Come to think of it, I’ve heard that all my life but never questioned it. Is it really true for all of them?

Jacob from TechLinked mentioned it. I had already dropped Reddit because the app sucks.

I hope people don’t get pulled over for gaming a navigation app and a phone mount on their handlebars. That would suck.

Answers with Joe?

What year is it? Locked devices have been illegal in Quebec for, like, ever.

I do know a few devs who prefer 5 days in the office. But they’re absolutely the minority.

Personally, I try to go once a week, but I usually don’t because I dread having a day with 50% my normal productivity.

It’s just so noisy all the time in there. Open space and really high ceilings for “collaboration”…

Well they don’t know know, but there are signs. For one, we fill in timesheets, and lying on them is a no-no. I could probably get away with stretching the truth a little, but if they notice I only commit between X and Y time, or that I’m seldom available for developer questions at a particular time, they might get suspicious and investigate my hours.

As for overtime… Well I think how companies handle it is they don’t actually ask us to stay late; they just give us unrealistic targets that kinda require overtime unless you’re a god if we ever complained they’d say they never asked for us to stay late.

We used to be able to accumulate time indefinitely and take time off according to the bank of extra time we’d worked, but once, someone accumulated hundreds of hours and just left on an unplanned vacation for nearly a full month and they really didn’t like that. So now, you need to work your quota (which you can have them adjust to your capabilities; 30, 35, 40…) on average every month. So, sure, I can work only 20 hours one week, but that’s 15 hours of extra time I need to do within that month.

And if you have extra at the end of the month, well, that’s lost.

Which sucks, because I used to use those as sick days over the legally required two paid ones we get per year; my health isn’t exactly resplendent.

This is so common in Quebec that I have trouble believing it’s illegal. I think it might be a loophole.

I have a salaried position. I don’t clock in. But it’s typically only used to deny us overtime pay. If I work 35 hours a week, I’m paid 12.5% less than my colleagues who do 40. And if my lunch break is too long, I’m expected to stay late sometime within the month to compensate.

And while I do have a shit job (save me) I’ve never seen someone whose employer didn’t mind their hours as long as they got shit done.

Huh. The person was off-frame. And I’m pretty sure i retroactively chose a color for the ball.

I think I might have a black-and-white imagination.

I’m lucky enough to be middle class, ever since landing a somewhat boring job that pays, like, 75% more than my old one, all in web development. I still can’t afford luxuries like a car or a house, but hey, I have a nice electric bike! And I can pay someone to clean my apartment every two weeks. It costs, like, 7% of my income, but I know I wouldn’t be able to keep it clean otherwise. Health issues suck.

I have poor friends who don’t earn much more than the minimum wage. They often complain about the price of groceries, and say things like “I’ve wanted this game so bad for so long but I don’t have any money left this month”. Each time I’m reminded of how thankful I am that I don’t really worry about prices anymore at the grocery store. And it makes me sad that we hadn’t such bad financial priorities that we have people WITH jobs who have trouble paying for food. Imagine those who can’t find a job!

There’s also my dad, as well as a friend couple of mine, who are rich. The friends, it’s crazy. They each have a car, PLUS a special summer car, they buy Dungeons and Dragons books on a monthly basis, they go on international trips yearly, they go camping in an RV, they’re always doing activities that cost a lot of money, they go to the restaurant a lot, etc. My dad is also on an airplane on a yearly basis.

It makes my head spin to just think about the sheer money. But none of these people are evil my rich friend is definitely more left-wing than anything else, and he’s a very smart person. They were just both blessed with luck, energy and talent, I guess. My dad is just a normal near-boomer. Neither better nor worse than the rest of them. He just got a high-paying factory job and had the energy to keep going.

I’m reminded of those people whenever I’m tempted to put all rich people in the same basket.

Another fun thing you can do is look at the sky (not the sun!) on a sunny day and start seeing your blood circulation and blind spot.

Car-centric urban design.

My TV is insulting like that. It technically has an EQ, but it makes no perceivable difference no matter what I do in it.

But assuming it worked, wouldn’t doing that strictly with sound frequencies cause issues? Like, okay, most voices are louder because I boosted their frequency, but now that one dude with a super low voice is quieter, plus any music in the show is distorted. Or something like that.

I wish they just provided separate tracks that you could control. One track for dialogue, one track for music, one track for sound effects, and maybe one track for less important voices. Then let us adjust the volume of each. That would help so much. And they basically HAVE to do it at some point in the process anyway if they want multilingual dubbing to work.

Speaking of dubbing: recently I’ve taken to watching more content dubbed in French strictly because it’s almost always intelligible, contrary to the aRtIsT aCcUrAtE volumes of the original. Pretty sad that I have to do that though.

I thought it would be simple: just make the mono/stereo/etc mixes easier to understand, and leave the advanced stuff to people with a million speakers.

I guess that’s too simple?

Movies (and even most video games) make me so angry with that kind of stuff. You want an artificially tailored experience that only works with a zillion-dollar sound system? Fine, you can make it an optional soundtrack that only kicks in with those systems. But the default audio mix needs to be intelligible even on my phone’s speakers.

Video games are annoying because often you can’t hear anything over the explosions music during the opening cutscenes, but at least you CAN fix it in the settings. Movies, yeesh, you have to rely on your TV’s crap postprocessing.