I mean, killing prisoners is cruel and unusual in a civilised society.

Pretty much every media outlet across the world.

The opposing party in the UK is electing leaders, and they’ve all been asked what they think of him. Like it or not, but in turning one of the biggest multi-billion dollar social media platforms into a small million dollar right-wing platform for crypto bots, he’s now got a lot of influence on politics across the world.

What makes it funnier is that he probably doesn’t give a fuck about the Tories in the UK, but if Trump loses he’ll own a right-wing platform with zero influence on what he cares about.

Twitter isn’t a top company any more.

Honest question. At what point will Tesla execs look at Musk and decide that keeping him at the helm is not in the company’s best interests?

Eh, to some extent, but we’ve got the foresight to accept these dishes as being British when you consider that the foods we eat aren’t authentic to those areas. Spag Bol isn’t being eaten in Italy, nor is Chicken Vindaloo in India.

We’ve got a long enough history that we can trace back when the Normans and Saxons came here, alongside the culture changes of Indian settlers, Jamaican workers, Irish, etc. That acceptance is not only why there’re a lot of distinctly British versions of different cultures’ food, but why many cities in the UK also serve decidedly authentic food at some of the best restaurants in the world - and that doesn’t even factor in how some cultures have fused over time.

Or a Kebab, absolutely fucking loaded with enough spice to blow your insides out the morning after.

The perception of Britain that most Americans have is that of the 40’s and 50’s. It’s hardly surprising that it’s completely fucking wrong.

To be honest, a 50% attendance record sounds pretty good. I’m really sorry to hear about this though, the spread looks great, and anyone that puts a watch party on for All In is going to put on a good time.

What time was it on for you guys? I went the first year and had an amazing time, but sadly had work this year. Perhaps you should make the pilgrimage over next year for Forbidden Door?

It’s absolutely mad to me that Sonic Team have done nothing with this since SA2: Battle.

I hate to say it, but it’s literally built for mobile devices! Have a Chao Garden game on consoles/PC, have them be downloadable onto your mobile device, and basically turn it into a Pokémon Go type thing where you can get kids and weebs to exercise and explore the outdoors.

The Ribbon is much better, and has been a part of the Office suite for over a decade, easily.

Poor examples aside, designers and engineers are rarely given a seat at the table in big tech companies. Most tech CEO’s were either tech managers or sales people at some point, and are so far removed from IC work or valuing specific crafts for their user value that someone on the UX side probably doesn’t get a say in how this shit is built.

Some UX designers either work to very specific business constraints, or work on stuff that has zero benefit to the end-user. Some engineers work on stuff that solely provides metrics for shareholders and leadership.

I’m tempted to set up a blog just to post about this subject, because it’s everywhere, but big tech is now so top-heavy that for years many huge decisions have been made on a whim by execs. Tech has grown so large and powerful that tech execs (and those clinging to their coat-tails) put themselves outside of the echelons of what an IC can reach, and far above the user. Years of MBA double-speak and worshipping the altar of guys like Gates, Bezos, and Jobs means that it’s “good” to be opinionated and ignore fact over your own judgement. This results in senior management deciding “let’s put AI here” or “the colour scheme should be mostly white”, despite reluctantly paying hundreds of people many thousands of dollars a year to KNOW about this stuff.

That, in essence, is why everything feels shitter nowadays. It’s because some fifty-something MBA cunt believes that you need AI, or a good UI needs more buttons - stuff we’ve known for decades is fucking stupid. That’s irrelevant though, because by being “General Manager of UI at MegaCorp” and having an assistant to arrange their Outlook calendar, they know more than you, pleb.

They do for smaller companies. In one of my old employers (around 200 people) Blind wouldn’t recognise my work email as being from an actual company.

Sadly, those are also the sort of companies that’ll scrub bad reviews.

People are allowed to like what they like. Please don’t gatekeep.

People that work on-call do this, especially in tech or security.

I’m considering making the switch because my paging calls are from a random set of phone numbers, so I cannot attach a specific ringtone to them. After a few horrible pages, you start to associate your phone going off as a world-ending experience, when it’s just your wife calling to ask if you want her to pick something up for you from the shop. A separate device that disassociates my phone from pain would be nice.

Oh, 1000%. I could write a book on how monumentally stupid the whole process is (and most Amazonians agree), but the fundamental points are:

• The people that stay are of a certain mindset, where you don’t pick up “hard” tasks, and you are quick to establish blame/ownership elsewhere.
• Data is king, but you can lie a lot with data.
• Employees are customers also, and when you piss off employees you piss off customers and their families.
• You spend a huge sum of money on hiring and training talent, only to send them to your competitors.
• You spend money to give severance to active employees. That is still, to be, the dumbest thing ever. SO many people don’t resign, they just down tools or do a bad job to get the extra pay. PIP is called Paid Interview Prep for a reason.
• Amazon’s Focus/Pivot has such a bad reputation that being fired used to mean that other big companies would happily tell you “if you have any trouble at Amazon, let me know and we’ll start an interview loop”.

Most fundamentally of all…very few companies do this. It died with Jack Welch/GM and Gates/Microsoft, after they saw the same downfalls. Amazon is yet to learn their lesson, and it shows in how poorly the “Amazon Management School” under Bezos are performing. The other big tech companies also now do this, although less severe, and surprise surprise, they’re all going downhill - making awful decisions, delivering nothing of value, and ignoring customers over leadership.

The best way to do this is to correlate downtime with main providers. If a cloud provider goes down when AWS has outages on related services, it’s probably using an AWS service.

True, paired with Amazon moving many roles out of North America and into India.

With that said, a lot of people (like myself) joined Amazon when remote working was encouraged, only to then be told to go in 3 days a week. We lost loads of really great engineers that didn’t have opportunities in their local area. We’ll likely lose a LOT of people again, myself included, unless opportunities open elsewhere where I can transfer to a new area. Amazon are tricky, though, and they’ll preempt this by reducing transfers or laying people off soon to ensure that those that cannot adhere to 5 days a week are considered to have “resigned voluntarily”.

That’s all to say that a lot of bad faith on Amazon’s part will likely scare people away from joining. After the NYT article dropped almost a decade ago, Amazon got around it being hard to hire by having great transfer opportunities and high salaries. Neither of those exist now, and with all the anti-worker rhetoric and lies about internal AI performance “saving x hours on upgrades” I don’t see Amazon ever getting top talent again. Amazon will slip into boomer tech soon enough.

Amazon gets rid of around 5-8% of their staff every year through unregretted attrition, where they’ll fire “underperforming” people, with maybe 10-15% of people being threatened with underperformance "

Alongside this, to cut a long story short Amazon grew huge during COVID, and despite tens of thousands of layoffs the company has been trying to shrink everywhere possible, cutting fat wherever they can. IMO, leadership made lots of really stupid decisions, and the CEO has set Amazon on a course where irreparable damage has been made.

I work for Amazon. People are NOT happy.

Sadly, this is exactly what Jassy wants. Amazon are desperate for people to leave, and this is another push towards this.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens, but given that I’m unable to go to the office more than 3x a week due to having a young family to look after, my time.here is clearly limited - unless I’m able to work something out.

There is a strong remote advocacy group at Amazon, but the best that was mustered last time was a one hour protest during lunch. This might be the catalyst for people to say “fuck it, let’s unionize”, but I’m not confident.

A lot of people see it as needlessly dragging a conflict on, but NATO (probably) knows what it’s doing, and has had plans for scenarios like this for years. Russian escalation in the region isn’t exactly new, and it’s the sort of campaign that NATO as a group will define its legitimacy on.

I’m sure that if both sides wanted to hurt the other they’d do so, NATO especially so - but to both sides it’s ultimately a game. NATO will flirt with weapons, and Russia will throw citizens at the problem and use grief/loss to restore the “fatherland”. It’s why I don’t see an end to the conflict for as long as Putin is in power.

My only fear with the indie gaming industry is that many of them are starting to embrace the churn culture that has led AAA gaming down a dark path.

I would love an app like Blind that allows developers on a game to anonymously call out the grinding culture of game development, alongside practices like firing before launch and removing credits from workers. Review games solely on how the dev treated the workers, and we might see some cool corrections between good games and good culture.