TipRing

I had a spirited discussion with an LG repair guy working on the smart fridge that came with my home. I don’t allow malware on my network so the fridge doesn’t get to do whatever a fridge needs internet access for.

He tried to scare me by saying it would connect to whatever network was available but I live in the sticks and there isn’t even cell coverage here much less another router for it to connect to so unless they are putting a satellite uplink in it that would not happen and I would think he knew that since I had to put him on my guestnet so he could call his support line.

So then he said it wouldn’t work properly unless it was on the network and I told him if it somehow connected I would use an ACL to ensure it couldn’t talk to anything.

Anyway, bought a cheap fridge from CostCo with an extended warranty and they dumpstered that LG POS. Good riddance.

I stopped watching her generally when she put up her poorly thought out, TERF-filled anti-trans video, but the “Capitalism is good, actually” video came up in my feed and I watched it out of curiosity.

It’s so wrong it’s impossible to know where to begin. She invents a history of money that didn’t happen, defines capitalism in a nonsensical way and in the comments admitted she did no research for the video whatsoever and yet still defended her points as if her absolute ignorance on the subject was somehow laudable.

Absolute buffoon. Nobody should watch her videos. She is intellectually dishonest and generates ignorant content to garner clicks.

It was literally outlined as this in Project2025, ban porn then define speech you want to suppress (primarily LGBT but also women’s health) as porn.

I appreciate the discussion, I get out of my depth pretty quickly on the topic being a linguistic hobbyist rather than someone with actual education and background.

It’s an approximation, but the t is partially vocalized giving it a ‘d’ sound even if it’s not made exactly the same way.

This phenomenon is called “T flapping” and it is common in North American English. I got into an argument with my dad who insisted he pronounces the T’s in ‘butter’ when his dialect, like nearly all North Americans pronounces the word as ‘budder’.

If the criticism is limited to “It’s too hard.” then I would agree. But that’s not a valid response to criticisms about specific design elements like “these power ups feel like they do nothing”, even if it’s a perception issue at hand you need to address the actual observation and not jump on with ‘git gud’.

I was learning a game a few months ago and struggling with understanding a specific character, so I went to the official discord and asked for advice, not complaining it was too hard, just asking for what kinds of strategies work and I was met with endless ‘try harder, scrub’ responses and literally no actual advice. I quit playing the game because the community was so up it’s own asshole.

And for sake of clarity. I don’t play HK, it’s not my preferred genre and my favorite game (that I can replay) is Noita so I am familiar with reviews that complain about difficulty. It’s fine for games to be hard and it’s also fine for people who find the games too hard to leave a review saying they found it too hard. That is part of informing buyers so people can only pick it up if they desire that kind of challenge.

It’s just a trend that is all too common in gaming. People like a game or a developer and become incapable of seeing an opinion that they disagree without taking it as a personal slight. It’s weird.

We should definitely talk about how levying criticism, especially thoughtful criticism, is treated as a personal attack by other people playing the same game. It’s a bizarre form of tribalism.

It is a Civ tradition, BotS made Civ4 amazing, but I’d argue the base game was solid and just needed some mechanical polish.

I listened. I bought Civ6, hated it, didn’t get any of the predatory DLC and went back to Civ4. Didn’t give Civ7 so much as a glance. Sad to hear it went downhill from 6 though.

Femboys can be hot too, though often authors seem to mix up femboys with trans women and that ends up being frustrating when I try a CHOYA game marked as m/m and it doesn’t have any actual m/m in it.

On the m/m side, the visual novel Coming Out on Top is a remarkably well-written, if saccharine, dating game about a college guy figuring things out. I don’t usually like VNs but this one was worth playing. It’s has a lot of gay sex in it, that is literally the entire point so, you know, be aware of that.

He really tries not to bother me, but the screaming gets my attention and when he’s about to physically destroy the computer I feel I have to step in and fix it. That being said, he is not comfortable installing it himself so I want something that provokes the minimal amount of hand-holding. Honestly, the biggest issue with me not putting Garuda on his system is that he needs Davinci Resolve for his work and it doesn’t install directly off the AUR, you have to download the application separately from Black Magic Design’s site and edit the build file. He is not going to understand how to do that.

I am very happy working in Linux as my daily driver, while my husband is bugging me to switch his desktop and laptop over since he is frustrated at how awful the UI in Windows 11 is. But I know he has a low tolerance for frustration and while he has decent technical skills, he tends to accumulate the absolutely most peculiar technical problems I’ve ever seen. I mean, I’m rather savvy with Windows and he comes up with problems that take me a long time to figure out - issues that would be difficult to cause even if you were intentionally trying to break Windows.

So I don’t really know what to do here. He likes my Garuda setup because I’ve shown him how customizable KDE Plasma is, but the amount of weird shit dealing with the AUR that I have run into, stuff that I can solve fairly easily but a layperson would likely not be able to handle, makes me want to put Mint on his system even if he’ll find it less suitable.

Definitely read the original SecureAnnex article as well. The behavior of this software and the people behind it are damning.

I design contact centers for a living. I have done so for almost a quarter century now, until very recently I only had worked for Fortune 200 companies (moved to the public sector which is a nice change of pace).

A quick bit of jargon definition: We refer to various means of communication as “channels”. A contact center is multi-channel if you can reach it by more than one channel (i.e. phone, SMS, chat, email, etc.). It is considered omni-channel if you can switch between these channels (supposedly seamlessly, but see below).

This article gets several points dead on and misses several more. Here is my professional take, make of it what you will.

1. Call centers are expensive. Licensing and software costs are very high. There are few vendors who offer scalable omni-channel offerings and the licensing costs end up being exorbitant. And you need omni-channel contact centers because:

2. Phones are the least efficient way to service customers. An agent can only be on the phone with a single customer at a time, but they can staff around 6 chat or email sessions simultaneously. For a customer, this devoted attention is a boon, but for a company it’s very costly because Agents, even poorly paid ones, are the most expensive part of your contact center if you are paying benefits, and if you aren’t you will not get good agents.

3. Agent turnover is very high. Agents are poorly paid and their job sucks. They are driven by metrics that are poorly thought out, intended to drive efficiency but ultimately create poor behavior; the article gets this very correct. A lot of poor service you get is caused by agents trying to hit impossible metrics. Don’t blame the agent, the managers are the problem here.

4. The technology has gotten better - and worse. VOIP infrastructure radically reshaped contact center design and the migration to CCaaS reshaped it again, with some good sides and a lot of bad sides. Telephone technology is an aging tech with a substantial demographic issue. I am consistently the youngest member of my teams and I have been doing this for almost 25 years. Expertise is aging out of the field and taking a lot of knowledge with them. Further, the number of disciplines you need for expertise has dramatically increased. It is no longer enough to just know CCNA-level networking, wiring, PSTN tech, linux and windows servers administration, codecs, basic related legal knowledge (wiretapping laws, Ray Baume’s Act, TEHO laws in India, etc.), design and infrastructure theory (like Poisson distribution), but now you also need to know Kubernetes, docker, ESXi (or equivalent), AWS, Azure, etc. It’s a lot and nobody can know it all, the complexity of modern design and no education program to get there means there’s just a lack of comprehensive understanding of the technology at a pretty fundamental level for most people trying to design and maintain this stuff. The result? A system designed around 99.999% uptime is now failing to meet that SLA, hell some vendors won’t even promise it anymore but most will just lie and claim that they do. So there are reliability issues.

5. AI. This one hits pretty closet to home for me because of a personal experience so a quick anecdote: at one job, I had a spirited discussion with the head of our IVR technology group over how effective AI would be at reducing call volume into the center. He initially had great success, reducing call volume by ~30% in the 6 months. He received accolades and commendations, a big bonus, he was riding high and honestly he deserved to be. The problem, and what prompted my attempt to intervene, was his promise to continue that trend, predicting that his AI tech could reduce human-required calls by 60% within the next 2 years.

   To me, this was madness. His initial success was because he moved the payment system into the IVR instead of having agents do it. This is a no-brainer. Computers are quite capable of taking payments or listing basic account information, but more complex tasks involve a much greater up-front cost in technology development and we didn’t have that budget, it was a massive over promise and I told everyone who I could to not take his estimation seriously. Unfortunately, he had a PhD and I am a college dropout, so they listened to him and cut 50% of their agent count via attrition. The results were predictably disastrous and the company hasn’t yet been able to fix it years later (thankfully, I left that place).

6. I don’t think this is intentional per se. Having been in numerous meetings with leadership about contact center issues, I can say that they are just as upset by poor customer service as you are. There is no top-down effort to make your life suck. But line must go up and contact centers are always cost centers which means companies hate them, they don’t view customer service as integral to making money despite understanding that angry customers will leave them so there is a constant budget short-fall. The issue isn’t someone at the top thinking “If we treat our customer poorly enough they will stop calling and we’ll save money!” It’s just standard corrosive capitalism creating perverse incentives that make everything worse. It’s a systemic problem.

Anyway, that’s my view for whatever it’s worth. I am glad to be in the public sector now, which has its own issues, but at least everyone is focused on actually providing service because the service is the value.

Golly, I can’t understand why younger generations aren’t having more kids.

You may be confusing democratic socialism and social democracy. They are similar in their short-term goals, but democratic socialist have fundamental economic reform as their long-term goal, while social democrats just want to curtail the social problems of capitalism.

We need like a hundred more Mamdanis and AOCs.

This is why 62% of Democrats say they need new leaders. The neoliberals (and their billionaire backers) are afraid of losing power while the ground-level party is already shifting. I’m not convinced that splitting off the progressives will be productive in our current electoral system. By the time the Democrats die off the fascists will have abolished elections. Instead I envision an outcome similar to the political realignment the GOP just finished, where a growing progressive caucus gains enough traction in primaries to force concessions from the party leadership until the neoliberals are all but pushed out entirely.