Jesse Waters knows a lot about affairs.

He cheated on his wife, they divorced, he married the woman he was cheating with.

Nothing wrong with changing the constitution, as long as people do what’s required.

The journalists and the culture at the newspaper wanted to endorse Harris, but the billionaire owner swooped in and overrode all of that. This is obvious.

I realized there’s another layer to how messed up this is though. A newspaper changed it’s journalistic practices to benefit an aerospace company (Blue Origin). Why is a newspaper connected to an aerospace company?

More and more companies are being owned by fewer and fewer people. The American dream is dead, the free market is a myth at this point.

Throttling everyone equally during times of congestion is also fair in its own way. I’d be okay with that.

I like this term, “billionaire media”, because right-wing media likes to use “mainstream media” as a slur to dismiss any other media source that disagrees with them. It’s a term that shuts down thinking and gets people to automatically dismiss any claim from “mainstream media”.

“Billionaire media” doesn’t really work this way, because if Fox News starts criticizing “billionaire media”, eventually some viewers are going to wake up and realize, “wait, isn’t Fox News owned by a billionaire too?”

People, especially Republicans, love to talk about the “mainstream media”. That term needs to die.

There is only “billionaire media” and “independent media”.

You’re billionaire media if your owned or funded by a billionaire; I don’t care if you’re only on YouTube, if you’re getting hundreds of thousands of dollars from sponsors, you’re part of the billionaire media.

If you’re funded by a bunch of small donations or have no funding at all, then you are independent media.

Today my trust for billionaire media sank even lower.

When limiting is required, because many people are using the same network, limiting those who have already used the most seems fair.

Your comment might cause me to do something. You’re responsible. I don’t care what the legal definitions say.

If we don’t care about legal definitions, then how do we know you didn’t cause all this?

Epic vs Google turned out a lot different than Epic vs Apple.

Also, Epic vs Google was decided by jury.

How would you force someone to take time off?

If I was their boss I would say something like “you’re job is to stay home and do anything besides work for the next week, you will still be paid for this time”. Easy.

As for the on-call stuff. Yes, that’s the point. It should be unsustainable for a company to continually rely on their daytime programmers for frequent on-call alert handling.

If off-hours issues happen often, the company can hire an additional team to handle off-hours issues. If off-hours issues are rare, then you can depend on your daytime programmers to handle the rare off-hours issue, and know that they will be fairly compensated for being woken up in the middle of the night.

I’ve been at too many companies where an off-hours alert wakes up a developer in the middle of the night and the next day the consensus is “that’s not good, but we’ll have to fix the underlying issue after we finish implementing the new UI the design team is excited about”. It’s not right for a developer to get woken up in the middle of the night, and then the company puts fixing that on the backburner.

I’ll say it again. It’s about aligning incentives. When things that are painful for the worker are also painful for the company, that is alignment. Unfortunately, most companies have the opposite of alignment, if a developer gets woken in the middle of the night the end result for the company is that they got some additional free labor, that’s pain for the worker, reward for the company; that’s wrong.

When I think of a tech worker union my thoughts first go to standardizing everyone’s pay and limiting what I can earn myself. I’ve probably fallen to anti-union propaganda.

A tech worker union that says nothing about pay could still do so much.

A union could ensure that the company’s incentives are aligned with worker’s incentives around things like on-call.

I’d love a union that forced a company to give all on-call workers compensation. Something like:

1. If you’re woken up in the middle of the night, you automatically get 8 hours comp time (time off), plus 2x the time you spend on-call during off hours.
2. Accrued comp time over 20 hours must be payed at 10x normal pay if the employee leaves the company for any reason. The idea here isn’t for employees to accrue comp time, but to give the company a strong incentive to ensure employees use their comp time.

Basically, if a company is having lots of on-call alerts, or the company is preventing employees from using their comp time, you want this to be directly painful to the company. Incentives should be aligned, what is painful for the worker should be painful for the company.

Or, regarding “unlimited PTO”. I’d love to see a union force companies to:

1. “Unlimited PTO” policies are fine, but they must have a guaranteed minimum amount of PTO specified in writing. So none of this “yeah, we heave ‘unlimited PTO’; oh, we’re really busy this quarter, so can you wait to take PTO until next quarter?”.

Tech workers have it good compared to a lot of workers, but there are still plenty of abuses a union could help with, even if the union never even mentions pay.

The reason why is that they need my email address?

Like anything medically related in the US, it’s our time to crack open our wallets and do our patriotic duty of paying half the nation.

Like, if I want to talk to a doctor for 5 minutes, then it’s my time to pay the all the insurance industry workers, and I have to pay my part of those 3 minutes long drug commercials you see on TV every ad break and before every YouTube video, and I have to pay all those people locking down the medical devices so that the users can’t use their own data. This is my time to shine, I got to pay for all this because I talked to the doctor for 5 minutes. Also, hopefully in the end I have a few cents left over to give to the doctor.

Fucking rent seekers…

The rumored 4th and 5th games…

And I think their board is panicking trying to figure out how they can regain me, specifically, as a customer.

More seriously, I apparently am not the only one who eventually got their fill of Ubisoft games. I think Ubisoft has planted resentment in the minds of all their customers, and as soon as they slipped a little in game quality their customers were more than happy to leave, just for the sake of leaving.

I may not like it, but you do make an interesting technical argument.

I think it would still be detectable though because of buffering.

What you’re saying assumes that videos are streamed frame-by-frame: “here’s a frame”, “okay, I watched that frame”, “okay, here’s the next frame”.

With buffering videos will preload the next 30 seconds of video, and so if you pressed a button to skip ahead 10 seconds, that often happens instantly because the computer has already stored the next 30 seconds of video. Your plan to just pretend to skip ahead doesn’t work in this case, because my computer can know whether or not it really did skip ahead, because of buffering.

Couldn’t we avoid all this by giving players the option to host and moderate their own servers?

Use a more holistic approach. Combine heuristics like the average speed and aim hit percentage with reports from other players.

Review player reports, if a player makes a false allegation in their reports, mark that player as having less reliable reports. If a player reports someone who turns out to be a definite cheater, mark whoever reported the cheater as having more reliable reports. Etc etc.

Like, if the report just says “player was moving fast outside a vehicle”, maybe they were cheating, or maybe they were just goofing off trying to stand on top of vehicles the whole game. If the report says “player was moving fast the whole game, had the highest kill count, and was also reported by 5 other players in the match for cheating”, it’s a little more clear what’s happening.

I bought Crysis and didn’t like the DRM, so I haven’t bought a Ubisoft game since. How’s that working out for Ubisoft?

“Do you guys not have phones?”