For a while there, after hitting 50, I was kind of happy they thought I looked so young. 🤔

Find a local special interest group that gets together to practice. Check meetup.

It could be FOMO. Personally, I see value in keeping social media from children. The problem is I don’t believe this is all about that. As usual, it’s all about surveillance.

XMPP works through gateways, so any SMP or PBX Voice call is routed through the standard network, so is not secure. VOIP and the XMPP chat features, however, can be secure and private. The encryption exists and you can host your own servers, which covers both of the privacy concerns.

I’m old enough to remember when network television didn’t cut important scenes from shows in order to show me commercials.

If these businesses are getting so much efficiency from laying off their employees, why do they need increasingly more advertising?

I doubt there are enough of us who block (when it is even possible) to seriously affect revenue.

Also, if they can break their contract with me to pay for a service with no commercials and force me to watch them anyway, I have no compunctions with denying them the extra profit.

I did it recently because it was only way to update my Lenovo Legion BIOS. I bought an SSD on a stick, so it is a fully accelerated windows to go installed via Rufus.

The main problem with USB drive setups is the xfer speed of SDRAM, so I suggest you go for an SSD stick.

And heck, I’m on Ubuntu and have no problems. I played BGIII and Cyberpunk 2077, full graphics,no glitches. Currently back on Skyrim with a couple hundred mods using Vortex.

Any Linux distro with Protontricks should be fine.

I had the same issue for a Lenovo bios update. I finally just installed windows to go on an ssd memory stick and booted that to do the update.

Yes, I am nuanced enough to understand the security issues and respect that - on their equipment.

As for monitoring, there is a very large and prosperous market for products to do exactly that, and we are frequently told we have no right to privacy on company equipment.

The watched pot never boils. The watched employee is constantly distracted, stressed, and wondering when he will be admonished or fired for something he doesn’t even know is a problem.

I had to read up on that to know what it was about. While I’m all in on unions and collective bargaining, I’m not keen on Communism as a political approach. the original idea was a plausible answer to the woes of the struggle between groups of people, but it does not acknowledge that the problem is human behavior. Specifically, a portion of the population that will always seek dominance, regardless of the means or declared ideology. This is what happened with Communism. The assassination of the white revolution in order to insert the red revolution is class 101 in that fact. The United States’ founders understood this, which is why I’m still behind the checks and balances approach to power.

Yes, it eventually is subverted and must be re-established (sometimes forcefully) but it is as Churchill said, Democracy is the worst form of government… except for all the rest.

Yes, I do tend to over explain and it does annoy people, especially my son. I have a near pathological need to make sure others understand the why. I’m working on it.

Been looking into Stoicism lately, and not explaining yourself (to people who don’t care or can’t comprehend) is one of the tenents - not wasting precious energy.

Aha, okay. It would have been redundant to put that in there since we had just gone through that process together. I’d also mentioned my reservations in earlier emails.

Thanks for explaining it, it didn’t occur to me. You are right though about alternatives. He’d actually offered to seek another way, but I was emotionally unable to accept that at the time due to all the effort already sunk. For me it was cutting my losses, and I might have done myself a disservice there.

It comes from knowing how the tools work. AARP has job campaign workshops where they help redesign resumes to first be successfully read, and then include the exact keywords the seek. Then it is up to you to carefully study the job description to modify your resume to match the needs, while remaining honest, of course.

This, you do for every job. Basically, it’s okay for businesses to lean on AI and automation, but applicants are cheating when they do that. Hypocrisy at its most pure.

Yeah, the check for things like invisible text,etc.

Well, as a .NET developer, until a few years ago, that hang-up would have been totally justified.

I kept windows in some form for .NET development until Core became viable. Even now I have to keep it around, even in hardware bootable form. VM is insufficient when windows is required to update the BIOS. (Thanks, Lenovo.)

In some respects, I feel ADHD works well with software engineering and hyperfocus can be a superpower. However, increasingly the barriers to entry explicitly require behavior that disqualifies ADHD at the door.

Asking me to give a concise, accurate, and confident answer in something I haven’t thought about in a year, under pressure, generally results in spectacular failure. Ten minutes after the meeting, however, I can recite nuances on the topic most people never consider. Too bad there’s nobody to hear it.

You are channeling my feelings. In this case, the instructions said Firefox or Chrome, but it had to be Google chrome, since that’s the most invasive and Firefox was not working. It’s when he said try Chrome that I finally said to myself, “what the fuck am I doing?” And ended it.

I hate cloudfare. I use vpn so about 30% of the time I’m banned because some asshole use that IP for bad behavior. Usually fixed with a reconnect. However, the other 70% of the time I have to “prove I am human”. It’s exhausting.

I was eager to try Qubes a few years ago, and toyed with it. At the time it was not playing well with windows and setting up the is templates looked a bit annoying, so I dropped it with intent to revisit after a major version or two. I think now is a good time to pick it up.

I’ve worked in large corporations. Many times such decisions are made without knowing important gotchas. It’s often a result of sleazy marketing by vendors.

You mean like my last job. Yes, it was the insulting treatment at my most recent employer that gave me an extra bit of self respect that pushed me to make that decision. The proverbial last straw.

I was afraid that might be the collective response. Fortunately, that was not the case.

I am saddened so many had similar experiences, but glad I am not alone in my disgust and dismay at the state of affairs.

What in my writing gave you that sense? Perhaps I can improve my communication for the future.