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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Generally speaking it rests on “god” or “gods” being beyond our comprehension. The whole “biblically accurate angel” thing isn’t just a meme, to some degree it’s also best effort attempts at making images of something described in a way that most people nowadays would consider borderline lovecraftian.

    So it kinda follows that if those things are supposed to be the approachable messengers, than anything remotely human-like can’t map well to the “form” of the god over them.

    Also, biblically there’s already arguments for time not being a thing for the Christian god.

    If omniscience is truly what it says on the tin, there’s no reason that a being with it couldn’t care about what every creature in the universe is doing with their respective reproductive bits, as well as caring about every single more important thing everywhere, simultaneously. The whole point of omni-* in terms of gods is to be limitless.

    I genuinely don’t get how you could possibly think that’s somehow mutually exclusive with believing in space/the universe. The universe is so incomprehensibly big compared to what any of us will get to directly experience in our lifetime. If anything I would think it would make it easier to believe in a being similarly incomprehensibly outside the scope of human existence, experience, and understanding. Like you’re perfectly fine with the cosmic infinities, but you can’t bring yourself to imagine some being one more level hierarchally above that?

    You think that someone could look at all the amazing and wildly weird shit in this world, think that some god being made it all happen, but then also think “yeah, it definitely stopped there, no more”?

    Like, I’m sure there’s plenty of people that do. There absolutely were over the course of history. But to me it just seems kind of like a huge conceptual schism to believe in some sort of god being and not believe in space/the universe/etc.





  • It gets better. Both in the “PTSD” and they got what’s coming to them sense. Some additional context: This was a switchover from one system to another.

    They agreed to a specific special solution that my team would set up for them, different from our standard switchover for everyone else. We just needed some incredibly basic info from them that any member of that team should have been able to provide in 30 seconds.

    They got the info to us two days before the deadline.

    So, some stuff happened and while we had everything switched over to the new system, we didn’t actually shut down the old system for a few more weeks past the deadline we had shared. Before we shut it down I did a final scan and notified any person/team that still appeared to be using it. These problem children were, because of course they would.

    Sent them the “Hey guys, you didn’t turn off your old shit pointing to the old system when you were supposed to. You’ll need to find an alternate solution now” email on a Monday. One member of their team puts in a ticket about something only tangentially related, but definitely caused by the old system shutdown, not working on Wednesday. It doesn’t reach me personally due to lack of any useful details, instead just sitting in my team’s generic queue.

    That Friday, 30 fucking minutes before we close for the week, I get a response from the next manager up the chain from the one that played games with this shit earlier. Clearly the shitty manager is trying to play politics now by bringing in his own manager, who hadn’t been in the chain. “Thanks for letting us know, we’ve been trying to troubleshoot this all week! How do we resolve this?”

    So, their team ignored my email. Still didn’t understand anything from any of the previous emails in the chain or else they wouldn’t have had anything to waste time failing to troubleshoot. You tried to send data to a system/server that no longer exists. Then this power play right before closing in what I think was an attempt to be able to blame me for being a week behind on something.

    “You would need to follow the instructions I’ve attached from my first email about this sent to [shitty manager] on [over a month ago]. Please let me know if you jave any questions!”

    Last I heard from them. Hooray!



  • Oh my god. Spend time making shit clear and concise, send the email to the manager. No response. Multiple other teams already responded to the initial email and moving smoothly.

    Send a short follow up a week later with the rest of the team cc’d. Manager responds to the initial email, dropping the “hey fuckface, do your job” email from the chain.

    “Please schedule a meeting with my team to discuss.” (Literal words. Nothing the fuck else.)

    (Putting the dropped email and the full team back in) “According to calendars, your team is not available as a full group for two weeks. Given the tight deadline on this, if you or your team have any specific questions, I’d be happy to discuss over email.”

    Nothing for two weeks, in the meeting it’s clear that none of them even attempted to read any of it.


  • It’s also sometimes a necessary tactic to cover your team’s ass. Very often, the people holding things up will blame another group on the project. Getting everyone on the same call so the bullshit can be called out in front of everyone can be necessary to protect your team’s reputation.

    Holdups: “Well, we can’t start testing until Infrastructure builds our servers!”

    Infrastructure: "You asked for a 3TB server. The largest in our environment is 1TB, and it handles [heavier thing than this]. Two weeks ago we suggested a smaller size to begin with and that we would increase it as need was demonstrated, asking for your confirmation before we continued. We also asked [group owning the vendor relationship] to see if we could schedule a chat with a technical resource at the vendor to help us better understand the need for something so far outside our standards.

    We’ve not seen a response regarding our suggestion. Can you confirm that our suggested solution is acceptable during this meeting, or do you need to confer with other people in your department?"

    Happens all the fucking time. Instead of admitting that the timeline isn’t possible, or rightfully blaming the vendor for absurd requirements (no, we aren’t giving you fucking domain admin), teams will just play pass the blame all the way to whatever department owns the deepest part of the tech stack or access management.

    The easiest way to push back is to state how unambiguously bad their request was, and that they’ve not replied to you, in front of everyone. If you’re lucky, all that takes is an email. If it’s a project involving people who think they’re too important to read email, then you need the call/meeting. Unfortunately those “too important” people are also the ones who have the biggest sway on the business.


    It’s stupid, but as long as people are involved in business, there will be people problems to solve. Those often don’t work in the realm of “most efficient” or “most sensible”.

    Whatever your level of digust at it is, the soomer you learn to start looking at the “business politics” side of things the better you’ll do.

    This is also what good project managers are for. Unfortunately those are rare.





  • The comic says in 30 minutes.

    Edit: and from what I’m seeing online, depending on some factors like the type of beans used, four espresso shots could end up around 300mg. 3/4 of the daily reccomended limit in 30 minutes is going to be tough on most people, especially to someone looking at it “as a treat” instead of just their regular coffee/caffeine for the day.

    I work in tech and I can’t drink alcohol, so I’m no stranger to caffeine. It’s one of a few vices available to me. But I’m not going to pretend that my worst of drinking 64oz of coffee, a caffeinated soda or two, and a caffeinated mint is normal. Or that wouldn’t make me feel ill if I did it all in 30 minutes even with my tolerance.


  • Lol, you mean “go outside”? Pretty high bar for some internet denizens.

    I’ve had plenty of conversations with religious folks that didn’t touch upon their holy texts at all. And plenty of conversations with atheists that were interminably about what they thought those texts said.

    Whenever someone generalizes a group so drastically like this, I tend to wonder about how limited their life experiences must be.




  • Also his claim that email chains end up creating an extra copy of an attachment every time? That’s not how most email clients handle attachments. They usually only carry forward in forwards.

    And even if his idea is true for his setup somehow, data deduplication at the storage level isn’t particularly difficult to set up, and I would argue is table stakes for any business doing self hosting.

    Similar when it comes to data retention policies, quotas, auto deletion of spam after a shorter time window. It’s not fun and for some setups may not be easy, but it’s part of the bare minimum for email. So yeah, you absolutely do it yourself or pay someone to do it for you.

    Edit: and if you pay someone to do it for you, you have to abide by whatever dumb hoops they make you jump through, or find someone else to pay.


  • This is awful, but while I see the huge impact for personal users, I’m not sure I see the business case for his current setup. I’m sure this will inpact business setups, but his specific use case just seems off.

    He really buries the lede about why the weird setup of why address@businessdomain.com (to my mind the professional business email) had to be accessible from businessname_address@gmail.com (to my mind a misused personal email) in the first place. It’s down in the comments:

    You can’t be serious. Especially for a company he runs, this is silly. Just tell them they have to use the business domain for business email. The whole @gmail.com thing also opens up potential regulatory issues depending on the details of the business.

    With his current setup Google is already accessing all his company mail data. I don’t really get his objection to having the MX record directly route to them at this point.

    I’m probably missing some big detail, but I don’t get why he has his current setup to begin with.

    Edit: Didn’t want to jump to conclusions, but I’m not the only one with the takeaway that this seems to be jwz trying to use google/gmail for email storage without paying for google workspaces for his employees. Maybe that isn’t the case, but it sure looks like it.