my_hat_stinks

I made a fair bit of commission upgrading people to much much better hardware and speed for not much more money.

See that’s your entire problem right there, you’re in sales. Your incentive is to drain every penny you can out of customers through useless up-sells and selling hardware to get the service they’re already paying for.

You literally just argued that if your 600mbps router only supplies an 80mbps connection then your 600mbps connection is 80mbps. And speed isn’t divided equally by the number of devices connected either, that’s just ridiculous. The impact of a connected but idle device is minimal. Also, why would you need 600mbps for only 4 devices? You could stream 4k video on all four devices 24/7 and you’re still not using even a quarter of that bandwidth; you’re looking at a recommendation of only 15mbps to 25mbps per user for a 4k-viable internet connection.

Here’s a ping to my stock ISP-supplied router on another floor and three rooms away via wifi:

--- 192.168.1.1 ping statistics ---
611 packets transmitted, 611 received, 0% packet loss, time 623436ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.647/0.779/2.105/0.110 ms

It’s obviously impossible to improve a 0% packet loss, switching to a wired connection would be a considerable cost for minimal benefit (though admittedly that ping is unusually good, I’d normally expect slightly over 1ms average). I’m also getting over my advertised speeds according to fast.com and speedtest.net despite being on wifi and running through Mullvad so I suppose the problem might just be that I’m not using whichever scummy ISP you work for.

I have a home office and have work from home (or hybrid) for pretty much my entire career, even before WFH was normalised. I can assure you a wired connection is not a necessity to work from home.

So the ISP isn’t to blame when the cheap ISP-provided hardware fails, and the solution isn’t for the ISP to replace insufficient ISP-owned hardware but for you to buy your own instead?

The “wire everything” approach is a little excessive for most home networks too, outside of exceptional circumstances modern WiFi on modern hardware is more than enough for home users. It’s only worth the time and money to wire everything if you’ve identified specific issues with signal loss or noise, don’t just do it by default.

UK is under BST (UTC+1) for half the year but people are usually just taught that the UK is GMT (UTC+0) which is based in the time in Greenwich, withought mentioning DST. I suppose it’s also possible everyone is taught BST and just forgets about it because daylight savings sucks, but either way most people seem to think GMT and UK time are the same thing.

This means you’ll get people asking for GMT times when they want BST or UK local time.

I feel like someone not releasing anything but squatting IP rights for 13 years is a poor argument for longer copyright terms.

Your security is only as good as the weakest link, which is usually people. If your password policy encourages users to stick a note to their screen then your weakest link is anyone in the office deciding to take a selfie or joining a call with their camera on. Best practices balance security with what users are actually willing to do.

According to this list it was used figuratively by Jane Austen, who I believe died more than 200 years ago. That page also claims the earliest known use is 1769, so it’s probably less than 300 years in writing? It’s moot either way, if you’re going for an etymological argument you could go further and say literally should mean anything to do with letters or writing, from the original Latin literalis/litteralis “of or belonging to letters or writing”.

Hard disagree; it’s not a useful comment precisely because it’s prescriptivism. It’s suggesting people are incorrect because they’re using a commonly accepted meaning of a word, that’s just not how language works.

Edit: Perhaps I should be clearer. The “less vs fewer” rule was invented roughly 200 years ago and doesn’t actually hold true, “less” has been used this way for far longer. It’s the epitome of “I want English to work this way, fuck everyone else”.

Good luck remembering them all, also change them all every 30 days, so here are my secrets.

Password expiry hasn’t been considered best practice for a long time (must be at least a decade now?) largely because of the other points you mentioned; it leads to weak easily memorable passwords written somewhere easily accessible. Even when it was considered good 30 days would have been an unusually short time.

Current advice is to change passwords whenever there’s a chance it’s been compromised, not on a schedule.

Language is defined by how it’s used, if it’s common for people to say “less” then that is correct. Trying to define the only “correct” usage counter to how people actually use the language is prescriptivism, which rarely changes how people actually speak. The only real use of prescriptivism is elitism.

You clearly understood what was said, you just wanted to announce you’re “better” at English.

I’m not sure I follow your logic here. You believe you’ll come into contact with other people’s piss and shit less often when people don’t wash their hands?

Urine isn’t sterile. While it’s true that paper towels are better than dryers, drying your hands (even with a dryer) is better than not drying. Washing your hands is, obviously, better than not washing your hands.

If you don’t wash your hands you’re already in the worst case. It makes no sense to complain about the methods of drying available.

I’m not sure where you’re getting the idea that language models are effective lie detectors, it’s very widely known that LLMs have no concept of truth and hallucinate constantly.

And that’s before we even get into inherent biases and moral judgements required for any form of truth detection.

Now what indeed? You’re still paying all the maintenance fees but now you’re not generating regular income, and you’re at the mercy of your government’s empty home laws. Where I am I believe that’s currently just paying double taxes, but it’s also entirely possible for government to pass more regulations if there’s a lot of unused housing they need.

To me that seems like a demonstration of why it would work. Allowing the people living there to buy the house from the government moved housing from the hands of government into private ownership. Allowing the people living there to buy the home from a corporate landlord will remove housing from corporate landlords, which is exactly what’s needed if we want people to be able to afford housing. People buying the home they live in from their landlord won’t remove council housing.

It’ll probably drive down house prices but that’s kind of the point. As a private homeowner I’d lose out on some potential money if I ever moved so that’s not ideal, but that’s a fair “loss” if it means other people can afford somewhere to live.

My gut reaction is that this won’t work long-term. Users on youtube often point to specific timestamps in a video in comments or link to specific timestamps when sharing videos, meaning there needs to be some way to identify the timestamp excluding ads. And if there’s a way to do that there’s a way to detect ads.

Of course, there’s always the chance they just scrap these features despite how useful they are and how commonly they’re used; they’ve done similar before.

I still can’t wrap my head around the fact there’s a group who intentionally named themselves “proud boys” which somehow isn’t a group for openly gay men. If they weren’t a neo-fascist terrorist organisation I’d think the whole thing was a joke.

If someone said they were concerned about their sugar intake would you tell them to just stop eating entirely? It’s possible to take steps towards privacy-friendly services without cutting yourself off from the modern world in the same way as you can cut back on sugar and still eat food.

You absolutely do not need to “burn all your devices” to improve your privacy, suggesting so is unhelpful at best.

Have you considered events from their perspective? From what you’ve described, they were told to wait until a notification was sent, then they were given a notification with the instruction “send this”. If it was me my first thought would absolutely be that that’s the notification to be sent, the only reason I’d hesitate is because those sort of communications are well outside my job description.

The reason they sent the product afterwards is obvious; they were told to send them after the notification was sent, and they had sent the notification.

From what you’ve described, you are communicating incredibly poorly then blaming your workers for misunderstanding.

Why do you people do this? This isn’t [email protected].

That link is a 404 so I can’t tell what it says, but here’s a 1996 US act to enforce net neutrality: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996

And here’s a 2006 Tim Berners-Lee blog post about threats to net neutrality which specifically says net neutrality already exists, you really can’t get much more authoritive than that: https://web.archive.org/web/20060703142912/http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/node/144

Obama may have enacted some legislation around between neutrality (again, your link 404s so I can’t tell what specifically you’re referring to) but it certainly wasn’t created under Obama.