I’m French Press and I use Fedora.

I’m in the UK, and I work with a LOT of Americans already, so know this first hand:

• You fuckers are always in for a culture shock when you realise that everywhere isn’t like London. You seem to either expect London or Harry Potter Land, but when you end up somewhere like Bristol, Leeds, or Birmingham the frame of reference just dies and you see the wheels turning in your head trying to make sense of it all.
• Weirdly, you seem to really like our supermarkets. They’re a lot smaller than yours, meal deals are a novelty that never gets old, and paying the price on the tag is the greatest thing ever.
• You love our bread, and our chocolate is like crack to you. You’d think that you’d moved to France or something…
• Butter on bread will fuck you up. You use Mayo all the time, but we use butter/spread, and it messes with your minds.
• You quickly learn that Europe is a continent, and that cultures across the continent are very different to one another. You also learn that no one knows US history that well, or that we had a war with you (since we have basically had a war with everyone at some point).
• The drinking culture is a really interesting one. Some love it, some hate it. It’s a staple of British life
• We get paid a lot less than you do, but your money will go much further because you’re not spending it on healthcare. You’ll also get taxed a lot, but ultimately you’ll earn enough to be comfortable, and a comfortable life in the UK is nice.

To answer your question, you’re more than welcome here, and it’s much easier to get a visa to the UK for you than for us to go to the US. Expect some people to give you shit for Trump, but give them shit back for Brexit and electing the Tories for 15 years.

Because none of those points matter to the average user.

I’ve told this story a few times now, but I never get sick of it.

Back in 2011 I left a startup that got acquired. On my last day we had a Christmas Party with our parent company, and we got to speaking to one guy that was on his own. After a few drinks, he blurted out that he had worked there for maybe 12 years, but at least 5-6 of those he was “unassigned”. When we asked what that meant, he said that his manager left and he was never assigned to a new team. He badged in every day, and after doing maybe 6 months of busy work and asking “wtf am I doing” to no answer from his department or HR he just came in to do his own stuff or play Unreal Tournament. He had yearly reviews with the head of department, and these were just high-level goal meetings where they reviewed the department, asked what he wanted, and left at that. Each year he was getting between a 2-5% pay rise, and outside of badging in he was only ever judged on his department output.

I always wonder what happened to that guy. The company is quite large and is still going strong, so he’s probably still there. I won’t name them, but another thing I loved about them was that they didn’t really know where to put Software Engineers, so they just assigned them to Marketing and gave each engineer a marketing budget to personally use - around £10k each. The best part? Everyone in marketing knew it was bullshit, but they pushed everyone to spend it because otherwise their budget would go down. Some highlights were a trip to Toronto to buy some books, a full team trip to Amsterdam to go to a React conference and live in basically 5-star accommodation, and renting a hotel lobby to quickly burn some money on interviewing interns. I think they actually have a tech department now, but I know many people I worked with that stayed for close to a decade because the WLB and perks were just too good to ignore.

Easy.

1. No one outside of the fediverse bubble gives a fuck about federation. It solves a problem no one has, and offers no real solutions to problems users have.

2. Mastodon offers nothing on the Twitter experience outside of “but it’s federated”

After close to two decades of programming, C# is still the best language I’ve used. While some of the newer features seem a bit weird, I’d say it’s one of the few languages that has never got in the way and has just let me write code that made sense. Even with all the improvements Java has made over the years it’s still nowhere near as good as what C# was like maybe 15 years ago.

The same goes for everyone’s other “fav” language, Python. Ruby has been a better beginner scripting language than Python for many years, and while Rails is definitely a ghetto, as a language Ruby is great at teaching great programming fundamentals.

It absolutely fucking BAFFLES me that Brooks’ Law isn’t known by every software manager on the planet.

I’ve quoted it so many times at work, even in engineering focused teams in at least two big tech companies. It’s not a concrete fact, but it explains why so many teams are hilariously shit at delivering software.

A lot of people really don’t want to hear this, sadly.

Both Paul brothers are solid boxers, Jake especially. I’m in no way against their current plan to have weird pro matches because people of their fame would always struggle to have a legitimate amateur career. Admittedly I have little experience of amateur boxing, but in MMA the promotion around these events is often sketchy at best, critically unsafe at worst.

IMO Jake Paul having 12-15 influencer fights is like having a bunch of amateur fights. He’ll probably only do a few and once he’s ready for a can boxer (perhaps a Tommy Fury rematch) we’ll see him retire. All in all, a fairly standard career for a professional fighter, which for a POS influencer is absolutely great.

Yeah, the person above isn’t being accurate at all.

While here in the UK we rely heavily on the US for control of Trident, the US dropping NATO support would just require additional defence spending and closer alignment with Europe. If Trump is bought by Russia, Putin would see this as a Very Bad Thing, and would want to keep the US in the fold because even with the US NATO would likely steamroll Russia.

The Trump dynamic is somewhat problematic, should it fester elsewhere in Europe. Globalisation was an important trait to maintain for the US, whereas most populist movements move towards buying local or supporting national interests above all else. Europe is largely self-sufficient, even in defence, so Trump would probably cut off huge numbers of imports/exports just to prop up Elon’s shitty cars.

Oh boy, I’ve seen a few:

• At a startup, one dude had obviously lied about his credentials. He was hired as a writer, but couldn’t write shit. He spent the entire day hitting on women and bitching about how his ex wanted support for a child he wasn’t convinced was his. He was fired about 3 days in…

• When I was a student, I worked at a sports store. One girl there was, let’s say, packing in the chest compartment. She was also about 17, maybe 18. Most people were nice enough to not hit on her, but one day the security guard (who was maybe late thirties at the youngest) made a comment to me to say “I would absolutely destroy her back door, you know?” (but slightly more graphic). I told management, and she was brought in. She broke down, and went over all the off-hand comments he’d made to her. The manager immediately walked out, told him he was fired, and apologised to her.

• An old employer hired this guy who was a Microsoft MVP nominee. The guy was one of those types that could talk brilliantly, but couldn’t take criticism. He listened to me, as I was senior, but ignored anything from managers or people at his level. To cut a long story short (I could write a book on this guy, and it would be hilarious) he lied about a project he worked on solo for six months. After checking in on his work we found he had bypassed our PR system and had been accepting all of his own requests, so no one has verified his code. It was an absolute mess. It cost the company a quarter of a million, for a project that should have brought in £50k. We later found out he was a nominee because he was so active on some Microsoft support forums, and mostly got that through posting “yeah I had the same problem” or from supplying easy or wrong answers. That loophole was closed shortly after…

Non-American here, trying to understand.

Are these prices after insurance? If you have insurance through work, and you’ve paid a premium for “good” insurance (assuming you can do that for your family), are you still paying insane amounts for medicine and hospital care?

I’m British, and I’d say that this was probably my first time acknowledging what college is like in America. We can legally drink at 18, but we’ve usually got a year or so of drinking behind us already, so university for us is basically just studying between drinking sessions at a time when it’s legal (and encouraged).

Van Wilder seemed absolutely wild to me, especially the idea of dorms outside of a first year, and all the events that US colleges have for people. The basketball scene especially is wild, because university sports are (again) an excuse to drink with people that like playing basketball. It kinda seemed amazing to me, but yeah, being an older guy around students would be my idea of hell nowadays…

I say this as someone in big tech, AI is pushed because it’s an easy lie to keep big companies viewed as innovating to shareholders. I say this knowing that Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon have contributed significantly to AI research in the last few years alongside the obvious contributions of OpenAI - the goal isn’t groundbreaking AI work, but to act as a smoke-screen to show that nothing else has been delivered.

Google has lost ground in advertising, and is losing customers on many of their services. Amazon is losing ground in cloud computing and in retail. Apple has stagnated with recent poor releases. Microsoft has made ground in cloud, but has struggled in advertising, Xbox, Office, and Windows. They use GenAI to keep their stock price high, otherwise they’d drop like a sack of shit because shareholders would say “what the fuck have you even done in the last half a decade?”

Van Wilder

Soundtrack is incredible, it’s one of Tara Reid’s best roles, the cast is absolutely stacked, and IMO it’s basically Deadpool without the costume. It’s Ryan Reynolds best movie to date, and if he doesn’t return for a second (the sequel doesn’t exist) his career afterwards is ultimately pointless.

There was an article back when Brexit happened that stated something few people believed at the time - this will likely result in Trump winning the GOP nomination and securing the white house.

It’s exactly the same again. The elite don’t see the problem, so working class people vote for the destructive option as it harms those in power as much as it harms them.

I don’t mean this in a horrible way, but a lot of people on here are extremely entitled when it comes to immigration.The US is an incredibly hard place to move to, even if you are a skilled worker. While it often is easier to move into Europe or Canada, it’s not a given that you can just walk into any of these countries and expect to live there. Immigration is hard!

It’s quite simple, and aligns with why he got in in the first place.

The economy and cost of living is still in the toilet. Trump is a protest vote because competent public servants have failed to even acknowledge that everything costs 2-3x what it did a decade ago. Sad to say, but most people don’t give a fuck about LGBTQIA+ rights, Israel, Ukraine, or anything outside of this.

Call it apathy if you want, but it’s ultimately a failure of moderates to acknowledge a better social net for people (I.e. left policies) or propping an economy by improving lives for regular people so their money goes further.

Go to your Democratic party and demand change.

Find a candidate that will stand on the basis of free healthcare, equal rights, the right to union, enforcing a higher minimum wage, enforcing paid sick leave and a minimum of 20 days holiday a year, and committing to lowering the cost of living.

Once someone stands up for this, push them to the moon for the next four years. Tell anyone else NOT on this platform to fuck off.

Essentially, America needs a Project 2029.

I agree with the sentiment. There are so many “democracy is dead” posts that make me want to scream “motherfucker, it’s dead in America, not worldwide”. The US is one country out of over a hundred. Many of us are just glad that you’ll finally shut the fuck up about your election.

With that said, from a climate perspective it fucks everyone over. From a business perspective the economy tanking will affect markets worldwide. For Ukrainians and Palestinians, there’s a huge shift towards Russia and Israel that will be problematic for decades.

I imagine a lot of it is to remove current stock, and because the UK has several tobacco companies that moved into vapes, and also employ hundreds