Semi-Hemi-Demigod

Yeah. There’s always a chance that a customer could have an issue on a weekend and then I’ve gotta fix it. Once I was on 27 hours of conference calls over a weekend. But as I’ve gotten better at my job those sorts of things happen less and less.

Honestly the worst part of my job is doing my timesheets and updating weekly status, but when the weather’s good I do that from my hammock with a cold beer in hand which makes it suck less.

I’m salaried so I don’t have a lunch break. I work from home so I basically set my own hours as long as I can be contacted from about 10am to 3pm and go to any meetings I have scheduled.

Which was when Slashdot was like BBS before the Eternal September

For more inclusive piracy, check out Our Flag Means Death

Nation-states were a stupid idea to begin with

I think it has more to do with maintaining a manufacturing base for defense than it is about jobs or the economy.

I was a teenager who wanted to be a 1337 haxxor so I found out what warez were, and then wanted to play a bunch of games for free.

I remember those days. Except back then you had the added challenge of finding space for it on your 1.2GB hard drive

I’ve worked for a couple startups and you’re absolutely right. If you make a profit you pay taxes on that money, so startups like to spend most of the money they bring in. They also want to show revenue growth, since that’s what investors like to see. You grow revenue by getting more paying customers. And you do that by doing what your customers want.

When you go public, your goal is to increase shareholder value. So you do this by reducing costs and finding ways to wring customers out of revenue. You find ways to nickle and dime customers out of revenue so much you develop an entire branch of law devoted to you suing your customers

Yeah, I should have clarified for the children in the audience

I remember downloading porn in the 90s. It would take me about a week, mainly because I had a 28.8 modem, but also because I had to schedule them to resume in the middle of the night so my parents wouldn’t know I was downloading porn. It would boot up at 2am, download for three hours, and then shutdown at 5am, about an hour before my dad woke up for work.

I stored it on a Zip disk labeled “homework.”

So what? It figured out The Answer, big whoop.

Get back to me when it figures out The Question.

I’m an asshole sometimes so I throw anything I make in the trash

There is, but since color printers are the ones that were used in counterfeiting most black and white printers don’t do that sort of thing. Plus I don’t know how you’d encode that much information in black and white without making it visible on the paper.

Only color laser printers put those yellow dots on paper. The black and white ones don’t because they can’t: They don’t have yellow toner.

So get a black and white printer and you’ll be fine.

I don’t know about the others, but Roblox and Minecraft have environments that are designed for infinite replayability. It’s like being amazed that kids are still playing with Lincoln Logs or Legos.

Exactly! Ads are designed to force you to engage with them. Even noticing the ad at all is engaging with it, and they’ve got teams of psychologists figuring out how to make that second of engagement influence you.

People who dismiss the influence of advertisements seem to forget that companies wouldn’t spend a combined $615 billion globally every year on something that people can just “choose” not to engage with.

I probably wouldn’t play as much Civ VI if it weren’t for the expansions or monthly challenges. Does that mean I’m playing an eight year-old game?

Three day special bridge rebuilding operation

They look like extras from The Labyrinth