On the other side of the same coin: When I mass edited my comments before quitting Reddit, I got site-banned. Basically, my first account’s automated edit got me auto-banned from several subs with pro-spez mods. Some subs had set their automod to detect when people were using the more popular methods of auto-editing, and set the automod to ban for using them. Then when I did the same with my second (and third, and fourth, and fifth, etc…) account, it almost immediately got site-banned for ban evasion.

Basically, account 1 was banned from a sub, so when account 2 started doing the same thing on the same IP address, it was flagged as ban evasion. And ban evasion is one of the few things that will get you banned site-wide instead of just from a specific sub.

I went back and checked a few months ago, and all of those site bans were lifted and the edits were undone. Likely because a site ban prevents the comments from showing up (which hurts Reddit’s bottom line, because they show up as a bunch of [removed] comments instead,) but also prevented any of the edits from actually being published. So when they lifted the site ban (to get those old comments to show back up again) it was as if I had never edited them at all. I had probably a million karma spread across my various accounts. I was extremely active at one point, so Reddit had a direct incentive to unban those accounts with literal thousands of comments.

That still sounds pretty humane. Maybe a wood chipper… Feet first.

Many have theorized that the MuskJet Tracker account was the biggest reason he purchased Twitter. Because Twitter refused to ban the tracker, so Musk started rumbling about buying it, in an attempt to intimidate them into compliance. Then that backfired on him when Twitter forced the sale.

Oh and there's probably less of an emphasis on hiring business majors since the workers on the floor tend to have a better idea of how damaging decisions that seem to make more money on paper can be.

There’s also the idea that as employees rise through the ranks, they have a better understanding of how their old jobs are done. Let’s say you’re in a manufacturing job: Nothing is worse than being managed by a business degree who doesn’t even know how to turn on the equipment you use every day. Because that manager has no idea what is and isn’t possible to do with the machinery, what kinds of timeframes to expect from jobs, etc… So you’ll end up getting unrealistic expectations, based purely on numbers on paper.

There’s a huge difference between a game featuring politics as a sandbox for players to play around with, and featuring political themes as a main story driver.

Civ is a good example of the former; It has politics present in the game, but the politics aren’t presented in a hero/villain way. They’re presented as potential advantages for the player, potential disadvantages for opponents, etc, but the actual policies themselves aren’t central to the system.

The game pulls from historical political systems as a way to present them to the player, but it could just as easily forego that and call the system some made up word besides “political systems”. Because the politics and policies aren’t actually important to the gameplay; All that matters to the player is what potential benefits and drawbacks they provide. You don’t actually care if a particular civ is “democratic” or “totalitarian”, because those titles could just as easily be replaced with “A” and “B”. The only thing that matters to the player is how that particular civ’s political affiliation will affect their actions.

But if a game heavily features political themes and messages as part of a plot line, then it’s not something the player can avoid or ignore. If it’s central to the story, one side (likely the side helping the player) is inevitably going to be presented as the hero, and another side (likely the side working against the player) is going to be presented as a villain. Final Fantasy X, for instance, is a good example of the latter. It heavily features anti-religion themes and messages. It’s impossible to play through the game without receiving “religion bad” messaging, because they’re central to the game’s plot line, with religious leaders as the main villains. We can draw direct parallels to real-world examples. And if you’re someone who is religious, those parallels may make you deeply uncomfortable, because religion is being portrayed negatively no matter how you play the game.

Yup, this list is biased as hell. It was trying to determine iconic characters. Put Mario and Lara Croft in front of a 90 year old person. They’ll recognize Mario immediately, but almost certainly won’t recognize Croft. Hell, I’d put Bowser, Peach, and Luigi over Croft.

Yup. Rand() chooses a random float value for each entry. By default I believe it’s anywhere between 0 and 1. So it may divide the first bill by .76, then the second by .23, then the third by 0.63, etc… So you’d end up with a completely garbage database because you can’t even undo it by multiplying all of the numbers by a set value.

For real though, I have written some truly monstrous operations in Excel.

What do you mean you want to use Excel to manage everyone’s calendars? And now you want to export that horribly built calendar management spreadsheet to Google Calendar? What do you mean you want the Google Calendar entries automatically formatted based on who is working on a particular day? I mean yes it’s possible but-…

And every piece of code you think you write for one-time use is guaranteed to be reused every day for the next 5 years

The scheduling demand thing is referring specifically to the project manager going “we need this for an upcoming major product launch, so you need to fix this before the launch.” It feels like Microsoft cracking the whip to try getting free labor, because it is.

If they truly can’t do without it for their product launch, they can fork it and fix the bug themselves. Surely Microsoft has the resources and brainpower to do so. But the PM didn’t want to do that, because it means they’d be spending their own time and resources on it.

Yeah, it’s always interesting to see how newspapers will twist the English language to keep using passive voice with cops. It’s not “cops kill innocent” it’s “innocent killed by police’s gunfire.” Notice that in the former, it’s the cops actively killing, while in the latter it’s the victim who is listed first, then the gunfire is what is active. It’s a small bit of psychology to make the police’s actions seem more distant and removed from the situation.

Yup. Middle management’s #1 priority is justifying their own jobs. If nobody is in the office and their “management” boils down to watching a bunch of green “available” pips in Teams to see if any of them dare to turn into yellow “away” pips, then that can be outsourced or automated. So they’re clambering to get people back into the office, so they can make a point of strolling through the cubicle jungle and harassing their employees.

I think a lot of that is over-correction due to trolls. Because “both sides are the same” is a common trolling tactic to discourage democrat votes. So many democrats will assume by default that criticisms about Biden (even when true) will eventually lead to “both sides” trolling. So they just automatically skip straight to step 5 of the argument and start calling you a troll.

Typically speaking, you’d want to cut instead of boost. Cutting is easy; You just reduce the volume. Boosting is much more complicated, because you need to “add” signal where none exists. So boosts tend to be noisy and/or outright distorted, while cuts will maintain a clean audio signal.

Need to boost around 2KHz? Try cutting everything else instead.

Which is honestly just a step away from .txt. You can literally type out a .csv file in .txt if you want to. The .csv filetype simply tells the program that the plaintext is formatted a specific way.

Or just get a cheap multi viewer. Sure, professional switchers and multi-boxes are thousands of dollars. But you can get a barebones one with no customization, no reclocking, no audio mixing, etc for like… $70?

FWIW, the PlayStation was meant to have the Nintendo button layout too. In Japan, O is synonymous with “yes/good” sort of like a check mark (✅) and X means “no/bad”. So the X and O buttons were meant to be used in that way. But western game devs didn’t know that, and designed their games with X as confirm and O as decline.

Take it a step farther. Why is cheap grain available on the market? Because European import regulations were relaxed to support Ukrainian grain exports.

In case you weren’t aware, grain is one of Ukraine’s largest exports.

It’s primarily meant for people who have slow connections. If you’re downloading a game over DSL or satellite (which is often the only thing available unless you’re in an urban/suburban area) then the 5GB of extra compression could be a huge time difference. It’s also true for metered connections, where you have to pay by the GB, or where you have a data cap.

I mean, she’s never tried to hide the fact that she’s Russian. And she also hasn’t hidden the fact that she dislikes Putin. But lots of Europe is struggling right now. For instance, the farmers protesting across many parts of Europe, as a result of the war and Ukrainian exports.