Year: 2025

Ops Nopes

Chill Amusing, Annoying

And about the below, being taken off high-impact projects for trivialities is not any sort of exaggeration. It happens constantly.

Just yesterday a person in Operations contacted me with an “urgent” request. And the request was that she wanted me to take over managing and organizing her group’s email. Note that she has full and unrestricted access to everything needed to do this herself, has been trained how to do it, and should be approaching her own manager for this request. It is in no way my team’s responsibility and has absolutely nothing to do with anything we’re supposed to be doing or really should be even thinking about for a single second.

Currently, I’m wrapping up a project that will lead directly to millions of dollars of additional revenue potential yearly. I’m in fact one of the few people in tech where many of my projects actually cause a revenue increase. Her even talking to me about this means I had less time to work on this project that the CEO is watching like a raptor.

Though she was put out, I told her that my team’s role is not really intended to be professional email and inbox organizers, that she should go to her own manager if she needs assistance, and that there was no need to put in a ticket as we’d just route it to her manager anyway. Or more likely, just close it.

And we get requests like that all the time at any company that I’ve ever worked in any similar role.

It is exhausting.

When It’s Over

Chill Annoying, Tech

How many of you don’t actually interact with end-users?

In my field if you’re good enough, I don’t think you ever stop dealing with end users.

Once they figure out that you can solve their problem in 5-10 minutes that the helpdesk might take a day, a week, or months to puzzle out, it is fully over. Even if it’s not the best use of your time and the company has other priorities. And often enough the “tier 1 emergency” is that they forgot how to unmute their headset.

The end users seem to be able to sniff out your problem-solving ability like some weird sightless creature from a cave in Guatemala. I don’t know how they do it, but they always find out and always ignore all protocols, escalation paths, good sense and etiquette to locate you and take you off a $10 million high-value high-impact project so you can spend time and company money researching why they cannot click a button in Microsoft Word.

A good use of time, certainly.

Biblio

Chill Killin' It

Sometimes I go into someone’s place and have a peek at their bookshelf. Often enough, they’ll ask which ones I’ve read.

And also fairly often I can answer truthfully, “All of them.”

I love doing that. Don’t know why.

Lotta Bot

Chill Tech

That’s CGI of course, but given the current rate of progress and assuming it continues, I’d say we’re 12-15 years away from that result.

Chill Links

New Russian Drone Made Completely Of Chinese Components: Ukrainian Intelligence.

America in 2025 is a nation that is being dragged by malign political forces into a pit of fascism, oligarchy, and hatred.

New TV Novels.

Conspiracy theorists don’t realize they’re on the fringe.

In an Age of Climate Change, How Do We Cope with Floods?

Silicon Valley AI Startups Are Embracing China’s Controversial ‘996’ Work Schedule.

OpenAI CEO tells Federal Reserve confab that entire job categories will disappear due to AI.

If GLP-1 Drugs Are Good For Everything, Should We All Be on Them?

Fire, Brimstone, and Hegseth: Idaho Christian Nationalists Establish a DC Beachhead.

Trump’s insane war on renewable energy.

Risk

Chill Regular-ass Post

Agreed. Most people should not be permitted to do any form of short-term trading. It takes nerves of steel, very high intelligence, tolerance for risk and stress, and the ability to lose money without flinching. You’re playing against the worst sharks in the world who will eat you alive without a second thought. Most people will be bankrupted.

And yes, I do know. I day-traded for years actively and made 64x my initial investment before I mostly hung up my spurs. Yes, that is 64 times, not 64%. Unfortunately, I did not have all that much capital to start so I didn’t get as rich as I could’ve if I’d started out wealthy.

What Is Binary?

Chill Clowns

Does anyone else have like ZERO patience for developers that don’t know how to computer?

What’s odd about these threads is how many people vehemently insist that even developers should not have any idea how to use a computer and should not be expected to comprehend anything about one.

I expect the (also-wrong) defense of end users not knowing the name of an application they’ve been using for 15+ years and the like. But to see people claiming that even devs should not know the first thing about their own tools and the targets of their programming is fucking infuriating.

We systems types really are expected just to do everyone else’s jobs these days, aren’t we?

(And the title of this post is in reference to a developer at an early job of mine who didn’t know what binary was and asked me, “So, what is binary?” I was utterly flabbergasted.)

Pow Imp

Chill Clowns

AITA for pointing out the truth to my brother?

I think this is the first time I’ve ever seen “power imbalance” applied to a man being an alleged victim of one.

In feminist discourse only women can be completely powerless fragile effectless flowers in their own lives, never men. Not exactly refreshing to see it changed up, exactly, but that it did happen at all is remarkable.

But Jesus fuck, let people lead their own lives. Neither one of them are hurting a fly, and I’d say the same thing if the relationship was the other way around.

All we really have is a clown imbalance.