My GF is a ghost writer. The publisher has her write into files that are uploaded to a shared platform where editors and other creatives and execs tweak and move each chapter through several named states (represented by different folders), until it reaches "Final."

She gets paid per X words. Come the day before the deadline for payroll, they (sometimes, often its late) open up the payroll system, and she has to re-upload the Final chapter to a folder in that tracking system. Tonight (when they opened the system for her), she has to enter 130 chapters by 10am tomorrow.

It's not just moving a file. She has to download the Final chapter, select the text, copy/paste into the payroll tracking system, and then fix formatting that their silly system creates, like extra spaces, double quotes, etc. Each chapter can take minutes. These pasted chapters are then the final product. She has to stay up all night until its done, or she won't get paid on time.

I feel like she's being taken advantage of, doing admin work for free. This feels like someone else's job. Is this even compliant with labor laws? Is it legal to have her do 12hrs of gruelling repetitive labor to move her completed text like this? Her being paid is conditional on her entering this data.

I know hourly employees must be paid for hours worked, whether it was tracked or not, and tracking is an employer responsibility.

Edit: added more words

If a dearth of officers results in higher crime rates, Phoenix residents need to remember cops walked away from the job because they didn’t want to do if it required respecting constitutional rights. And if the city has trouble attracting replacements, that says far more about the people attracted to law enforcement careers than the specifics of the job itself.

cross-posted from: https://reddthat.com/post/21412303

Water shed map of the Great Lakes

Edit: to be clear, I mean the original post. Thx for anyone checking

I haven't run windows since 2019. However I need to boot my old drive to grab some data. I really need to make sure this system doesn't update any windows components, but I'll need it to have internet access for a portion of the time.

On a different system, I used to have two reg keys that I would run to disable or enable updates when I found that disabling the services only worked until the watchdog would re enable them. Those resulted in updates saying something was wrong, which is perfect by me.

Now that web searches for stuff like this are all AI-gen'd SEO BS, can anyone tell me or point me to a reliable resource for truly disabling updates on Win 10?

PS - Bonus points if Anyone can link me to the page I used a few years back that had all sorts of privacy enhancing and telemetry disabling option on the left side and would create a reg file for applying those changes on the right. It might have been a purple theme, I forget.

Edit: it may also have been a "services" command that fully disabled services from CLI where the GUI says access denied. I forget.

Edit 2: I got the updates services disabled via registry. Thanks to those who refreshed my old Windows admin memory. I dumped Windows on my personal systems years ago, and haven't had to think about this for a while. It's a shame when the operating system changes to this model of SaaS where they call all the shots. I want security updates, but not bleeding edge drivers, candy crush, "feature enhancements", random unexpected reboots, etc. I miss when the update feature didn't assume nobody in the world could handle manual updates. You know, like sudo apt-get update.

When I use yt-dlp -x to grab audio only, the resulting opus files are often troublesome to play back in strawberry, stopping unexpectedly. They also sometimes don't index at all, and metadata including embedded cover art don't seem to stick.

So, since most of my library is already vorbis in OGG files, I have been converting the files, but my inexperience with audio codecs and YouTube audio formats in general is shining through. I use 320kbps, but the resulting files are typically about twice the size afterward. I'm thinking I'm probably wasting space for no reason.

What is a comparable bitrate for the OGG files for a given bitrate opus source file?

EDIT: Here is my conversion script find ./ -iname "*.opus" | parallel --load 0.9 ffmpeg -i {} -c:a libvorbis -b:a 320k "{.}.ogg"

EDIT2: Here is the updated version with a suggestion from @Supermariofan67@programming.dev find ./ -iname "*.opus" | parallel --load 0.9 ffmpeg -i {} -c:a libvorbis -q:a 6 "{.}.ogg" which results in only slightly larger files (5.4MB > 7.2MB).

Received notice of a change to the service in my inbox today. Seems icky to me.

Devices in the network use Bluetooth to scan for nearby items. If other devices detect your items, they’ll securely send the locations where the items were detected to Find My Device. Your Android devices will do the same to help others find their offline items when detected nearby

Your devices’ locations will be encrypted using the PIN, pattern, or password for your Android devices. They can only be seen by you and those you share your devices with in Find My Device. They will not be visible to Google or used for other purposes.

ETA: here's the link to opt out: opt out of the network

Stats
Age - ~10yrs
Weight - 10lbs
Claws - present and trimmed twice monthly
Disposition - Alpha male, but gets scared of his 7lbs sister when predator mode is activated
Favorite food - spicy chip crumbs
Intelligence on 1 to 10 - 6 (kind of derpy but knows about twenty words and does tricks for food)

History
Charlie was a wild feral trapped in 2017 by a shelter in Maine as part of a spay/neuter program (hence the missing ear tip). When they prepared to release him to the wild again, he had come down with a respiratory infection, and had to be treated for over a month. During that time, he became docile toward some people, so they decided to try to adopt him. They named him Banana. Prospective parents didn't like him because he was indifferent at best or hissing and growling at worst. He also didn't get along with other cats. We're suckers for cats with hard stories, so we scooped him up and brought him home as our only cat (for a time), where he quickly became my buddy. He was 13 pounds when we brought him home, but he's a much more lithe weight now. He lives with a 7 year old female tabby who is tiny and forever kitten. She and Charlie play a lot, and no matter how much he bullies her, she always gets right back in his face and doesn't back down. When he can't find her, he cries; not from loneliness, but fear of where her tiny sharp teeth will come out of hiding from.

I'll be sharing fun pictures of Charlie and his sister from time to time. Enjoy your weekend, Lemmy!

When using qBitTorrent to download Linux ISOs, I am seeing that the total size of the download is one thing, then the total downloaded when complete exceeds (sometimes by almost double) that size.

For example:

Size           Downloaded  
900MB            1.56GB
1.6GB            1.91GB

Why is that thing?