Teamwork makes the dream work.

Keep telling the DBAs that my company outsourced a big chunk of their tech stack to that its against company policy to work all the way on the other side of the planet, but they refuse to show up to the office.

Israelis don’t believe it is their land. That’s the rub

Joe Biden confirmed it by repeating it over and over again. Why would I need more evidence than that?

I’m willing to believe he asked ten of his VPs and nine of them agreed with him. Also, that he’s currently looking to fill a newly opened tenth position.

Amazon policy is to stack rank all of its employees and regularly fire anyone in the bottom tranche. So any kind of deliberate slowdown would need to be incredibly well-coordinated. Even then, there would inevitably be a ton of attrition as the automatic Fire Everyone triggers started kicking in.

Its not enough to play by the rules with a company as vast and encompassing as Amazon. You need to take it a step further and start sabotaging the anti-organizing functions of the company. Start shoving monkey wrenches in the employee monitoring systems. Start dismantling the automation that allows the business to function at such a breakneck pace. You’ve got to get in there and break the machine before it breaks you.

The bloody managers are the biggest problem. Most don’t understand code much less the process of making a software product.

So, I’ve had my eye on management and started doing some management training. The job of management really isn’t to do the work itself (or even to understand the work). That’s the job of specialists and technical leads. The job of management is to oversee the workforce (hiring, organizing teams, dictating process, allocating project time, planning mid and long term department goals, etc) not to actually get your hands into the work itself.

It’s certainly helpful to understand coding broadly speaking. But I’m in an office where we’re supporting dozens of apps written and interfaced with at least as many languages. Nevermind all the schemas within those languages. There’s no way a manager could actually do my job without months (if not years) of experience in the project itself.

At the same time, the managers should understand the process of coding, particularly if they’re at the lower tier and overseeing an actual release cycle. What causes me to pull my hair out is managers who think hand-deploying .dlls and fixing user errors with SQL scripts is normal developer behavior and not desperate shit you do when your normal workflows have failed.

Being in a perpetual state of damage control and thinking that this is normal because you inherited from the last manager is the nightmare.

But at least the bozos at the top get to make the decisions and the cheddar for being ignorant and not listening.

Identifying and integrating new technologies is normal and good managerial behavior.

Getting fleeced by another round of over-hyped fly-by-night con artists time after time after time is not as much.

But AI seems to thread the needle. Its sophisticated and helpful enough to seem useful on superficial analysis. You only really start realizing you’ve been hoodwinked after you try and integrate it.

Setting aside the absurd executive level pay (every fucking corporate enterprise is just an MLM that’s managed to stay cash positive) it does feel like the problem with AI is that each business is forced to learn the lesson the hard way because no business journal or news channel wants to admit that its all shit.

Really looking forward to this shit showing up in AI-edited Wikipedia citations in the near future.

I don’t think Iran will need to wait that long. This looks like the US/Israel are planning a joint operation counterattack on Iranian facilities. Which will trigger a retaliation in turn as Iran escalates in kind. Etc, etc.

The big difference now is that the US military will officially be getting its hands dirty in the region, much like we did in Desert Shield / Storm and in Libya. Very possible that the ghost of John McCain finally gets its long-sought-after bomb bomb Iran.

Then once signed up discovery was/is a pain. How do I find good accounts when they aren’t synced with the instance I am on? Fuck if I know, I never found an equivalent to lemmyverse.net for mastodon.

Feels like the A.1 issue of Mastadon as a platform. If person A on instance Q wants to follow person B on instance R, there’s no straight line easy path to do that. Compared to Twitter or BlueSky or Threads, where its all one ecosystem and you just say “I’d like to follow @LieutenantDickweasel” and now you’ve got their posts in your stream, Mastadon is byzantine and not worth the effort to explore.

On the flip side, Truth Social is a Mastadon instance, and it’s trading with a market cap of several billion dollars. Seems successful enough to me.

I think I’m just falling out of favour with the idea of a microblogging platform with strangers

Generally speaking, you’re not on these services to follow strangers per say. You’re on there to interact with D-list celebrities and other highly niche personalities. Or you’re on the system to self-promote and become a D-list celebrity/niche personality. Webcomics artists, semi-famous musicians, podcasters, and political bloggers are all over my feed. I’d never talk to these people IRL. And I’d never interact with them if they were even slightly more popular or famous. But in this space, its a cozy little “oh let’s check in on what the author of AtomicRobo Comics is up to?” fan relationship that’s fruitful and fun for everyone involved.

But Mastadon is shit at putting indie fans in touch with their focus of attention. After that, what am I using this for other than a stripped-down Discord or glorified group-SMS? Pointless.

One reason why Truth Social was able to work stemmed from the fact that it was a single magnetizing D-list celebrity that drew people in. But even then, you’re talking about an audience in the… thousands? Even as a one-stop shop for all things Donald Trump, it’s low energy and lame when compared to Twitter.

Can the UK even support the 67M people they currently have?

clearly they did not approve bombing of aid trucks

indiscriminately

:-/

Gaza is a cautionary tale for that

Just like with Vietnam, it seems the measure of success is in blood. Since the population of Gaza has been decimated - quite literally 1 in 10 Palestinians are now dead and we’re expecting tens to hundreds of thousands more dead before the end of next year due to famine and disease, nevermind war - while the Israelis report minimal casualties, they believe they are “winning”.

We have seen this in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Vietnam…

The lesson of these wars to the political class is that they win reelections, they generate enormous profits, and they never seem to bother the median voter over the long term.

Israel has had a scope on the head of every Arab and Persian peace activist in the region. The only folks who seem capable of surviving are the ones armed and willing to fight back.

Biggest Military In The World is going to have more of this shit and be in more places where they can casually detonate an 18 kiloton bomb.

The “uniquely American” angle is more just the consequence of our size and the number of theaters of conflict we’re active in. I don’t imagine there’s many, if any, military forces on earth that could operate at this scale for the last 80 years.

Obliterating a large chunk of landscape and killing countless people because its cheaper than doing hardware maintenance does sound like a US Military tier move.

They cannot block a decision of the federal constitutional court

Given the concentration of AfD in the Eastern Block, you’d be inviting the region to pull a Catalonia and threaten to break away.

Germany has measures in place exactly for this scenario

Riot police, sure.

Read the article. It’s already happening.

Place your bets. Place your bets.

And it’s nonsensical to claim we cannot ban them

Who is going to pull the trigger? Point to the opposition leader willing and able to try and dismantle a party with this many active supporters.

We have laws against undemocratic parties

Which are used to target unpopular fringe groups not regional majorities. The UK would have more luck banning the SNP.

That’s like a core mechanism of our democracy.

The core mechanism of democracy is to abolish political organizations wholesale?

Reminds me of the time Trump dumped a M.O.A.B. over Afghanistan shortly after taking office, because he thought it would win the war overnight.