Caveat: I’ve never been to wanaka.

But McDonalds can make restaurants in the middle of many old European cities look “in place”, surely they can do Wanaka?

It’s obviously enough of a thing to warrant Google to crack down on it in both chrome and YouTube.

If it’s such a small problem, why spend the effort?

You don’t strap your dog in?

Weird. I’ve been thinking a lot about my aphantasia recently.

The closest I can describe what I imagined, was the feeling that those things happened.

For example. That vibe you get when you feel someone is just behind you. You can’t see them, but you know it. If I imagine someone behind me, I get the same uncomfortable feeling and an urge to look behind me.

Sony Bravia, not connected to any network, running in Pro Mode so it’s “just a TV”

Then a PC running plex and the arrs to substitute the streaming services.

If they know we have savings. They’ll just increase prices again to take them.

Alternative headline: “Is NZ ready for low quality low effort everything?”

And I’d probably answer “yes, that is our every day”

Not crazy, just sad.

Middle of the day, sitting at our desks working. This middle aged guy who was usually happy as Larry gets up and leaves the office leaving his stuff behind. Not a word said. I just assumed he was getting a coffee or something.

End of the day rolls around, stuff still there. Same thing the next day. Still there the next week.

People start asking what happened to him, but the agency he was working through kept telling us he’s coming back soon.

Over a month later, someone packs up his stuff and puts it in the bin. The guy was never coming back, turns out he went left and ended his own life the day he walked out. Never made it home.

The agency apparently only found out he was dead a few weeks after the incident, then strung us along so they could find a replacement. We terminated their contract and offered the handful of other employees jobs.

———

Another job, we had a new guy start. Very conventionally attractive and he seemed normal enough.

A few weeks later one of the women complained to HR that someone was stalking her. She was getting ‘flattering’ letters, emails, notes etc and they often contained information and photos in/about/around her work. Flattering, but not something she was comfortable with

Few weeks later, we’re told new guy won’t be coming back due to inappropriate behaviour.

Woman had to get a restraining order against the guy. In a twist of irony, she said that if the guy had just talked to her, she would have gone on a date with him in a heartbeat.

You can find some stuff on AliExpress usually by misspelling brands. Eg Abidas or Adimas. Or if you know the product just search for that.

But just because you bought a counterfeit from a stall, where the vendor couldn’t hide the bad quality, doesn’t mean you’re going to get the same quality online.

I used to love ‘the cloud’. Rather, a specific slice of it.

I worked almost exclusively on AppEngine, it was simple. You uploaded a zip of your code to appengine and it ran it at near infinite scale. They gave you a queue, a database, a volatile cache, and some other gizmos. It was so simple you’d struggle to fuck it up really.

It was easy, it was simple, and it worked for my clients who had 10 DAU, and my clients who had 5 million DAU. Costs scaled nearly linearly, and for my hobby projects that had 0 DAU, the costs were comparable.

Then something happened and it slowly became complicated. The rest of the GCP cloud crept in and after spending a term with a client who didn’t use “the cloud” I came back to it and had to relearn nearly everything.

Pretty much all of the companies I’ve worked for could be run on early AppEngine. Nobody has needed anything more than it, and I’m confident the only reason they had more was because tech is like water. You need to put it in a bucket or it goes everywhere.

Give me my AppEngine back. It allowed me to focus on my (or my clients) problems. Not the ones that come with the platform.

I was maybe a little inebriated, and he was very rude.

He had to wait for the next train, and I had a sore jaw for a week. Mild inconveniences al round. I think everyone got what they deserved.

Threw a man’s belongings off a train because he was listening to music without headphones.

Worth it.

He was a shareholder and board member too. He 100% was an instigator.

I worked for a tech company that went through an acquisition. The GM for my department knew what was up and insulated everyone from it.

6 months later, redundencies for every department but ours.

He also just told us what he wanted, and not how he wanted things done. Probably one of my best bosses tbh.

They were first to market with a decent GPGPU toolkit (CUDA) which built them a pretty sizeable userbase.

Then when competitors caught up, they made it as hard as possible to transition away from their ecosystem.

Like Apple, but worse.

I guess they learned from their Gaming heyday that not controlling the abstraction layer (eg OpenGL, DirectX, etc) means they can’t do lock in.

While suing everyone else that makes shovel handles that work with your shovel heads.

I should probably be doing it anyway, but back to wearing masks in store.

Problem then is, You Still gotta buy a truck to buy and haul your 2nd motorcycle, your 3rd motorcycle, your dirt bike, and your track bike.

It’ll most likely mean the people running stuff in the background. payroll, asset management and purchasing, IT staff, etc.

These people will have an impact on ‘crime fighting’, but marginally. Eg. If there’s a problem with payroll it might mean the police officers are paid a day or two late. Or maybe office supplies aren’t kept well stocked in station.

But it might also be anyone who’s not an “officer”. So police station support/maintenance, mechanics, analysts (people who help the police analyse gathered intelligence), 111 operators, etc.

This would probably have significant impacts on ‘crime fighting’. 500 extra police isn’t going to be as effective if police cars are broken, intelligence isn’t accurate, or there’s a wait time on 111.

Alternate headline:

Companies accept money for a thing that will happen anyway, and will be unable to prove if they say no.

GenAi is unfortunately here, and the technocracy wants you to want it so they can farm you for more and more intimate data to leverage and enforce their technocracy. And the only way they’re going to do it is by keeping the press positive, and feed it more and more data in the hopes it fixes things.