Thrashy @ Thrashy @lemmy.world

Laboratory planner by day, toddler parent by night, enthusiastic everything

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2 yr. ago

I'm Commander Shepard, and this is my favorite issue of Fornax on the Citadel!

"ArE yOu TrIgGeReD, LiB?"

"No, just feeling pity for you in spite of myself."

Don't get me wrong, either -- I'm not at all in favor of mandatory RTO policies, and that team that I loved at my old employer is now scattered to the winds as a result of layoffs and related attrition. The corporate arm of that company had nothing to do with how well my team meshed and worked together (though I will give lots of credit to my immediate boss there -- I went to work at that company to work with her specifically, and she was one of the best managers one could ever ask for), and I suspect we'd have all agreed to be in-office together one or two days a week even without the RTO mandate. But it's been hard to get integrated at this new place of work, and I was looking forward to this trip as a way to start connecting with coworkers, only to find out none of them actually turned up to the office anyway. Without the company making a specific effort to bridge the gap, I think that remote work can become really isolating and reinforce existing cliques and teams to the detriment of those who join up later on.

I recently switched jobs from a company with a "soft" hybrid work requirement to a fully-remote position with a company that doesn't enforce any office attendance policy. As a neurodivergent introvert, remote work is a comfortable thing for me, and I've got a good setup for it.

I took a trip across the state to be in-office for a couple days of meetings recently, and I was honestly kinda surprised to find that the lack of an office attendance policy had kinda killed the company culture. Even on peak attendance days, the office is maybe 1/4 full, silent as a tomb, and basically without value for collaborative work because the people you need to talk to probably aren't there. I went home from my trip feeling quite a bit worse about my new job, which was kinda the opposite of what was intended.

I didn't like being in-office at my old job, exactly, but I did really like my team, and enjoyed the conversations and banter we had. I'm fortunate to be working for a good employer that doesn't see the need to enforce an in-person work policy, but it's a little sad to realize that not having that policy means that the office as a place to work together with people is functionally dead.

The trick is that many of the factors that make wood more or less structurally desirable are environmental rather than genetic, and there's always a tension between things that are good for productivity (I e., rapid tree growth) and performance (tight growth rings and dense fibers).

Engineered wood is already giving us better wood. LVLs, LSLs, and PSLs are stronger, straighter, and more stable than solid sawn lumber, for a price. In commercial construction cross-laminated timber is giving us the performance and fire safety benefits of mass timber construction without requiring the destruction of old-growth forests. You just gotta pay the premium associated with those products, rather than budgeting for utility-grade scotch-pine-fir and expecting every board to be so straight that it scores a 0 in the Kinsey scale.

Battletech let you choose your pronouns independently from the gender presentation of your little 2D avatar icon and butthurt GamerGaters review-brigaded the game and harassed the one trans developer on the dev team.

Great game, though, even if your ops guy's idea of advance Intel is telling you about reinforcements the turn after they open fire on you, the DropShip pilot lands by Braille on your head sometimes, and your shipboard engineer is probably a plant for the cornball tecnho-Illuminati who have been doing a space CIA for the last few hundred years... But I digress.

Hard to say. Real estate has been weird in China for years since it's one of the few investment vehicles available to the masses. A collapse domestically could even push those with the ability to do so to move more of their money into overseas real estate, which could have the opposite effect. Regardless, it's a bad sign for the Chinese economy generally, especially given that Evergrande is only the first of what's likely to be a wave of real estate industry bankruptcies.

Alas, my knowledge on the topic is limited -- I work as a lab planner, and what I wrote above is most of what I've gleaned over the years of designing process development and scale-up labs. Past a point I just ooh and aah appreciatively at the big robotized bioreactor arrays my clients are putting in. Hopefully someone with a deeper background can point you in the right direction!

Biochem is incredibly sensitive to seemingly minor changes in conditions or procedure. A former coworker of mine had to change careers after the procedure she had to follow to run the assays for her master's thesis gave her severe RSI. She couldn't alter the procedure for ergonomics, though, because even something like changing the angle that she held the pipettor at could throw off the results.

In biopharma work, it's not at all uncommon when trying to manufacture a biologic to find a process that works reliably in the lab but doesn't give the same results when scaled up to production-size bioreactors, such that there's often a whole stage of R&D devoted to taking a procedure from the lab and reproducing it on successively larger pieces of equipment, while working out all the tweaks and adjustments needed to make things work and optimize production.

I don't know if it's any better than it used to be, but Blackboard was pretty universally loathed by the faculty when I was in college.

I make $115k per year, my wife makes another $20k or so, we have one kid, a tiny house in a slightly sketch part of our Midwestern city that I bought a decade ago when it was almost cheap, and both our cars are paid off... and we're treading water financially. I don't know how anybody my age is affording big houses and new cars, unless it's just by snowballing debt at an alarming pace. I'm already underfunding my 401k just to maintain some liquidity.

The server I set up for my friends is named "Portable Creatures: Exhalation of the Wilderness" for a reason.

This is a pretty good indicator of the quality of her legal guidance, in that she's halfway to a valid form of objection, but seems to have forgotten the other half of it. You are allowed to object to evidence or testimony that is more prejudicial (i.e. "the defendant was seen kicking puppies at the dog park on a weekly basis") than it is probative, meaning that ts useful in proving or disproving the allegations (the case was actually about a bank robbery not involving puppies at all). You can't just cry "prejudiced!" and expect the judge to go along with you.

USB-A is only rated for 1,500 mating cycles, whereas USB-C is supposed to last for 10,000... Though in reality the ports on my phones seem to start getting too loose to hold the jack in at around 1,000 cycles. Still, it's not a totally unreasonable standard, and any device that hasn't been designed to be thrown away should have ports broken out onto replaceable subassemblies -- as is the case with many business-class laptops, for instance -- so replacing a failed USB-PD port shouldn't be too much trouble.

Can't forget the spineties!

I installed KDE Neon on Friday evening and things were going great, everything was testing well, and Saturday game night with the gang went flawlessly, but this morning the VMWare Horizon Linux client spontaneously decided that it didn't want to accept mouse input anymore, so after ten minutes of troubleshooting I gave up and booted back into Windows so that I can be productive today.

A battle lost, but the war is not over yet.

Worth noting that Outlook the Office suite component, and Outlook, the freebie mail client that comes with Windows, are not the same thing. They're just named the same because yadda yadda executives yadda yadda name recognition yadda yadda brand synergy.

Unless your employer is one of the very few that doesn't provide Office to its users, this isn't about the version you are required to use.

Greed isn't the problem, per se -- it's that outside of the biggest sites, which could hoover up ad targeting data of hundreds of millions to billions and sell that data through their own internal ad platform -- the model was never viable to begin with. Notice that the enshittification really took off all soon as interest rates jumped? Tech startups have all been floating along on easy money, but now that loans aren't basically free, VC dollars are drying up. Companies that could previously offset their capital burn with yet another round of investment now suddenly need to make money on their own merit, and are finding that they have to cut service to the bone and monetize the bejeezus out of what's left if they have any chance of survival.

This is mostly an opinion piece -- the facts cited have mostly been reported by others already, and the author provides links to those sources.

What's got me is, why bother with the legal system? Just call up the Texas National Guard into federal service and order them to enforce the law as regards Border Patrol's access to the border. If they refuse, court martial 'em. Either way, Border Patrol gets access to the border to cut down Texas' illegal barriers, and Abbott gets an unsubtle reminder about how the states are subordinate to the federal government. Win-win scenario.