Admiral Patrick @ ptz @dubvee.org

I'm surprisingly level-headed for being a walking knot of anxiety.

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Yeah. We have a decent budget and aren't opposed to buying software (or, shudder, contracting a vendor), but we always try to seek out an open source solution first.

Get out.

That's a big part of it for me, too. The other part is that I document things pretty thoroughly, but no one wants to read that. I'd much rather they read the docs I wrote and ask specific questions than expect me to just explain everything from scratch.

Cat S22 Flip. Sadly discontinued as well as the manufacturer (Bullit) out the phone business.

Yeah, not sure how long that'll hold up for me, but for now, so far so good.

The rule-of-thumb used to be "look at the hands", but I use a combo of focus, lighting, perspective, background objects (especially ones with text), color saturation, common sense (e.g. 'could this even be remotely real?'), etc. The scary part is if someone would run that through a filter and present it like grainy CCTV footage, all that (minus the common sense part) would be lost and I'd likely be stumped.

This probably isn't a super-helpful answer, but for the most part, I haven't needed to use any (yet?). Dunno if it's just me, but pretty much every AI generated image still just looks "off" and uncanny in a perceptible and slightly off-putting way.

That said, there are occasional false positives depending on the lighting, focus, and filters used for legit photographs. No false negatives yet, though.

"By the time I explain how it needs to be done, I could have just done it"

Speaking from experience, it's a hard habit to break. But you'd think the mental image of rolling up a $1 bill and lighting it on fire would push some people away.

I know managers who swore by MS Project (2007 I think?), and I didn't totally hate it myself. Haven't really looked for an alternative, but also, haven't needed to for the most part.

I wonder if it's just that project management has changed since then, and everything is all Jira/Kanban boards now? I think most of our projects have been laid out in Trello-like software and Git issues/tasks for probably the last 8 or 9 years.

he found enough money in the couch the night before payday to buy a pack of smokes

Relatively speaking, did he even find that much? I live in a poor, red state and cigarettes are almost $10 a pack (which is only a bit more than what they cost in NY in 2005). If I hadn't quit almost over a decade ago, I'd for sure be quitting now.

Edit: I quit in 2013 and am now realizing that's over a decade.

You mean the IRS alone will not steal an additional +$500 billion from the poor, helpless billionaires this year, right? /s

I think Windows 2000 was the last Windows version I actually liked. It went downhill from there until 8 when I finally jumped ship for good. If I recall, Office 2003 was pretty close to Office 2000, just not as "flat". I'm just more familiar with 2003 since I had it on my own PC and only used Office 2000 in the labs at school (so I could be mistaken).

Gradient support on shapes was massively improved (more than 2 points on custom gradients), 3D bevels and rotation support was added

Can't say that's a feature I've ever really needed in an office suite, so am unable to confirm or deny LibreOffice can't do it.

better effects on photos were introduced and you can remove backgrounds

That's kind of outside the scope of a word processor / office suite. I just use GIMP and import it into the document.

In office 2019, you can also import and export Drawing objects to SVG

LibreOffice Draw (part of the suite) can create, edit, import, and export SVGs. LibreOffice writer can import and use them.

It sounds like you're just complaining that other office suites don't have a bunch of out-of-scope, unnecessary features bolted on. Definitely not worthy of condemning them over that.

A big one for me is Microsoft office (desktop), Libreoffice and other FOSS alternatives just simply don't come close,

What, exactly, is missing? MS Office pretty much peaked, feature-wise, in like 2003 (or, arguably, 2007), and LibreOffice is ahead of that. I also find the workflow to be closer to "classic" Office and, to a slightly lesser extent, WordPerfect, which I appreciate.

You can even give LibreOffice the ribbon menu if you want (it's in preferences somewhere). The default button icons may be rough (though recent versions have improve), but you can even customize those.

Oh, yeah, the speculation is not unreasonable. I just don't know if that's necessarily a good thing (unless there's a huge leap in durability preceding that).

I'm already rocking the foldable I like, anyway lol:

Remember "phablets"; almost all smartphones eventually turned into phablets.

Which is, arguably, for the worse. I miss smaller 16:9 devices I could use one-handed and reach all the corners of. Almost cried when I had to give up my OnePlus 3 and everything now is an unwieldy, tall-skinny rectangle.

I've not had a hands-on experience with foldables yet, but the reviews I've read imply they still seem too fragile for the price.

should have named it the Department of Dismantling the Administrative State, but that's not a meme.

At least if you read the acronym backwards, SADD, it's fitting.

“Musk will have effectively crippled the modern American state and ripped vital services away from ordinary Americans in order to pay for more waste at the Pentagon.”

So, mission accomplished then? I never believed for a moment it was ever about reducing waste / increasing efficiency. At best, it was scrounging the government couch for change to pay for tax breaks for the rich.

!lemmysilver

Yep. One of Cave's recordings to the "astronauts, Olympians, and/or war heroes" in the old test tracks.