Lies!

Everybody knows that the terrorists on the planes aimed them at the floor containing the Illuminati outpost and it was the fire from the cooling liquid for the supercomputers used to mind control everybody in New York that melted the support steel structure.

Above a certain level of seniority (in the sense of real breadth and depth of experience rather than merely high count of work years) one’s increased productivity is mainly in making others more productive.

You can only be so productive at making code, but you can certainly make others more productive with better design of the software, better software architecture, properly designed (for productivity, bug reduction and future extensibility) libraries, adequate and suitably adjusted software development processes for the specifics of the business for which the software is being made, proper technical and requirements analysis well before time has been wasted in coding, mentorship, use of experience to foresee future needs and potential pitfalls at all levels (from requirements all the way through systems design and down to code making), and so on.

Don’t pay for that and then be surprised of just how much work turns out to have been wasted in doing the wrong things, how much trouble people have with integration, how many “unexpected” things delay the deliveries, how fast your code base ages and how brittle it seems, how often whole applications and systems have to be rewritten, how much the software made mismatches the needs of the users, how mistrusting and even adversarial the developer-user relationship ends up being and so on.

From the outside it’s actually pretty easy to deduce (and also from having known people on the inside) how plenty of Tech companies (Google being a prime example) haven’t learned the lesson that there are more forms of value in the software development process than merely “works 14h/day, is young and intelligent (but clearly not wise)”

This is one of those articles that should both be in !theonion@midwest.social and !nottheonion@lemmy.world

I suspect indirectly both variants come from the same source or maybe even it’s the La Haine that’s indirectly the source for my variant (though I learned this joke a long time ago, possibly before 1995).

By the way, that’s excellent film intro.

Reminds me of the joke about the guy falling from the top of the Empire State Building who, half way down, was heard saying: “Well, so far, so good”

This kind of thing just confirms how it’s really all about the Power elites keeping an eye out on the plebes trying to organise and change things so that they can kill any such things in the early stages.

Democracy was supposed to slowly bring Autocracies around to its way of doing things but instead what we’re seing is the very opposite of that.

Who needs integration testing when we have users who will do it for us?!

The rightwing is in the majority in Europe, both as governments and in the EU Parliament - in the last EU elections the only countries that took a turn to the Left were the Scandinavians and Finland (which has a similar culture to them) and those tend to be a decade or two ahead of the rest of Europe.

Also it’s not only the US that has slided towards Authoritarianism after 9/11 - the same also happenned in many European countries (even if you don’t consider Britain which has never had quite the same level of Democractic principles as the rest and might actually be less Democratic than the US). Even Germany which one would expect to have the most abhorrence to things like State surveillance because of their past went that way (more than most, even): for example, if you want to buy a Prepaid (i.e. without a contract) SIM card for your mobile phone you have to provide identification and it all gets registered, which is quite rare in Western nations in general.

Last but not least, lets not forget we’re living in the end-game of Neoliberalism, an ideology which weakens the power of the entity which is controlled by the elected representatives of citizens - the State - by promoting what they call “non-interventionism”, “low regulation” and privatisation of everything to leave the power of Money to do whatever it wants, de facto a higher power than the power controlled by the vote (in other words, replace Democracy with Oligarchy) something which has now advanced to such a point that as the Money has concentrated in fewer and fewer hands and massive companies in the markets deregulated by Neoliberalism leverage dominant positions to extract ever higher rents from normal consumers, even the Middle-class are feeling empoverished and angry. In this environment increasing surveillance facilitates the early detection and supression of movements for changing things that aren’t just content with a few meaningless and easilly ignored demonstrations or can’t be controlled by the money-men (as most of the Far-Right is).

The balance between projecting to voters the impression that they have Democracy whilst reducing real choices for them and installing more and more control mechanisms of Authoritarianism, might not lean quite as hard to Autoritarianism yet in most of Europe as it does in the US, but the same kind of slow abandonment of Democratic values (in practice, of Democracy) by the mainstream politicians has also happenned in Europe over the last couple of decades.

Both the pushing of surveillance in hard-to-eavesdrop communications channels and even the way in which these ideas are sold to people (i.e. “for the children”) are absolutelly consistent with Late-Stage Neoliberalism, the former being meant to facilitaty the control the populus by suppressing at the embrionic stage people organising to change things and the latter being quite a typical Neoliberal kind of argument to sell people things which are bad for the general citizens but are useful for those who have Power.

Britain provides interesting examples of the directon that things seem to be taking in the rest because they’ve been more Authoritarian than the rest of Europe for decades so you can say they’re ahead of the rest of us in this trend: for example they have Ecologist organisations under surveillance (some years ago it was well known that an EU Parliament Member for the Green Party had been under surveillance) and use Anti-terrorism legislation to arrest Ecologists organising demonstrations.

I had to check twice to make sure this was “The Onion” rather than “Not the Onion”

Play the ball, not the player.

"Giant monstrosity with too few and too rigid tentacles " descends from space…

“Will horrors never cease?!”

Media Bias Fact Check has all the trimmings of a Propaganda Op - what better way to have centralized control of information in the Era of the transnational information access network that’s the Internet than to control Trust in the multitude of information sources from all over the World - from some entity deep into the Right side of the political spectrum plus it’s based in the US, whose Overtoon Window is already way to the Right than the rest of the World, so you end up with hilarious takes like BBC being Leftwing which is a common belief of Brexiters and other Far Right types in the UK.

(Curiously, the BBC themselves about a decade ago commissioned a study about it by the University of Nottingham and it turns out the BBC is pro-“whatever party is in Government”: note that there is no electable leftwing party in Britain since New Labour - currently in Government - is at best Center-Right. Also as a foreigner who lived in Britain for over a decade I can tell you the BBC reeked with nationalism, especially in their coverage of foreign affairs).

And that’s without going into the whole pro-Zionist slant of MBFC’s “bias” “fact” “checking”. I don’t know who is funding that operation but it certainly isn’t the likes of the ACLU.

That it is being given very special treatment by some mods in “World News” is very interesting.

I can tell you they’re not Electronics Engineers.

Electronics Engineers are like “we have to design this so that it can handle a power source whose voltage can be between +5% and -20% of what it says on the box” or “assume the resistance of your resistors, the capacitance of your capacitors and the inductance of your inductors can be randomly off by up to 10% plus it changes with temperature”.

I switched from Physics to EE at Uni and it went from “these formulas represent the world” to “here is the empirically measured curve of gain vs temperature (were the difference between extremes is over 1000%) of a common transistor you’ll have to use”.

Maybe it’s the area within Engineering or maybe Engineers get taught differently over there, but at least half of my degree was about dealing with how the real world deviates from the “purity” of Mathematical Formulas.

Who wouldn’t start salivating if a man with such a grandiose beard rang a bell?

If there is one thing I’ve learned from Physics, is that everything is relative.

It’s pretty easy to pump up the official GDP Growth number by understating Inflation since the former is mathematically reduced by the latter.

You might have noticed frequent news (and people complaining) about the prices of things having gone up A LOT in the US and yet official Inflation figures are quite subdued.

Then on top of that, it’s an Election Year and the political pressure to massage then numbers to make them look good is likely higher than normal (plus they can always be corrected later, after the election).

The US might not practice China-level Economic-figures Massaging, but they’ve definitely been a lot more Fantastic and Fabulous (in that they have a lot more Fantasy and Fable to them) since the mad scramble to look good (or at least not as bad) after the 2008 Crash.

I did the same transition a couple of months ago (the Windows to Pop! OS one, not the desktop environment one) and even though I’m a gamer (something which has stopped me from moving to Linux on the main usage of my home desktop since the late 90s - were I’ve usually had it on dual boot but not used it that much) am very happy with it.

I’ve actually been familiar with Linux since way back in the Slackware times, but only now have I started using as my main desktop.

I do think it’s getting to be the Year Of Linux On The Desktop for a lot more people than ever before thanks to the aligned forces of Windows “all your computerz belongz to us” 11, software as a system with general enshittification and just how much easier it is to game on Linux thanks mainly to Valve and the steady, unrelentless, stream of improvements being done by the Wine devs.

Judging by their ships, they have gravity generators which are small enough and have a small enough ratio of energy consumption to energy generation to be used in something like the Millenium Falcon.

Which would mean that from an Engineering point of view the option on the left would be perfectly feasible.

On the other hand it does make some sense to structure a combat vehicle as an onion with more mission critical sections inside were they are better protected and less important ones on the outside - you easilly have armour in between levels in that setup whilst in the setup on the left you would need to explicitly add rings of armor sectioning your corridors to achieve the same.

That said, in the Star Wars films we can see that the ship hangars with access to space have a “side” open to space and the “floor” side perpendicular to the radius line of the Death Star, which is consistent with the left side option and inconsistent with the right side one (where the opening to space would be on the top).

The claim “they learned from their mistakes” does not follow from “they made mistakes” and hence is not supported by it - for example, it’s quite common for people to make a mistake and then derive the wrong conclusion for why, hence not learning from it. You’re literally ignoring the part I disputed in your original statement (that making mistakes does not always lead to learning from them) and instead addressing something I did not dispute at all (that learning is an improvement) - absolutely, learning is an improvement, shame that “learning from one’s mistakes” is a stated desire on how things should be from Pop Culture (i.e. “you should learn from your mistakes”), rather than an observed and confirmed causal relation that’s always true.

Again, shit that isn’t Logic. You adding a claim of madness for my personality really just drives down the point on that.

As for the straw-man, selective picking of what somebody else wrote (with or without the inclusion of selective quoting) “enriched” by affirmations of your own that go beyond what the other person wrote and are not supported or even implied by it, is literally the most common way to build straw-men.