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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 29th, 2023

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  • I can see it. My corporate work laptop is locked down with their security and monitoring software, so I’m not using it for personal things, even if it is allowed for some limited things. And there’s company resources that I can only access through the machines under their control, so I couldn’t ditch it either. And using that laptop for a second job would be a big no-no.

    I can see the school laptop being similar, though my experience is that they tend to not be locked down quite as hard as the corporate machine, unless you do boneheaded things with it and piss off the school’s IT department.

    So I can see the need for a personal computer, plus it’s always nice to keep that well separated to avoid things like incidents hooked up to a projector and screen sharing.





  • I’d rewrite the ending of The Force Awakens so that they don’t destroy Starkiller Base at the end. Instead they’d just damage it heavily or somehow disable it. A victory for the rebels, but now we have a story for the next movies.

    Then the second movie would then have to be rewritten to be about the First Order trying to repair Starkiller Base, perhaps they need some rare resource or something, and the rebels are trying to stop them. We get a bunch of space battles and AT-AT walkers and stuff.

    The third movie would then also have to be rewritten. The First Order has got the thing working again, so the rebellion would get to destroy it for good this time. More space battles, lightsaber fights, and big explosions.

    Really, the problem the sequel trilogy had is that they didn’t know what to do with it. The Force Awakens ended up as a soft reboot of A New Hope, which is why we got a third Deathstar. But then they blow it up at the end of the first movie, which puts them in a bind as now they really don’t know what to do with the next two movies. What now, a fourth Deathstar? At least this would give some sort of overarching story for the trilogy, rather than the making-it-up-as-we-go mess that we ended up with.




  • I’d argue there was a fourth serious failure, and that was Intel allowing the motherboard manufacturers to go nuts and run these chips way out of spec by default. Granted, ultimately it was the motherboard manufacturers that did it, but there’s really no excuse for what these motherboards were doing by default. Yes, I get the “K” chips are unlocked, but it should be up to the user to choose to overclock their CPU and how they want to go about it. To make matters worse, a lot of these motherboards didn’t even have an easy way to put things back into spec - it was up to you to go through all the settings one by one and set them correctly.


  • Github Copilot is about the only AI tool I’ve used at work so far. I’d say it overall speeds things up, particularly with boilerplate type code that it can just bang out reducing a lot of the tedious but not particularly difficult coding. For more complicated things it can also be helpful, but I find it’s also pretty good at suggesting things that look correct at a glance, but are actually subtly wrong. Leading to either having to carefully double check what it suggests, or having fix bugs in code that I wrote but didn’t actually write.



  • When covid hit they cut my hours to 32 a week. They wouldn’t let us do a four day work week which was kind of lame, but instead we got four 7-hour days then a 4-hour half-day on Friday. It doesn’t sound like a lot but even an extra hour in the evenings and an early start to the weekend turned out to be really refreshing. When things went back to normal, I asked if I could keep that schedule even with the 20% pay cut, but they said no.

    Unfortunately, it seems that there simply aren’t a lot of white collar type office jobs where you can work for less than the standard 40 hours a week while keeping the same hourly rate and similar benefits.



  • I’m kind of with you with Terraria. I’ve put about 120 hours into it so it’s not like I didn’t get my money’s worth. But with that, it really feels l’ve done everything I feel like I need to do in Terraria. I think one thing the game kind of suffers from is being around for over 10 years with new content being added the whole time, and sorting through all that requires too much time digging through the wiki. Even when it comes to things like base building, dealing with all the workbenches and crafting stations gets tedious.

    Another problem I had is after a while, a lot of the music starts getting really repetitive.





  • That’s the problem. A lot of those high-end, expensive appliances are built just as shitty as the low-end, basic models. The difference is just some bells and whistles and a higher price tag.

    I have no problem paying extra for a higher quality, better built appliance. But the challenge is differentiating those from the low quality, built as cheaply as possible appliances that have just been marked up with a premium price tag.

    At least when I buy the cheap, shitty model, I get what I paid for.


  • That’s a different thing entirely. Members of the US military don’t have combatant immunity when it comes to the US legal system, because what they are doing is legal in terms of the law. Combatant immunity would apply if they are captured as a POW by another nation following the Geneva conventions, which basically says that nation can’t charge them for acts of warfare, murder, etc. for participating in the war as a combatant. So long as they weren’t committing war crimes or something along those lines. So once again the President, as the commander in chief, doesn’t need immunity to order an airstrike or whatever, because it’s already legal for him/her to do so.


  • It’s simple really. It’s not murder when someone in the military kills an enemy combatant. Murder is illegally taking another’s life, and members of the military can legally kill enemy combatants. That’s laid out in the Geneva Conventions and all of that.

    The President is the commander in chief, so he doesn’t need immunity to order some terrorists taken out. That’s the way it’s worked for nearly 250 years. Joe Citizen is not a member of the military and is not the president, so generally they can expect to get in trouble for that sort of thing.

    The President can order some terrorists killed the same way a fighter pilot can shoot down an enemy plane, a soldier can throw a grenade into an enemy foxhole, or navy captain can order the shelling of an enemy position.

    Also note that immunity here doesn’t mean something is legal for that person. The act is still just as illegal as it has always been. It just means that the person who has immunity can’t be prosecuted for it. And in the case of absolute immunity, can’t even be charged for it, unlike things like qualified immunity where someone can still be charged and then can argue immunity as their defense the courts get to decide if it actually applies.

    As such, a member of the military doesn’t have or need immunity, because what they are doing isn’t illegal. That also applies to the president in that sort of situation.