Sent a relatively new and somewhat nervous co-worker a “grandpasimpsonleave.gif” responding to the 8 billionth mutual emergency of the day followed immediately by “I kid, I kid, we’ll fix it! 😉 [Relevant follow up question]?”

Guess which of those two messages was the last one unaffected by the outage? Yep. I got to watch her devolve into a panic as her messages reached me and my responses didn’t get sent to her, and THEN delivered in the worst order/selection possible. Felt like the more critical the message, the less likely to send.

And! She’s on the other side of the continent and all her location’s phones are through teams also! And it was time sensitive.

Rough Friday.

Also they were HORRIFICALLY unreliable, to the point where my mechanic’s actual quote was “Folks, I’m not in the habit of talking myself out of a $10,000 paycheck, but this car is not worth it.” 30 minutes before we walked in his door it was working fine, by the time he went to drive it to the bay it wouldn’t start, and never did again.

It wasn’t even paid off yet.

To say nothing of the fact that one had to drop the engine to get to the alternator, the electrical blew itself out twice in the 4 years we owned it, very few of the features worked with any competence, and we just got our 3rd or 4th safety recall for it (or whatever is left of the parts at the scrapyard).

Consumer Reports rated its reliability as a six - not out of ten, but out of ONE HUNDRED.

Absolute lemons.

needing to ask people what 3rd party chat service they prefer

Yeah Signal’s great and all, but my spouse’s family refuses to use anything but WhatsApp, half my family uses FB Messenger while the other half use Discord (and they are feuding about it), the older folks in my hobby group refuse to learn anything but the default text on their phone (that group chat is an unmanageable NIGHTMARE), and anything from work uses teams…except the US folks who use slack, and now my friends want to get me on Signal, too? Relevant XKCD.

The solution to my problem is not yet another messaging app. I just want ONE inbox!

I’ve been pretty happy with Beeper so far. There are some features that aren’t quite as good as using each app natively, yet, but I think they’re off to a great start considering the sheer scale and variety of interfaces they’re working with. It even gives me tools to deal with the hobby chat anarchy, and now I can send default SMS messages from my computer!

To anyone reading the summary, this does not do it justice.

Read the article in full this time.

Much worse than that - they were loaned the only working prototype of a small two-man team, along with the GPU it was designed to work with. They “lost” the GPU, tested the prototype on a GPU it was never meant to work with, publicly shit on the product REALLY hard when it didn’t work, were asked for the prototype back as, again, only working copy, gave the owners the run around for a long time, then finally admitted that they’d not just sold it but auctioned it off. Very likely to a competitor of the owners.

Holy cow I thought the screenshots currently on this post were the whole thing and I was horrified??

No, the screenshots are like, half?? THE TAME HALF???

I’m literally saying this as a visa holder / residence permit holder in my country of residence right now. When it was issued me, it was made very clear that my status in the country was a privilege that could be revoked at any time for a myriad of reasons. Now, “repeated wars of aggression by your home country with the specific excuse of controlling territory occupied by you” wasn’t EXPLICITLY listed, but I’d be shocked to retain my status in those circumstances.

I’m not their citizen - as of yet I haven’t started attempting to be one. Describing myself even as “from” here would be misleading. "Once a _____ always a ______” doesn’t even apply - I’ve never tried to be anything BUT a ______??

If article was “Lithuania strips citizenship and rights from Russian born naturalized residents” I’d be concerned. Instead, article is “Lithuania deports small fraction of its Russian and Belarusian expats identified as active threat during wartime”. Which is actually surprisingly restrained.

There’s a small difference between saying

“due to repeated wars by our neighbor explicitly using the presence of their citizens in foreign soil to justify annexation, we’re revoking temporary residency of their foreign nationals and deporting them. Return to your home country or go elsewhere.” And “Citizen or not, once a jap always a jap, due to our beef over Pacific imperialism we’re taking your property and imprisoning you in this concentration camp”

I am at the beginning of the same journey I think - a big part of why I never learned to touch type was how uncomfortable standard keyboards are. It always felt like trying to get my body to do something really stressful and unnatural, no matter how much I practiced, and I would get a lot of pain when typing.

I’m going whole hog on learning once my new board gets in - fully ergonomic split, column staggered, tenting, most likely Colemak DH, and we’ll see if we can make this ish work!

The No Name ice cream wafers are also the best around, and the cheapest to boot!

We were actually surprised that not only were they just as good at like ⅓ the price, they were WAY better.

You can get a giant pack of them for literally the price of a checkout line candy bar.