As a fellow Beehaw local, ditto. Would definitely be a shame, even if I can appreciate why it’s being considered.

I do think the potential federation to build a unified alternative to centralised megacorps with freedom of movement for users is well worth the cost, and Beehaw leaving the party erodes that, but ultimately what will hit me on a day to day will be the loss of the usage pattern described above.

Not to feed into the bosses’ paranoia, but I’d say WFH 5-days (on paper) and bunk off, which is a lot easier to do WFH anyway.

I don’t actually think the employer misses out here, even if most companies already take far more than they’re owed from their employees to begin with.

The reality for a lot of jobs, especially those that require deep work, creativity etc, is that watching how long people are sat at their desks is not a good way to improve results anyway. Better a motivated happy workforce, and managers that are thinking in terms of how well a team is delivering useful things for the org rather than obsessing about timesheets.

If the company is happy to pay me X salary for the results I provide them, everybody wins. It’s foolish for organisations to think that getting people to work longer hours, whether it’s forcing people to work 4, 5, or 6 days, is going to get them more bang for buck.

As for remote working, I’ve worked exclusively from home for over a decade in fully remote teams. Everyone wins with WFH. There can be problems to mitigate and there’s always some subjective preference to consider, but on the whole the average employee and employer wins big from the arrangement.

All the pushback I’ve seen on WFH since the pandemic seems in large part management using it as an excuse for their own incompetence.

“How can I tell my employees are working if I can’t see them at their desks?” If you cant tell if they’re working now, then you didn’t know they were working before either!

On-boarding new people, building up young people, is just different from before. Make sure they have decent equilment for video and normalise teams sitting in video rooms when the work. Encourage buddy working at all levels. Recognise and respect the upfront cost of training. Encourage and fund opportunities for socialising both remotely and in person.

Managers don’t know what’s happening without the “water cooler effect”. They’re used to be able to shout at teams across an office, or easedrop. Again, this demonstrates a weakness in their ability to communicate and interact with the people they claim to “lead”. Good managers will be in the same video rooms and chatting shit with the people they lead while they work as a united teams. Shitty managers will sit on their hands while not even noticing their team does everything they can to avoid a unhelpful or unsupportive “leader”.

The worse one is productivity. I have no doubt things are going worse for corpos since the pandemic. This likely correlates with increase WFH. The ideas that this is proof that WFH is outrageously. During the pandemic we had teams working 17 hour days. Corpos took the opportunity to cut every corner and show contempt to the workforces, and they didn’t fix things when the COVID numbers went down. The big shots made some truly terrible strategic calls. All these things and more are seeming to lead to a kind of mass enshittification across a ton of organisations. But bosses don’t want to own their mistakes, let alone fix them , so WFH ends up the scapegoat.

(Sorry! This thread seems to have brought out the rant in me!)

I just did. I’m lucky that I can afford it. Although, because of tax, it affects my take home way less than 20%.

It’s wild really. I’m lucky, and most of my career I’ve been in the maximum tax bracket in my country. Also cause I’m lucky, I kept getting raises and bonuses, because I work damn hard and I’m pretty good at what I do.

The thing is though, I’m no better off in terms of my life quality for all that money. I live in a small semi-detached in a nowhere town. I’m incredibly grateful to have been able to buy rather than rent, but I’d still like to strive for a little more space, a little more privacy or a little more excitement. But the way property is, even though I’m earning well, it seems impossible. I’ve tried unsuccessfully 3 times in the last 5 years to move , and come to the conclusion without earning a considerable amount more than I am it’s impossible.

My basic needs were met long ago. I find ways to waste money here and there, but nothing to really work towards. I guess I could have kids, but this place is too small for a dog, let alone a couple of sprogs, and I wouldn’t wish this world on another generation. The only good reason to be earning more for me is to maybe protect the quality of life I have should I lose my job or the situation gets worse in general (inflation, climate change etc), and again it doesn’t seem like it’s much protection. I believe in the important of tax, I’d pay even more if I thought it’d be used for good, but with this circus in charge, it’d hard to imagine much of my considerable tax bill going to help people rather than ending up in the pocket of some corpo with a government contract.

Add to that, jobs seem to get worse and worse. I swear everyone I know, across multiple sectors, is burning out. Corpos and governments alike are treating people like garbage, working them to death then discarding them as reward. Profits go up. Nothing of value gets made. Everyone but the bosses gets fucked.

As for my job, I worked hard and gave it a lot. I’ve seen the company mistreat and discarded good people for years, while outsourcing to halfwits and grifters (and I can’t even be that angry at the grifters given what they’re paid regionally). It’s impossible to make a positive change, although I still try. But I hate it. The job grinds me down and takes everything.

I plan to work as little as possible, even if it means cutting back. I live in hope that it’ll mean I recover a little, maybe find some joy again. Not much hope, but worth 20%.

(Sorry for that becoming antiwork tirade. It’s been a shitty few years.)

This comes to mind https://youtu.be/KrcY6PXkGuE?si=ShC5paBmaDBcR66C

I’m going out my damn mind trying to work out what I should set it at. I’ve been obsessively adding more and more temperature and humidity sensors around my living space to work out exactly what my idiot brain thinks is comfortable.

I don’t understand why 23C/50% makes me feel like I’m in the fucking Amazon rainforest one day, but on another I feel like I’ve got ice forming on my damn face like Jack Nicholson at the end of The Shining.

I’m this close to buying a ZigBee rectal thermometer. Core body temperature has to be the missing piece. (I suppose any ZigBee environment sensor can be a rectal one if I bite down on something first).

(Oh and lux, I wonder if lux levels tricked my brain but that doesn’t seem to correlate either!)

I had a great time with it myself, despite many obvious flaws. It seems to scratch an itch that I’ve yet to find an alternative way to scratch!

Maybe it’s as simple as cyberpunk fallout? But the worlds texture (again despite it’s imperfections) feels more than just cyberpunk. The fallout comparison has other similarities too (apart from the buggy engine lol), I love the active and relatively expensive mod scene too.

I was definitely disappointed that the story felt a bit limited, but I’m looking forward to a new play through when the DLC is out, even if it’s another trainwreck.

I loved the anime too which makes me excited for my next play through, similar to how reading the Witcher books opened up a whole new lover for the Witcher 3, although there’s much less of a connection between the Cyberpunk game and the anime obviously.

Long story short, I can understand others frustration with the game, and I hope (perhaps naïvely) that CDProjectRED get their shit together with how they treat there devs. But despite that I loved it, and deeply hope they don’t abandon the franchise due to how badly the first release went. I must guiltily confess that it’s a real struggle not to preorder the DLC out of the vague sense that it’d count as a vote to stick with it. I won’t, mostly because corpos don’t work that way, and I don’t want to endorse the bad behaviour towards their Devs especially, but still.

Go easy on people. It’s hard to change, and something like lemmy can be intimidating for people to get on board with. That’s ignoring the fact that even if they move they can’t force their communities to come with them.

I’m personally happy to see the back of Reddit, and am convincing anyone I can to switch too, but I can understand the challenge for the average user to switch. Hell, even Reddit is a technical step-up for a lotta people. The tech world has forced a paradigm that traps the average user, using the fact it all appears free as the bait. Be angry at big tech, not the ones they swindled.

Good point! I did mean to acknowledge this. I don’t mean to say factory work is necessarily unfulfilling by nature. We should be looking to automate all unfulfilling jobs away where we can, factory or otherwise. I’d guess factory work is often more fulfilling than the range of white collar bullshit jobs (“B” ark type stuff 😜) where there’s no sense of really doing anything of value. I suspect though a lot of the unfulfilling white collar bullshit work does require automation replace, but we can just stop making people do pretend work just to be able to live! (I say this confident of my ticket on the “B” ark myself!)

I would say however, how well they’re paid isn’t the whole picture thought. If there are nasty jobs that need doing, we should at least make sure they pay well, but better that all have fulfilling and well paid jobs, rather than sacrificial one for the other. Utopian/idealistic I know, but if I’m going to be dreaming might as well dream big! 😁

I don’t know my Marx, but doesn’t he have a thing about factory work being by it’s nature dehumanising due to its focus on being just one tiny part of making something, rather than the craftsman it replaced. I think there’s something to be said for that, and where we can accepting that while a production line may be strictly more efficient than craftsman, that efficiency isn’t everything all the time. (Again using factory analogy here but the same comparison can be made of various “white collar” jobs too).

Oh I should also say, that I can imagine the full automation of some jobs being bad for similar reasons, even if it might seem like a win. If there is joy to be found in, for example, the work of a making furniture by hand, then I can see it being a negative to fully automate that job away, even if we can ensure every furniture maker isn’t affected financially by the loss of the jobs. There’s something of value in the feeling of performing ones craft in the equitable service of someone else, and if we have machines making the furniture the same, then we risk robbing people of that.

No simple answers I guess! Balance in everything, everything in balance and all that.

I’d say even if the overall efficiency ends up lower with automation (not that you’re saying that or that it’s true) I’d say it’s still the right course.

If we in developed countries are saying that working in a factory is degrading and inhumane work, then it’s not much of a solution to offload it to a country with people desperate enough to do it anyway. It doesn’t solve the problem if we get our own people to do it either, by incentive or otherwise.

The aim should be that no one is stuck doing degrading, unfulfilling work. If automation fails to be as efficient than human labour, be it in the short term or long term, and whether that be in terms of profit or resources, it’s still worth it to minimise the number of people stuck in unfulfilling wage slavery.

Again, to emphasise the point, even if human hands are cheaper than automation for the next hundred years, we should still drive to automation.

That being said, this all assumes we get our shit together as a society to get UBI and other ways for people to live meaningful lives without the factory work!

Good spot!

I briefly worked in safety critical software, so adjacent to defence and aeronautical in the UK. I recall that when the UK was asking for the source code for windows running on the trident subs at the time (which is terrifying thought at the best of times. A whole new meaning to blue screen of death) that UK gov had asked to inspect the source code but was told to swivel. IIRC US and China were both allowed to look. That was all on the grapevine though, and I was still a kid so obv take with a pinch of salt, but I’m inclined to believe it.

I had more direct experience in my role validating software to run on military aircraft. We were contracted in to “prove” that the software was up to do-178b security stand and bug free via line by line inspection and some other techniques (which was a joy as you can imagine). I never got the impression that the source would be shared with the government, only that it had to meet the standard.

Interesting sidenote there, was that because it was for defence, being up to the standard was really marketing more than legal requirement. We’d find bugs that would trigger hard reboots of the hardware and the message was always “thanks for letting us know, but it’s too expensive to get the original contractors back to fix it so we’ll just ignore it”. I think they’d have been legally obliged to do something for civilian aircraft but military is a different game.

(Again should emphasise these are vague memories from working a gap year before my masters, so take with pinch of salt.)

I never managed to finish Disco Elysium, but not out of lack of love. It’s absolutely fantastic.

I really want to go back to it, but I’m almost afraid to. There’s so much depth to all those characters, I’m worried by not having played it for so long I’d have forgotten all the useful context, but starting from scratch feels, IDK dishonest somehow? The playthrough I was on felt like the “authentic” one, and restarting, at least without completing that imperfect first playthrough, would be somehow missing the point.

My other fear is that, also finding myself in a bad place increasingly over the last few years, I’m afraid it might end in a way that’s too bleak to bear. Your comments on finding hope in the ending, despite despair, might be the motivation I need though!

Yes to both! But especially Barotrauma! Really unique atmosphere to that game and such a rich selection of gameplay mechanics I’m always fighting off the desire to start another game!

I even get lost just building convoluted, overcomplicated and, as a result, buggy submarines in the editor.

Man, I love that game. It might be the greatest unsung game to come out in the last few years. My only problem is being a misanthrope, and scared of the general multiplaying public, I’m always intimidated by public games, but I’d love to convince enough buddies to play a campaign through. As you say, you lose some of the existential dread, but I’d love to explore some of the roleplaying aspects and more complicated gameplay loops, and the bots are a liability (although so much better than they were!).

Not a fantastic game, but the first Walking Dead Telltale series really hit me in the feels and so has stayed with me. The Witcher 3 definitely affected me, but it’s hard to seperate that feeling from the books.

I’d say Kerbal Space Program, Factorio and Rimworld because whenever I play those it’s like coming home, but since I’m always playing at least one of them, it feels a bit like cheating.

The feeling of the Tribes games is always there in my mind. I occasionally go back but the freedom of movement in that game is just so liberating. I never know why they aren’t more celebrated. (Titanfall 2 comes close, but still not quite the same).

Battlezone 2 is IMHO another unsung classic. I loved the mix of RTS and FPS. Another one from before the mechanics of FPS and the general feel of motion had standardised (to a fault) which I think helps it keep it’s hooks in me.