Annoying

Dele

Chill Annoying, Tech

Did you get used to the changes that comes with managing / directing?

I’ve been doing it for a long time and I’m still not accustomed to it. The very hardest part of management is willingly handing off something to someone junior that you know you can do in 15 minutes only to have it take them two entire weeks to implement. Even then, typically the task or project still inevitably has to be revised seven times before it’s ready to release to production.

Delegating like this is hard but necessary. Otherwise, the junior team members never learn anything and never advance in capability or project leadership competence.

But I still am not great at handing off. Not as much as I should.

Sort by Likelihood

Chill Annoying, Lying Liars

These people are fucking delusional and are still claiming the near-certainty that phones serve ads based on overheard conversations is a conspiracy theory:

I’ve told it before but I’ll relate it again. I was hanging out with a friend in a hotel room. Neither one of us had used our phones to search for barbecue grills. Ever. She has no interest in barbecue grills and doesn’t own one. I at that time did not own one and had not for a while.

So we were joking around about barbecue grills for some reason. It was all of a 20-30 second bit of a longer conversation. After we were done talking, she got on her phone to look at something and said, “That’s odd. I just got an ad for a barbecue grill. I’ve never gotten an ad for that before and we were just talking about it.” She went to a few other sites and also got some ads for grills. I confirmed with her after that she’d never searched for barbecue grills, didn’t own one, and had never had one as an adult and that no one in her household did or was likely to have searched for one.

Now, what’s more likely — that her phone was listening to her, or that a random ad for barbecue grills (that, again, she had never seen before) just happened to pop up 2-3 minutes after we’d discussed it?

Hmm, I wonder.

People just accept the corporate line without even a single fucking thought in their heads, don’t they?

Hackity Hack

Chill Annoying, Tech

Most of what I do in the tech space these days are absurd and ridiculous hacks to attempt to get applications and services to work like they should and that they formerly did, rather than as their authoritarian makers are attempting to herd me to into.

I don’t herd well.

I realize that most of it is about ability to steal data and personal info, but that’s not any kind of excuse. I miss the days when I was in control of my own machine and what it did. They were far better.

Not So

Chill Annoying, Tech

Siri “unintentionally” recorded private convos; Apple agrees to pay $95M.

Remember when this was a “conspiracy theory?” I do — I recall when you were laughed at and mocked by the “smart” people for saying that your phone listened to conversations, even though it was obvious that it was happening if you had more than one brain cell.

As it turns out, both Apple and Android devices were doing it.

Fuck all y’all. Not so smart it turns out. Corporate shills are beyond contemptible.

Serving Up

Chill Annoying, Tech

Who remembers Server 2003?

Server 2003 was the peak of functionality and design. It did exactly what it was supposed to do and nothing else. It was easy to use and it did not pretend to be a tablet or a phone. It hummed along without thieving any data at all and just worked.

I miss the days of non-cloud. Cloud nonsense made my job more difficult and far, far more complex, contra the claims of MBAs and cloud propagandists everywhere. That’s a lost fight now, of course — everyone seems perfectly willing to cough up every last bit of data, self-determination and self-respect to unaccountable corporations.

Server 2003 wasn’t perfect and it was still part of Microsoft’s stack, and even then they were doing very despicable things to be fair.

But IT, tech and the world has gotten worse since then, and more hostile to the users on all sides.

Ridge-id

Chill Annoying, Clowns, Political Economy

NIMBYs have made all of us significantly poorer compared to what could have been. One economist estimated that GDP would be 30% higher without NIMBY evil. I think that is probably correct, though I suspect the real number could be as much as 50% larger if we’d crushed NIMBYs when we should have (during the 1970s). Preventing people from living where productive work and economic prosperity is located has all sorts of follow-on effects that are difficult to account for.

Areas with year-round good weather like San Diego and its immediate surroundings should probably have a population of 20+ million.

AI Write Right

Chill Annoying, Tech

This is already happening. One of my team members did his year-end self-review. I read it (am his manager) and it seemed like it sounded AI-ish. I asked him if he’d used AI to create it and he said he hadn’t, though I know he uses ChatGPT for other things. He’s honest and I believe him that he didn’t use AI for this particular item. But the review is written in that style, likely because he has been using AI for other mundane tasks so it has lodged in his brain. I’ve also seen the same in emails from other people that I’m pretty sure were not actually AI-generated.

I do not like this.