sp3ctr4l

Oh… ok.

I am genuienly confused by this.

First we had news the DoJ is pursuing a very aggressive penalty against Google, seeking to strip Chrome and possibly Android from them, force each to be spun off, old ma Bell style.

Now Trump’s FTC is moving forward against MSFT.

… The … these people were at his inauguration.

These tech giants have all thrown their hats in the ring for Trump.

… WTF is happening?

Is there some kind of inner power struggle thing going on here, or is Trump just actually too stupid to even notice some of the most powerful people and groups that support him stand to get fucked by an FTC and DoJ pursuing anti monopoly type prosecutions?

In other news, its been over a decade since Facebook started selling user data to Cambridge Analytica, who used it to massively target and proliferate polarizing political advertising during the 2016, greatly contributing to Trump’s win and the proliferation of QAnon insanity and general political diviseness and radicalization in the US.

I’d call that quite an ‘experiment’, but sure, Facebook is still definitionally doing a massive psy-op campaign, all the time, with new tech too, yep, that’s bad.

=P

If you go back far enough, you’d be coding the ENIAC via punchcards.

… Or maybe today you could write code on paper and have an AI augmented OCR system try to run it?

I mean, the entirety of Steam’s code could maybe be described as an obfuscated version of

while(true){ print(money); }

Good luck finding a used one that isn’t barely on its last legs from being poorly OC’d/cooled, or is just an outright brick that burned out in a crypto mining farm and is now being resold by a shell entity of a shell entity of a shell entity on Amazon or Ebay.

I didn’t say these were at feature parity and frankly I don’t care for half those features.

I’m fairly sure you can still set up a TS channel to automute everyone and have that act as a chatroom or chat channel, and I’m also fairly sure you can ping user groups with a pop up or TTS message for announcements, unless TS has radically changed.

You can also set up small html/xml pages per channel if you want to keep some pertinent info posted, and ping people when an update to one of those pages occurs.

There is media viewing in the client itself.

Host an image somewhere, throw it in a channel or server page description.

Yep, there’s no built in, automatic, free image hosting in the chat feed or video livestreaming.

Discord is enshittifying and mtx monetized because it has massive serverside costs from hosting everything, streaming everything, and thus must seek revenue in increasingly shitty ways to pay for it.

They’ll be selling all your data, introducing advertisements, monetizing even more, and moderating/censoring within a year or two of going public on the stock market.

If you want to host a teamspeak server, you pay the basically negligible cost of running your own server, and you make your own rules.

I’d say this is more like pitching a motorcycle to someone who takes the bus to work, but the busses are all getting privatized and will have their fares go up by 500% and they’ll require a blood sample upon every embarkation and debarkation.

Reminder that TeamSpeak still exists.

https://www.teamspeak.com/en/

Windows, Mac, Linux clients for TS6, Win, Mac, Lin, iOS, Android clients for TS3.

https://www.mumble.info/

Mumble also still exists, less official support for mobile clients tho.

Star Citizen is certainly a gigantic ongoing delusion/scam of development hell…

But it doesn’t really meet the sort of ‘internal corporate contagion’ criteria, it won’t directly tank non Star Citizen teams or games.

While they have contracted out development work at various points… its not a giant conglomerate of different studios working on different projects.

If it finally liquidates and goes tits up, it only kills Star Citizen, and maybe Chris has to sell his yacht or w/e.

Star Citizen is its own special kind of nonsense.

Since Ubisoft introduced us to the term AAAA game with Skull and Bones, my attempt at giving an actual, solid definition to differentiate a AAA game from a AAAA game has had this as a fundamental aspect:

The game gets stuck in development hell, analagous to a movie that keeps needing reshoots and rewrites, and ends up requiring so much money thrown at chasing the sunk cost fallacy that it negatively impacts not only its own development, but impacts the development of other games by the same studio/publisher, and/or the overall financial solvency / employment headcount of the overarching parent company.

Basically, what a AAAA game actually is, is analagous to a bank or large corporation that is Too Big To Fail… but video game companies largely are not going to be bailed out by the government.

So, by that metric, we’ve got:

Skull and Bones

Concord

Suicide Squad

If you go back further in gaming history, you could probably find more games that fit typical AAA criteria (Large-Huge numbers of actual developers, aiming at a high level of graphical fidelity, financed by a large corporate publisher that controls a plethora of studios, all these measured relative to the timeframe of development)…

… and then also hits the AAAA criteria, that the development drags on forever, a sunk cost fallacy mindset sets in amongst management, management then gets high on its own supply, and the game draws in so many manpower and financial resources that it endangers entire other projects and teams not directly connected to this particular game’s development if this Too Big To Fail game does actually fail.

How do you think he does it?

I keep fucking forgetting 404 media is a legit news source and I’m not actually looking at a parody news/onion style community.

Currently, each generation of executives doesn’t come from within the company.

This in particular I find to be just the most astonishingly duplicitous, completely full of shit thing about American Tech Corps.

They are masters of lying to you and telling you that if you work hard, perform well, blah blah, you’ll adcance through the ranks.

All outward oriented ‘how to be a good employee’ type media propaganda says you need to be loyal and stop job hopping.

All these motherfuckers job hop all the fucking time and they know they do!

EDIT: After a decade in the tech industry, I got assaulted and just give off of disability now, basically in poverty.

There is literally no amount of money you could pay me (lets be real, promise to pay me and then not actually pay me that much) to get back into the tech industry.

My QoL is 100,000x improved not having to deal with the constant deceptive office politics, utterly incompetent managers and useless projects.

You’re 100% right about ‘what even is a career path’.

They don’t exist.

Barring super basic stuff like an A* or whatever to be a basic network techy, certs are required or desired certs are constantly changing, as are required skillsets and experience in general.

None of the HR people that write job descriptions have any clue what the words theyre using mean.

They kept inflating ‘required years working with X program or language’, and everyone just started lying on all their resumes.

The hiring process is a theatre of the absurd.

AirBnb has gone so hard into gentrifying areas that it is now literally genocide.

I tried telling people who were buying homes just to AirBnB them 15 years ago that what they were doing could only possibly lead to a massive rise of income disparity, and thus suffering.

The liberals would give some kind of self pitying, dodge response about how sad it is, but that’s the only way they can get ahead.

At least the conservatives were more straightforward: ‘Do you think I care?’

Landlord lives don’t matter.

This has always been the case, but in the US, basically no tech employers actually treat their junior employees as apprentices, they treat them as temporary contractors, and are thus unable to maintain any consistent kind of institutional knowledge, which then reinforces the loop of relying for contractors for everything a small level of hierarchical steps under C Suite.

Completely off topic, but I first read that as ‘DNA’, did a double take.

At this point, an announcement that whoever is in charge of all DNA continuing to work just stepped down or got fired… wouldn’t really seem that out of character for this timeline.

Agreed, they’re part of the problem too.

Its a shit sandwich of incompetence and laziness, and everyone is chowing down, yum fucking yum.

I realize I am coming off a bit more aggressive than I mean to… very, very angry after watching the fascist goon squad in Idaho…

Bleck.

… Anyway.

I would not expect basically anyone at this point to be any kind of competent whatsoever with any kind of cybersecurity.

I worked in tech for a decade, database admin, backend stuff, handling PII, often having to teach front end web designers how to do anything more complex that building a CSS stylesheet or using Wix or something like that how to actually interface with an API… and my experience is that literally no one outside of a computer security minded role knows anything, at all, about cyber security.

Non tech managers and team leads are usually even worse. You have to basically baby talk them through everything, and they usually don’t learn anything anyway, and will then just use all the terms and concepts completely incorrectly and conclude they said or agreed to or told you to do almost the exact opposite of the meaning of the sentence they actually used.

The entire problem is that everyone just assumes that because they paid for something, it actually works as advertised.

Buzzword? Other Buzzword? Authoritative salespitch? Sold!

The vast, vast majority of people never do proactive due dilligence, only reactive finger pointing.

Leaving default passwords in critical hardware systems that are made by somebody else and sold to people or businesses is widespread and has been widespread for decades.

Here is basically a chatroullete of internet connected, public facing cameras that are basically all accessible, live, in realtime, because nobody bothered to change the default login/pws.

The whole point is to illustrate how common this is.

http://insecam.org/

They used to have a lot, loooot more, but they had to start automatically delisting the absurd amount of cameras that were inside peoples houses, watching people fuck and have domestic disputes and such, and adopt a policy of ‘please email us if you see your own camera and we’ll take it off the site and also tell you how to fix the problem on your end.’

Just going through the US, the first one that’s popping up for me is an amalgamated view of what looks to be the entire security feed of an apartment complex in San Diego.

… Did… did you expect landlords, or building managers… to be competent at anything other than figuring out how to withhold your security deposit, and overcharge you for utilities?