They’ll paint flames on the side to make it go faster.

Well, sorta.

Plenty (maybe even most) of 1st level manages will see and understand, but are still unable or unwilling to push back on unrealistic expectations coming from outside (sometimes not even from above, just from customer) so from the point of view of those working under them the result is the same if they’re not doing their own internal time reporting averaging and and are honest towards them.

Further, they often fuck-up things, from planning to analysis and taking in account the dependencies on external providers and it’s the team that has to make up for it. Absolutelly, the managers will notice people going the extra mile … and do the same thing again next time around and it will be just as “unexpected” and “we have not other option” as all the previous times.

I would even go as far as saying that the “understanding” manager that fucks you up anyway (sometimes because they’ll always put themselves above those working for them and might even be fake, others because they’re not very good at playing the game that needs to be played to other stakeholders) is the most common of all.

Looking back (to almost 30 years of experience in several countries), some of my worst managers were “really nice” people but the team still suffered massivelly because they were not in fact good managers (they suffered alongside the team, for all the good that did to the rest) - essentially the team was holding the career of somebody who should probably be doing something else and at the end of the day, the managers rather than the rest were the ones getting more pay and bigger bonuses.

It’s a pretty damn sad thing having to do it if you’re a fair and honest person, but that’s just how the world works.

(There are a few managers out there whom you can be honest towards without them taking away your reward for being efficient of going the extra mile, but in my personal experience those are pretty rare).

Yeah, but they’re great at discharging the righteous indignation of people who might otherwise do something extreme like going on demonstrations or start campaigning for non-“moderate” political parties.

This way people just put their personal data next to a meaningless and powerless piece of text on a website alongside that of other people, get the feeling of release after having done something about what pisses them of, and won’t do anything further about it.

Petitions are the single greatest invention of the Internet Age to keep the masses dormant (Social Media would’ve been it if, it wasn’t that, as the far-right has shown, it can be used to turn some people into activists).

Welcome to the world of making software for random people, almost certainly made worse by she being a woman.

As others pointed out, most people do appreciate it, but they tend to be silent about it, whilst a small minority are demanding little whinny bitches (in a non-gendered way) who think they’re owed service and some are even trolls.

To those reading this, I suggest when you get something you like for free you at least give some feedback that you liked it and, if the person has some kind of sponsoring scheme going on and you really like it, consider contributing, if only to incentivise more of the same.

Those on the other side are people too and they will appreciate it.

Yeah, I’ve been there - it’s how I learned to upgrade and eventually assemble my own PCs: I couldn’t just buy a new one every time it started to run slow with newer games so I learned which parts gave the better bang for the bug (back in those days it was often memory) and would upgrade them and eventually hit another bottleneck and upgrade that part and so on, and once in a while I did need to to a big upgrade (i.e. the motherboard, which usually meant also new CPU and new memory).

I was also pretty lost - at least to begin with - back then, but, you know, doing is learning.

Anyways, I still keep the “no waste” habits from back then (for example, recently I upgraded my CPU with one which the benchmarks say is twice as powerful, only my CPU is from 2018 and I didn’t want to upgrade the motherboard so the replacement had to be a CPU for the same socket type, so something also from that time. Ended up getting a server class CPU for it, which back then was over €200 but now, 2nd hand, cost me just €17).

Over time have learned to prioritize other things also and learned that sometimes spending a bit more upfront saves a lot more over time (for example, if I aim for stuff that produces less heat (i.e. that use less power to do its work, which in todays technical lingo is “lower TDP”) and I might spend a bit more but save it all and then some in lower electricity costs over time.

Point being that with a bit of reading and looking around you can learn what you need to better chose what you get, even if 2nd hand, in such a way that the results are less of a hassle and sometimes even end up saving more money (such as how parts that use a lot of power even 2nd hand can, in year or two, add up to something more expensive than newer parts which consume less because the 2nd hand ones eat so much more power).

Also as one gets more financially able to afford it, it’s normal to trade personal time savings for money, in the sense that I don’t really need to have a fragile setup held together with chewing gum and string which is constantly giving me problems and I have to waste tons of time on it just to keep it going, when at least for some things I can get a ton of extra convenience and save a lot of my time by spending a little bit more money. There is a monetary value for one not to have to worry about something breaking all the time and having to constantly tweak and maintain it, you just have to find how much is it worth it for you (I can tell you peace of mind and no-hassle It’s worth a lot more for me nowadays than back when I was a teen).

Well, that’s the second part of my theory but I didn’t went into it to avoid muddling the point I was making:

• I think the “neutral” majority shift more to one side or the other depending on who dominates society and the main sources of culture and information in it.

So in present “Greed is good” (very much a Sociopath slogan) times with mainstream media and a large section of the Culture production and distribution (in the form of TV, but also TV Show and Movie making) in the hands of extremelly wealthy people and when those we are told we should look up to are people like Musk (well, him specifically maybe not anymore) and Bezos, the “neutral” majority has shifted significantly towards the asshole side of things.

The World would be a lot different if our “heroes” were Scientists and Environmentalists.

The “Most moral army in the World” really showing their country’s “Western values” there…

The secret is to give yourself as Elitez Hacker objectives things like “least maintenance time required” or “maximum computing power lowest energy consumption” (or it’s companion “silent yet powerful”).

Maybe “I’m fed up with the constant need for tweaking and the jet-plane-like quality of my heater-that-does-computing-on-the-side” is the real mid-life crisis of techies.

Curiously, judging by my recent upgrade parts search, the peak of the capability-to-power-used curve on PCs (at least gaming ones) seems to have peaked about a decade ago.

Signed, a fellow Old Sea Dog Of Tech who has also gone through the same change over a decade ago

That’s not mid-life, that’s entire-life.

Years ago I concluded (wrongly or rightly) that most people are neutral, a small handfull are actually good people (willing to sacrifice their personal benefit for people they don’t know with no expectation of gaining from it, even in the form of social approval) and a small handful are assholes, but the assholes do such a disproportionate amount of damage that they end up having a massive impact on everybody else.

The stuff in computer games that makes NPCs move around the game world from point A to point B has been called AI for ages (and in this case specifically, is generally the A* pathing algorithm which isn’t even all that complex).

It’s only recently that marketing-types, salesmen and journalists with no actual technical expertise have started pushing AI as if the I in the acronym actually meant general intelligence rather than the “intelligence-alike” meaning that it has had for decades.

Salesmanship is the essence of management at those levels.

Which brings us back around to the original subject of this thread - tech bros - in my own experienced in Tech recently and back in the 90s boom, this generation of founders and “influencers” aren’t techies, they’re people from areas heavy on salesmanship, not actually on creating complex things that objectivelly work.

The complete total dominance of sales types in both domains id why LLMs are being pushed the way they are as if they’re some kind of emerging-AGI and lots of corporates believe it and are trying to hammer those square pegs into round holes even though the most basic of technical analises would tell them that it doesn’t work like that.

Ultimately since the current societal structures we have massively benefit that kind or personality, we’re going to keep on having these kinds of barely-useful-stuff-insanely-hyped-up cycles wasting tons of resources because salesmanship is hardly a synonym for efficiency or wisdom.

There are only two types of “Super High-IQ” people who will go for an unpaid job working in politics for the likes of Musk:

• Very naive young things, hence very inexperienced and who are going to do all mistakes in the book and then some for the next couple of years as they learn the ropes. By the time they know enough about the job they’ll be burned out from working for a guy like Musk not to mention knowing enough to know they’re better of elsewhere.
• Grifters looking for making maximum money from being in politics. Since they’re not getting paid, that means corruption, lots and lots of corruption.

Also, even amongst the “very naive young things”, in my own personal experience, the high intelligent types with the personality to be real believers of far right stuff, are at most above average intelligence but below genius level IQ (which is 120) and hence not really “super high”-IQ (which would more 160+) - I once worked with a guy like that who thought himself very intelligent and in his new job ended up working in an office with two genious level colleagues and he was very entertaining because of his “buttons” were so obvious and he was so easy to give the run around.

Super-high IQ people are often the very opposite of street smart, but one thing they aren’t is stupid and at most fall into the first part of the saying “you can deceive most people some of the time, or some people all of the time, but you can’t deceive most people all of the time” - they can be swindled but they’ll figure it out faster than most.

Well, Money de facto ruling over massive domains in a country, including access to life essentials, is the very opposite of Democracy.

Well, I for one am fine with them attacking foreign military navy ships of their own coast.

Not the the attacking of civilian vessels though (unless we’re talking about Israeli owned or Israeli bound ones were I’m a bit more conflicted - there should be a blocade and sanctions of Israel, but attacking civilians is wrong) and if they’re indeed extorting shipping companies then that’s just criminality rather than any sort of resistance.

If government is actually the top power on the land with oversight over and the power to rule over everything, then the power of voters which choses the people who lead said government controls the top power on the land, which is what’s known as Democracy (even when imperfect).

However if government ties its own hands so that it doesn’t really oversee or rule over the domains were Money has the most power, then it’s not the top power on the land anymore - Money is - and the votes of people do not control the highest power on the land anymore, they only control a secondary power, so what you have in not Democracy anymore, it’s Oligarchy - Money is not democratic since doesn’t have any “one person one vote” rule and instead some have billions of times more power than others.

“Small government” is really just a slogan for a government which has had its hands tied by reducing its funding so that it’s unable to oversee, much less rule over, the areas where Money dominates, especially when it comes to facing the wealthiest people and companies. Mind you this only works if the other elements of Democracy are kept, so Money still wants a Judiciary and Law Enforcement independent of Government to uphold their ownership of things and stop the plebes from taking their shit, just a government weakenned in all other areas and unable to fight Money in the Courts.

It’s curious that the “terrorists” are actually targetting military targets whilst the military are killing civilians.

I’ve had fewer problems with GoG + Lutris in Linux than I’ve had with Steam in Linux, to the point that I had to pirate one of my Steam games in order to be able to run it in Linux (the pirate version runs just fine).

Mind you, I get the impression that older AAA games are the most problematic ones, thought that’s maybe because I don’t run anything with Kernel Anti-Cheat and nowadays don’t really do online gaming (in fact all my games in Lutris are run inside a firejail sandbox with network access disabled).