I agree that it’s a huge fuck up, my comment wasn’t in defence of the post office, just a related story :)

Whenever I have delivered code for a client it has always been in a way where the client has complete ownership of the code and can maintain it themselves later (or ask a different company that isn’t us to come do it) because that’s the only sustainable approach, and all companies should absolutely demand that all work done for them is done this way.

I did consultancy work as part of renewing and replacing ancient software systems for an insurance company, and it’s amazing how little people actually know about how their own business processes are actually supposed to work.

Orgs are in the position where everyone who built a system is gone, and all the current people who work there defer to the system for how the processes work, without actually properly understanding the rules. And so the system itself becomes the arbiter of correctness.

This is obviously horrible because it ends up where nobody dares to touch the current system in case they break it in some way nobody understands.

We ended up speaking to people across the whole business to painstakingly work out what the rules really were, putting together a new system and effectively “dual running” that side-by-side with the old system, so we could compare outputs and make sure they were the same. In some case they were different, and in some of those cases it was actually because the old system was actually wrong, but nobody noticed!

It’s a mess.

Back in my days working as .NET developer on Windows 7, I came into work one morning to find a colleague fuming that his machine had died on him.

He spent the whole morning reinstalling Windows and getting his environment set back up, and then pulled the branch he was working on, happy to finally be done with setup and get back to work. Ran his test suite and bam, machine crashes!

It was only at that point the penny dropped. We took a look at his branch, and sure enough he’d accidentally written a test that, when ran, deleted his entire C: drive!

That particular lesson made me very careful when writing any code that does things with the filesystem.

Those few days between jobs are moments of pure joy.

You’re finished with all the bullshit of the previous job, and are blissfully unaware of whatever fresh bullshit is waiting for you at the new one.

The person you replied to isn’t entirely wrong, though.

“ricing” was a term in use in the car modding scene around the 80s and 90s especially, where among certain groups it was popular to modify Japanese import cars with kits and decals etc to mimic the look of the Japanese racing scene.

Some people considered these mods to be tacky and worthless because they usually tended to focus more on aesthetics than performance, purely tricking the car up visually with no other changes. Due to the Asian origin of these mods and the stereotype that Asians eat a lot of rice, the cars were insultingly dubbed “rice burners” or " ricers" and the process of doing it “ricing”

It was intended 100% as an insult, basically meaning “Your car looks like shit because of all that Japanese crap you put on it”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_burner

Like many insults of course, the insult is often “reclaimed” by the group it targets, who begin to use it between themselves in a favourable way, without any insult or negative connotation.

Ricing in the context of computers where people are styling, theming and “tricking out” their desktop almost certainly was borrowed from the car scene.

By this point there is basically no negative intent around the term at all, and especially not racist, but the place the term came from was.

You’re right of course, it’s definitely down to simple lack of incentive, rather than some kind of conspiracy. But the conspiracy was a fun shower thought! :)

I was almost convinced they were keeping this broken on purpose, it’s been broken so long. Like, years long.

It was broken so long I honestly wouldn’t have been surprised if news surfaced that Discord was taking back-handers from Microsoft under the table to keep it broken. With steam working so well on Linux now, broken discord streaming without actual working audio share was one of the last things that posed a hurdle for gamers ditching Windows.

(In the meantime, thank you Vesktop for your service <3)

Yes

Not seen Nagato in a while

Yay!

This may be a nonsense suggestion but is the game trying to activate the headphone mic?

If so this could be switching it to a different mode and cutting your headset audio quality in half.

EDIT: two other people suggested the same thing at the same time, never mind :)

The number one thing I noticed after installing Linux on my old macbook was that the battery life was immediately halved.

I totally expected that to happen, though, because my previous experience had always been that power management on Linux was kinda terrible.

Time to try this out and see!

For added theatrics, after they pay you can slowly fade the site back in over a few days too, as if websites need bill money the same way humans need food, and it is slowly getting better after “being starved”

The fade should be slow and subtle. At first the client thinks they are just imagining it, but then they start getting customer support calls about the site being faded, and their bosses are pointing it out too in meetings, and as it happens more and more the panic really begins to set in.

Finally they reach out to you in a desperation when there’s barely anything left of the site and ask you to urgently fix the problem, and you just shrug your shoulders sympathetically and explain it’s happening because they haven’t paid - but not like in a way that suggests you are doing it on purpose, but a way where it’s simply an unavoidable natural consequence, like if you didn’t pay your electricity bill your power would get cut and the site is slowly “dying” and fading away because of that.

They’d pay so fast.

Yes

My banking apps work fine on Calyx.

Banking apps normally check for rooted phones as the thing they don’t like. Because pixels come with an unlocked bootloader, you don’t need to root the phone to install a custom ROM, and so banking apps are still okay.