I mean I’m sure it was a mix. There are a lot of stories out there about how if you didn’t stay on top of your outsourced factory they would look everywhere to cut corners to save a few extra cents here and there.

You (used to?) have to constantly check production quality and make sure nothing was changed out for a low cost part or lower cost source material. Otherwise your product quality falls off and you’re losing money on warranties and repairs and losing customer goodwill.

The other thing that happened is these factories, once they had your design, would make the same thing with lower cost parts / materials as a knockoff and sell it unbranded, as they don’t care about US or European IP Laws. Word might get around that “hey you can get the same brand X product as brand Y or from Aliexpress and save 50%”. Now they’re undercutting you, and you lose customer goodwill because people think your product is overpriced. Then the knockoff fails and they are happy they never bought your product in the first place because they think yours would have failed too. Through word of mouth people say “oh that broke after a month” not realizing the offbrand was made with shoddy materials, less screws, cheaper batteries, an inferior screen, literally anything they can do to save money.

What the fuck is up with the huge “swipe for the next article”?

I can’t even read this one with that in the way why would I want to swipe for the next one?

Firefox w/ uBlock Origin is still fine.

For Microsoft 365 / Office 365.

This guy did just that:

https://youtu.be/qy_9w_c2ub0

Thought it was a really cool idea / project. Essentially a modified Z Flip.

This was an interesting video / project I quite enjoyed.

https://youtu.be/qy_9w_c2ub0

Watched a guy using an air horn on his bike riding around a European city using it on people walking in the bike lanes. So many people had no idea they were in a dedicated bike lane. Either blocking it or walking in it or crossing over it right in front of him.

I love that my global settings has a whole section labelled Privacy, but I can’t disable this globally for all chats my account joins.

Instead I have to disable it for each chat individually.

What awful design WhatsApp (obviously on purpose so I’ll forget with new chats).

Well maybe this is the push that those friends will need to move to Signal…

There’s a rather long documentary on it. I want to say by NoClip but not totally sure.

Short version is they came up with the idea in the 90s I want to say, playing tabletop with a friend group. Two main designers. Helped set up a company to make a computer RPG version and designed and built the game with a team. Outsider investing came in and bought up some amount of the company.

Once game was built and shipped and they were looking into what to do next they were effectively ousted from the company. So the two original designers of the game now get nothing and lost control of their passion project.

Edit: while. NoClip is making one, the one I’m thinking of was done by People Make Games. At least I think it’s this one? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JGIGA8taN-M

I actually looked up the source for this and couldn’t find it.

That being said I agree with the sentiment.

With a built in game pad. And saying a game is SteamDeck supported means it supports SteamInput which means it supports the gamepad natively.

Friend recently asked me something similar as he’s finalizing a divorce and has started dating again, though he’s a bit younger than you (and the girl is a bit younger than your example).

I forget exact ages but the half your age plus 7 rule was met. Say 42 and 29?

She worked in our industry and specifically the same role he did, but at a more junior level I have to assume.

Distilled down a but I essentially said if they like each other and they are together because of that, then it’s fine. They are both adults and can have fun together as much as they want. They need to keep that balance though. If it becomes a mentorship kind of situation then they probably both need to take a step back and reflect on what that means.

Software engineering in Canada in the 2000s. Most of the labs in my university ran Linux, at least in the engineering, math, and science areas of campus.

Personally I ran, depending on the year, LFS (Linux from Scratch), Slackware, or Gentoo (which still lives on that laptop today but also it hasn’t been booted or connected to a network in like 10 years).

I think there was only one lab with Windows. We also had a lab of Solaris machines but I bet those are gone now.

No idea what Law, Nursing, and other faculties in the other side of campus used.

From the company that put root kits on music CDs…

Oh absolutely having an aggressive manager and skip will help you with bonuses and promotions. But they don’t force managers to give people low scores anymore.

While the management tool had a weird slider and score system (you could give a number between 0 and 1000 IIRC), the general terminology was you could get between 0 and 200, indicative of how you compared to the average person at your level. 100 meaning you did average per-say or completed about 100% of the work an average person could complete.

While not unheard of it was basically impossible to get 200% (required at least your skip/M2 and maybe your M3 to agree).

Last I heard (keep in mind this was 2023 or so) managers got around 105% or 110% of their bonus allocated for their team. Generally that meant you could give everyone “100” if you wanted, but practically it never worked out that way.

Also there were strict rules you couldn’t take from a more junior budget to give a more senior person a higher bonus. You could however take from a more senior budget and give it to a junior.

I. E. I couldn’t give two SWE1s 80 to give a SWE2 a 120. The reverse was allowed though.

Layoffs are generally done algorithmically. I’m not kidding. They don’t want to be sued. They follow all the legal rules otherwise (can’t layoff a US citizen without laying off a Visa employee first, etc).

Source: I worked there for 11 years, I was an IC but have many friends who are managers who would tell me how the system works, and have been laid off twice. The first time I found another position within MSFT but the most recent time, in December, I opted to take some time off and find something else.

Edit/addendum: when the managers get in the room for people discussions a lot of that is around promotions. Very little is bonuses. Bonuses are determined by your manager, then go up the chain. So your manager sets and signs off on your score. Then your M2 checks it and either sends it back if they don’t agree or signs off and sends it up. Then your M3. At the M3 and higher levels I suspect they don’t look too close but just make sure everything makes sense and the budgets balance.

Microsoft got rid of that in 2014 or so, when Nadella took over.

Oh neat my Total Wine and More has this. I’ll have to get some next time I go.

Depending on what I needed I remember using AltaVista, AskJeeves, Dogpile, and I feel like later on MetaCrawler or something like that (would search multiple search engines for you and ordered them scored based on platform and relevancy iirc?)

Oh that makes sense. I also now just realized all the RoR2 maps are pre made, you just randomize the order you see them in, and the enemies that spawn there (within a fixed set)

Rogue had you start from scratch with a new character in a random map every time.

Rogue-like games initially meant you start from scratch in a new random world, but you incrementally improve your experience by small buffs you can buy, or changing your starting equipment / skills (sometimes by changing out which character you start as).

Rogue-like has slowly changed to mean “start over regularly but slowly unlock new items/buffs/equipment/characters/etc to help you further explore a world which may or may not be random”

So it applies to games like Risk of Rain (and 2), Balatro, Dead Cells, and Rogue Legacy, just to name a few examples (though 3 of those are 2d platformers with randomly generated worlds if I remember right…).

But yeah it seems to have morphed into a broadly used term for games where you get better over time through purchasing permanent buffs and whatnot (as well as natural skill), but are forced to restart any time you die.

Vampire Survivors and other similar style games have you constantly restarting when you die so I think the term fits as a partial descriptor.

Maybe we could adopt the idle/clicker game term Prestige, but that’s more of a voluntary restart when you hit a wall and can’t progress, so I don’t think it quite works.