https://yingtongli.me/blog/2021/08/29/drm5-2.html) and I had a thought.

The SEH pattern (PUSH 32bit address then RET) should be identifiable with a plugin, and a code flow override should fix the decompilation.

I wonder, did you try this, and did it help fix the Ghidra decompilation?

I can't help but wonder what kind of world we exist in, if people are driven to drugs (not specifically ayahuasca, but also prescribed ones) just to live.

The spike in mental health diagnoses and drug use ... it feels like there's something seriously wrong with the world and environment in which these people exist. The system is broken, as it were.

I've had my house egged and repainted, and been physically assaulted at events over baseless personal grudges held by others. You could tell me they hate the guy just for existing, and it'd be 100% believable.

If I had to guess - I'd say it was down to refusing their name suggestion. Which is a really damn petty reason to hate someone, but one I can entirely believe. One of the personal grudges I was dragged into was exactly that petty.

The internet has been well overdue for a good chlorine dosing for a long time.

I wonder if the advice about having different passwords to different sites needs to be expanded: have different, unrelated usernames too.

They may have been funny when they were released - but his relentless shilling for muse has made it very clear what the purpose of them was. Dunk on the competition, to big up Muse and his own profile.

They're (IMHO) unwatchable when you follow the money trail and realise what they are, and always were: thinly veiled shills.

Good question. Assuming you're US based - Why not write a letter to your representatives, asking them why the police ignore and dismiss online harassment, and why a single US citizen continues to be allowed to operate what is solely a hate site?

If legal pressure isn't enough, why not try political pressure?