More like “sales teams are the reason middle managers think ALL employees slack off when not watched.”

I get that sales is a SUPER depressing culture, a ridiculously antiquated work environment, and full of some utterly soul-sucking mandates from above, but I have never seen, in any workplace, a team that needs someone constantly riding herd on them like the sales team.

Every place I’ve worked, every place that a place I’ve worked has had as a client, and every business I’ve ever visited had the same problem – sales people are largely unmotivated because their job has a much higher chance to SUCK OUT LOUD than most of the other jobs at a given company.

When five figure quarterly bonuses, daily friendly team competitions for gift cards, more paid-for-by-the-company outings than the c suites get and pickle ball on company time twice a week aren’t enough to hype people up to do their actual job, something is really fucking wrong with the job expectations.

Some of it is about the "Why"s.

Netflix nearly stamped out piracy for a while there by being a vastly more attractive alternative. Between them and Hulu, and to a lesser extent prime(at the time) if it was streaming, you could watch it somewhere at a reasonable price for a marginally reasonable viewing experience that was at least as good as most TPB downloads.

Then the IP owners got greedier and decided to strike out on their own with the “everyone has a streaming service” model, which would be GREAT if they largely shared content, but they don’t.

The greed continues, not in order to adequately compensate creators, but to make a few handfuls of people not just rich but filthy rich. Every action they take suddenly becomes more penny pinching for more greed. At this point lots of the CONTENT CREATORS wish they had a better choice (how often do they say ‘please watch it this way, that’s just how they rank stuff, sorry’?)

Why is it the opposite with AI?

Because in comparison with stuff like streaming video or music platforms, AI is BARELY pretending to offer a functional service in exchange for the greed that’s behind all of the money they’re trying to force it to make for them.

And that’s just for one side of the debate.

Why isn’t the fact that AI is largely garnering the same responses even from DIAMETRICALLY OPPOSED GROUPS telling you something about how bad of an idea it is in it’s current incarnation?

The kicker there is … Nobody I know is going to think “wow, playback on this video sucks, I should disable my ad blocker”.

Like, it wouldn’t occur to ANYONE I know that a piece of software we consider necessary could be the problem, ESPECIALLY if everything else is working fine.

That’s not even number ten on the list of troubleshooting steps and most people don’t make it past one or two before giving up.

WTF were they thinking?

Huh.

Maybe it’s just the games I play, but I mostly hear people in MMO’s ranting about steam and swearing they’ll never use it (or never use it again). At least some of these people have seemingly zero personal issues with Amazon gaming, arc, epic, gog, and a few other steam clones.

I realize that by the numbers, steam is probably still the biggest, but unlike that early half-life debacle, most games are on multiple platforms now. Steam being bigger isn’t what I’d call monopolistic anymore, it’s just good sales on games and inertia.

Given epic’s often BETTER sales, despite the fact that I really dislike the layout and functionality of the epic client, most of what steam has going for it is the deck and inertia.

For those wondering about the upswing here:

If the age verification movement goes unchecked, it’s possible that you could be forced to tie your government ID to much of your online activity, Gillmor says. Some civil rights groups fear it could usher in a new era of state and corporate surveillance that would transform our online behaviour.

“This is the canary in the coalmine, it isn’t just about porn,” says Evan Greer, director of Fight for the Future, a digital rights advocacy group. Greer says age verification laws are a thinly veiled ploy to impose censorship across the web. A host of campaigners warn that these measures could be used to limit access not just to pornography, but to art, literature and basic facts about sex education and LGBTQ+ life.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.

Corporate culture is a malicious bad actor.

Corporate culture, from management books to magazine ads to magic quadrants is all about profits over people, short term over stability, and massaging statistics over building a trustworthy reputation.

All of it is fully orchestrated from the top down to make the richest folks richer right now at the expense of everything else. All of it. From open floor plans to unlimited PTO to perverting every decent plan whether it be agile or ITIL or whatever, every idea it lays its hands on turns into a shell of itself with only one goal.

Until we fix that problem, the enshittification, the golden parachutes, and the passing around of horrible execs who prove time and time again they should not be in charge of anything will continue as part of the game where we sacrifice human beings on the Altar of Record Quarterly Profits.

Safe deposit box?

Everyone who has one, I hope.

It’s called a Bitcoin “wallet”, too. If someone else is holding yours, it’s not your money.

But they’re almost all using it STUPIDLY, aren’t they?

How many people who purport to have Bitcoin actually hold their own private key?

(strike)Frank from IT(/strike)the cleaning crew

I jest, but I’ve seen more facilities maintenance teams cause power issues than IT teams.

It’s aready possible to flash a phone ROM in two clicks

That’s precisely the kind of access that a web browser should NEVER, EVER have.

If you think 2 stage download keylogger apps getting into app stores is bad, wait until it can be done with a banner ad. Or by viewing a comment on a post.

Thank you for your service to this thread.

“WebUSB is a JavaScript application programming interface specification for securely providing access to USB devices from web applications”

Holy Hannah, NO!!!

Might as well allow a website to direct write to your hard drive unprompted again.

Does noone see how BAD this stuff is?

Stop creating attack vectors with glowing neon signs on them.

This is also why there’s such a a prevalence of flashing warning banners, fake pseudobluescreens, and other scary shit disguised in chrome notifications.

The notifications in chrome are as close to on by default as you can get and with the right code snippets you can make it look like the FBI locked down your workstation and you need to call them.

Firefox should start hardening against this behavior now because popularity gets targeted even more specifically.

Make it an end user safety feature.

Force every notification to have

“This is a notification from a website that you elected to receive by allowing notifications. You can disable these notifications here”

with a link to the setting on the frame of of every one, no fullscreen allowed, no flashing, double-check and prohibit the words FBI, CIA, NSA, TSA, IRS, Social Security, Microsoft, etc.

What do you use now?

I work in IT and between the Advent of “agile” methodologies meaning lots of documentation is out of date as soon as it’s approved for release and AI results more likely to be invented instead of regurgitated from forum posts, it’s getting progressively more difficult to find relevant answers to weird one-off questions than it used to be. This would be less of a problem if everything was open source and we could just look at the code but most of the vendors corporate America uses don’t ascribe to that set of values, because “Mah intellectual properties” and stuff.

Couple that with tech sector cuts and outsourcing of vendor support and things are getting hairy in ways AI can’t do anything about.

Yeah, I’m no marketing guru, but I feel their actual point would have been better conveyed by a pile of all of the things the iPad replaced slowly gathering dust, spider webs, and eventually archaeologists.

And while it hurts now, it’s REALLY going to hurt when large swaths of useful answers that don’t exist anywhere else are gone and there’s nothing replacing them.

Noone writes hundreds of pages of documentation for their stuff anymore. Without the collected knowledge learned from experience there, what do we have?

Unless we have source code to read, very little.

I’m still feeling the pain of google search results sucking combined with most of the large coding forums being gone and reddit slowly going to garbage. Stack Overflow was the last bastion of collected knowledge of it’s type… and it’s not like it was 25 years ago where we still had phonebook-sized manuals for almost all major software because agile has killed the concept of exhaustive definitive documentation for a given version of something.

I used to sorta roll my eyes at people shouting about federating everything, but at this point I’m scared and agreeing with them.

There’s no way Microsoft would purposefully disable VPNs from working

No, but they’ve done it accidentally before.

One time a few years ago it broke all LT2P VPN’s unless you removed a specific KB########.

IIRC, six months later there was still no fix.

I think it’s been fixed now, though.

They forced cloud on us so they could do the same nickel-and-dime billing that webhosts used for cpu cycles/ram/storage…

…because it’s lucrative as hell when taken to a grand scale.

But there are sometimes side benefits for us.

I, for one, am over the moon levels of happy that I will never spend another weekend patching Exchange servers.

Once old.reddit dies I’ll never go back

I’m the same way, but that’s because I find the text formatting, comment layout, and page framing to be almost completely unreadable without it.

My ten year old monitor is at a nice 1980x1020 and when I view a post on base reddit, it crams the post into the middle of the screen, displays one or two comments below it, and then displays… other posts? Or something? It’s mind-boggling, difficult to sort out what’s what, and I can’t figure out who’s needs are being met with a layout like that.

When I click on a post, I want to see the whole post, laid out across the majority of my screen real estate, and I want all of the comments visible beneath the post, with multiple comment sorting options.

I just realized what I’m basically asking for is a forum layout.

You know, that thing that worked for decades.

I’m putting up with Lemmy even though I have a few minor gripes (mostly related to sorting and search) because the community is part of what’s important to me, but the main reason I stick around anywhere is the ability to read content I’m interested in. When the on page formatting of that content sucks, I quit reading it.

I quit subscribing to newspaper websites (and ultimately quit visiting them for news entirely) when the on page advertising squeezed out the actual journalism. I could adblock, but the formatting is still a disaster and barely resembles a news article if you print it out and hold it up to a newspaper, so screw that noise.

I’m sometimes willing to be okay with being “the product” when it’s my choice and I know what I’m trading for it and judge the value of what I’m getting in return to be acceptable.

When I do that, though, and major changes I don’t like get made to what I’m “getting out of it” with no way for me to go back to what I did like, it’s a rug pull and a breach of trust.

For all of the market analysis everyone is supposedly doing, you’d think at least ONE major player would figure out that noone likes it when their routine grinds to a screeching halt because someone decided to move the user interface around and now nobody can find anything.