Thank you so much!

A few years ago I went to visit my mom around Christmas, I picked her up and we were heading over to my grandmas. On the way, while my 1 year old is screaming in the back seat, she asked if she could run into a store on the way.

When we got to my grandmas she gave me the bag that she had just bought, store logo on it and everything, no hiding a thing, that contained 1 roll of camouflage themed duct tape, and a pack of trash bags.

I had told her earlier in the year that I was using trash bags and duct tape to block the windows in my garage while I was doing some renovations in there, and so she got me trash bags and duct tape, almost a year later…

I still appreciate that she got me anything at all and there was at least a thought behind it even if I don’t understand that thought.

The chicken looks pretty cool too, like he’ll steal your wallet and your girl in between puffs before you even finish coughing.

I don’t think an uprising is going to break out tomorrow as an immediate reaction to his actions.

But at the very least he got a lot of people talking and thinking. People who a year or two ago would call someone “complaining” about the health conglomerates and the way we’re getting fucked crazy.

I was that person called crazy, and now my whole family, neighbors, friends, coworkers are fucking pissed and finally waking up. People who I never thought would.

It certainly doesn’t stop at health insurance, we’re getting killed from 100 different angles. But he got people talking.

Might be an unpopular opinion but, this sounds really exciting to me. I hate fidgeting with my phone and always have been super interested in a true AI type assistant type thing.

It’s a shame no one should ever trust this, regardless of what company makes it.

Oh what the world could be.

That’s interesting to hear. I started out as a web dev and made quite a few transitions until I got the title software engineer, bounced around a few companies until I settled at my current job and since I got that first salary job have never been asked. I even did a short stint of security work a company that had a decent amount of government contracts when I was desperate.

I honestly didn’t think they were still a thing outside of maybe directly in government positions.

I’ve only ever had to pass a drug test for low paying hourly jobs. I’ve never been tested for a salaried position.

I don’t understand how not having social media is a red flag. I know people look at it funny, but I don’t get why.

Not your main point but for the past few years I’ve spent half of the months sick. I got a cold 3 weeks ago, everyone else in the house is better, my throat is still halfway swollen shut, my nose is a broken faucet, my heads still filled with helium. I’ll start feeling better just in time for the Christmas party where I’m almost certain to get sick again.

I went to a doctor to see if there was something wrong with me and got a bunch of test done, got a nice ~$800 bill and haven’t been able to get in touch with the doctor since. I missed 2 calls from them about a week after my tests and since has been calling in a couple times a month to find out if there’s something up but I keep getting “the doctor will call you back later”.

I would like to assume the fact that no one is calling me back means I’m don’t have anything seriously wrong, but I still would like to know for certain.

Ahh how could I forget about the bored, racist, wannabe cops with nothing better to do. The perfect face to any modern company.

I highly doubt it, if the store is too busy they’ll likely either do nothing because why would they or if it’s really bad add some robots who can handle the workload so they can get rid of those pesky employees.

In the past few years almost all of the fast food places in the closest plaza to me have been working on a skeleton crew. Lines wrapped around the building, 2 miserable employees, upset customers, but the money is still coming in.

Most people can’t just leave their job, even a days wage can crush a lot of people.

That worker doesn’t want to be there, that’s likely one of 3 jobs they need to barely scrape by.

You holding them up from doing other tasks they need to do to keep a job that barely feeds them is doing nothing but making their day a little harder. It affects the company 0%. The company is faceless and doesn’t care how much you abuse the worker bees as long as they get your money.

I don’t know what the answer is aside from not patronizing the company at all, but I know that’s not it.

I did a thing once where everyone brought a gift and some game was played and if you won your round you got to pick the gift you got, or something like that.

The person who picked before me got 2 crisp $100 bills, the person after me got airpods. I got… A painted rock, I was so excited. It was the only gift that someone put actual effort into and wasn’t just a quick buy.

Not that I would’ve been upset with $200 but I still have that rock sitting in my garden

That’s always a possibility especially when every company under the sun is making smart things on a whim for as cheap as possible. I don’t trust any of them as far as I can throw an oven.

I have a few random smart things, but before I connect them to the internet I make sure they have a decent api that I can use, block external access from the router and set up a little interface so that I can VPN into my home and control stuff if I need to. So in order for anything to be compromised my whole network would have to be owned. Which is still possible but I trust that a lot more than letting 20 different apps for each device have access to anything in my home.

I can totally see a point in some of the features.

The other day my wife and I got 20 minutes from home before I said “oh shit I don’t know if I turned the oven off”. Turns out I did, but we had to drive home to check. I would have loved to pull up an app that told me it was actually off, or even if I was on be able to turn it off from there.

With that said, it’s not worth all the extra bullshit in my opinion.

I would have to lightly disagree about Linux. I think for the average person, just using a browser and occasionally editing a document, some distros are absolutely plug and play.

Installing it can be overwhelming for people unfamiliar but once it’s installed there’s not much to do aside from use it.

My sisters been using Linux for years since most of her schooling has been online, she was on mint for a while and then I switched her to Fedora. The gnome interface was the biggest hurdle to get over and she figured it out in about 10 minutes. She uses firefox, libre office for documents and sheets, the software app to keep everything up to date and install stuff. That’s all there really is to it. The only time she’s ever called me for help is when she changed her password and forgot what it was.

I think if it came pre installed people would do fine.

What’s this “cable management” thing?

Thankfully my subscription ends in a few weeks and didn’t reup early.

Does anyone have any suggestions for Kodi? I’ve been using seren + rd for years, I got a month of all debrid since I can use it with seren, but it being based in France as well I’d rather switch.

I found POV which I can use with torbox. But I’m absolutely clueless as to what the popular, functional addons are nowadays.

I hate apples almost as much as corn on the cob.

The skins always get stuck in between my teeth and it makes me want to use a chainsaw to get it out.

I’m all for skinned apples and uncobbed (decobbed? cobbless?) corn though.

Not really a dumb reason, but back in the day I was stuck in the WordPress developer loop and tired of it. I was pretty familiar with a handful of languages, but wasn’t doing much more than setting up themes and building out pages with builders.

One day I heard the CTO talking about a tool he would love to have but couldn’t find anything that worked how he needed it to. The CTO was a big buzzword guy and recently shared an article with my manager at the time about how C++ was “the best language”. So naturally I chimed in and told him I could build that tool easy peasy and I would use C++ obviously because it’s the best language.

It was such a simple tool, basically just matching phrases and categories and spitting out a list of options. It took me months to make, but I learned a lot and it kind of worked for the most part and everyone was happy. I eventually got a de-facto department in the company where I would just build internal tools and handle some legacy codebases that they were previously outsourcing.

I later on got my current job because of that leap.

TLDR: I learned C++ because I was bored and lied that I already knew it.