ineligible for promotion

This seems like an empty threat to me. Every promotion I've ever gotten internally has come with a negligible pay increase (~4%). The best promotions I've gotten have been leaving to take a new job somewhere else (~20-50%).

Congress believes it's a national security threat which is probably true but they haven't bothered explaining this to their constituents at all. Ideally they'd pass comprehensive privacy protection laws to setup standards that both domestic and foreign companies would be subject to. Then companies either adjust their behaviors and meet a certain level of transparency or they would be prosecuted under the law.

But no... We get this instead: a confusing and obviously targeted ultimatum with Congress telling everyone 'trust me bro this is the only way'.

I write a lot of scripts that engineers need to run. I used to really try to make things 'fail soft' so that even if one piece failed the rest of the script would keep running and let you know which components failed and what action you needed to take to fix the problem.

Eventually I had so many issues with people assuming that any errors that didn't result in a failure were safe to ignore and crucial manual steps were being missed. I had to start making them 'fail hard' and stop completely when a step failed because it was the only way to get people to reliably perform the desired manual step.

Trying to predict and account for other people's behavior is really tricky, particularly when a high level of precision is required.

"We're making something new but it's boring and will suck." said no one ever.

This would have been really good for me to know about 20 years ago.

Sorry guys, this is just me with a basement full of computers running Linux.

There was a golden age of Netflix where I basically stopped pirating movies and TV too.

Now streaming is a fragmented ad-ridden nightmare and I pirate more than ever before. It's not like it's free either, I pay for a VPN, disk storage, let alone the time and maintenance.

If I could buy (and actually own) high quality digital copies of movies/tv with no bullshit at a reasonable price that would be a serious value proposition that would beat out the hassles that come along with piracy.

Seamlessly syncing game saves between my Deck and my primary gaming PC is so nice. Before I travel I just make sure to wake up the deck long enough to get updates and sync saves.

For non steam games I use syncthing but that always requires just a little bit of work.

We're basically dependent on the EU and California to have any rights as consumers at all.

Apple has setup their walled garden in such a way that you're basically all-in or all-out of their ecosystem. I don't know that they have brand loyalty as much as they have a captive audience that they can sell iWhatever to over and over again.

I'd argue with this, but it seems like image and video file extensions have become a lawless zone with no rules so I don't even think they count.

Pretty ridiculous to have multiple standards for this anyway. Imagine if you had to hunt down a gas station that served whatever proprietary fuel you needed.