Okay, the cross platform part makes it make a little sense. They're trying to push everything over to arm (again!) and having something easy to cross compile would help..... But, you know .... The start menu is small potatoes compared to gestures at the rest of Windows ...

Is this a representation of self?

.... I mean, is this me?

One time, I was walking down the street with my brother and a junebug flew right into the side of my neck. My instinctual reaction to this was to freak the fuck out, flail my arms and jump about a meter to the side away from where I was hit.

.... That all happened in about 0.087 seconds.

Yes, I jumped sideways.

I don't think that the otter minds being called thicc.

Who was the apology for exactly?

I just want to talk at the fellas here. Man to man.

If you do this shit, the women will leave and not come back. I know the incels are going to think that's typical female behavior, and I'm here to say, no, it's not. It's typical for someone, of any gender, to want to exit a situation where they feel vulnerable, and that's what is happening.

Think of it like this: you end up in prison, and your naked, alone, you have no allies or friends, while taking a shower with about 100 other dudes, and Bubba comes over with a grin saying "you're awful pretty". How would you feel? I'm guessing you would want to nope the hell out of there and never take a shower with Bubba in the room, ever again. And that's natural. You were in danger, you want to avoid that danger. While the circumstances might be different for the women you're interacting with, that raw emotion, the exact same one you would have felt with Bubba talking about how pretty you are, the feeling that gave you, it's exactly the same.

Now think, after Bubba made such a statement, what could Bubba do to win your trust to shower next to them again at all? Probably not much. Same deal fellas. There's little to nothing you can do or say to make them feel comfortable being around you when you've done something that inspires that unsafe feeling of danger.

Now, how could Bubba avoid the situation of you feeling like you're in danger and wanting to get out of there. A reassurance? Like Bubba instead saying "don't worry, I'll protect you".... You're going to wonder "from what?" Because until Bubba spoke up, you had no feeling of danger. How does that make you feel? Well, I would feel like there's danger that Bubba knows about that I don't, so now I'm on edge, looking for what Bubba is talking about, and all of a sudden, I'm having the same feeling of danger, just this time from an unknown assailant. That's not good either. I'd still want to gtfo and not go back. Worse now since I don't know what the danger actually is. Not only would I not want to shower with Bubba nearby like in the previous scenario, but now I don't want to be left alone with anyone.

Same deal fellas. By trying to reassure the lady, you imply that there's danger indirectly; she gets creeped out and leaves to not come back.

So, what's the right thing to do here?

It's easier than you think. Treat them like you would any of your male friends. Treat them like a person. You don't need to reassure your male friends that you'll protect them, nor do you feel the need to defend them when their "honor" is challenged. Let them handle it, but have their back if they need you.... and only if they need you.

Be a friend first, and if something happens that makes your relationship with that person, more than just friends, so much the better. Don't expect it, women aren't slot machines, where you put in enough tokens of niceness and eventually you win the sex jackpot. It doesn't work that way. It never has, and it never will. You can't force someone to like you, and if you try, you'll either take any attraction that they might have had for you, and destroy it, and/or simply cause them to feel unsafe and creeped out, and they'll find a way to exit and never return.

People, regardless of gender, just want to do things they enjoy. If you also enjoy those things, then engage in the enjoyment of those things with the other people who enjoy them. Don't make it about gender. If, beyond that, you both like eachother, you'll find a way to spend more time together and that's when things can grow to more than just being friendly, as long as you're both agreeable to it.

If you continually obsess over the fact that their anatomy is different, you'll end up filling whatever negative ideas you have about the other gender, and push yourself so deep into a hole of confirmation bias that you may never recover. Just be people. Treat others the same, as people.

I believe in you. You can do better. Always improving.

You will fall, you will be rejected, you will have set backs. And that's all normal. It's a part of learning. You got this.

I work with Windows as a requirement of my job, I'm in IT and I'm constantly in and out of the bowels of the operating system. I have a lot of thoughts on this stuff.

My first thought is, stop moving everything around. Even in Windows 10, if you're using an older version, say 1804, and you switch to a newer version, say 22H2, stuff is moved all over the place. It makes it super hard to direct someone blindly to the control they need to click to get something done. You're making my job much harder than it needs to be. Stop it. There's no reason to move this crap around.

To bring out my grumpy old man routine: back in my day, if you wanted to do anything, you went to the control panel. Everything you needed was there. Now it's in settings, no wait, clicking on this settings option for that thing now launches an appx thing that, surprisingly (/s) is broken.

Too many damn times have I tried to open their damned settings app or the new defender security appx dialog simply crashes. The solution is almost always dkim online repair. Well, if it needs repair so damn much, how about you just repair it for me as part of system maintenance? The fuck.

Windows 11 is a special form of suffering. Right clicking on a file and.... What the fuck is this? I basically click on "more settings" every time I right click. And the changes to the settings application.... Don't get me started.

Also, why in the fuck do we have copilot installed by default now? You're an operating system, stay in your goddamned lane.

The only good thing I can say about Windows 11 is that it has really good security. So good that I frequently have trouble doing routine things. Today, I was trying to run a PowerShell script and it told me some bullshit error, which is pretty common for PowerShell. After googling the error, the recommendation was to change the execution policy. I went to do that at an administrative PowerShell prompt and it told me that I didn't have access to change it. While running as the administrator. Yay. Shit is broken again. Fuck me I guess. I'm off to unfuck my less than five month old new work system because Microsoft can't get their shit straight.

Customization options do not and cannot help me. 90% of the time I'm working on someone else's computer, so I have to fucking deal with the default behavior because I'm not going to change it for 500+ users whom I support. I'm pretty sure I'd get more than a few complaints. So I have to fucking deal with whatever hairbrained decision Microsoft made about what should be default.

Windows 10 had its own share of bullshit. One of my most common annoyances was the way the OS decided to install fucking candy crush, every fucking time a new user logged into the goddamned computer. It's like playing whack-a-mole, but not fun and filled with uninstalls. I hope Microsoft made some good money on that brand deal, because I sure paid for it with my frustration.

After all of this, I keep finding myself in the fucking registry, and thank God that's one thing that hasn't been fucked over by their new UI team. I keep having to fix dumb issues by injecting registry keys so I can not deal with the stupid UI all the goddamned time. It's hacky, and I'm happier for it.

I could keep going. Pretty much every decision they've made in the past 5 years has been some measure of bad. The only thing I've agreed with them doing is finally ending internet explorer. Begrudgingly, edge is better, but not by a lot, IMO.

The last thing I'll say is that the tpm bullshit is going to give me an aneurysm. Having a TPM at Windows install usually prompts the system to activate bitlocker. Bitlocker itself isn't bad, but it's fucking terrible when windows does this shit and doesn't really inform the user about it. Nobody knows that they need to back up their goddamned bitlocker recovery keys, so inevitably, when something goes wrong (we're talking about Windows here, something will go wrong) and the system stops booting, you need the fucking bitlocker recovery key to do anything. Your option, if you can call it that, if you can't get the recovery key, is to format all of your shit, and reinstall from scratch. I know several people who have lost a lot of work and irreplaceable files, like pictures, because bitlocker fucked them over and they had no idea it was even running.

Sorry about your loss, but all those family photos you saved that don't exist anywhere else are locked behind basically uncrackable encryption, get fucked, I guess.

I'm going to cut this rant off. Needless to say I'm pretty tired of Microsoft's bullshit. Make an operating system. That's what people want. That's it. We shouldn't need "debloat" scripts to fix your nonsense. Gah.

The act of someone sitting at a brand new Mac, with a never-before-used interface, and immediately clicking the computer icon to drag it to the trash, is such a powerful image for me.

The statement of, "this is what I think of this computer" is so strong, because I have to believe that whomever did that must have been a tech person to be at the event; but perhaps they just thought it was a shortcut and didn't like shortcuts on their desktop so they tried to remove it? Like, you can do this with Windows.... Because the computer object (in Explorer) is immutable, and any reference to it is simply a link to that object.

I prefer the thought of them just being like "this computer is trash" and doing that, and causing the system to crash.

I consider Gates to be "better" than most billionaires, but, I recognize that he's still a billionaire, and as such, his philanthropic endeavors are as much about him having wealth and maintaining his wealth as they are about him being a "good person".

Let me explain: it's a tax write off. Basically, billionaires often donate to charity, not because they're particularly giving, but because it reduces their taxes. They basically take the money they would otherwise pay in tax, and instead pay it to a charity that then does whatever they do with it.

By establishing a charity for himself, he can personally pay his charity the money that would otherwise go to tax, then as the charity, dictate where those funds are spent. Instead of giving the money to someone else to do with as they will, he basically pays himself, so he can dictate what happens with his money.

In turn, he pays little to no taxes, and only has to ensure the money circles around his charity somehow. That may be in the form of paying himself (or others) as a function of running the charity, or sending the money to places and people who he believes can benefit from it (or indirectly, benefit him).

It becomes a large circle jerk of money that otherwise would have gone to the government for taxes.

EDIT: before this gets any worse: he's not making money with tax write-offs. That's literally impossible. The point is to control where your money goes. Here's an example. In situation A, bill, the individual, wants a thing to happen.... Say, it's research into a new form of energy. So Bill takes $1000 from his gross income and pays someone to research that thing to make it a reality. At the end of the year, bill gets a knock on the door, it's the tax man, looking for his cut off the $1000 bill earned. His cut is 30% or $300. Now let's move to situation B. Bill wants the thing to happen, but Bill owns a charity. So Bill donates the money to his charity and gets a tax write off for it in the form of a receipt that he can submit later. As a representative of the charity, bill then pays that $1000 to people to make the thing. At the end of the year, the tax man comes calling for his $300 of bills income. Instead, bill hands the tax collector the receipt for the charitable donation he made with the $1000 of income. The tax man accepts it and leaves with nothing.

The charity is a tax shelter so that bill has more money available to spend on the things he wants to have happen. So more of his money can go towards those things without being taxed.

I hope that clears it up a bit. Jesus, there's a lot of people here that don't understand tax write-offs. There's more that simply don't understand me, or have literacy issues, and assume far too much about what I'm saying here. Yikes.

As an IT guy, start a ticket.

Those update messages are likely from an automated system, and the updates are probably controlled by a completely independent system that nobody looks at regularly.

By submitting exactly what you did here as a ticket to the IT team, you're pushing them to check in on those systems and approve updates that haven't been approved.

Yes, it's dumb. The updates should be automatically approved. Obviously they're not, or something has prevented them from approving it.

Personally, as IT, if I get a ticket about this, I'd want to dig into why the update wasn't approved and make sure future updates get approved without delay; solving both the immediate issue and all related issues in the future. However, if I'm not aware of the issue, I can't really fix it. From their view, they likely only see a dashboard of all devices and yours (along with others) are probably flagged as needing an update. This is extremely common and probably entirely ignored under normal circumstances. Almost every one of the systems I administrate at work have updates that are pending. Either the system hasn't been restarted (mainly desktops and servers and such) or, if it's reliant on a user taking action, I assume the user doesn't care enough about the update to bother running it.... The idea that the update hasn't been approved or that there's a problem getting or applying the update, doesn't even enter my brain as a possibility until someone complains. Simply put, I don't have time to investigate every pending update that has not yet been applied. You'd almost need a dedicated person just to keep an eye on updates in order to keep on top of them, and nobody pays an IT person solely to look after updates.

So I'm busy fixing Debbie's printer, and Joe's scanner, and Frank's email that's slowing the date in that strange format again because he somehow changed his regional settings to the UK again....

Do your IT team a favour and send them this. I promise you that they'll be grateful, even if they don't seem like it. Bluntly, this is a perfect amount of information.

I get requests that range from "please call me when you have a chance" to "this specific function in this specific program is doing a thing that's different from what I see on a coworker's screen and I like how their screen shows it better because it reminds me of my grandchild's grade 3 school play where they played a tree." Ok Linda, thanks, I really didn't need to know about little Timmy's school play.... Users either give us nothing, or way too much irrelevant data. So this image shows exactly what is required for a diagnosis. Either the messages will be stopped or the update will be approved.

I took economics in my college days and this is a very stark example of people who are bad at economics.

Everything costs money. You can relate everything to a dollar amount in business. From labor, to time spent, to equipment and it's use, the cost of fuel for transportation etc. Knowing the full cost of selling an item including the time spent making it, the supplies used, the failure rate where you need to replace it at no cost to the customer, everything should be able to be factored in. From there you can set the cost of something, taking the overall price for all involved aspects of creating the thing, and adding some profit margin.

Spending a dollar to make a dime is adequate. If your economic costs are a dollar and you sell the thing for $1.10 then you make money. Sell enough and that's business.

With all that being said, the cost of transit fares should be set with the expectation that there will be unavoidable times where people will ride for free. Whether that's because of gate jumping, or other fare avoidance, or that someone simply entered into the system in an unexpected way that bypassed the fare system, or if it's simply that a fare was given out as courtesy, it's all baked into the fares that everyone pays.

The only time chasing down the people intentionally skipping their fare, makes any sense is if that amount of loss because of fare skipping is significantly above the expected losses from fare skipping. Googling it, the NYC transit system has a gross revenue around 5.8 billion dollars. Which means the amount of revenue to be gained by chasing down ~$100k in losses is around 0.0017%

If, the process of chasing down the fares costs over 1000% more than the fares are worth to do it, then the simple answer is: don't do it. That's basic economics.

In addition, they garner so much negative publicity in that process that they damage their reputation needlessly, which may lead to additional spending to improve their public image.

Finally, if you don't have more than 0.002% of your earnings set aside for losses like this, then you shouldn't be running the business. In reality, that number should be much, much higher than 0.002%.

To conclude: the whole thing is stupid from the outset. Tracking the losses makes sense, so you know what the figures are. Once you know the figures, crunching the numbers to see if pursuing action against the perpetrators is trivial, and should show a very clear picture of whether to take action or not.

In this case, no action was appropriate. Instead, they spent $150 million to get their public image ruined chasing after a bit more than $100k, and they will likely spend $100M more to try to repair their public image.

The losers in this situation? The people.

I remember reading about this. He was actually lost, in that he strayed from his trail and didn't immediately know how to return.

Rescuers were alerted because a family member had reported him missing after he didn't arrive home on time.

As the story goes, to the best of my recollection, the "lost" individual went for a hike and said they would be back before sundown. When they got lost, they obviously missed that deadline. They were biding their time in the forest until daybreak to try to find the trail to get back because it was too dark to look for it. So while he was "lost" it was mainly because the sun had gone down. He didn't feel like he was in any danger, and wasn't at any risk of immediately being harmed or killed; AFAIK they were reasonably familiar with that forest and they were more than capable of surviving in those conditions; so he had no motivation to seek help.

TL;DR: guy didn't feel like he needed help.

I'll start with: I believe Madison.

I honestly did not even know that she had left, so all of this is news to me. I assumed that she went into a role that suited what she wanted to do (like production or editing or something with no significant on camera time), and was still there. I usually avoid following anything so closely that I'm aware of whatever drama they get into. Which isn't to imply that Madison's experience is mere drama, because it's not. This is an egregious HR violation on all fronts, and bluntly, if Madison still has any evidence of any of this, a lawyer would do well to pick up her case at no cost to Madison; as far as I'm concerned, with any level of evidence, especially right now with the PR nightmare they're currently weathering, they'll want to settle quickly (if they have any sense left in their heads whatsoever).... And Madison can walk away with a very reasonable pay off for all this mental anguish.

Of course, money doesn't un-do the fact that it happened.

On the surface, to me, this looks like LMG hired Madison to appease the masses, partly evidenced by the fact that he announced that he had done so before she was even made aware that they were interested in bringing her on board, which seems to be a trend with Linus now - saying things have happened when he simply rubber stamps the approval to go ahead and start the process.... Then "allowed" her to appear on camera enough to show that yes, she does work here... Then as the hype from fans died down and stopped being a benefit to the company, slowly berated her into leaving quietly so schmucks like me (anyone that's not so dedicated that they read the LTT forums daily), are unaware, and they don't lose viewers.

The workload described, at first didn't sound too bad, busy, sure, but not bad. Some Twitter posts, FB posts, a few tiktoks daily... Yeah ok. That's a fairly reasonable bar to set, a little high IMO, but ok.... Then she went on. And on.... And on.... What the fuck? I get the idea that it's "only social media" so some think it's "not really like working" (which I don't agree with, I just understand why people think that), since managing your own social media is fairly trivial, but when managing it for someone else, you have to constantly check yourself and consider "is this me saying it? Or is this the right tone and perspective for what the company would say?" Because if you say the wrong thing, you're reprimanded, or fired. That kind of mental gymnastics is rough; and having to do that for a dozen posts a day is a lot of work to accomplish alone, and you're probably going to make some mistakes unless you can bounce the posts off of someone like a long term employee or manager to make sure that the message isn't straying from the brand you represent.

I've personally been in plenty of scenarios where I've been over worked. It happens. When being overworked is basically your job duties, that's unreasonable in every way.

On top of that the dismissive and demeaning treatment isn't going to help. I'm not surprised that Madison noped the fuck out, and it's sad that happened, and more sad that she felt that she shouldn't even say anything. It's unsurprising that she left and that she had such a major impact to her mental health by being there... Honestly, it's almost surprising that she stayed as long as she did.... And this isn't even addressing the sexual misconduct. I know for me, when I think "sexual assault" I'm thinking the worst case scenario, and bluntly, some of the comments that she relays (like "you've never gotten drunk with us") makes me think that could have happened... But it's not exclusive to that. This is sexual assault. She was sexually harassed and sexually assaulted by staff and bluntly, I hope she names and shames those who were involved. This is unacceptable in any and every way in the workplace and everywhere else. Madison's gender, sexual orientation, preferences, history, everything, is entirely personal, and discussions of such things in a workplace is completely unacceptable. If she wanted to offer up such information of her own volition, sure, but berating her about it, and harassing or demeaning her about it is completely unwelcome both socially, and legally.

IMO, Madison has a legal case if she ever chooses to pursue it.... I think she should but I understand why she hasn't, and isn't.

As for LTT and LMG, I'm extremely disappointed that Madison was set up to fail like this. I get that it's a bit of a boys locker room, where most of the staff are "one of the guys" regardless of who they are or what gender they are, and ribbing is part of that. Clearly this was above and beyond it and from what people said to Madison after she left, her treatment was worse than most.... Well beyond a good ribbing, and others could tell. Anyone who participates in ribbing among friends can recognise when they've gone too far. IMO, it was clear that they had, and they just kept doing it. No part of that is ok. The staff then took it further and further into sexual harassment and assault, and the management team was complacent. This is wholly unacceptable on LMG's side. Their behaviour is reprehensible.

I hope Madison is doing better. I'll probably track down her twitch and throw her a sub, because she deserves it, and never deserved to be treated the way she was. I don't know what she's doing now, but I wish her all the success in the world.