Shower thought: the reason management and executives dislike remote work.
This is indeed an extremely large component of the RTO push: it’s both those who relish brandishing visible power and extroverts attempting to poorly fulfill their social needs with fake work friends who’d throw them under the bus in a fucking instant.
And I want no part of any of that.
When I lived in North Florida, I felt like an uninvited and unwelcome guest in my own life. But now with my partner I feel like we’re superstars in each other’s favorite movies.
What a difference. What a freakin’ difference.
Laid off after 10 years and just feeling sad.
This is a company getting rid of its highest-paid staff. This will probably happen to me one day I’m guessing, since I still am in very technical roles while also managing people — so I am sometimes paid more than my own managers (which makes some of them angry, but none of them can do the things I do).
This is merely typical MBA thinking in action.
It’s a real tragedy that the vast majority of men are taught early on that expressing any interest of any kind in a woman is harassment and is hurtful to the woman in question. This creates really fucked-up dynamics later on. I know feminists claim this does not occur, but it very much does; even apart from my pariah status as a kid I was taught that any expressed interest in a woman was harming her. So were all my friends. And I’ve talked to many, many other men who got the very same message.
I’m not here to blame feminism or anything in particular. There are multiple causes. But it is what happens. And it shouldn’t.
Such a beautiful song and video — and the best vocal work Haim as a whole has ever done. Love the quoted Fleetwood Mac verse too. This is also an excellent live performance of the song:
Danielle’s vocals here in particular are better than the studio version.
GFI Software (Kerio) closes all user forums.
The enormous push of the last few years has been to make information harder to find and to be more restricted. Forums closing and sites being shut down are all part of this reversal. Corporations and politicians do not find it in their best interest that you be able to talk to others easily about them or their products. The internet was an anomaly and without precedent — now we are going to revert back in many ways to information being difficult to find and unreliable.
AI chat is going to make this so, so much worse. I hate the future. Truly hate it.
All of this is true:
Using software professionally isn’t about having a chic, boutique experience – it’s about getting the job done as quickly and efficiently as possible. Sometimes, that means working with irreducible complexity.
…
I could swiftly accomplish basic tasks in programs on the various platforms, including management of the programs themselves, such as determining which window was focused, what was a button and not, how to find advanced features, how to learn keyboard shortcuts, etc. Fundamental functions had fixed homes (Save and Open under File, for example) and the way to access them was sufficiently similar. This was efficient (learn one concept, apply it everywhere), easy to use (observe one system/program, operate all of them) and thus satisfying: my skills are transferable!
The core problem is that computers used to be aimed at those experienced with them, and those unafraid of having to learn something and capable of doing so — and usually those with quite high IQs.
Now, computers are aimed at mouth-breathers with the IQ of a turnip who cannot find dog food in a Purina plant. Also, computers and applications have been contaminated by mobile conventions and the useless and harmful paradigms that the mobile restrictions promote, leading to the insanity of (for instance) having no focus indications on windows any longer because mobile does not have that. There are no words for how absurdly stupid that is, and how harmful to usability.
Every current UI designer and their associated MBA overlords should be flung into the sun. The mouth-breathers too, but I think they’d make the sun too dumb to shine. Just Toro chipper-shredder for them, I guess.
I want real usable computers and programs back again. I think what I (and the author of the linked post) object to the most is something that many are too reticent or too afraid of consequences to say, but I’m not. And it’s this: I am not a dumbass, and should not be forced to do the things that dumbasses have to do.