I just had flashbacks to Dead State. It was a AA title written by one of the guys from Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines so I was watching it closely during development.

Suddenly, it went from EA to full release. I was surprised, but picked it up without reading many reviews.

I enjoyed the game and put maybe 15 hours into it, but then I had to move and had to pack up my PC for a few weeks. By the time I got settled and booted it up, it had gotten a massive patch which fixed a ton of bugs, filled in missing content like item descriptions and a bunch of other polish that would typically be done during pre-launch.

Meanwhile, one of the devs had gotten into a high profile pissing match with the community over accusations they had rushed it out the door. I normally try to sympathize with devs over a reactive community, but I couldn't help feel like I got punished for buying the game at launch and experiencing those relatively non-replayable opening hours in a non-optimal (Dead) state.

Exactly. It's all of the quiet parts, but out loud, typed out, indexed, and easily accessible.

Hey that's me! I coasted through high school and got to college having no work ethic or ability to really study material that I almost, but not quite, had down. Dropped out senior year to work in IT, got fired a year later, and had to move back in with my parents for almost a year before I went back and finished my degree and got a new job.

It was very humbling

Leader: "Alright, while he's working on breaking into their system, we'll--"

Hacker: "I'm in."

Leader: "That fast? Did you find some zero-day to exploit?"

Hacker who just tried username "admin", password "password": "Yyyyeeeeeees?"

I can't wait for someone to try to justify fleeing the police with this law. "Officer, you were executing your official duties. I was trying to obey the law by staying 25 feet from you but you kept pursuing me!"

Guess I'll cross New Orleans off my list of possible vacation destinations. Not a big fan of voluntarily entering police states.

I have an ex with the same name as one of my sisters. You do that once, and it gets confusing and awkward. Twice? People start coming to really odd conclusions.

I know some bank tellers who say they are taught to comply with ANY robbery instructions. Even if it's as simple as someone slipping them a note saying, "This is a robbery" with no explicit threats. If they feel comfortable, they can slip him the marked bills or dye packs, but they won't be punished if they don't. Get the robber out, lock the door, call the cops.

I could totally see the tellers recognizing the avocado for what it was and figuring it was on the cops to catch him, not theirs.

Radio Star is already dead and buried, but Video's knife is still wet with blood? Who else did Video kill?

hackers only need a simple $169 hacking tool called Flipper Zero, a Raspberry Pi, or a laptop to pull it off.

At that point, why mention the Flipper Zero or RPi? Just say it can be done without specialized hardware. I feel like they're trying to piggyback off of the buzz from the Flipper Zero being banned in Canada recently.

I remember mowing the lawn at home in the early 2000s when an Army recruiter pulled up and tried to get me to sign up. We lived in a cul-de-sac, so he was clearly there for me. I was 17 at the time.

The older I get, the more creeped out I am that they showed up unsolicited and talked to me without one of my parents present.

There's a junior Congressman from NC, Jeff Jackson (D) who offers really candid views of the House floor. He sent out a newsletter after the vote which provided some insight on what Dems were thinking about the vote.

The Speaker knew he was going to lose those folks, but he was hoping to peel off a few votes from the minority party.

Some folks in the minority were expecting him to reach out and say, “Hey, let’s make a deal. I’ll offer you this, and I want your vote.”

But instead, he went on TV the day before and basically said, “Here is my offer to the other party: Nothing.”

The minority party heard that from him and said, “Well, ok then, best of luck.”

That said, I’m not sure the Speaker could offer anything to the minority party. If he did, and his party found out, they’d be furious, and then he wouldn’t need six votes anymore - he would need 20 or 30 or 50.

...

My sense is that if he had felt it were at all possible for him to stay in power by working with the minority party, he absolutely would have done it - he just knew it wasn’t.

Phone systems that give you the prompt, "Press # for more options" etc are called Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems. If you encounter an IVR that asks for credit card info, social security number, etc, don't enter it in! If you stay silent, you will usually be routed to an agent, though that varies on whichever system you are calling into.

Even if the system is designed for completely non-nefarious purposes, the IT people who maintain the phone system can analyze call logs to pull electronic keypresses (DTMF) and reconstruct every digit entered to capture your data. Most IT people would never consider abusing this access, but some organizations contract or sub-contract their phone support out to the lowest bidding third parties and might not do a great job of vetting their techs.

Giving this information to a live agent has its own risks, but if you initiated a call to a documented telephone number for the organization you are trying to reach, it is generally a safer option than keying in sensitive digit strings to an IVR. It is much harder for anyone outside of the call center to scan recorded audio for information like this. (Though technology is closing that gap)