If you want to do resource profiling, Visual Studio can do that out of the box. For simple benchmarking, specifically for seeing how long certain calls take, I just just the Stopwatch class and ouput the result to a log entry. Assuming you’re using C# that is.

Second Protectli. They are solid little x86 boxes with no moving parts.

People, especially younger people, need to get on board with the idea of supporting quality journalism financially. The decline in traffic is concerning in and of itself but print journalism as an industry has been circling the drain for years because advertisers and subscribers have increasingly abandoned the medium. Good quality reporting is an art. One that LLM’s are wholly incapable of.

I recently cancelled my Office 365 subscription because I’m no longer willing to financially support Microsuck’s bullshit. It was hard too. There isn’t another groupware solution that works as well as Exchange. It was important enough for me to make the move despite that. I’m not completely cured of my Windows dependency yet but I’m working on it.

Ohio missing the “good old days” when their rivers were flamable.

Aaaannnnnddd the server crashed.

I’m just gonna leave this here

The value of institutional knowledge is almost impossible to quantify and organizations are often totally inept at assessing the risks that come with losing it. Even if the risks are properly assessed and understood, the cost of mitigating them is immediate for a potential return on investment which is unknown.

I know from personal experience that getting an organization to mitigate these types of risks is usually an up hill battle. Even when the organization can easily afford it.

It’s easier to stick their heads in the sand and it goes way beyond just “white color” professionals. If you own a manufacturing plant, you could potentially lose a machinists annual salary, or more, in one hour of downtime. But I’ve seen at least a few large operations where the tool and die shop consists of one very overworked machinist. Management’s attitude is “oh, well we’ll just hire his replacement off the street whenever he finally decides to retire.”

The only problem with that is that the current guy has been there for 20 years, knows where ALL the bodies are buried, and has the skills to bring the plant back online with a welder and some scrap metal.

Even if the next person is really good at their job and magically shows up at the front door, it’s going to take them a while to get up to speed. That “while” costs money. In fact, it costs a lot of money. But there’s no way to reflect that on an income statement so nobody does anything about it.

Personally I like using server side rendering when I can. The UI should be as light weight as possible and you can do a lot with just HTML and CSS. That said, it’s pretty hard to build a responsive web app without at least a little bit of JavaScript.

Hey everybody! I’d like you to meet my girlfriend. Isn’t she beautiful? The black powder coat really accents her indicator lights.

On December 15, 1953, led by Paul Hahn, the head of American Tobacco, the six major tobacco companies (American Tobacco Co., R. J. Reynolds, Philip Morris, Benson & Hedges, U.S. Tobacco Co., and Brown & Williamson) met with public relations company Hill & Knowlton in New York City to create an advertisement that would assuage the public’s fears and create a false sense of security in order to regain the public’s confidence in the tobacco industry.[12] Hill and Knowlton’s president, John W. Hill, realized that simply denying the health risks would not be enough to convince the public. Instead, a more effective method would be to create a major scientific controversy in which the scientifically established link between smoking tobacco and lung cancer would appear not to be conclusively known.[13]

The tobacco companies fought against the emerging science by producing their own science, which suggested that existing science was incomplete and that the industry was not motivated by self-interest.[11] With the creation of the Tobacco Industry Research Committee, headed by accomplished scientist C.C. Little, the tobacco companies manufactured doubt and turned scientific findings into a topic of debate. The recruitment of credentialed scientists like Little who were skeptics was a crucial aspect of the tobacco companies’ social engineering plan to establish credibility against anti-smoking reports. By amplifying the voices of a few skeptical scientists, the industry created an illusion that the larger scientific community had not reached a conclusive agreement on the link between smoking and cancer.[11]

Internal documents released through whistleblowers and litigation, such as the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement, reveal that while advertisements like A Frank Statement made tobacco companies appear to be responsible and concerned for the health of their consumers, in reality, they were deceiving the public into believing that smoking did not have health risks. The whole project was aimed at protecting the tobacco companies’ images of glamour and all-American individualism at the cost of the public’s health.[14]

A Frank Statement

Putting aside all the late stage capitalism going on here, I still can’t get over the fact that Alphabet (Google) spent billions of dollars developing self driving car technology only to arrive at, “Oh shit. Someone left the car door open. What do we do now?”

Don’t even need to spend that much. Trump accepts fake peace prizes.

The problem is that it’s not just software. Shareholders and corporate “leadership” have collectively decided that they are willing to sacrifice any and all future success in order to make stock prices go up today. They don’t know where the business will be in five years and frankly, they don’t care. Virtually all of the big names have completely stopped innovating. Cramming “AI” into their shitty products and trying really hard to pretend that’s it’s something different or “new” when it’s just the same shit but with more bloatware.

Manufacturing isn’t much different. I worked at a specialized industrial tool manufacturer for a few years. They were trying to add a new “smart tool” line and demoed it at an international trade show only to get completely excoriated by their customers who were all like, “Don’t even talk to me about ‘smart’ tools when the [very expensive] tools you already produce don’t fucking work.” But that’s how it goes when your business is built on acquisitions and the way you make your stock price go up is by coasting on your brand portfolios past success while simultaneously eliminating the people who made that success possible.

I’m still looking for a good solution that includes support for notes. I’m migrating off Exchange Online and using mailcow temporarily but the built in notes feature is sorely missed.

Altman, a regular user of X since 2008, has been forthright about his frustration with the bots on it. In September, he posted to X that “somehow AI twitter/AI reddit feels very fake in a way it really didn’t a year or two ago.” A few days earlier, he made a similar point, citing dead internet theory, which posits that since 2016, the internet has been overrun with non-human activity. “I never took the dead internet theory that seriously but it seems like there are really a lot of LLM [AI]-run twitter accounts now,” he wrote.

CEO of glorified bot farm complains about effects of bot farming.

I need Office/PowerBi/Teams to work without issue. The web versions do not cut it for my use cases.

Same problem. I actually use Mint on my laptop but the desktop still has Windows 10 because some apps are still just not useable or fully useable on Linux. As much as I wish Libre Office was a full replacement for MS Office, it’s not. At least not for power users.

“Lets use Oracle DB for that.”

Statements made by the utterly deranged.

No. But there are a number of advantages of using PostgreSQL over the others.