Dave Grohl got a lot of shit for playing a private show for Amazon leadership after they had laid off thousands of employees earlier this year.

Now, I guess it kinda makes sense why. It’s not just that he’s morally bankrupt, but he probably needed some extra cash to fund the incoming divorce and raising a new child.

With all that said, I kinda feel for the child. It’s gonna suck to have this scrutiny on your shoulders, and to have weird parts of the Grohl cult of personality hate you for existing. Would it actually be that good having him as your dad when his other kids apparently want nothing to do with him now?

In some European countries, Pepsi actually reduced the sugar amount and replaced with artificial sweeteners.

IMO more people should be critical of the systems and tools that they use instead of shitting on the tools that others choose to use.

We do assume too much of our tools, but many people here are guilty of assuming that other OS’s are broken in ways that do not reflect the average customer experience.

Genuinely interested in how that is practical in an office setting. We barely have room to keep leftovers, let alone decent bread and cheese. It’s also a bit boring if you’re having it most days.

Meal deals are rarely ever decent. They’re enough to get you through the working day if you sit at a desk all day.

Can you give an example of a “proper one” that isn’t cooked?

It was the Edinburgh Fringe Festival recently, which is a huge comedy and arts festival that occurs yearly. If you’re a stand-up fan it’s basically your main event on your calendar. Dave is a TV channel here in the UK that plays a lot of comedy.

One of the coveted awards is Joke of the Fringe, where comedians are judged on their best one-liner. As you can imagine, while it predates social media by many years it’s basically a content gold mine - either from the top list or from those that heard hundreds of new, solid jokes.

Mine is 5 months. I was really hoping that by 2 it would get a little easier…

The killer for me is that she’ll get me up for 5 mins in the night, but it’ll take me an hour to get back to sleep each time.

I had a chat with someone that is a Senior Staff Engineer at a huge company a while ago, on what I’d say is a pretty big service that millions use.

They don’t write much code any more, but they debug a lot of issues. The way they described the workflow to mastery is:

• If you know nothing, ask someone that knows something
• If you know something, Google, and there will be answer from an expert
• If you’re an expert and Google doesn’t work, read the docs and specs from the masters
• If you’re a master, start writing the specs, and offer addendums for when the spec needs to change.

IMO, Googling gets you 99% of the way there in many situations, but if you know nothing the answer might be in front of you and you wouldn’t know it.

Haha, I thought I was the only one!

I started doing it to annoy my wife, but now I still do it, and it’s taking considerable concentration to not dab when I sneeze.

Alex Kidd in Miracle World.

Such a great game, and so fucking hard!

The Pixels are probably the best high-end phone, but today the selection available is all bad enough that your choice comes down to “what features can I lose?”

Even the likes of OnePlus have been shit for years. A company that literally entered the market on releasing an affordable flagship with near-stock software. Their last great phone was the OnePlus 6, before they decided to start ditching features.

I had assumed that more companies would enter the market and take over, but that hasn’t happened. You still end up with no choice, whether it’s a poor screen, an awful camera, no storage, removed ports/jacks, no NFC support, or stupid little features that no one would actually give a shit about.

The strength of early Android was that you had flagship phones that had the best new features, and experimental releases that tried new things on a budget like barcode scanners, slide-out keyboards, a desktop OS, remote features, etc. This still exists, but you’re paying even more for the pleasure of testing something in the wild.

IMO, the world could use a new mobile OS, and one grounded in reality.

That thread is hardly accurate. Lemmy acts holier-than-thou about social media, so most people that do use Twitter or Facebook didn’t post because they’d be shit on or have memes created about how they use social media owned by evil robots.

Isn’t that incorrect? The costs incurred by the NHS in the UK are much lower than what a hospital would spend in the US, especially on drugs, where there is a single market with limited customers.

Haha, I said don’t ask!

It came up during one of my childcare courses that I took before I became a dad. You can buy colostrum and breast milk on the dark web, and in some inner-city hospitals it’s not uncommon for some women to sell all their breast milk and to give their baby formula for some extra cash. We were told by the midwife that ran the course not to do this…and naturally it resulted in more questions than answers.

Genuinely one of the only things I remember from that course.

Don’t ask me how I know this, but some parts of the bodybuilding community have been known to pay lactating women a surprisingly high amount for their breast milk.

Working in Ruby did 10x more to help me write clean code than reading Clean Code ever did.

Many of the lessons drilled into me with Ruby (keep a consistent style, tests are cheap, keep your methods relatively small where possible, reduce nesting where possible) carry over nicely into other languages without needing to go through any OO bullshit.

IMO, the best lesson around Clean Code is this: you’re not clever, write obvious code that works with as few tricks as possible.

Wasn’t Alyx HL3?

Many people use the example of Steam to say “well, they’re doing things right”, because they offer a better service to everyone else.

My point is that Google could have welcomed competition and still stayed at the top. Instead, they created walls that welcomed this ruling, and damaged themselves and customers in the process.

Google gained their initial position fair and square. They had the better search engine, and despite the likes of Bing being actually pretty good they were never able to compete.

All Google had to do was to follow its initial mantra of “don’t be evil”. That’s literally all it needed to do. Sadly, they were evil, and these are the seeds of that evil. I maintain today that Chrome, YouTube, Maps, and Search would still be dominant if Google were to welcome third-parties to compete and take space on their devices.

This, IMO, is a case that is damaging to their CEO above anything else. It shows that over the last few years many of the steps taken that have alienated fans and employees have actually damaged the company too. The exec actions have damaged them, and as such the execs should pay the price or course-correct.