What the fuck? I was like dead certain that you were stuck with a bunch of high schoolers at a grocery store or something. That should never be happening anywhere remotely close to a cube farm.

Best strategy is to play dumb. “Hello, [fuckface’s manager], I have some concerns about the tiktok content [fuckface] is making for the company and some questions about my job responsibilities in relation to it. [Fuckface] pretty regularly interrupts my work to request me to act in these videos and it is getting in the way of my usual duties. If my participation is required, could you please let me know in writing? I’ll also need to discuss with my manager about how this should be prioritized and scheduled alongside my other job duties.”

Force their awareness in a way that doesn’t immediately look like an assassination. The more you can get in writing the more rope this guy makes to hang himself with. If somehow they claim it’s actually work related, keep pushing the edges of “I just want to be sure” until his channel is company property or he shoots himself in the foot.

Alternatively, get paid to intentionally do bad acting. “Oh, I’ve never been good on camera, sorry!”

Why would that take the fun out of it? Just tell them no.

Just like this coworker. Just tell him no. “I’m not helping you with your side hustle man, find someone else.”

Lol, this is why we don’t tend to give software engineers local admin, and why most places hire separate UX designers.

Don’t even need to go that far. Pro and using Group Policy covers most of it. A registry entry here, a powershell command for uninstalling some bloat there… LTSC just saves uninstalling some of the bloat still on Pro.

If your laptop doesn’t have enough ports built in.

I don’t know what this guy is smoking. Copilot had administrative controls before it rolled out, through Intune and Group Policy.

I won’t deny it’s godawful to have shit split across AD, Group Policy, Regedit, and Azure/Entra/Intune.

But they very much still have controls for all this shit, almost always available before the feature rolls out. I’ve literally never seen this shit make it through to our end user devices in an un-intended fashion.

Hell, just hold non-security updates for a period of time for review before pushing it to your entire environment if this (not actually happening) issue is a concern. That’s like basic table stakes for Windows environment administration: update cadence management and pilot machines.

Please don’t claim to speak from a place of authority on this and then spread falsehoods. There’s plenty of shit to hate without making things up.

Like the third party app approvals in Azure and Teams defaulting to allow any non-admin user to be able to approve any azure app access to all of their data with no oversight. You can (and should) lock that the fuck down. It’s a batshit default, not a lack of controls.

With PXE boot you don’t even need a USB. Boot into the imaging “OS” over the network.

My workplace has a couple of dedicated network switches on a dedicated “imaging” VLAN in the hardware room, that way normal users can’t accidentally reimage their own machine. I think the desktop guys can get 32 going at once, and the complete automated setup time for one is like 40 minutes.

I grew up with that too, but the only time I’ve had any sort of slowdown from grouped icons is when I’ve been juggling like 4 excel sheets. I don’t often find myself with that many instances of the same program open often enough for it to matter.

It was an adjustment at first back in… Windows 7 I think, but I really haven’t missed it since.

There are also various browser extensions to show you an image from the middle of the video instead of a thumbnail. I personally prefer that.

Lol, lmao even. Welcome to the grind. There aren’t many/any easy ways, it wildly varies based off your situation and skillset, and anyone who found any sort of “trick” isn’t about to share it.

The “easiest” way online, assuming no particular skills, is probably mechanical turk work. Amazon has a system for it. mturk.com

You get paid barely anything, I mean like literal pennies, to go and do stuff like fill out surveys, categorize photos for AI training datasets, etc. Most people who make any halfway reasonable amount from it are using all sorts of scripts and stuff to maximize how much they can do in the least amount of time.

If you already have money, giving it to an investment banker to handle for you can be enough to live off of, but you need an absurd amount of money to start with in order to just live off dividends.

The scale is a significant part of the problem though, which can’t just be hand waved away.

Yeah, didn’t want to jump to conclusions, but that detail was quite absent from the blog post.

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.

Thank you, I didn’t want to jump to conclusions, but his setup seemed like a convoluted way to have Google handle the storage at no cost to himself. Glad I’m not the only one with that takeaway.

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.

A VPN should have you covered.

Beyond that you can check the fmhy guides or the piracy megathread (on !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com) for some tips and sources. There are options for direct download, which is generally safe from legal issues (for downloaders, not for the uploader) even without VPN.

You should probably check if it’s already up on APKmirror. It likely is.

… maybe? It’s “anger powered jet packs” from an ancient meme image that I’m not sure the source of:

Oof, I always forget about that last one.

Most DRMed ebook filetypes can be converted to non-DRM ones using Calibre and addons for it. That might cover comics, but I can’t confirm as I’ve never been into digital comics.

Apple’s iTunes used to let you pay like 30¢ more to get certain tracks in mp3. Others have mentioned bandcamp. About a decade ago Amazon used to be straight mp3 downloads for purchased tracks, but I’m not sure if that’s standard anymore.