sylver_dragon

That does seem like bad design. If it’s causing you and your team an inordinate amount of time to constantly re-login, you may want to go up your management chain and try to quantify it. e.g. in an 8 hour day, you would expect to re-login around 24 times in the day. If that takes an average of 2 minutes per login that 48 minutes per day. Across 260 days (assuming a standard work year), that’s 12,480 minutes per year or 208 hours. Multiply that by the rate it costs to keep you employed. This includes both your pay and all the costs of employment, the common rule of thumb is to multiply your hourly rate by 2. So, if you’re paid ~$50/hr then it costs ~$100/hr to keep you employed. So, 208 hours of your time is costing the company ~$20,800/yr of lost productivity. That’s a significant amount of lost productivity and that is only accounting for 2 minutes per login and not the lost time as you deal with mental context switching. It’s not a cheap cost and is not increasing security by all that much.

Is the expiration every 20 minutes, no matter what; or, is the expiration after 20 minutes of inactivity? The two have different answers. The former sounds like a misconfiguration and you may want to reach out to your IT team and ask them about it, sometimes mistakes are made and it could just be you having a strange problem. The latter is pretty common and does serve a purpose. Inactivity timers deal with the issue of people logging in, and then walking away from their system. This is common enough that solutions like inactivity timers are used. There are cases where this is a problem and they need to be disabled, but those will usually be policy exceptions and will need to be requested and documented.

If you’re getting logged out of your system every 20 minutes, that really sounds like a bug and not a security feature. Get in touch with your IT and/or security team about it.

Microsoft’s partner portal website mysteriously said his account had been deactivated, without specifying why.

My money is on Microsoft’s AI based detections causing false positives again. I spend way too much time chasing ghosts from Defender. Their machine learning based signatures are especially egregious. You get an alert with a name like “Win32/Wacatac.b!ml”. That last “ml” bit denotes that it’s machine learning based. And then you get fuck all to help you determine why the alert fired. Sure, it might actually be a trojan. More likely, it’s a false positive. But who knows, because Microsoft won’t provide enough information to perform a reasonable analysis of the binary.

And MS has been pushing CoPilot hard. It’s in everything and it’s happy to slop up answers for you. The accuracy of those answers though can be a bit spotty. I’d certainly never turn it loose on tools which can have business impact. But, I doubt Microsoft has any such reservations about letting CoPilot slop all over third party devs.

Seems people have to relearn this lesson every few years:
If you don’t want something to be public, don’t put it on the internet. “Privacy” controls from these companies fail regularly, sometimes by design. If you put something on the internet, it will be public eventually.

Or two decades fighting an asymmetric war which President Bone Spurs personally managed to avoid.

By “de-shitify” they meant removing all the shit which isn’t owned and controlled by Microsoft.

Yup. With the ease and low likelihood of being caught, piracy has become a pressure relief valve on shitty content practices. Make things too hard to get and people will recognize that setting up a VPN and torrent client aren’t all that hard. Make the experience really bad, and you’ll get dedicated people creating entire software platforms to lower that barrier to entry for piracy even further. Sure, some of those software platforms will get knocked down, but they usually result in the code being released and other folks come along and build on them.

As consolidation and enshitification rise, I expect us to see piracy rise again as well.

The real miracle in the Bible is that Joseph didn’t fuck for his entire marriage and was ok with that.

According to Christian mythology Jesus has several brothers and sisters from Mary and Joseph. So no miracle there. One just has to wonder if they waited until after Jesus was born to start fucking.

3 days, 3 years, who cares about units?
Obviously not Putin, he doesn’t care about Russian units at all.

Steam made it easy to buy, download and play games. So much of the competition was focused on preventing piracy to the detriment of the user experience. Steam was buy, download, and play all your games in one place with a minimum of bullshit. Then they implemented Steam Greenlight. It let some smaller studios get onto a major platform and proved out that there was a demand for those titles. They were then smart enough to realize that trying to gatekeep those studios with the “Greenlight” process was stupid and opened the flood gates.

Really, this goes back to Gabe Newell’s comments about piracy (a decade and a half ago [1]):

We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem,” he said. “If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable.

Steam was a real competitor to LimeWire/Kazaa/etc. The other options, at the time, were stuck in the mentality of treating their customers like pirates. And once people bought into the Steam ecosystem, getting them to buy into any other ecosystem was almost impossible. Steam’s main trick wasn’t building a community, it was building trust. Users trust Valve to not fuck them over. That’s a hard thing to create and it’s fragile. If you look at a competitor like EA’s Origin, many folks won’t even consider it. EA’s reputation of fucking customers is well established. No one wants to sink hundreds to thousands of dollars into a storefront with such an anti-user reputation.

nasa is about to remote into the computer

I’ve dealt with slow RDP sessions while fixing servers in the past, but the lag on this connection must really suck.

Yup. Being young and stupid, a group of us were lighting those rose fireworks (the kind which spin and light up on the ground), putting them in a water balloon launcher and flinging them into the sky. While we were aiming for a river, this also meant we were aiming for some brush. Unsurprisingly, we eventually had one land short while still burning and started a bush on fire. We ran down and started trying to put it out with dirt. This wasn’t going well until we remembered we had a small container and a ready source of water (the river) and managed to douse the fire.

While I did enjoy Tom Bombadil in the books, I’m not surprised he never made it into any adaptation. It’s this odd coda in the story which isn’t all that important to the overall plot. Sure, it helps to build the world out and show that there are strange things outside the power of the One Ring. But, he’s a Chekhov’s gun problem. Tolkien sets him up as this amazingly powerful entity, who could probably solve all the problems Middle Earth is facing and who promptly fucks right off for the rest of the story. And his tendency to fuck off is mentioned later to explain why he isn’t fixing anything. In the end, he serves no purpose for the story which cannot be easily dealt with otherwise. It just seems like Tolkien really wanted to include him somehow, stuffed him in and didn’t have a competent editor to say, “look Ronald, I know you love this character, but this bit really needs to be pulled.”

It’s the return of the Glasshole.

If you have the time, put some resumes out before accepting the first thing to come along. I don’t know how things are in Germany, but I’ve always believed it’s easier to find a job while you are still working. That said, if the new position, pay and work culture seem good, taking the position for now may be a good choice. You can always job hunt later.

As for how you conduct yourself, I’d always suggest conducting yourself in a professional manner. While you may have zero intention of coming back to this organization, you never know when you are going to run across the people you work with again. And the next time they may be in a position to help or hurt you. For example, I worked for a company really early in my career which started falling apart quickly. Towards the end of my time there, they announced they were closing the office I worked at and basically gave my department a big “fuck you”. I could have gone out causing trouble or just worked my time until I left for greener pastures. I did the latter. Years latter, I was applying for a job I really wanted and an important member of the hiring team had worked with me at the first job. Not as my boss, just someone in another department. He remembered my work and work quality and had effectively said, “yup, hire this guy”. While I have long since left that job as well, his confidence in me changed the trajectory of my career.

Maybe it’s different over there, but I’ve always heard that “it’s who you know, not what you know” that gets you hired. And I’ve run into that in my own career. You don’t want to be a pushover, but keeping professional relationships professional can pay dividends down the line. Do the job you are paid for, don’t make messes for other people and at least try to be professional in your dealings with others. You may be able to climb the ladder quickly today by being an asshole, but you never know if the fingers you step on today will be attached to the hand you will need to help you tomorrow.

What are you more worried about, third party, MitM interception (e.g. IMSI catcher) or Google knowing who you are communicating with? The former is technically harder for an attacker, but the use of such devices is well documented and poorly controlled. Google is, well Google. And you can expect them to monitize any bit of data they have on you. Also, that data will almost certainly be handed over to local law enforcement, especially if they have whatever the local equivalent of a warrant is.

As with most security, there are trade-offs. You have to decided what risks you are willing to accept and what you are not.

This is one of the reasons vigilantism works better in fiction than in real life. In cases where some vigilante left a beat up suspect and some sort of evidence, any competent defense attorney is going to move to have the evidence suppressed due to issues around chain of custody and possible tampering. They would likely also push the narrative that the vigilante is the real criminal and left the evidence to frame their client. Between possibly getting much of the evidence suppressed, and building doubt around anything remaining, a conviction could be really hard for the prosecutor.

This also ignores issues around vigilantes going after the wrong person for something (see: lynchings) and applying wildly disproportionate, extra-judicial punishments for crimes (see: lynchings, again). Crime and punishment really are hard problems which don’t lend themselves to easy answers. And there is a reason the Code of Hammurabi is seen as such a big deal in history. Rule of Law is an important concept which protects people.

Unless the romance is central to the game, that sort of focus and depth just isn’t going to be put into it. There is also the issue that the writers in video games have far less control over the main character than they do in other mediums. In a book, you don’t have to worry about your main character deciding to to fuck off for a week collecting all the boxes in a village and stacking them on the town well, just because it’s funny. That main character stays on task and on plot for the writer. There are games where that high level of control is possible, visual novels exist, but that starts to push into the question, “why not just make a book/movie instead?”

Similarly, I think it’s going to be hard for any video game romance not to come off as transactional, due to the nature of a game being a computer program. Imagine trying to tell Romeo and Juliet as a video game. At some point, Romeo and Juliet will need to interact. Romeo arrives at Juliet’s window and professes his love. How does the player interact with the game for that scene? Is it just a cutscene? Or a cutscene with quick time events (press X to woo). Trying to replicate a Jane Austin style story would be even worse. As books about people sitting about in drawing rooms drinking tea and being catty to one another, replicating that in a video game is all going to boil down to dialog trees. Perhaps the first time through it could feel fresh and interesting, but on a second playthrough it’s going to quickly be obvious that the whole thing is really just “pick the right options for a chance at sexy-time”. Maybe we could get a Jane Austin Rouge-like, in that each time you load it up the characters’ personalities change and you really do have to pay attention to verbal and social queues to get anywhere. But even that is still really just “pick the right options for a chance at sexy-time”.

Ultimately, I think video games are always going to be fairly transactional in nature. They are computer programs and are ultimately deterministic. All the interactions you have in a video game need to be planned out, scripted and maybe even voice acted. It’s what makes all the interactions in Baldur’s Gate 3 so amazing. Everything those characters do was planned for, written and recorded. Every comment, every facial expression was planned, written and coded. There is no spontaneity, because there can’t be (maybe with AI, but that’s a different can of worms). That so many little things actually did get covered is amazing. But, the trigger conditions for playing that bit of animation and voice acting will be hard coded. Whether or not a character likes the main character must be a set of numbers stored in memory, because that’s how computers work. Yes, it could be far more complex than just an easily identifiable number. And perhaps hiding those numbers from the player would make it feel less obvious, but they aren’t going to go away.

And all the work which goes into planning, writing and coding those interactions is time spent during development. Going back to Baldur’s Gate 3, wouldn’t it be awesome if some of the NPCs started pairing off with each other? If the main characters isn’t getting busy with Shadowheart, maybe she discoverers an interest in big men who can turn into bears so you come back to camp sometime to find her and Halsin sitting very close together talking softly. This could even have the whole random element where different characters have different crushes/interests each time you play through. That would be neat to see, but it’s going to require a lot of extra development. Unless that’s a feature which starts selling video games, it’s not going to happen. Perhaps this sort of thing will show up in indie games, I wouldn’t expect it in major titles anytime soon.