I think that's deliberate: you walk into a dollar store and think "they aren't spending a dime on the shopping experience, so they must be passing that dime onto me."
Yes, yes of course. The leftover smell of homeless urine by the front door isn't real; it is only carefully calculated scents piped in by corporate dollar store yuppies to have you believe this is an authentic experience.
I used to (when I did that more) set up a bond of my wireless and ethernet devices, so when ethernet was plugged in it was preferred, otherwise it would use wireless. It was pretty seamless, and provided the same MAC on both networks.
I used to do that too. Nowadays I just run a WireGuard VPN and treat my WiFi network as "untrusted" (which is a good idea anyway) and it's more seamless if IP addresses change, or even if I leave the house and go somewhere else - I can expect most connections to stay up.
I've long (very, very long) been a storage snob. Originally via the IBM UltraStar drives, and continued with the Intel SSDs. Even with good backups, a drive failure is often a pain in the ass. Slightly less so with RAID.
IBM really locked me in on the Ultrastar back in the mid '90s. Sure, it has proven itself to be a great product. But some of the first ones I bought, one of the drives arrived failed. I called the vendor I bought it from and they said they wouldn't replace it, I'd have to get a refurb from IBM. So I called IBM, when I told them I had just bought it they said I needed to call the place I bought it from because otherwise I'd get a refurb. I explained I had already called them. "Oh, who did you buy it from?" I told them. "Can you hold on a minute?" ... "Hi, I've got [NAME] on the line from [VENDOR] and they'll be happy to send you a replacement."
>ridiculous hoops people are put through to get a job these days
I'm sure that's true in some areas, but our last hire I was shocked at the ridiculous lengths the applications would go to to avoid putting in even a minimum effort to apply for the job. Like the Van Halen brown M&M test, we put a line in the middle of the job advert saying "If you've read this, put your favorite color in at the top of your job application message. We had low double digits % of people who would do that.
Honestly, on our next hiring round, I think I'm going to make people fill out a google form to apply, and have any of our job posts say "Apply at <URL>" and completely ignoring any apps we get through Indeed or the like. We had a team of 3 people reviewing applications for an hour or two a day for a month and most of the responses were just human slop.
As a new college grad I might be able to add some insight.
We're stuck in a stalemate where the sheer volume of applications for employers to handle and applicants to send makes them take shortcuts, leaving both sides wonder why people aren't trying.
If somebody has to send in 300-500 applications (which is not unheard of) and answer the same questions till they go blind, it's not surprising that certain things are missing or people don't care. Applicants don't have any reason to believe their info isn't thrown in the trash by an LLM as soon as it is sent.
Lazy people will always be a problem but until there is transparency or trust developed I doubt we will see meaningful change.
Look at the power dynamics then. Who has more power in this situation: people with rent and mortgages? Or companies with more money than God? Companies could simply stop using LLMs and tomorrow and be fine. They brag about laying off thousands while turning record profits; they can turn off the slop machines.
Let's not blame the people with no power in this situation.
> Like the Van Halen brown M&M test, we put a line in the middle of the job advert saying "If you've read this, put your favorite color in at the top of your job application message.
TBH I can't blame them. you're applying to hundreds of applications repetitively with qualifications that barely matter because you're encouraged to apply anyway. You can only spend so many hours reading HR-drivel (that at this point may or may not be ai-generated) before you focus on just finding "job title, salary , location), and then slamming apply. It's just not worth editing my resume to add some weird qualifier if I don't even think I'm going to get a reply. It's another hoop.
It's the complete inverse of hosting Van Helen at your show. It'd be more like trying to make a cashier recite their company motto. They are not that dedicated to any one role. They can't afford to be.
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I don't know if it's feasible for your situation, but smaller teams tend to have candidates email their resume. It can still be LLM'd, but I will tend to pay more attention if I feel like I have a direct communication channel. Not yet another greenhouse application form. It leaves room to be more free form with my pitch as well.
I got my first Dell laptop, the XPS15, 5 years ago. Prior to that I had a good 25 years as a Thinkpad die-hard. The XPS has been ... ok. I've had some issues with it resetting for no apparent reason over its life. Frequency varies, but sometimes it'll just blank the screens and then the BIOS comes up on the display, a few times a week, then it'll be good for a month or more.
I had one issue where I needed to ship it back: it would reset and then it was running off the battery, and no matter what port I plugged a charger/docking station into it wouldn't charge until I powered it off and back on again. I got them to do a replacement under warranty a couple years ago.
Around a month ago it was doing the reset fairly frequently and then wouldn't power on sometimes, and I noticed the wrist rest was a little bowed. I replaced the battery pack (kind of a pain, but not the worst I've done), and it was good for around a month, but now it has that "won't charge the battery" issue again. I believe when they did the previous repair they replaced the motherboard, but now I'm out of warranty.
For my next laptop I kind of want a Framework, so I can replace the mobo if I need to. My work likes us to replace hardware no more frequently than every 5-6 years, but we get a warranty for way less than that (my laptop I pushed to get a 4 year).
Meanwhile my previous Thinkpad T470s is still going strong, though the screen just developed a line through it. That's ~10 year old now.
My personal 4 year old Macbook has been a real workhorse, never had any hardware issues with it. My son's macbook has been another story, he's had that in for service 4-5 times in the 3 years he's had it. But, I suspect that is more him than the hardware. I don't baby my MBP, but he is just terrible with things. He's lucky if a pair of glasses can last 6 months, ditto with a phone (usually broken screens), so I'm not sure I can blame the MB Air...
I think we have the exactly same problem with the Dell laptop. Anyway after reading through all comments I figured it is unlikely buy a Dell laptop, and less likely to buy a refurbished one as they only carry a 1-year warranty max (one year for 49 CAD and 100 days for free).
And yeah my 470S is still pretty strong. I started to use it again for my side projects.
I kinda wish I could find a contracting job, so that I can buy an expensive laptop and expense it as cost, and my wife won't cast an angry look towards me, lol.
I have the exact same issue with my XPS 9500. But for me it turned into a daily issue and there's a bunch of forum posts of people having this issue. I think it's a manufacturing defect and Dell just never admitted to it and just gave board replacements to people that had warranty (with plenty of posts of people complaining that the same issue came back after the replacement as well)
For the last 2-3 years I've been "this close" to getting a few devices and setting up a repeater node on my home roof and my office roof, and one to play with... I love the idea of bringing an alternative to SMS to my area. But at the end of the day, is anyone actually using it for anything?
The funny thing about SuSE, and admittedly I haven't touched it for over a decade now: Everyone I knew who used it touted that it had great enterprise support as a reason for using it, but everybody I knew that used SuSE used OpenSuSE. This was over ~20 years of providing Linux support, RHEL-based and Ubuntu were by far the distros we dealt with the most.
One issue I had with OpenSuSE was that once a new release drops you have around 6mo to migrate all your machines over to it. Which, for most businesses, is a pretty short timeline, in my experience.
I've always preferred authoring RPMs over debs, but Caninical having basically one distro without the forks, I think is a huge benefit for a business using them.
These days, since it's all about containers, I'd recommend openSUSE microOS, which is a minimal immutable rolling OS that's suitable as a container host. https://microos.opensuse.org/
One of the big rules is you don't expose the unwilling public. Apologizing to the two women who were brushing the author's hair is a double-whammy: you're involving them in the sexualizing of this experience, and you're implicitly expecting them to be ok with it and forgive you.
If someone is going to demand you do this or they will end their friendship with you, you're "lowkey" better off losing that friend.
To be fair, it's likely that the author's former friend would have a hard time disagreeing with this if presented in exactly the way that you have.
I suspect that what such a person finds offensive isn't OOP's behavior (i.e. receiving a hair treatment without incident), but rather the thought in and of itself. Since they know that they can't credibly assault a person's character purely on the basis of an involuntary or intrusive thought, they have to settle for calling out some behavior as a stand-in for the thought. In an alternate timeline where OOP had apologized (which would really just be extremely socially awkward, not outwardly harmful), I'd bet on the former friend making the exact opposite stink and chastising OOP for failing to keep it to herself.
Another layer that wouldn't be surprising in this instance would be subconscious homophobia. The friend thinks she's upset at OOP for "victimizing" two poor strangers without their knowledge, but in reality she's disturbed by the sudden realization that she herself may have been or may one day become the unknowing object of such thoughts. Since she can't say as much without implying that she's categorically uncomfortable being around queer women, she reached for any excuse to turn it around on OOP and make herself feel like the good guy.
My physio therapist is very nice and caring, genuinely interested in conversation and helping with my and other people's physical and sometimes even psychological problems. While she was moving my legs using her upper body, it felt quite intimate and I admired her for being so professional while doing her work physically and giving psychological support as a bonus. I'm sure she will notice at times that some people get intimate feelings but she seems to be okay with that, knowing she is helping patients while such things can happen as a side effect.
All to say that feelings are only natural and they can induce thoughts. Why apologize.
> moving my legs using her upper body, it felt quite intimate and I admired her for being so professional
This highlights something that I've been chewing on a lot lately. I'm not sure what you specifically meant by the word "intimate" when you said that, but I do think it's really interesting to distinguish between "intimate" and "sexual", even though they often coincide.
As an example, years ago I was staying with some out-of-town friends after a break-up and they wanted to introduce me to a couple of lovely single women they knew. I hadn't really been taking great care of myself in the fallout of the breakup, so I went and shaved and got cleaned up. While doing my hair, I realized that my eyebrows were pretty unruly and somewhat sheepishly asked my friend's wife if she'd be comfortable taking some tweezers to them and helping me get them cleaned up. It wasn't, even a little bit, a sexual moment but it ended up being incredibly and unexpectedly intimate. We were both pretty surprised by it and ended up getting closer (as friends) afterwards.
What a nice story! Cleaning up eyebrows shows nicely the discrepancy between intimacy (feeling love and care) and erotica (feeling lust?).
The hair grooming in the article probably felt similar.
Thinking about the physio therapy, her upper body felt very warm and soft but it was probably a rather standard technique for firmly moving the joints and ligaments in legs and hips.
What it made most intimate was not just the softness of her body but also the care she took for the movements, knowing that it would help.
So my limbic system went into oxytocin producing mode, which the aware mind easily picks up with warm thoughts. I think that's where the bridge between intimacy and sexual thoughts can happen, but there my thinking was not firmly going into that direction, it just felt warm and comfortable, even a bit emotional.
In your case the feelings apperently came from both directions, it was not a professional/client context after all.
> What it made most intimate was not just the softness of her body but also the care she took for the movements, knowing that it would help.
100% that was a big part of it too for me. It was the care and attention that was going into it, plus the element of trust that goes into giving someone consent to inflict sharp but short-lived pain.
I’d actually be really curious on the physiotherapy side of it whether there is actually a combination of intimacy and professionalism happening on the other side of it. I’ve done physio with people who did not give me warm and fuzzies at all, and with people who, like for you, left me with that nice oxytocin sense of satisfaction. I wonder if the people who left me with that feeling are good at what they do because they have some added degree of empathy or mirror neurons or whatever that makes them feel good when they treat their patients softly and intentionally.
Indeed i think it is a win win between caregiver and patient, which has little to do with financials. One of the feats of the limbic system is promoting emotional resonance which can happen in both directions and does not to have to imply romance.
>While she was moving my legs using her upper body, it felt quite intimate and I admired her for being so professional while doing her work physically and giving psychological support as a bonus.
Have you considered that from her pov, there was nothing intimate about it? I wasn't there to watch it, but in my experience, these situations are only "intimate" or awkward AFTER you start talking about how intimate and awkward there are. For people who have to touch bodies regularly at work (eg. me when I was a gymnastic coach), there is nothing intimate about it. The only ones who think it's sexual/intimate/awkward/weird/etc. are those who have no experience with it.
It's the same thing when you get a medical procedure done. Believe it or not, the nurses and the surgeon do not give a single fuck about seeing your dick. Its not intimate or sexual for them.
For her it probably did not feel intimate indeed. Still giving care can give a sense of emotional connection, with or without physical contact. Like I wrote, what made it most satisfying was the combination of the physio with empathetic conversations.
The apology in that case is more a polite society way of expressing "I appreciate your work, this isn't me taking it as something else".
I somewhat agree you don't need to apologize in that particular case you've outlined; medical professionals, of which that person effectively is, have usually seen it all. But there is a reasonable justification for why someone might choose to throw out an apology there all the same.
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