WFH

It’s already happening and wastes a tremendous amount of time. In a sea of bullshit slop there might be one (1) claim that’s actually valid and might land you in deep legal trouble if not addressed. As usual small business are the most vulnerable to this.

Cool. I have to admit I haven’t bought anything there for more than a decade, there was a non-zero chance they went to shit.

20 years ago, if you wanted a decent guitar in France, you bought it from Thomann.de

Crashing mid-game.

Of course. In this case productivity is a shorthand for obedience. If you do everything I tell you to do, when I tell you to do it and have it done before I need it so I can look good to my managers, then I will deem you productive. Meanwhile, their requirements are completely fucked up and impossible to implement as is, and the deadline is impossible to achieve.

I fucking hate politics so much…

There’s a guy in my team. I need to push him into a more advanced role. Because he deserves it, and because otherwise I might lose him. I brought him in from another team where things were going bad. Real bad. Turns out, all he needed was a human working with another human, not an type 1 cunt demanding output from a walking, breathing toolset. He already fits and fills that role within the team, but I need to make it official. Better pay, more perspectives. I know I’m gonna get cockblocked by the fuckers who still hate him for the wrong reasons. Career reviews are at the end of the year and I already dread it. I need to get involved in politics and I’m terrified of it.

I became a manager about a year ago. Now that I’m part of the “inner circle”, I can see firsthand what I suspected for the past 20 years.

There are 2 types of managers.

There are cunts bosses who treat their employees as property for their personal gain and advancement. They demand productivity at all costs (see: LLM-cogsuckers), punish for mistakes and pressure people into responsibilities they should take. They are the ones who want RTO to exert control on their employees. They are the ones who “joke” you must take a half-day leave if you need to go before 6PM. They are the ones who openly shit on their employees (or other teams employees FWIW) because they’re not benefiting them enough. They are not part of the team, they feel and act above everyone in it.

The second type, which I strive to be and most of my closest “manager friend” are, are servant-leaders. They want to get shit done by easing roadblocks and making technologically informed decisions. They understand that productivity is a consequence of a functional team and happy employees. They take on responsibility for mistakes and push the team towards finding solutions to prevent them. They understand that Life^TM is more important than work. They are an integral part of the team, they’re not the boss but a full member with a different role and different responsibilities, like a PO or a data analyst.

As a tech lead first and a trained Scrum Master second, I feel much more comfortable in the second role. I help the team internally and report and manage external roadblocks with other teams. It’s what I already know. I hate the hierarchical part of the job.

One of the largest slop-machines targeting one of the most vocal and popular anti-slop edutainment channels as slop feels like a targeted attack…

Ah yeah let me check my thermometer after a whole night of ventilation… yeah it’s still 27, down from 28 last night whooo. And this is my bedroom which is towards north.

European living in a “temperate climate” here. A decade ago, I didn’t need AC. Temperatures over 30 happened for a few days at a time a couple times per summer. Heatwaves that killed old folk with sustained temperatures over 35 for a week happened once a decade.

Now it’s the norm. We see temperatures in May that would only have been possible in the peak of August in the mid-2000s. We see temperatures over 35 everyday for weeks at a time. When it finally rains, it doesn’t cool down anymore. It just gets unbearably humid. Temperatures at night don’t fall down below 28 after a few days.

Even worse. My living room, home office and kitchen are in full sunlight the whole afternoon. I can live in the dark, but the walls have a thick insulation. Insulation doesn’t deflect heat, it stores it and slows it down. It’s literally accumulating heat as soon as a single sun ray touches it. Once the heat creeps through, they stay hot and radiate for a week. You could ventilate all you want, you can’t fight the thermal mass of a wall heated through its core up to 45C.

Climate change transformed my mild-winters, warm-summer region into a rainy-winters, unbearably hot summers region in a few decades.

I would never buy a such a critical piece of equipment if it depended on an app. I’ve seen too many devices being rendered useless or crippled when their app disappears or worse, forces a subscription model. Meanwhile, I SSH into my Mikrotik router, as the gods intended.

I’m not using it for the incentive. I’m using it to avoid punishment. The company I work for made it mandatory to use it daily. So I’m tokenmaxxing bullshit tasks so I can focus on interesting ones, but yeah I already feel it’s making me lazy because I sometimes can’t be bothered to read a log anymore. We are truly fucked.

This company is working on terrible assumptions. They spent years hunting for the best engineers in the country (or so they pretend to anyway) and suddenly decided that

• we are average at best and it is better and faster than most of us (it’s not)
• software engineers don’t like to write code anyway (we do, at least when the challenge is interesting)
• it will forever be more affordable than properly qualified engineers (oh boy it won’t)
• a PM with Claude is as qualified as us to bring features to production (talk about tech stack suicide)
• etc.

They either have drunk the propaganda koolaid and betting everything on this lie, or are so arrogant they think we can succeed where the largest AI investors in the world utterly failed (see GitHub that can’t even get 3 nines of availability since the switched to full-ai-code).

It’s either a political move (nobody wants to be responsible for and/or depend on another ministry), or 4D chess where they would prevent a single vulnerability to expose the entire user base.

Fun fact, Orange (former France Telecom) has developed its own distro for the best part of the last 25 years. It’s… very peculiar.

By who are we kidding. The actual work will be offloaded to the shittiest contractor available (Capgemini/Atos/SopraSteria), it will take 5 years of the planned 2 and will cost 3.5 times the initial budget, for something sensibly shittier than an uBlue script.

And guess what, the company I work in proudly announced today they will replace our internal chatbot with ChatGpt Enterprise. It’s like they gladly and actively increase their dependency on an enemy state.

Not true. 500Mb models suck ass and are just here for fun. A lot of local models in the 2.5Gb range can run on a phone and produce very coherent output on par with free-to-use LLMs without actually destroying the planet (while using them I mean, training is still a nightmare).

“Fun” fact, political bias is baked in the local models too, don’t ask Qwen3 about what happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989…

Yeah this one is much more recent.

https://github.com/seapear/AffinityOnLinux

There’s a Wine fork tweaked especially for Affinity that works amazingly well.