I'm pretty tired of things "sounding" okay. That was in 2024.
2025 has told me that actions speak louder than words. I don't really see much engagement on trying to "relate to each other" on this platform lately. Not from the community nor those who moderate it. Just a facsimile of trying to maintain decorum in an age of chaos
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Rant aside: a company isn't a person to relate to. They are made of people, but those people clearly make no attempt to relate either. This is a PR response, which despite having "relations" in it is not an attempt to engage with the community nor promote curiosity. So I will treat it as such.
I think the biggest issue is people who claim it can't be done and that the only way to accomplish this is to physically meet.
I feel like the biggest hinderance to making the most out of a remote option are the ones who prefer going to the office or explain all kinds of issues with "it's because we don't meet in person".
One just have to embrace and apply the mindset that it is possible. Different, surely, but still possible!
I'm not saying there is something WRONG with going to the office, it is lovely to hang out in person with lots of people, but it is very limiting in many ways as well. Just limiting in other ways than remote. You learn to deal with both, when you need to, though. The issue is mostly that people deal with the office-problems but don't care much about dealing with the remote-problems.
that's an interesting angle, I wonder if this pattern of defaulting to "because we don't meet in person" is that a giveaway for some lacking of communicating in writing I wonder. Just people who can't get an idea out effectively in textual form for complex ideas on a repeated basis and chalking it up to needing that in person outlet. That's curious, does being face to face elicit other modes of communication and ability to articulate and connect things. Maybe. But I suppose it could also be an opportunity to lean on the "see what I mean", "do you know what I'm saying" and allow body language and other social lubricant type bits and pieces to smooth glossing over when another doesn't follow or see what they mean.
Sadly the fact that it HAS been written about for so long just fuels the fire (no pun intended) for the sceptics.
Something I often hear when trying to talk to people who refuse to believe the impact we have:
"See these domsday prophets have been ranting about this for over a century and we're still here enjoying life!"
This just makes the problem worse because little remember this 30 years later and think you're a liar or idiot because you pushed exaggerated claims.
In the 80s in the UK acid rain was hyped up, in the 90s it was 20 years of oil reserves in the education system.
Both now have generated adults distrusting education because they're not an academic and they just remember what a fool told them at face value without nuance.
One of the biggest recently being reports that we will have millions dead unless X which doesn't match reality which is just going to create more anti intellectual fear
Acid rain was hyped up because it was a real problem and was fixed by tighter emissions standards[1]. Same with the ozone layer hole, an issue I heard a lot about as a kid, which was fixed by regulating CFCs[2]. These are examples of successfully tackling an issue and largely solving it, not "panicking over nothing".
> Overall, the program's cap and trade program has been successful in achieving its goals. Since the 1990s, SO2 emissions have dropped 40%, and according to the Pacific Research Institute, acid rain levels have dropped 65% since 1976.[43][44] Conventional regulation was used in the European Union, which saw a decrease of over 70% in SO2 emissions during the same time period.[45]
This default reactive stance causes pointless arguments and discussion as I'm trying to demonstrate.
Yes there were 200% valid concerns. But this lead more to something close to hysteria than actual communication.
These concerns turned into teaching kids that the environment is going to die. The "unless nothing changes" gets lost in the discussion with 90% of non science teachers. In the same way that "emmissions have fallen" is on page 23 and is not front-page news.
The net result of this, although well intended. Is that most people are taught the headlines which turn into "watch out for acid rain". And now 40 years on they are even more confused and distrusting given the inconsistent messaging around this.
(News flash the oceans are still getting more acidic, almost no effort has been made here imo, but I digress)
Bad communication on these topics is more dangerous than not getting public approval. Bad communication around fossil fuels spreads distrust on the topic of conversation. (Again I remember well meaning teachers saying fuels would dry up by 2010 when I was in school)
Bad communication on climate change or global warming (notice how they don't use that latter phrase in outreach now) causes distrust here. Same goes for healthcare, 5G and the list goes on.
There will always be people who disagree. Trying to reach 100% is also futile. The communication should be straightforward clear and consistent and it's falling short of that by a long way.
The "just trust the science" is exactly the same call to authority as "this book says throw them off buildings". It helps nobody. But it happens at _all_ levels of outreach and bad education because people get afraid to say "good point, I don't know".
Yes, Im painfully aware of this. Christ I wouldn't be making the point of I wasn't this aware of it! (My own personal anger aside here)
I have a strong educational background and a head on my shoulders. However from the mainstream public perception it just "disappeared one day" and transformed into "fossil fuels will be gone" which turned into "global warming" which is now "climate change".
This is obviously complete nonsense to anyone with a science background but is the result of decades of broken outreach combined with poor public education.
Why do you think it's nonsense? There are at least two competing narratives about climate change:
1. It's huge, an emergency and we're all basically fucked, in fact there's nothing we can do the problem is so vast.
2. It's actually not that big of a deal, most of the warming is natural cycles, a bit is human made but we're not sure how much, a mix of changing power sources and adaptation is entirely possible and if anything the path we're already on. There are likely bigger environment problems to focus on.
The second is the position you'd expect people to take having seen environmental problems be fixed without much fuss in the past. And obviously not every academic "crisis" is fixed via regulation. Think about Limits to Growth and all the claims that the world would run out of food that were popular in the 70s and 80s, or really for much longer than that. Governments didn't do much there and yet there was no crisis in the end, in fact we ended up with a crisis of obesity.
I'm not talking about the "narratives" around the "conversation".
The first problem is that this changes as it's almost 110% political.
The comment I'm making is that bad education causes problems 10-20 years down the line. Inconsistent exaggerated stories which are not presented in context are dangerous and in the case of multi-genrrational issues undermine the whole effort to get anything done.
Talking about the "we'll run out of food" as another example is showing how people don't trust the people saying this. The problem here is that the word "academic" often has to be put in quotes. It's so doo-gooder pro science but who shouts a lot and causes more problems for researchers. (For another example most of my time doing outreach is undoing the damage caused by fools "explaining" the highs boson)
I'm one of the few persons I ever heard of that actually enjoyed being on-call. I believe it goes with my puzzle problem solving mentality to an extent. Being randomly challenged with a problem to look at where you might not know the solution, simply excites me.
Combining on-call duty with an approach of weeding out repeating issues, build better systems and ensuring that unnecessary calls don't happen is key of course, being woken up 25 times for silly predictable errors is pointless and draining.
And finally having an employer that doesn't expect you to be in at 8am if you've been up all night is also very important, catching up on sleep is necessary to manage your balance and health. But given this freedom, I totally dig it. :)
> And finally having an employer that doesn't expect you to be in at 8am if you've been up all night is also very important, catching up on sleep is necessary to manage your balance and health. But given this freedom, I totally dig it. :)
Check the labour laws in your country, I'm pretty sure expecting people to be in at 8am after working on an incident during the night as part of your on-call is illegal.
In any normal country there are laws to ensure employees get enough rest every day.
The issue isn't so much that one single separate service is priced in a certain way. When you add up dozens and dozens of services for various split needs for the business, and each one of them has a $/user/month thing and then to build decent security into it all, you double or triple that amount per service. It adds up, very quickly.
For the good of the Internet, the security of the global entirety of things, it is very very wise if everyone makes an attempt to make the defaults sane and secure, including things like this. It surely is a differentiator between "individual" and "business", but it shouldn't have to be. I agree wholehartedly with the sso.tax site that it's just one way for business to attempt to make revenue out of a basic need that any modern company would have.
Make the profit of real value added services for enterprises, automation, integrations, support, advanced features that gives insights or saves money or whatever; but don't be sneaky with the security aspect, is basically what I'm saying.
Compare it with streaming services. No one can argue against Netflix being particularly expensive. Anyone can afford it. It's just one latte per month. But when you not only want to consume what is on Netflix, you have to get another service, and another, and another, and another. Very very soon the aggregated cost starts to be very noticeable for a lot of people. And piracy makes a comeback.
No, on mobile Firefox that shows an empty 'loading' page and not the image.
It's not just Firefox which is broken, with Chrome it's impossible to zoom into an image as it redirects the i.imgur.com/xxx.ext links to the HTML wrapped page with a low-fidelity thumbnail and no way of extracting the original.
Interestingly when I open that link in my current window I get redirected to the imgur UI, however if I open in an incognito tab it loads the image directly.
