Ask Lemmy

If you ask a computer expert to fix the weird thing Outlook just did, or explain why Excel is suddenly writing Gibberish into your tables –
Even if we wanted to explain it to you, we can't. No human being alive on earth knows the reason and how to fix it.
Some of us are really good at poking it till it behaves again.
Others are brave enough to venture into the dark lands of learn.microsoft.com .
But what awaits us there are articles written by Copilot about how it worked before Microsoft changed it again for no reason.

The better you get at coding, the less you'll probably write code. This is for two reasons: you can't fuck up code that isn't written and you need people that understand the bigger picture to focus on making that picture clearer. This unfortunately leads to junior and mid-level developers writing most of the code. But it's not like things would be 10x better if senior devs wrote everything, because even for someone experienced coding well is fucking hard.

Working with electricity is actually quite simple in a lot of respects, and I make a lot of money mainly because people are afraid of it (and rightfully so, me too). But many of the small things like changing plugs/switches out and hanging fixtures can be done easily by anyone with a basic knowledge hand tool use and basic rules like a) turn off the main if you don't know which breaker you're working with, b) check that it's off with a meter or hot stick, c) even then, don't directly touch the shiny parts, and d) match your colors exactly as you found them (take pictures to be safe). Granted I've been doing this for 10+ years, but even a layman can save themselves a service call with a couple basics and YouTube is a great resource for such things.

When I worked in local television news, people would probably be shocked about how frank and open newscasters often were during commercial breaks. We got direct satellite feeds of the national newscasts, and they didn't mute the mics or turn off cameras during breaks. We got to still see and hear them while local commercials ran.

I remember Katie Couric going off about a bunch of dumb shit during commercial breaks. I especially remember her being a demented cheerleader for the War on Terror, especially behind the scenes.

There used to be a video of her cutting a Native American historian from a special on Columbus Day and saying "what does he know about Columbus anyway?" after chiding him for having negative things to say about Columbus. Since they were short on time, they made the decision to cut him from the program. I'm having trouble finding it now.

The 1995 film Spin is made entirely from direct satellite feeds from between commercial breaks. It was specifically about the 1992 election and how both Republicans and Democrats "massaged the message" with the news media, but watching it you'll get an idea of how it works, because a lot of the clips are from commercial breaks. (The video I mentioned about Couric and the historian might even be in this film, it's been a while since I've seen it).

Mediaburn has a copy of the film to watch on their website.

https://mediaburn.org/video/spin/

In IT the first problem/question should always this:

Is it a people problem or a technology problem?

IT can fix technology problems, managers need to fix people problems

if someone gives an IT person a people problem and they try to fix it, it will probably not go very well

same if you give a manager a technology problem and ask them to fix it

this is the most important lesson that leaders needs to understand

Millions of government employees work hard every day on so much shit you'll never see or understand that does in fact make your life so much nicer than you deserve when you complain about government workers.

And I'm NOT talking about the cultic worshipped military. I'm talking civilian civil servants at all levels of government.

SOME people are really gonna wonder why everything's getting shittier and never make the connection that their idiotic notions about government led to it.

Academia, USA.

You’re getting the exact same quality of education for introductory classes at a community college, state school, and private school.

I know because I teach the same suite of classes at all 3 as an adjunct. Same book, same syllabus, same schedule, same assignments. The only difference is the price tag, and I’m hardly alone in that.

Actually, scratch that. You’re getting a better education at the community college because the people in charge there bother to remember that I exist and treat me as an equal.

I'm in accounting and considering what I read in the news, it was surprising to me how honest it is in real, regular, non public companies. We get real audits that are trying to validate our records, we give them our real work to look at, try so hard to figure out the real cost and revenue each month and year, to allocate things correctly, nobody is pushing for some fake result, only for a clear picture.

Those companies with fraud? A lot of things have to go wrong, and someone has to be really trying hard to defraud, and needs to convince others to go along with that. Most companies hire accounting because they actually want to have a good picture of what's going on financially.

I don't work in a kitchen anymore but the amount of single-use plastic used in chain restaraunts is soul crushing. Most folks have no idea

The drinking water systems in the United States are so precarious and vulnerable, that I’m genuinely shocked we haven’t had more widespread issues with the water supply. The systems are made up of thousands of locally-managed interconnected intakes and outflows, and oversight is spotty and combative.

Please use a water filter. And thank your local utilities and maintenance people for their hard work keeping us alive.

Your house is insanely easy to break into unless it's built with special materials or has steel bars over all openings.

Disregarding the fact that windows break, pretty much every residential door (both interior and exterior) can be busted down by anyone with a decent body weight or with a framing hammer. Hammer thru the door skin, or claw pry on the jamb to force the latch to release, or even just bodyslamming it can be enough to separate the lock block and stiles and the doors will simply fall apart from there.

All big banks run on horrendous excel spreadsheets ridden with errors

This is common knowledge by now I think, and yet evidence shows common doesn't mean people remember. If you ship anything, fragile or not, be sure to pack it like it's going to be thrown, dropped, get wet, and stepped on. It's not even that workers in shipping do this (most damage is usually either bad packaging or mechanical damage in the automated parts), but things happen between point A and point B, many of them unavoidable. And I see SO MANY packages that consist of just some thin cardboard with a few pieces of tape, or a plastic bag that's easily torn, or documents/letters that are smaller than the label we put on them(??? That won't get lost :/ )

Pack things like you want to to make it there. Just look at packages you get successfully, and I guarantee on many you'll see marks of the war zone they went through. Now imagine if they had been sent with an old worn out box you found in the garage and threw some tape on and didn't bother putting any protective packing inside because "it'll be fine if it bounces around a bit".

Financial institutions are not as secure as you think.

Every once in a while I will see someone ask "We bank online why can't we vote online?" Banking is secure enough that the money the banks lose is less than the money they make. Also not all lose of funds will hurt the bank if the individual is scammed, since individuals are supposed to keep their accounts secure and not fall for scams.

Your bank is using old technology and Excel for a lot of internal records keeping. Most fraud detection is a cost to the bank not a money maker. Stopping money laundering, human trafficking, ect means the bank doesn't get that money and has to pay people to investigate it and shudder report to the government.

Like almost every other business out there they work off of poorly made or old tech and the lowest paid people are push to more work with less time and resources.

The bespoke software that runs most of the business world is actually way simpler than a lot of people think.

If you're a university student and some company hires you on the first year to work on a business analysis system to be used by a major regional retailer, you might be thinking you must be some kind of a wunderkid, but it also just might be because this system really isn't that complicated, and you had no idea about the average salaries on this field, so they hired you on the cheap.

That business is just constant problem solving one after another and going through as many to-dos as you can day after day, while still maintaining sanity. That is persistence.

That business is always a house of cards that can fall apart anytime and so you must always keep your eyes on it. That is exhausting worry.

That business is so hard, you'll be tempted to quit everyday. To overcome that urge to quit you'll need a much bigger purpose or mission that drives you. Purpose brings determination.

That business really is about value creation for the entire ecosystem (customers, employees, vendors) and that a business is not above that ecosystem. Wall St & American capitalism is short sighted because it demands you pass lesser and lesser value to that ecosystem quarter after quarter, and that is like a slow axe to your own foot.

That most modern economic theory taught in business schools and used by execs in the biggest companies worldwide is all flawed because it fully relies on capturing and optimizing all sorts of business data, but the truth is that it is impossible to capture real world in data.

It’s often really fucking stupid to get a phd.

Broken/buggy software usually is not developers/QA’s fault but management and clients.

Consulting want something that conforms exactly what is signed and as fast as possible, if there are later bugs that doesn’t invalidates what was agreed or new features take longer to introduce it means more money as maintenance/evolution contracts.

Clients often don’t see why they should pay extra and include extra time for better code. Also they prioritise stupid things like changing the font in a page over fixing a bug in the checkout page.

I'm a software developer making big bucks and I'm lazy and stupid

How to read well and closely as well as how nonsense academia can be. A recent work I read had multiple minor claims that were not factual while maintaining their main point. It made me realize how it’s hard to have everything right in a work but also how academia and research in general is like a tower of dominos, unless one person questions it the field will continue to build on bs claims.

Lotta boring crap about PLUs, SKUs, UPCs, TPRs, and such. Stores have dedicated pricing staff for a reason. One trick that might be interesting, but not surprising, is the way stores hide price increases by putting a product "on sale" this week, so it's cheaper than last week, but raising the regular price, so it costs more when the sale price ends.

Don't think there are any particular quirks of logistics that are super hidden.. maybe the most surprising thing for me was the amount of plastic waste? But even then I feel like that wouldn't surprise most people

Youth worker here: How much fucking work it is to just keep things from falling apart constantly. People assume most of my work is planning and doing activities with teenagers. But a lot of the time I'm like 50% caretaker.

Horoscopes on radio shows? Made up on the spot or stolen from google. And I'm willing to bet the ones on newspapers and websites are too.

I wonder how many astrology girlies would have their hearts broken by this.

Learned this when I interned at a radio station. (My field is communications; Journalism + Marketing.)

Brazil nuts aren't nuts! They're fruit seeds. The fruit is the size of a cannonball.

Most public school teachers have very little say about what happens in the school or the curriculum. We're just carrying out orders and hope that students will go along.

Student discipline can only be applied with parent and administrator cooperation. If admin doesn't do anything about bullying, fighting, or cheating, then the school is screwed.

The depth and diameter of my sinuses