He really tries not to bother me, but the screaming gets my attention and when he’s about to physically destroy the computer I feel I have to step in and fix it. That being said, he is not comfortable installing it himself so I want something that provokes the minimal amount of hand-holding. Honestly, the biggest issue with me not putting Garuda on his system is that he needs Davinci Resolve for his work and it doesn’t install directly off the AUR, you have to download the application separately from Black Magic Design’s site and edit the build file. He is not going to understand how to do that.

I am very happy working in Linux as my daily driver, while my husband is bugging me to switch his desktop and laptop over since he is frustrated at how awful the UI in Windows 11 is. But I know he has a low tolerance for frustration and while he has decent technical skills, he tends to accumulate the absolutely most peculiar technical problems I’ve ever seen. I mean, I’m rather savvy with Windows and he comes up with problems that take me a long time to figure out - issues that would be difficult to cause even if you were intentionally trying to break Windows.

So I don’t really know what to do here. He likes my Garuda setup because I’ve shown him how customizable KDE Plasma is, but the amount of weird shit dealing with the AUR that I have run into, stuff that I can solve fairly easily but a layperson would likely not be able to handle, makes me want to put Mint on his system even if he’ll find it less suitable.

Texas thinks they can pass laws binding the legal actions of people who don’t live in Texas. If the SCOTUS upholds this, it opens a huge can of worms where every state can effectively legislate behavior in any other state. For example, California could prosecute gun sellers in other states who sell guns without performing background checks to California residents who travel there. It would be a mess. The right should not want the court to decide in Paxton’s favor here.

It doesn’t look like a toe-ring box though.

Rip currents kill so many people, that sucks. I’ve been caught in one before and while it was scary I remembered how to get away from the current before swimming back in, but even experienced swimmers can drown in the right circumstances. 54 is just way too young to go.

Definitely read the original SecureAnnex article as well. The behavior of this software and the people behind it are damning.

He will for sure Taco this one. Increasing costs for the health insurance lobby and right-wing alt health idiots will end up with paying triple for their Ivermectin or whatever? That is more heat than taco Trump can take.

A song about leaving a committed relationship with someone to go sow your wild oats? Troi doing some deep cut heckling here.

Germany has been on my list of places to flee to if the fascists here start rounding up LGBT folks. I have lapsed fluency from when I lived there 30 years ago but I am confident it would come back quickly. The problem is that my husband doesn’t speak any German at all and I think it would be a culture shock for him.

I design contact centers for a living. I have done so for almost a quarter century now, until very recently I only had worked for Fortune 200 companies (moved to the public sector which is a nice change of pace).

A quick bit of jargon definition: We refer to various means of communication as “channels”. A contact center is multi-channel if you can reach it by more than one channel (i.e. phone, SMS, chat, email, etc.). It is considered omni-channel if you can switch between these channels (supposedly seamlessly, but see below).

This article gets several points dead on and misses several more. Here is my professional take, make of it what you will.

1. Call centers are expensive. Licensing and software costs are very high. There are few vendors who offer scalable omni-channel offerings and the licensing costs end up being exorbitant. And you need omni-channel contact centers because:

2. Phones are the least efficient way to service customers. An agent can only be on the phone with a single customer at a time, but they can staff around 6 chat or email sessions simultaneously. For a customer, this devoted attention is a boon, but for a company it’s very costly because Agents, even poorly paid ones, are the most expensive part of your contact center if you are paying benefits, and if you aren’t you will not get good agents.

3. Agent turnover is very high. Agents are poorly paid and their job sucks. They are driven by metrics that are poorly thought out, intended to drive efficiency but ultimately create poor behavior; the article gets this very correct. A lot of poor service you get is caused by agents trying to hit impossible metrics. Don’t blame the agent, the managers are the problem here.

4. The technology has gotten better - and worse. VOIP infrastructure radically reshaped contact center design and the migration to CCaaS reshaped it again, with some good sides and a lot of bad sides. Telephone technology is an aging tech with a substantial demographic issue. I am consistently the youngest member of my teams and I have been doing this for almost 25 years. Expertise is aging out of the field and taking a lot of knowledge with them. Further, the number of disciplines you need for expertise has dramatically increased. It is no longer enough to just know CCNA-level networking, wiring, PSTN tech, linux and windows servers administration, codecs, basic related legal knowledge (wiretapping laws, Ray Baume’s Act, TEHO laws in India, etc.), design and infrastructure theory (like Poisson distribution), but now you also need to know Kubernetes, docker, ESXi (or equivalent), AWS, Azure, etc. It’s a lot and nobody can know it all, the complexity of modern design and no education program to get there means there’s just a lack of comprehensive understanding of the technology at a pretty fundamental level for most people trying to design and maintain this stuff. The result? A system designed around 99.999% uptime is now failing to meet that SLA, hell some vendors won’t even promise it anymore but most will just lie and claim that they do. So there are reliability issues.

5. AI. This one hits pretty closet to home for me because of a personal experience so a quick anecdote: at one job, I had a spirited discussion with the head of our IVR technology group over how effective AI would be at reducing call volume into the center. He initially had great success, reducing call volume by ~30% in the 6 months. He received accolades and commendations, a big bonus, he was riding high and honestly he deserved to be. The problem, and what prompted my attempt to intervene, was his promise to continue that trend, predicting that his AI tech could reduce human-required calls by 60% within the next 2 years.

   To me, this was madness. His initial success was because he moved the payment system into the IVR instead of having agents do it. This is a no-brainer. Computers are quite capable of taking payments or listing basic account information, but more complex tasks involve a much greater up-front cost in technology development and we didn’t have that budget, it was a massive over promise and I told everyone who I could to not take his estimation seriously. Unfortunately, he had a PhD and I am a college dropout, so they listened to him and cut 50% of their agent count via attrition. The results were predictably disastrous and the company hasn’t yet been able to fix it years later (thankfully, I left that place).

6. I don’t think this is intentional per se. Having been in numerous meetings with leadership about contact center issues, I can say that they are just as upset by poor customer service as you are. There is no top-down effort to make your life suck. But line must go up and contact centers are always cost centers which means companies hate them, they don’t view customer service as integral to making money despite understanding that angry customers will leave them so there is a constant budget short-fall. The issue isn’t someone at the top thinking “If we treat our customer poorly enough they will stop calling and we’ll save money!” It’s just standard corrosive capitalism creating perverse incentives that make everything worse. It’s a systemic problem.

Anyway, that’s my view for whatever it’s worth. I am glad to be in the public sector now, which has its own issues, but at least everyone is focused on actually providing service because the service is the value.

There is a lot more yikes in the article than I was expecting.

Garuda is built on the zen kernel and ships with KDE, I have been using it for a year now and it meets all my needs.

PEPFAR was targeted by Musk because he is a racist asshole who didn’t want money going to help black Africans.

No carrier has cell service at my house but maybe they will add a sat phone.

My ACL says my TV can’t talk to the internet.

Putin would be more than happy for the US to drop a nuke in Iran since it gives him free reign to use nuclear artillery in Ukraine.

What’s shitty is that this drug could damn near wipe out HIV if it were accessible to everyone who needed it.

But I guess we can’t have that.

He probably believes poppers are the real cause of AIDS since that was a conspiracy theory for awhile.

You can absolutely under the current law be tried by both the state and federal government for the same action if that action violates both state and federal law. See the 2019 case Gamble v. United States for the most recent ruling on it, but the idea is that the state and federal government are “separate sovereigns” and so it doesn’t violate the double jeopardy clause.

In practice doing so is unusual and DoJ guidelines discourage federal prosecutors from pursuing cases that are prosecuted by the states, but there is no law preventing them from doing so.

The state prisons of MN? They would be holding him and have no reason to release him on Trumps orders since they don’t work for him.

Best I can imagine is that the Feds charge him with murder, Trump pardons him for the federal charges, the state charges him with murder, then the SCOTUS rules that he can’t be charged due to double jeopardy.