admiralteal

admiralteal , 1 month ago to workreform in From 2017 to 2020, the U.S. Department of Labor recovered $3 billion in stolen wages from employers

Also the DoL is perpetually under-resourced and short staffed. They aren't one of the "good" law enforcement agencies that get bipartisan support -- only the ones who beat up protestors get that kind of universal appeal, somehow. Even though funding to places like the IRS and DoL have insanely good return on investment.

admiralteal , 1 month ago to workreform in From 2017 to 2020, the U.S. Department of Labor recovered $3 billion in stolen wages from employers

The whole "retail theft" wave is a moral panic anyway. It's not backed up by numbers. NYC and LA saw some elevation because of a small number of actual criminal organization that largely got rounded up and prosecuted. Most other "organized retail crime" stories are utter nonsense.

Most of the rise in theft that people cited was based on a completely bullshit statistic which came from the NRF citing one of its own members testimonies in which that member cited an incorrect number. It was actual dogfooding being passed as statistical analysis and even they have backed down on it.

admiralteal , 1 month ago to technology in Ordered back to the office, top tech talent left instead, study finds

We can't claim to know it left them with "bad" employees. I think there's vanishingly little evidence that recruiters actually go after the "good" employees effectively -- I'm pretty skeptical that a pro recruiter actually gets you better employees, they just make the process of getting employees way less stressful. We also have no reason to assume that a good or bad employee is correlated in any way with caring about not returning to office -- it's possible very bad employees are just as likely to quit as very good ones. How do you even tell good from bad, anyway?

What this "return to office" stuff definitely DOES do is preferentially retain the most obedient/desperate employees. Which may be part of the goal, along with low-key downsizing.

admiralteal , 1 month ago to technology in Gabe Newell, the Man Behind Steam, Is Working on a Brain-Computer Interface

You mean Half Life: Full Dive, followed by Half Life: Full Dive 2. The second in a trilogy never to be finished.

admiralteal , 1 month ago to technology in An Interview With Jack Dorsey

I, for one, could not be made to care one iota about what Jack Dorsey has to say. He's a weird little fuck, and only getting weirder.

Time long past to be a lot more honest about these tech billionaires -- pretty much every one of was just immensely, immensely lucky, and until they can talk honestly about how nearly everything to do with their success compared to any other mid-level software developer was just blind luck, we should assume everything coming out of their mouths is pure grandiose delusion.

admiralteal , 1 month ago to technology in What Happens When a Romance Writer Gets Locked Out of Google Docs

Google loves to have entirely ai-driven moderation which makes decisions that are impossible to appeal. They are certain that one AI team lead is more valuable than 20 customer service agents. Meanwhile, YouTube shorts is still a pipeline to Nazidom and death by electrical fire.

Might be the worst customer service in the tech industry, though that's a highly competitive title.

They also don't offer replacement parts (even major parts like the charging case) for their headphones. So I guess they're intended to be a disposable product. Evil shit.

If you've ever had an entirely positive interaction with Google customer service... you'd probably be the first.

admiralteal , 1 month ago to technology in Tesla to lay off everyone working on Superchargers, new vehicles

Musk told workers that Tesla "will continue to build out some new Supercharger locations, where critical, and finish those currently under construction."

Sounds to me like the plan is to finish what is already under contract and do no more. I sure am glad the US authorities committed to that north american charger standard... what's even the status on getting a full specification for it including third-party development at this point anyway?

I can't pull a quote for the new vehicle development team's situation because Tesla basically just keeps making the Model 3 with barely even incremental improvements to it, and even that one has totally inconsistent build quality vehicle to vehicle. Unless someone thinks the Cybertruck is going to save them -- hah.

admiralteal , 2 months ago to technology in Net neutrality is back as FCC votes to regulate internet providers

The user above is just one of those guys who looks at anything the dems do and thinks, look at this bitch eating crackers.

Nothing good can ever be celebrated or praised. It has to always be bad.

admiralteal , 2 months ago to mildlyinfuriating in Had to buy a certain product to use a certain substance and there's a really stupid new law.

I think you may be forgetting that weed is illegal, federally. The product you're buying is for tobacco -- officially -- because if it weren't it would be a federal crime to ship it across state borders.

admiralteal , 2 months ago to technology in Windows 11 Start menu ads are now rolling out to everyone

Not really. With the super easy, friendly distros it basically just goes.

I switched to Linux Mint Cinnamon a while ago expecting to just fool around a bit but mostly boot back into windows to do stuff. I've now found that the ONLY thing I need to go back to windows for is when I'm forced by dumb policies to use an MSOffice product, which fortunately doesn't happen to often (and no, LibreOffice is absolutely not a sub for MS Office. The spreadsheet app is worse than google docs, and I'd rather work in typst than have to deal with the libreoffice writer -- especially as soon as I need to display an equation/figure/table of contents. Of course, I'd rather work in typst than deal with MSWord too...)

That said, I don't really play games anymore. Games may still require frequent windows visits. But... I've been looking forward to a complete edition of horizon forbidden west and all accounts say it's linux compatibility is near perfect, so maybe things aren't so bad these days on the gaming front.

admiralteal , 2 months ago to technology in Apple AirPods are designed to die: Here’s what you should know

Out-of-date iFixit Article

Follow up where Sony made the good ones worse

But Fairphone does always give us hope

admiralteal , 2 months ago to technology in The little smart home platform that could

That was the point that hit my limit, now that you mention it -- getting it to show up on a duckdns address on the https public internet. Not being able to make that work after fiddling with all kinds of contradictory guides nor with 2 or 3 completely different reverse proxy tools just left me mad. Especially since a regular ngix reverse proxy manager container works fine on the same computer, but for some reason was just refusing to connect to HA (SSL issues, I think).

Having HA just working locally didn't really make it a replacement for the big tech solutions that already work fairly smoothly. I'm sure I'll go back to get it the way I want one day, but the learning curve on any selfhosting is still pretty rough.

admiralteal , 2 months ago to technology in The little smart home platform that could

I had it briefly up and running and can only say... it's a bear, at least if you are trying to use it as a drop-in replacement with existing hardware. I'm sure I'll go back and sort it out at some point, but it left me just feeling tired and frustrated even when I had it doing most of what I wanted.

If you were thoughtful about hardware from the ground up, maybe it would be more straightforward, but I tried getting it running on just an old workstation with ubuntu installed on it that I use for very basic stuff like syncthing and it was just painful. Mix of Kasa/Wyze/Philips devices that are just what I've somehow collected over time.

It would be nice to see better first-class add-on support. I found myself needing to SSH into a VM to get stuff into it, and even then it was twitchy in all the wrong ways. Would also be nice to see better support for the containerized version, because that's so much easier to distribute and execute compared to a VM. Next time I'll probably just try to do it all with docker and see if it hurts less, since I don't think any addons I was using were critical to begin with.

That said, if you're doing HA, get a dedicated piece of hardware for it. I suspect it vastly simplifies things.

admiralteal , 2 months ago to nostupidquestions in If you're selected for jury duty (US), should you give up your anonymous social media accounts?

Good answers here, but ignoring probably the most realistic and practical truth of the matter in my opinion.

You won't immediately be sent to the stocks for saying "I don't want to answer", the worst case scenario is that some officer of the court informs you that you must answer the question even if you don't want to. And even that is only going to happen if the attorney asking the question insists. And I struggle to imagine a situation where a competent attorney would do so.

Being hostile towards your prospective jurors, making them feel exposed and uncomfortable, is not a way to march to victory in a trial. They want to ensure you aren't prejudiced against their client/case. Making you dislike them personally IS prejudice. Causing prejudice is a bad way to eliminate prejudice.

They will ask questions, mostly yes/no ones, that you need to answer honestly. They may ask for clarification. If you don't want to answer and say so, it's unlikely anyone will press you because that unnwillingness to answer is just as clear an indication of who you are as anything else.

admiralteal , 2 months ago to technology in Tesla stops cybertruck deliveries—accelerator pedal may be to blame

Sounds like a compelling argument for why we need better safety standards for cars and traffic engineering.