I work in payments.

Remember the Superman movie scheme taking a fraction of a cent off of every transaction? Every time you dip your card, 1/30 of a cent is sent directly to Kim Jong-Il's personal hairdresser.

Coming in 2027 is the all-new Hezbollah Rewards scheme, where 125,000 points can be exchanged for a custom-painted missile lofted towards Tel Aviv.

I keep looking for a mail-order spouse, but I'm only willing to order from the "free shipping once you spend USD10" section of Aliexpress.

I'd think AI imagery is uniquely toxic for product marketing because it reads as an admission the product is worse than the picture.

We know you'll pick the most flattering angle, and the one perfectly formed unit out of 500, with a photo of a real shirt. It's the upper bound on reality, but it's still reality. If you have to hallucinate instead, you probably can't even make that cherry-picked example look good.

I read about this. They make the printer WITH a perfectly good USB port and then stick a "no USB" label over it and attempt to force you to use their wireless setup.

https://post.lurk.org/@yaxu/110833261398955782 for more.

Yeah, it's surreal. Back when the Oregon Trail Generation got their first 486 class PCs with 14.4 dialup, all the safety guides were about "never use your real name."

The fear of some theoretical elite AOL pedophile corps and being able to age out of an embarrassing "ponygirl1987" account actually made good prep for the idea of "you have multiple identities for different contexts" and "keep personal and work stuff isolated."

:lightbulb:

If we gave the Project 2025 crew Jira, it cpuld drag the entire operation to a halt.

Atlassian, your hour of need is at hand. It's time to Save Democracy! Let us send wave after wave of Scrum Coaches to chase down Musk toadies and demand they play Scheduling Poker before defunding the VA. Do they even have a Definition of Done for conquering Canada?

500% of every "replace the legacy system" project is even discovering what the legacy system does.

There are no specs. Well, they are, but they're wrong and onsolete, and never encompass use cases that you didn't even know were going on and only appear when you switch over and people scream that the tools that use an embedded copy of Opera for the Nintendo Wii to access their financial services break.

Cars fulfill a very self-indulgent narrative. 'I get to decide where and when I travel', makes people feel "free" snd "important" even when millions of them are silently coming to the same decisions-- like going downtown at 09:00 on weekdsys-- that allow huge efficiency plays.

Notice how many ads feature fantasies of open roads and trips to faraway attractions, not the real world of "I need to sit in rush hour traffic from 6:30 on to get to the Work Factory"

Maybe public transit needs to focus its message on the freedom from drudgery it offers-- you don't have to be staring at the driver in front of you, scanning the traffic reports

Bought the Blahaj because I'm a side sleeper in need of a pillow.

Did not read the EULA.

This is an interesting sabotage to any figures that want to maintain their presence.

If you search for "brandname twitter", you're probably going to get what you want. "brandname x" will be a SEO catastrophe.

Maybe they hoped to drive people to navigate through their own site and search facilities, but generally, not being where people are looking is a terrible strategy even on a chain of bad strategies.

Ham radio sex is worse.

"I'm not yelling out my callsign every 10 minutes as a fetish thing, it's a FCC requirement."

I sort of liked GTK back in the day when it was still the Gimp Tool Kit first and foremost. When it was 1999 and your other choices were a broken Lesstif, an early C++ centric Qt, clumsy Tk, and pre-Cambrian Xaw, it was nice to have something full-featured and tasteful.

Now I hesitate to pull in a GTK app because it won't theme right (I want to use the same bitmap fonts I liked in 1999, but apparently Pango stopped supporting them) and runs the risk of convincing the package manager to dump several gigs of GNOME crud on my drive.

I gather even the GIMP itself no longer tracks current GTK-- it's become solely in service to GNOME and their absurd UI whims (* * * * client side decorations)

Because Wayland is a hot mess.

What the hell is with the "Thank you for your attention to this matter?"

You're shitposting to a global media audience, not politely asking Facilities to restock the vending machine with Snickers bars.

Are you just in full Business Guy Autocomplete mode? A Bigly Language Model?

So that's where they store the gender fluid.

With American comics, it's not even the shattered continuity, it's that availability is a mess because some of the franchises are so ancient and collectible.

If I want to read through One Piece from the 1997 start, my library probably has/can inter-library loan all 105 volumes, or I can go to mainstream retailers and get any I'm missing without a huge fracas.

If I want to read Batman from the 1940 start, I'd better hope some of the rarer issues come up at auction in the near future AND that I can mortgage my house to afford them.

I'm amazed they never put out a DVD-ROM collection that's "Everything Marvel/DC did prior to, say, 1990, as PDF scans" just so mere mortals have a chance to enjoy the experience of completionism.

I've heard that some grant money is earmarked to be spent in stupid ways. "Here's $2M for technology" means they can put a Threadripper on every desk, but not replace the desk, or the 30-year-old textbooks within it.

I'm surprised there aren't an ecosystem of crooked vendors that know ways to help cashout such grants. Buy these garbage PCs for $1000 each, and we have a "surplus trade in programme" to buy them back for $600 cash each in 3 months, giving you no-longer-restricted cash to actually fix the hole in the cafeteria floor that's already swallowed Mrs Baxter's third grade class"

If you could pull it off, cycling through schools every few decades probably is s viable way to keep up to date with broad advances in sciences and the arts, and get exposed to enough current culture to blend in more effectively.

Although the opportunities to blow the masquerade are intense.

You're nominally a 17 year old whose family relocated from Topeka for the labour market. You really should not be chastizing Mrs Finster's history class with your strong, intensely personal feelings about Martin van Buren.

Floats for currency in a payments platform.

The system will happily take a transaction for $121.765, and every so often there's a dispute because one report ran it through round() and another through floor().

Lies!

I see wi-fi antennae. What gamer settles for that?

I want to go to an estate agent and say "I want a house so wired that if I down 82 redbulls and punch through the drywall after losing a round of Call of Skyrim, anywhere in the house, I should be able to reach in the hole and pull out a bale of Cat 6."