Lotus WordPro or bust

Lubuntu brother reppin’

My poor 2011 laptop is begging for the sweet release of death, but not before Linux keeps performing CPR on it.

I had to chuckle in an exasperated way when I opened the Xbox app on my phone… and there’s a fucking Copilot tab in there as well.

I understand the use cases for AI, but Microsoft seems to be throwing the whole lot at the wall and seeing what sticks.

holy jesus, I thought I’d banished the actual floppy disk to the back of my mind, particularly the DS ones.

You know what, it’s easy to rag on the devs at the time, but they worked with what they had. Good on them.

and/or well financially off.

In fairness, it was largely a convenience tax. Through my Atari ST, early PC, and (to a minimal degree) Amiga days, two or more drives just reduced the need for disk-swapping.

However… I’m not saying things were done on an industrial scale; but Xcopy with two drives was like trading a Vauxhall Nova for a Lambo Countach.

Whereas it’s inexcusable, it is understandable.

That must be right up there with one of the most boring jobs in the world. The autonomous systems will react correctly most of the time, so to sit through miles of uneventful journeys and have to catch an error in half a second must be really tough, even if it literally their one job. I suppose it’s like rawdogging an entire long haul flight - only to be expected to catch a priceless vase that will might drop from above you at any moment.

Anyone who has taken a long drive at night or on boring roads will likely tell tales of times they’ve struggled to stay focussed or wondered what happened to the last five miles, necessitating a rest stop for coffee or sleep - I suspect that isn’t even an option for these drivers.

At that point, the person is less than useless as a human-in-the-loop safety feature.

The preferred cereal of JEFF.K!!!11

You can generally tell how well a push has gone by looking at your phone at 9pm on the Friday nights.

If there’s no missed calls, it’s gone well.

If there’s two or three figures worth of missed calls, then it’s gone really well and it’s just been people wanting to congratulate you on how well it’s gone.

Either way, a Monday task.

Yes?

No such thing as a weird kids collection.

Whatever a kid is excited about is fuckin awesome man!

edit: as long as something isn’t being unalived to add to the collection obvs

I fucking love AI.

I’ll qualify that with a small personal story on it: I have a colleague in a nearby office the other side of the city, who steps into supervise his team when the actual manager isn’t there. Nice bloke, not much banter, but pleasant enough.

You can fucking guarantee though that when a division-wide email has gone out, or a change of plan comes in… he’s right on the phone to me asking what to do.

The first few times it was cute. A guy must really love his job or hate himself to go into junior management, so walking him through routine tasks he may not have been exposed to may be beneficial to him in the long run.

The problem is, it’s near constant. Every single time something changes, he calls - not for advice, not for opinion, but “can you do this for my team too?”. What really pulls a hair out of my arse is that there’s a 50/50 chance of it being something I’ve already showed him. I’ve spoken to his actual manager at exasperated length but it’s just a can kicked down the road with a “well he’s still learning, isn’t he?”

I suppose he is, and I’m no teacher. When he phones now, I just tell him “mate our org has access to that fancy new Microsoft Copilot, it’s fuckin’ mint bro, solves all your problems”, knowing fine well the disaster that’s about to happen - partly to expose him to new technologies, but mainly to be a smug cunt.

Invariably, he gets solutions that don’t quite work, or ideas that don’t quite fit the brief… and it’s satisfying as fuck getting the follow-up call and saying “sorry bruv, Copilot is smarter than me, which isn’t hard” or “nah sorry dude, it gives you a personalised response so that’ll be outside of my domain, making my suggestions worthless”.

Fucking love it. It has reduced my workload immensely.