If you want truly bulletproof clothing appliances and live in America, look up Speed Queen. They’re built to commercial standards and are trivially repairable. Many last for decades with only minor maintenance and upkeep.

Unfortunately, Speed Queen not available outside of America. 😭 Or, at least, absolutely not available in Western Canada.

I went with LG, as Bosch didn’t have the capacity I was looking for. Pretty happy with LG for both washer and dryer, four years and counting without a single issue. Would be nice if the front-loading washer came with an automatic dehumidifier, tho, as we have to leave the door open to avoid funky smells developing.

VW really dropped the ball on software

Why bother with software, then? Late-80s and 90s Type III Jettas can be absolutely bulletproof if you find them in not-bagged and well cared for condition.

Depends on when it was produced.

My 1998 HP 4050DTN is still going strong, an absolutely bulletproof beast of a machine. Plus, I can get extra-stuffed cartridges for it that can do 20,000 sheets at 5% coverage. Even after two degrees and a quarter century I am only on my third cartridge.

My HP 5000DTN wide-format printer is much the same.

Of course, this was years before the DRM enshittification path that HP started down, so there is that.

Depends on when it was produced.

My 1998 HP 4050DTN is still going strong, an absolutely bulletproof beast of a machine. My HP 5000DTN wide-format printer is much the same.

Of course, this was years before the DRM enshittification path that HP started down, so there is that.

Antibiotics.

Their discovery and development is what has directly enabled our sudden rise from 2B to 8B humans in only about a century. Without antibiotics, we would likely still be under 3B humans world-wide. Yes, disease really did kill off a lot of humans back in the day.

Graph out the human population over the last two centuries, and you can even see the very decade when Penicillin use became widespread, along with doctors washing their hands and other basic hygiene tasks.

In most western countries any unintentional mistake made by the employee is considered a cost of doing business… after all, if such a mistake is doable, there is a problem in the business processes that needs correction.

Now don’t get me wrong, many shady business owners will still try to pin things on employees and take it out of their pay. But that is illegal here.

And there are ways of having that entry removed from the list of options entirely, and not just shifted to the drop-down menu. Makes it harder to physically shut down, but its absence can be a WTF big enough for you to realize which machine you are working on.

I don’t bother doing that to VMs, which can be trivially restarted, but their Hyper-V hosts? You betchya I do it to those.

Many modern routers have this exact capability - to take a USB-only printer and serve it up over the network. Even some ISP modem/router combo units are set up to do this. Check to see if your router has any USB ports on the back.

I have a different take: I try to not be an unpleasant person.

I suffer from a particularly nasty Voltron of ADD and Asperger’s. High-functioning, yes. But it’s still a non-trivial level of neurological fuckery. This means that my social actions and reactions are… different. Sometimes they deviate significantly from the socially accepted baseline. So to be “nice”? What is nice? How to categorize that, measure that, evaluate that? “Nice” could be different for each person I come across.

So to avoid driving myself crazy, I have flipped things and simply concentrated on not being an unpleasant person. To not be rude, not disrespectful, not frightening or combative or creepy. It ends up being a little easier to categorize, define, and measure in that regard, because it involves not doing something instead of doing something. It is avoiding a baseline instead of trying to meet it.

Came here to say exactly this, only I wasn’t expecting to be anywhere as concise and erudite as you have been.

Cool, THANKS!! 😊 🙏

trying to get him to upgrade to Windows 11?

If it’s currently running Win7, it likely doesn’t have TPM 2.0, and in extreme circumstances may not even have the SSE 4.2 that 23H2 requires (Win11 will then fail to boot).

And while a RUFUS-modded installer can remove the TPM 2.0 requirement, the SSE 4.2 requirement is kinda baked into the pie; there is no avoiding that.

That is an interesting implementation of security through obscurity…

How does one enable this on the standard 7Zip client?

So maybe it is not related, then. Or maybe only causally related, or under certain more specific visualization deficits.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Historically, before agriculture it was about two to three women having offspring for every man who did.

During the Agricultural era (12,000 BCE to 2,000 BCE) that ratio hit a high of 9 women reproducing for every man who did so, and stayed around that for most of that time.

From there it slowly declined back down to the current world-wide average of two women reproducing for every man who manages to do so.

I have no sense of direction. None.

Sounds like you are a real-life Ryoga Hibiki.

Just curious: do you also lack the ability to visualize things in your mind? For example, I am able to bring up a road map of my city in my mind, figure out the most effective route between two points, and rotate that map in all three dimensions to “look” at it from all angles. My familiarity with the city layout and geography is the determining factor on how easily I can visualize that map. I can also do the same thing with large buildings and their internal layouts.

My wife, on the other hand, has a somewhat similar (but nowhere near as bad) sense of direction as you, and a commensurate inability to visualize objects in her mind. So while she can mentally visualize a soccer ball as a spherical object, she cannot even visualize the hexagonal pattern of pieces, much less (on a traditional soccer ball) how some are white and others black. She doesn’t technically have aphantasia, as she is still able to visualize to a small degree, but I have always suspected her inability to visualize effectively was directly connected to her inability to navigate effectively. She also relies heavily on GPS and maps when navigating anywhere else other than the town she was born in.

Love the smell of petrichor, the smell of the world after a good rain, especially if the temperatures are cool and crisp. Bonus if it’s deep in the temperate rainforests of the Canadian PNW, with no civilization near.

Love the smell of fresh-cut grass, reminds me of my youth even if it’s one of the only things that makes me sneeze uncontrollably (my only known allergy).

Marigolds bring me all the way back to childhood, as my mother had them planted around the entire house. I take one whiff, and for the briefest of moments I am a five year old without a care in the world. To this day I collect and re-sow their seeds everywhere I can. I particularly like the small ones with the dark orange and deep crimson flowers.

Hate the smell of tar with every fibre of my being. I could never be a roofer or a road worker or a street resurfacer for that reason. It makes me gag uncontrollably with even the faintest whiff.

that usually requires promoting a mixture of amphibians, birds, reptiles, small mammals, and other insects. To do that, you need a habitat full of various plants, trees, and terrains

So essentially, the opposite of the “modern, mechanized agriculture at scale” that is required to sustain our population’s food requirements.

No wonder we are seeing an insect apocalypse and a bird apocalypse, and a massive decline of all species, and hundreds of extinctions each year…

We’re fucked.

You do what you think you need to do, buuuuuut…

I’m in a senior level engineering position.

You are already exceedingly difficult to trivially replace. It’s entry-level devs which are a dime a dozen. Senior level engineering positions are frequently open for many months because candidates in general are difficult to find, much less good candidates.

Colour me biased, but I strongly think you are significantly underselling your own power and influence. Any company worth working for isn’t going to turf a senior engineer over a $40 stipend unless their middle manglement positions are staffed with morons.

Well, it’s your calculus to make, not mine.

What am I going to do, quit over using an app?

Why quit?

Ask them for help installing the app.

Then bring in an early-2000s flip phone with your SIM already in it, so you can prove that you are using it.

An employer cannot demand that you buy your own work tools unless it is written into the employment contract (auto mechanics, etc.). Provide them with a phone that they themselves cannot install the app on. Any early-2000s feature phone will not have an operating system with app functionality. An older but still smartphone-like BlackBerry running BBOS10 will also work in this regard, especially if you have uninstalled the Amazon App Store.

Even an Android phone whose newest possible version of Android pre-dates the oldest version that this app will install on can also work. For example, any Android phone which cannot be upgraded past Android 7 would be perfect with respect to MS Authenticator, as the current version will only install on Android 8 or newer. If you bring in a phone that has no ability to have Android 8 or later installed, your place of work will either have to exempt you or provide you with a work phone for that app.

You have solutions to keep work apps off of your personal devices, and few employers will have the legal ability to force you to buy a modern phone just for an app of their choosing. Moreover, it is your right to not have to suffer unreasonable employer demands just to have a job. That’s why worker protections exist in places where conservatives haven’t eviscerated those protections.

Act like you are a smartphone-phobe, and let them figure things out.