A couple of companies I have worked for are Windows 100%. Everything is very much locked down (can't even run an executable that somebody has not approved).

WSL gives me back a little usability and productivity. I can install linux and start coding (in whatever language), performing data analysis and generally using computers the way they should be used.

Some fuckwit computer 'experts', who only know Windows, just don't understand people being productive.

Are these people smart enough to use an anagram?

To be fair, it wasn't just the US. All countries experienced shortages. Each country producing their own goods doesn't really make a lot of sense, as well as being horrible for the environment.

It needs a different solution. One that is resilient to extreme events. Perhaps robotics can play a role here, but it is still too early for that. The orange man isn't helping here at all so I doubt the solution will come from the US. Even if it is a good solution, global trust in the US is gone now.

BTW Don't ask me what that solution is. I don't know. But it is global, not isolationist.

Ok, now imagine what nonsense is finding its way into code bases by people who swear by the AI assistants.

The top answer in a google search, even prior to the recently worse returns, is not always the correct way to do something. It is good, and it looks like a good answer, but given the circumstances, not hard for there to be a more appropriate answer.

Or am I just an old fuddy duddy?

No, development companies and IT support companies.

I've worked with some quiet, competent women and some loudmouthed, entitled, idiotic women. But I've also worked with some quiet, competent men and some loudmouthed, entitled, idiotic men.

I really don't think it's aligned to gender.

Sure, and that's totally fair. The issue comes when, say, 60% of JobsRequiringNavigatingSkills are men and 40% are women, and people say "this is unfair".

To be honest, though, it depends on the job. Men have, typically, much more upper body strength than women, so are more suited to being things like garbage men. Yet nobody's clamoring for equal numbers of women to be garbage *people*.

Yet they are for firefighters, even though firefighting is basically a job where you turn upper body strength into saved lives, simply because they want to be seen as "equal".

People are different and have different things they're good at and bad at. Most HR people are women even though that's a comfortable, high paid, safe job. And I'm okay with that.

Granted this is 100% true, but h.265 (or HEVC) can basically encode twice the bit rate at the same file size compared to h.264. Accordingly, transcoding h.264 into h.265 at 1.5 the bit rate is essentially lossless in terms of visual quality, but the final file will be approximately 75% the original size.

If someone has a bunch of high bit-rate h.264 (aka not stuff downloaded off the web which tends to be really highly compressed anyway), I can see someone wanting to save space and reencode it, especially if it's for something like "all of the X-files" which they're unlikely to want to rewatch anytime soon, and when they don't, won't mind a slight drop in quality.

Self-published author here, I'm on a first-name basis with Hugh Howey, and I know H.M. Ward indirectly through various Facebook groups and shared contacts. I've published about 20 novels so far (#21 coming soon).

I will disagree that "If you're an author and you aren't making money you're marketing yourself wrong or you're writing in a genre that isn't popular.", but I've noticed a lot of trends to success. Not everyone who does these things will do well, but most people who do, do.

The main thing is: you can't just do it with one book. Most people have a good book idea in them, some have two, some have a whole series. I've been publishing since 2012 and, as I said, I've put out 20 novels. That's about 3-5 a year. That's hard.

You hit the nail on the head in terms of genres. Sci-fi/fantasy is where I make my money, along with trashy romance under a pen name. I tick all the boxes you're talking about in terms of genre and I can basically all of this. That's where the money is. I'm not a millionaire, but I hit my first $10,000 month this year, which is nice. Learning a lot about taxes.

Publishing in this way has been my living for a few years now. It makes money. It's a hard job, doing what I do, but it's a good job. These days, Google Play is my largest retailer by *far*, but back in the day... I couldn't have done it without Amazon.

Even today they're a big chunk of my income, even if the GP train is where the money is for me.

It's not scary at all and is in fact completely understandable.

Basically until World War I, for the vast majority of people, you either killed or you died. Even during the 1600's, arguably the beginning of "civilization" as something where violence was not commonplace, people still fought highly ritualized duels, countries still invaded other countries for the express purpose of taking their shit, people took and kept slaves, nations conquered and plundered and stole and all manner of violent actions. The only way, at the time, to stop your shit from being taken, to stop yourself being conquered and enslaved, was through violence.

If you were strong, you survived. If you were weak, or chose to be weak, you died. Those kinds of instincts were bred into us over tens of thousands of years of evolution, ruthlessly and yet apathetically selecting the strongest, most violent, people to carry on their genes. The guy who got to fuck all the women was the guy who could club all the other men on the head the best. Violence, and willingness to use it, until recently, was strongly evolutionarily selected for.

It was really only World War I and II that changed that. We got so fucking good at killing that we decided: hey, maybe lets try another way. Instead of having violence be the domain of all, where our nations raise vast armies of conscripts, let's instead have small, professional armies well supported with things like tanks, aircraft, machine guns, artillery, night vision, etc. They actually work better.

As a consequence of this, the vast majority of our citizens are now peaceful, but our armies are, in terms of overall ability to project force, more powerful than ever. The Roman Legions at their absolute height would get massacred by even the US Coast Guard, let alone the full might of the US Military. It would be a laughable massacre where I would fully expect 0 casualties from the US forces (excluding illnesses, accidents, etc) and 100% casualties from the Roman legions, assuming they fought to the last.

This is a change that's taken place over less than 100 years. That is a tiny blink in an evolutionary time period. We haven't changed and won't change for thousands of years because there's no evolutionary pressure on us to do so.

But, you know, I figure I should end on a slightly more upbeat note.

As much as "to the victor go the spoils" applies... no man rules alone.

A single man, no matter how powerful, no matter how violent or manly or tough, is defeated by many smaller, weaker people. Refer, again, to my example of the modern US Coast Guard versus the ENTIRE Roman Legion.

A single man cannot build an Apache gunship--and that gunship will fuck anyone. A single man cannot build a tank. A single man cannot build the complex logistical network to fuel an aircraft carrier, let alone maintain it, supply it with aircraft, sail it, coordinate strike missions, and generally put warheads on foreheads. A carrier-based strike mission to drop a single 500lb bomb requires the combined efforts of literally hundreds of thousands of people, probably millions. Just to deliver one bomb.

But, like I said, nothing can stand against it.

So. In the small picture, individual might makes right, but in the much larger broader sense, victory belongs to the cooperators.

As long as those cooperators put their collective talents towards fucking shit up.

And it has all kinds of weird side effects.

For example, right now, if an OS update breaks an application, the onus is almost always on the application to update itself to work on the new platform (or throw in the towel).

However, if the law is changed such that upgrading an OS cannot remove functionality, what happens when, for example, Windows 11 arrives and Steam doesn't work on it, and Steam decides, "Well we're not fixing our app, and we're not going to work with you on a workaround, so... good luck getting people to upgrade hahahahahahaha".

It could be limited only to built-in services, but then, what happens when eventually (as is inevitable), Skydrive goes down for good? Skydrive is built into Windows 10 unless removed, and could be considered part of the OS (it's opt-out, rather than opt-in).

If the law changed, would Skydrive be a part of Windows forever and ever, and be essentially immortal?

Seems like this kind of technology would be very useful for long duration space probes.

... but it's actually not that bad. Comparable to Windows 7.

The new backup features are cool. Having volume shadow copies/file history baked in is neat.

The automatic restarting whenever an update comes in pisses me off, but I recognise that this is a necessary feature because so, so many people don't keep their machines up to date and (similar to immunization) that compromises the entire ecosystem.

Given it's basically free for me because I have a whole bunch of Windows 7/8 keys collected over the years, I'm okay with it. It seems good.

Sure and it is, but how many of them are running Ubuntu?

What show-stopping problem for a 2006 MacBook is present in 18.04 but fixed in 18.10?

What's wrong with running 18.04 until the hardware dies?