The thing I found out when I was a manager is you will get exactly what you measure. If you measure how long it takes to close tickets your customer service will suffer (that’s a stupid thing to measure anyway, but we had a stupid director). If you measure the number of tickets closed then you’ll get each step of a process as a ticket. If you measure billable hours you’ll get a bunch of time padding.

So since the religion is measuring the amount of sin and (in some denominations cases) good works performed, that’s what you’ll get. How many of the big 10 did you stay on the right side of? Did you put in 2 hours at the soup kitchen? Cool, here’s your ticket to heaven. It’s not measuring how good you are to your fellow humans. And they’re pissed if you don’t have to follow the same rules they do because you don’t believe in the same sins. So they try to force others to live by their dumb ass rules instead of trying to get others to be good people.

And the kid. And shot the dog. And likely deported the neighbor.

Case in point: the downvotes are from people who don’t know or care about the difference.

Depends on what you’re calling AI. LLMs (and generative AI in general) are garbage for all those things, and most things in general (all things if you take their cost into account). Machine Learning and expert systems can do at least some of that.

I absolutely hate that generative AI is being marketed as though it’s deep learning instead of a fancy Markov chain. But I think I’ve lost the battle over that nomenclature.

It does and it’s pretty awesome! I’ve taken my niece and nephews there on more than one occasion and we’ve road tripped with friends who have kids with ASD.

I am and same colors here.

I actually love a lot of things about our state. There are good people, there’s good food, there’s some really beautiful scenery, the music scene is crazy…I really like it here. I just hate the jackasses running the place.

DFW, Austin, and Houston account for a lot of people. All blue as fuck. If we could get people excited about something, anything, we could easily be purple.

I’m on mine far more often than I’m in a car. I think Tesla found out that I point and laugh at any cyber trucks I see at red lights while I’m out and is trying to kill me.

Relevant xkcd

It belongs in a museum!

There are both groups, and some in-betweeners. I have known several actual white supremacists. They are who they are. They hold “church” and talk about how all this is to keep the white man down.

I’ve known plenty who are casually racist but are more “I just don’t like them” than anything organized. They believe some of it, but they expect things to work out because they’re white so they don’t organize.

I’ve known LOADS of people who are just ignorant. They live in a bubble where all they hear is about how the government is trying to give others a leg up and they’re jealous. Where’s their help? They grew up poor. If someone in their past benefited from slavery or oppression it was squandered. They have friends and family of color and genuinely love them. Some of them are white passing POC. They do tremendous harm out of ignorance and because they were lied to. That’s not an absolution, because they could go find the information, but an indictment of the media bubble that they’re in and some of the others they associate with.

That doesn’t just go for racists. Sexists and LGBTQIA bigots are the same.

Back when I did stuff for the sake of doing it, I mapped DAW transport buttons to these. I never bothered replacing them when they broke because I moved to a jog wheel to scrub through much more efficiently.

They can’t back up their position, which is why they said they wouldn’t get sucked into a debate.

My favorite was "here’s Exchange 2003, you’ll figure it out. We seem to be sending out thousands of emails every few minutes and are on all the spam lists. See you in a bit. ".

That’s what they did to me 20-odd years ago. I did my best to train up the guys that came after me, but I am only one guy. I hope they’re not still doing that.

It’s crazy that I can’t tell if it’s bait from a pretty good troll, a real supporter of the racist in chief himself who believes this shit, or a supporter who is trolling because their real life is kind of pathetic. They all kind of sound the same at this point. But the fact that whoever it is went down the comment chain to reply to you instead of just those who took the bait points to 1 or 3.

I worked at an MSP for years and had clients who would send it back and forth that way to each other. The most common were medical practices, but banking wasn’t far behind.

Fax was considered secure because you could lock up the fax machine physically.

My favorite setup was a medical practice that dealt with stomach issues, including colon cancer, and their neighbor in the same building who was a pathology lab. They both had the PDF to fax and fax to PDF servers set up to send back and forth when someone could just walk 50 feet and hand over paperwork.