Yup. I’m still living paycheque to paycheque.

I’m at a prime age for “midlife crisis” I just need my finances to agree that I can have.

Got a new job last winter, I’ve gotten two raises since. Maybe I’m moving in the right direction? I hope so. (I’m a bit less than 5% above where I started after 11 months)

I like the new job too. So IDK.

I can imagine.

You should too. You can do it, I believe in you.

That may be the better mantra, but sometimes, you just gotta… Viva la revolution! …to get anything fucking fixed.

The average death age of any empire is 250 years.

Tick tock America. You’re proving that figure to be correct.

Okay, I’ll just say it.

Everyone has it rough right now. Mostly because we’ve been thoroughly railroaded by corporations for most of our lives, but still.

Everything sucks.

That’s a very normal reaction. You’re putting your life in the hands of technicians and engineers, to build, maintain and service the aircraft so it functions, qualified inspectors to certify that the plane is safe to fly, and pilots to fly the aircraft, and you, safely to your destination. Pretty much everyone you’re putting your life in the hands of, you’ve never met, never will, and it’s unlikely you’ll even know their names.

It’s a lot of trust to put into people you don’t even know, to keep you alive in your chair in the sky.

If that reality doesn’t at least give you pause, or some concern, then I’d be worried there’s something seriously wrong with you.

Rest assured that statistics are on your side. It’s far more likely for you to get to your destination without any significant complications then it is for any complications to happen, including any that might lead to a crash or a fatality. Statistically, it’s comfortably one of the safest, if not the safest, method of travel.

There’s nothing wrong with having some apprehension, fear, or worry, over placing your life in the hands of complete strangers; despite how qualified each and every one of them might be, they’re still strangers.

All I can say is, if you’re bothered by it, learn how to parachute solo. It’ll take a while, but learn it. Then just pack your own parachute any time you fly. Problem solved. If you lose confidence in the pilots to keep you alive, bail.

Thanks. I think a lot.

Probably too much

Not a stupid question.

Between the training required for a solo parachute jump, and the cost (and more importantly) weight of the equipment, plus the relative safety of commercial flights, it’s simply not justified.

In more than a few cases we’ve seen airliners make emergency landings that are gnarly, but the majority survive. In more cases than I can count, there’s checks and balances that ground flights because of safety concerns either at the departure point or at the destination (icing, high winds, etc), or due to mechanical concerns.

It’s rare that a fully inspected and functional aeroplane will fall out of the sky, and we do everything in our power to ensure that all planes that leave the ground are fully inspected and functional. Short of a freak occurrence, like a fast forming weather phenomenon, there’s so many checks and balances that airliner crashes are exceedingly rare.

So not only is a crash rare, there’s no guarantee that a crash will be fatal, usually the pilot can at least get the plane on the ground without killing everyone aboard, and the fact that it’s a massive amount of extra weight that requires training that the average person doesn’t have, there’s little point and nearly nothing to gain from doing something like that, while it would have significant downsides on flight efficiency and increase the costs of fuel per flight due to the extra weight.

Then there’s the consideration of, even if they were able to successfully parachute to the ground, what then? It’s pretty much a guarantee that nobody has a radio, and that you’re far enough away from civilization that your cellphone doesn’t work, so now you have hundreds of people spread out over potentially thousands of miles of terrain/water/whatever that you now need weeks to search and rescue everyone. Taking weeks on search and rescue, pretty much guarantees that you’ll find people who landed safely, then died from exposure to the environment.

On the flip side, if everyone is in the plane when it crashes then all you need to do is find the plane; everyone will be in that general area, whether alive or dead.

There’s just too many downsides to having parachutes on board to make it feasible.

I think they open sourced that recently… I should take a look.

Yep. With my dad teaching computers, we always had one in the house. I started on DOS, and I’ve used most versions of Microsoft operating systems since then.

I’ve built computers, upgraded, modified, tweaked and nerded out over low level settings and optimizations…

At this point, I can do all of that. I choose to simply buy something off a shelf because I can’t be bothered to do everything that’s needed to get my system working perfectly. Someone else has done the engineering to make their PC’s operate efficiently, so I’ll just let them do the hard work, and pay slightly more for my system so I don’t have to think about it.

Once the warranty is up, and something goes wrong, I’ll be in there with a multimeter and soldering iron to fix it if I have to…

The old RTFM technique, classic.

I’ve used most versions of Windows since 3.11 I didn’t bother going backwards because as far as I’m concerned, before 3.11, it was better to use DOS. Since then I’ve used 95, 98, ME, 2000, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10, and of course 11.

About the only one I “missed” was NT, and I’m not unhappy about that. My notes are: 3.11 was basically just an application running on DOS, which was fine, but it’s not really improving much. Few applications supported Windows at that point, so there was little reason to have/use it. 95 was hot garbage at launch, and did not improve much over time, however it was such a drastic change from DOS/3.11 that it was the best we could have hoped for at the time. 98 was forgettable, very little improvement over 95; at least until 98 SE came out, adding USB support, which changed a lot of things. ME was fine for the most part, they put to much emphasis on making it look better without making significant improvements beyond that; however, ME was fine and stable after a few service packs.

XP was the favorite for most, I saw it as Windows 2000 with makeup. That said, the biggest improvement here was the change over to the NT kernel, something we still use today. Windows 2000 was a favorite of mine, it was visually simpler than ME/XP, but all the functionality you needed was there. It was fairly barebones but that allowed for Windows to take a back seat to whatever you were actually using the computer for.

Vista was hated, but not because it was actually bad. The problem with Vista was that the system requirements to run Windows shot up significantly with Aero. At the same time, Microsoft introduced driver updates for security, so many older devices, built for XP, that were more or less abandoned, never got drivers that met the security constraints added in Vista. Vista also launched around the netbook era, when “a computer for every child” was a thing. The hardware was trending towards less powerful, cheaper chips, while Vista was requiring much more from the hardware, creating a perfect storm of people buying Celeron systems pre-installed with Vista and having a very bad time. Anyone using a Core/Core2/first gen Core I* chip had a lot fewer problems.

When Windows 7 launched, most people had abandoned Celeron as a product, and most hardware manufacturers were distributing drivers with the extra security needed for Vista (which was also required for 7), so everything went smoothly and 7 became the next favorite. I don’t have any complaints with 7, and I would be happy to keep using Windows 7 if it wasn’t for the fact that it’s abandonware.

Windows 8 was a solution looking for a problem. This was the era of Android honeycomb, the odd version of Android made exclusively for tablets. Microsoft seemed to think it was a good idea to do the same, however, sales of tablet windows systems are fairly paltry overall, so forcing everyone into a tablet optimized interface proved to be a bad idea, they “fixed” it with 8.1, and nobody cared. I had purchased a Microsoft surface pro 3 at the time, which was pre-installed with Windows 8, and I found that it was fine, but it was both a lackluster tablet, and a fairly bad laptop, it was an inbetween hybrid that was (again) a solution looking for a problem. Despite having one of the “more powerful” pro 3 units (I think I had the second from the top SKU, core i5), it frequently overheated, making it uncomfortable to use as a tablet, and due to thermal throttling, it was not performant as a laptop. It was a nice idea, executed poorly, solving a problem that nobody had.

10, in my opinion, is the gold standard. At least, until they started loading windows up with spyware. Any tracking, advertising ID garbage, or similar, was basically the worst part of Windows 10, and everything else was essentially a return to form and function for many things. To me it was like an evolution of Windows 2000. Not many frills, and windows mostly fades into the background so you can focus on what you’re trying to accomplish.

11 is trying to overhaul your experience, and doing so badly. Control panel, apps, and even your right-click menu is being done differently… They’re pushing you to do it the “new” Microsoft way, and so far, I haven’t met anyone that prefers anything that way.

IMO, 11 is a lot of Microsoft shoving terrible options in your face by default and whispering in your ear “you know you like it like that”

No, we don’t. Fuck off with your bullshit, fuck “new” teams, fuck “new” Outlook, fuck everything you’re slapping a “new” label on. We don’t want this.

Windows 11 is the best advertisement for Linux and Mac products so far.

They probably never will.

I don’t think that’s a bad thing. We made it easier, and they’re reaping the benefits of our work.

The only issue I see is that when it breaks, nobody will know how to fix it, since we’ve abstracted all the complexity away from the users, so they don’t understand the underlying processes that need to work for the thing to function.

Other than that, it just works.

“your sound card works perfectly”

I think when the hype dies down in a few years, we’ll settle into a couple of useful applications for ML/AI, and a lot will be just thrown out.

I have no idea what will be kept and what will be tossed but I’m betting there will be more tossed than kept.

I work in tech.

My dad was a teacher, his subject was computers, at that time “computers” class was heavily programming. Basic stuff.

It seems that kids from gen x, and the millennial generation had the timing to learn the tech before it “just works”, so we’re used to figuring it out as we go, because there was no way to look it up on the internet, so we had to.

The zoomers and younger generations are largely “it just works” users, where all the basics of getting things to just plug and play was a thing. If it didn’t work it was either “incompatible” or broken. So don’t try to make it work, or you’ll be sued for DMCA related violations.

IMO, there’s a sweet spot, somewhere in the late 70’s or early 80’s to about the early-mid 2000’s when people had to know something about tech to operate it. Anyone with the aptitude for tech, who was born during this time is generally working in tech.

People born before that are generally the old school pen and paper types, and anyone younger is generally the plug and play digital era.

If course, everyone is different, so the dates are probably liable to be different depending on the area, and each person may have different motivations, etc.

My generation (early millennials) are generally known for being the “tech” person to friends/family, and ADHD; at least, as far as I can see, from my little bubble of friends who mostly work in/with tech.

I’m Canadian and can’t vote in any American election.

I hear more about Trump than I hear about all of our politicians combined.

I just don’t understand how people can get so excited all the time about this stuff. Like, being so invested in some rich assholes life that you’ll commit treason and break into Congress to wander around aimlessly?

Why are you like this? Make politics boring again.

I should do this too. By and large there’s no reason to keep paper around anymore.

What do you do for backups?

I’m far too verbose all the time.

I don’t even want to read everything I write most of the time.

Oh god, we need to do something.

WE NEED TO SAVE THE BOOBIES!