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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: November 4th, 2023

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  • The conservative strategy has been to polarize politics in America in order to have a very aligned power. This means that if you aren’t 100% behind them, then you are an enemy to them.

    It is only through this that the GOP can both say that they are protecting individual freedoms but limiting or taking them away (of course opponents to this will be quick to point out the one and only counter point which is fighting against restrictions of the 2nd Amendment and only that), say that they are for smaller government but yet want private companies to be regulated that attempt to censor hate and misinformation (which has nothing to do with the 1st Amendment when it comes to non-government entities) yet still say that they are for businesses to operate as unrestricted as possible. They are anti-union because they are corrupt and take away accountability yet strongly support the worst of the worst of unions – the police unions. The GOP constantly cries that there’s a nanny government, yet they push laws to restrict people’s choices, censor libraries and try to tear down citizen protections. The GOP cries that this country’s deficit is out of control but when they are in power, they over spend. They complain that public schools indoctrinate but at the local and state levels attempt to indoctrinate in public schools. They talk about needing to stay in power to turn America around, yet when empowered in all three federal branches fails to pass meaningful legislation and run the government that they are overseeing and yet blame the government because they will eat each other alive for their own individual gains.

    There so much more but the GOP is a party of hypocrites. Without polarization mixed with some fear mongering their party would likely cease to exist with any real power because they do not stand for the ideals that their own voting base supports.

    The GOP constantly tries to create an environment of being constantly under attack and spews hate. Their voter base is simply a product of that.


  • For the big products, I think Google Assistant will be next followed by barely doing anything further with Android Auto until it dies a few years after GAS starts getting pushed out while it probably either won’t or will stop supporting ‘legacy’ Android Auto apps, so AA dies ‘because developers aren’t supporting apps anymore – totally not our fault and we’re sorry to see this happen.’


  • Former Googlers have always said that the big issue with sustaining products at Google is that it is highly competitive and Google rewards new products, not sustaining current products. So, most people want to continuously join/form teams for new products leaving little resources for current products. This has been the way since Google started becoming a large company – so decades now.

    This makes sense as to why Google puts out applications that seemingly do the same thing as something else but ever so slightly different and why there are sometimes cool new products that die on the vine years later and if there was no slightly different thing available it just dies or if there is then there is a half-assed migration.

    In the Reddit AMA the Google Home team answered a few questions and only the very few softball ones. One interesting comment they made though is that because of the Nest products and generally new products, they believe it is a challenge to support the older hardware, including integrating Google and Nest hardware, so basically you get features removed to make it all work. Of course, there was the promise and supposed internal roadmap that puts these features back eventually, but we’ve seen that kind of promise over and over from Google and it rarely happens. They are trying to replace Assistant with their Gemini AI which you can do now but it comes with even less features (but parity is coming – they promise!..one day!). Is that parity with current Assistant which seems to be supporting less and less and working worse?

    Google is losing a lot of consumer trust in products I think and it’s going to get worse for them as this trickles to the general consumer-base.



  • I accidentally overwrote /etc/passwd once and I allowed /boot to run out of space during a kernal update and I created a local user with the same user that was also on the realm/domain that I had joined and various bash script issues.
    Some stuff I’ve had to fix that someone else did:

    • named a file rm -rf
    • rm -rf /bin instead of ./bin – Also the fact that they had sudo was crazy and also I guess this was the second time
    • chmod -R 777 /
    • Various software bugs running swap out of space or hitting the inode limit by creating files over and over again with a timestamp in the filename and having to remove all of them because there was no backup to the OS
    • Someone disabled SELinux because something wasn’t working but didn’t tell anyone – ugh
    • Compiled java because they googled some issue and followed some old tutorial without understanding anything instead of using alternatives and symlinked the old java from /bin to /home/theiruser/java – had sudo because he was a Windows domain admin.
    • Cybersecurity guy didn’t know what some VMs did so he turned them off and figured he’d find out if/when someone complained. Caused a massive core services outage.
    • Same Cybersecurity guy deleted a bunch of data because he wanted to see how the sysadmins would respond and witness backup restorations. He did not inform anyone.
    • Cybersecurity guy above still has Domain Admin and sudo everywhere. I would have personally removed his privileged access regardless of what ‘CyberSecurity’ management thought but I was leaving for a new job by then anyway so I figured I’d just let them eventually lie in the bed they made.

    There’s more but I don’t want to keep going because it is Sunday and I don’t want to ruin it.








  • I’m a millennial and worked since I was legally old enough in my state. I did use a small loan for my first car and paid for my own insurance policy and gas. I went into the military as soon as I could, worked hard and bought a house.

    I bought my house during the housing bubble burst and couldn’t really afford rent in a one bedroom apartment. Rent kept raising every year as did housing prices. I was very worried about food, electricity, water and rent every month. I made too much to get any benefits. I moved to a shithole in a small meth town and then the bubble burst and buying a house was cheaper than rent.

    I was lucky. Very lucky. People now aren’t so lucky and are working hard but calculating grace periods every month to pay some other critical bill. Going without, skipping meals, living on the bare necessities and this piece of shit that has zero perspective because ‘he made it’ in time just says “they aren’t working”.

    All while unemployment has been at a historical low all while there is a housing availability crisis. He has to be very willfully ignorant and thus dishonest.


  • A 30% cut for steam games sold on steam and a 0% cut for steam keys sold by the publisher wherever they want with the caveat that they must give steam users the same sales at around the same time. They get their games hosted on Steam’s industry best CDN, a page with support for images and videos, an API with features users like, workshop API for mod hosting and delivery, and other SteamWorks API stuff for stuff like multiplayer, patch management without charging a fee for it, forum hosting to hit the highlights. Pretty much all of that drives engagement and is mostly turn-key though you do have to programmatically interact with their API when it makes sense.

    Steam provides a lot of benefit for a 30% cut of what is sold on their store front and a lot more benefit for getting all of the above for a 0% cut if they sell steam keys outside of steam.



  • It is a little more complicated than that. Yes consumers are trained to expect sales. It drives an increase in purchases. However, JC Penny is a sort of mid retailer. It isn’t high-end and it can’t support price competition to the bottom. Much like Kohls that basically lives on having things constantly “on sale” while all they really are doing is pricing below MSRP which is meaningless, especially when it is specifically designed to be underpriced.

    They didn’t simply make “$29.99 + tax” into “$30, tax included” but they removed MSRP markings that were higher than their ‘sale’ prices. They removed the “.99” from prices and generally lowered them to under the MSRP always though not necessarily down to their ‘sale’ prices to overall bring prices down everywhere.

    It’s “Everyday Pricing” initiative to lower overall pricing couldn’t compete with stores specifically designed to keep prices down and it certainly didn’t have the reputation of being upscale for any merchandise. Therefore, the only way to survive is to make consumers believe everything is on sale, always. Essentially fooling the customer into believing that they are getting a deal on better products for a cheaper price.

    If someone wants to buy nice clothes, they will buy nice clothes and pay more for them. Underpricing them could actually hurt sales. If someone wants a ‘deal’ then they are going to go to low price competitors. Mid tier retailers are always going to have a tough problem to solve, unless you fool the consumer.

    That marketing gimmick isn’t centralized to just the US or even North America. It works anywhere in the world for a mid retailer.

    Perhaps, you believe that this makes the consumers stupid but that would be a universal generalization rather than an US cultural one.


  • I know shitpost and all that but this isn’t actually true, as in it can’t be verified. It was one small mention in a book (Threshold Resistance) by A&W owner Mr. Taubman. He basically said he wanted to know why his same priced 1/3 burgers weren’t outselling competing 1/4 pounders…from a competitor…that I’m sure you can guess. So, he hired a marketing firm who put together a little focus group in the 80s. Some of those focus group members supposedly didn’t know that 1/3 lb. is bigger than 1/4 lb. burgers.

    Keep in mind that there’s no evidence or any firm mentioned and the bias surrounding the author that is writing a book about his experiences including a failed venture.

    All we know is it is one man’s anecdote and it has been used for 39 years so far to make fun of Americans for supposedly not understanding fractions.



  • Your immutable OS stays stable. For example, running a sudo pacman -Syu with a bunch of stuff from AUR in your Arch container for example will not bring down your OS or otherwise make it unstable. The immutable image you first install has been tested and it is the same image as the testers – same with the upgrades and updates, so long as you don’t overlap the image with rpm-ostree in this case.

    Immutability keeps your OS stable and if something does happen to go wrong, you just roll it back.

    If that isn’t something you need/want then that’s not something you need/want.


  • Yes, though keep in mind containers aren’t like VMs so the hardware isn’t virtualized or anything. The root system and everything in it is still immutable as well. In usage, it doesn’t matter for the container but it isn’t changing the root since what is writable to the container is outside of the root.

    Using containers this way is the way Silverblue was intended to be used for by the user and pretty much any other immutable distro of note.