Unless there are those who need certain words for their jobs, I can kinda understand why Microsoft wouldn’t want emails from work addresses to go out with political agendas… for either side.

Sure. Then block both sides, and not only the one not bringing you money.

Work emails should just be about work. Too many people use their work emails like a personal email… with their banking, shopping, etc. That’s what personal email addresses are for.

No one uses their company email for their personal banking, simply for the reason because if you’d leave, you’d lose your access, and since most companies run behind firewalls, vpns, 2fa tokens and similar additional credentials, it’s simply harder to use.

This policy should go for many non-work related topics too. IT can unblock the words for certain users who need to use them for their job.

Of course, let’s waste resources to maintain idiotic blocklists that are out of date the moment they are rolled out, and additional resources to make the blocklist actually work. Palestine, p4lestine, pale s tine, p a l e s t i n e, paleztine. Need more?

You’re not at work for someone with this kind of unhinged mentality watching you working for 8 hours a day straight with no breaks and no distractions. You’re there to get your work done. In my current team, we’ve had the best ideas talking about our problems at the coffee machine. I personally focus best when I have music on. We’re doing sports together once a week on a company fitness incentive, which boosted our team dynamic massively. None of this would be possible in such a controlled environment.

“Googling a lot while coding” is not even remotely close to vibe coding, please don’t gaslight yourself into that.

When you read up on things, you know what you’re looking for. You read a potential solution (e.g. part of a documentation, an example, someone else’s solution, a solution to a similar problem), you think about it and transfer that to your own problem, with your own code, with your own thoughts.

Using AI support is totally fine too - it’s a smarter code completion, nothing more. It might spit out something wrong, something partial, something good. You might ignore it as with the regular completion. In the end, it’s still you thinking about it, modifying it until it works, and doing your thing.

“Vibe coding” is basically saying tech jesus take the wheel. And it might go well for someone who cannot code, who managed to create their small game or some website. It will go horribly wrong for any project handling user data, sensitive data, or something that needs to be maintained after. We’ve had more than enough examples of that.

Take the following with a grain of salt, it depends on your specific setup, environment and preference, but might help you:

Regarding system backups, and depending whether you need to run fedora, check out nixos, which takes a declarative file and builds your system based on that. Declarative immutable system, no moving parts, no breakage. If your system breaks, revert to a prior version and keep using what you’ve had before before retrying. Your backup is a git repo or whatever is keeping your handful of config files. Has been an absolute game changer for me, and the community and ecosystem around it is far beyond the point of quirky esoteric immutable distro.

VSCode has a powerful feature that I’ve yet to see in another editor/IDE - remote development, and it works really, really well. Spin up a VM however you like (I’d recommend checking out Vagrant), and depending on how much you need to do in windows either use the windows box as a remote run target (just running your built artifact in windows), or as a remote development box (running everything in windows and using your Linux VSCode as a “Frontend” for everything else happening in windows). Both methods can be made to work seamlessly in vsc.

Excel - again depending on your usage, you can try wine, you can use a VM, dual boot, M365 in browser, or a remote VM.

You probably just should let an AI generate that.

Because it’s always been like that. An enemy image unites, and allows for political agendas which wouldn’t be possible otherwise. China and Taiwan? Israel and Gaza? The middle east? Jugoslawia? Kosovo and Albania? The soviets, Hitler, the OG fascist Mussolini, and even they weren’t the first ones.

Having an enemy helps unite people against them, and as long as the image of the enemy being present and being a danger is fed, inner conflicts matter way less, since the “danger” is the enemy.

For America it’s an especially interesting case:

• America spends ~900 billion dollars on military, which is as much as the next most spending 9 countries combined. Source. Fuck knows if that’s super accurate, it’s a fuckton. America’s main export good is war, so any enemy is a good enemy, and any war is a good war. Suddenly, the 66.5 billion spent on Ukraine since 2022 aren’t that much anymore.
• The “commies” and the “reds” are an historic enemy, and have been for a significant time of America’s existence. America has existed for 249 years this year. The soviet union existed for 69 years, counting in the Russian Republic right before its 74 years. Right before that was the Russian empire, which existed for 196 years. The Russians, in some form, have been an enemy since basically forever.
• A comparatively extremely dumb population on average at least in regard to the non-american world, in addition to intolerance of the “non-american way” of doing things and disinterest in other cultures.

And since the average American already is used in thinking black and white with glorious freedom of two-party pseudo democracy, it’s even easier to get the enemy image going.

For some variance, China can be used sometimes too.

And before I get called a Russian bot, fuck Putin, fuck Trump, fuck Musk, and many other political figures having blood of many people on their hands.

It’s not about being dumb and expecting stuff for free but a general anger towards subscription based models. Fair models exist and are possible, but are a collateral of the general hate.

Then, free alternatives exist, and believe it or not, some people do not have a tiny monthly fee they could spare or do not want to pay for something that a free alternative exists.

Threema tried exactly that, and failed comically.

No, but the more people block them, the less up votes and visibility they will receive for their posts.

Why are we giving this person their stage again? How probable is it that the instance admins of the like 15 instances they have accounts on will all collectively ban him? It’s just your average nazi spammer on the internet. You’ve read that “bio” this person has. Even if they get banned, they’ll come back just on principle. Just block him like any sane person would do, leave him shadow banned like that with his nazi friends, and call it a day.

So, you mean using a proprietary vendor to operate something binds you to that vendor? Congratulations, you’ve just discovered vendor lock-in.

“Obfuscating the environment” is also an absolutely unhinged claim, what even is that supposed to mean?

And again, Automattic is NOT in the right. What Automattic did was break license terms, attempt to extort, steal code, and light their whole brand, company, ecosystem and community on fire. Matt spit in the faces of his open source community (and open source in general), and every single person dependent on WordPress losing their job because of the shift he’s causing will be blood on his hands personally. Even if WP Engine was questionably morally or ethically, they did play by the laws and the license terms. Matt went on a mental breakdown and additionally to his unethical behavior broke several laws on that journey, which is exactly why he is losing the lawsuit. Matt and Automattic are NOT in the right.

To be fair, Matt is providing meltdowns regularly and totally free of charge. 😂

I’d laugh my ass off if WP Engine would lead a hard fork called WP Core. If any WP Engine folks read this, feel free to use the name, I won’t sue, I promise.

It really depends what you’re doing. If it’s really “only” blogging I’ve seen a lot of blogs using Ghost. Hugo is more of a “simpler” static site generator.

That whole blog post is so full of salt, that it really hurts to read.

Still going on about the “imbalance of the contributions”, well that’s open source for you - you don’t get to control who contributes how much, all you can do is ask nicely, and provide a good experience for contributors. Acting like a lunatic does not do that.

legal attacks started by WP Engine

Of course they did after the witch-hunt and the absolutely illegal, unethical and plain ridiculous behavior of Automattic. The counter they did, the whole ACF takeover and the slandering are a lawsuit handed on a plate.

The way “community” is quoted in that article for those who dared to disagree.

This legal action diverts significant time and energy that could otherwise be directed toward supporting WordPress’s growth and health.

Yeah, as a developer I also hate when lawsuits are stopping me from working. He had no problem letting go of nearly 10% of his staff with their “alignment offer” to get rid of people who again dared to disagree, but the legal action is diverting resources now.

But the whole “Focused on the Future” paragraph is going full mask off:

Before, they said that resources will be reallocated to “for-profit projects within Automattic”, and

We will redirect our energy toward projects that can fortify WordPress for the long term

It’s only a matter of time another hostile takeover will take place, and Matt will attempt to go full for-profit on WordPress itself.

We’re excited to return to active contributions to WordPress core, Gutenberg, Playground, Openverse, and WordPress.org when the legal attacks have stopped.

Full on extortion. Stop the lawsuit or we won’t contribute.

Honestly, if I’d be dependent on WordPress for my work, I’d not sleep well and start going into something else right fucking now. How are people that stupid, childish and entitled getting into such positions.

Matt never ceases to amaze with his smoothbrain decisions.

The amount of effort this moron puts into his weird personal vendetta against WP engine, even after the court told him that he has nothing, which was actually his last chance to end this kinda gracefully, could’ve been used for so much better things.

And he’s not only successfully kicking himself in the balls, he’s willing to throw so many years of community and project time and effort under the bus for it.

Go on Matt, keep telling how much you’re only doing this for WordPress.

And where did I say that no one should pay for youtube premium? Where did I say that everything should be 100% free?

If YouTube premium is worth it for you, go for it. In my opinion YouTube is getting worse by the day, and it’s monopoly due to its reach and resources suppresses any competition, unfortunately. Even if YouTube Premium would cost 10 cents I won’t pay it, because I simply think that YouTube has severely gone wrong. Vote with your wallet.

And before other connoisseurs of boot material chime in - I’m paying for Google one. I’m using drive and mail daily. I bought the new pixel, watch and buds day one, and all of those are amazing Google products I’m very happy to pay for, just as I do for Spotify, HP, Netflix, IntelliJ and any other product that brings me value.

Pay for what you want, and let me do the same.

YouTube is the biggest platform, and the one with the most resources. Whether it’s the best one is on another page.

And again, keep bootlicking. Chrome fanboy, goated YouTube, and even MSP, talking about copium. Your poor fucking customers and people working under you.

Yes, the problem are definitely the few percent of people using ad blockers, but absolutely not the corpos spewing out a few cents while watching creators fight against each other and the algorithm ™️ from their second yacht they bought this week.

Keep bootlicking, fool.

Bethesda brought HD texture packs for Skyrim and Fallout, yes. But they are free DLCs and came out several years after release. Bethesda did a paid modding shop.

But this is a feature that other games just have, that’s paid, on a preorder full price AAA game that’s already more expensive than other games.

Stop trying to compare, this is a whole new precedent of greed and mtx.

The smallest footprint for an actual scripting probably will be posix sh - since you already have it ready.

A slightly bigger footprint would be Python or Lua.

If you can drop your requirement for actual scripting and are willing to add a compile step, Go and it’s ecosystem is pretty dang powerful and it’s really easy to learn for small automation tasks.

Personally, with the requirement of not adding too much space for runtimes, I’d write it in go. You don’t need a runtime, you can compile it to a really small zero dependency lib and you have clean and readable code that you can extend, test and maintain easily.

It’s not surprising per se, but it’s something that people should be more aware of. And a lot of this consumption is not providing global services (like the Google search or workspace suite) but the whole AI hype.

I didn’t find numbers for Google or Microsoft specifically, but training ChatGPT 4 consumed 50 GWh on its own. The daily estimates for queries are estimated between 1-5 GWh.

Given that the extrapolation is an overestimate and calculating the actual consumption is pretty much impossible, it’s still probably a lot of energy wasted for a product that people do not want (e.g. Google AI “search”, Bing and Copilot being stuffed into everything).