It’s only going to increase as midterms get closer. Much like 4chan, just because lemmy isn’t run by business and political interests sure as hell doesn’t mean it has any further resistance to astroturfing than social media that is.

As long as it’s easier to make accounts and posts than it is for moderators to moderate, you’ll see shit like this.

Even if it’s astroturfing that aligns with your beliefs folks, please keep your eyes open for it.

Sucks is an understatement.

Look, there’s enough to go around. If anything, the horrid state of the Democrats should only highlight just how fucking bad the Republicans are.

Like, the bar was set down a mine shaft by the Democrats to begin with. What do you mean the Republicans reached the fucking planet core?

I don’t know how you can look at all the pictures and video clips of Biden creeping on girls, read testimony from some of them from the past who have grown up, know that Epstein’s Island wasn’t some politically partisan affair (how the fuck did Trump suck off Bill Clinton at an Epstein event if Bill wasn’t there)… and decide that of all fucking people, Joe fucking Biden deserves the benefit of the doubt on being a pedo.

Hands down he was better than the sack of fat and bronzer we have now. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t an obvious as fuck pedo.

It is in fact possible to understand the horrors of the Democrat fuckstains while understanding the Republicans are monumentally worse.

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.”

There’s no need for them to go fishing when they’ve got more incriminating shit from lemmy data for free. Community subscriptions and even up and downvotes on lemmy aren’t private.

It gets better. Both in the “PTSD” and they got what’s coming to them sense. Some additional context: This was a switchover from one system to another.

They agreed to a specific special solution that my team would set up for them, different from our standard switchover for everyone else. We just needed some incredibly basic info from them that any member of that team should have been able to provide in 30 seconds.

They got the info to us two days before the deadline.

So, some stuff happened and while we had everything switched over to the new system, we didn’t actually shut down the old system for a few more weeks past the deadline we had shared. Before we shut it down I did a final scan and notified any person/team that still appeared to be using it. These problem children were, because of course they would.

Sent them the “Hey guys, you didn’t turn off your old shit pointing to the old system when you were supposed to. You’ll need to find an alternate solution now” email on a Monday. One member of their team puts in a ticket about something only tangentially related, but definitely caused by the old system shutdown, not working on Wednesday. It doesn’t reach me personally due to lack of any useful details, instead just sitting in my team’s generic queue.

That Friday, 30 fucking minutes before we close for the week, I get a response from the next manager up the chain from the one that played games with this shit earlier. Clearly the shitty manager is trying to play politics now by bringing in his own manager, who hadn’t been in the chain. “Thanks for letting us know, we’ve been trying to troubleshoot this all week! How do we resolve this?”

So, their team ignored my email. Still didn’t understand anything from any of the previous emails in the chain or else they wouldn’t have had anything to waste time failing to troubleshoot. You tried to send data to a system/server that no longer exists. Then this power play right before closing in what I think was an attempt to be able to blame me for being a week behind on something.

“You would need to follow the instructions I’ve attached from my first email about this sent to [shitty manager] on [over a month ago]. Please let me know if you jave any questions!”

Last I heard from them. Hooray!

Yep. To anyone saying it takes up time that they need to get work done, remember the magic words “What would you like me to prioritize?”

Oh my god. Spend time making shit clear and concise, send the email to the manager. No response. Multiple other teams already responded to the initial email and moving smoothly.

Send a short follow up a week later with the rest of the team cc’d. Manager responds to the initial email, dropping the “hey fuckface, do your job” email from the chain.

“Please schedule a meeting with my team to discuss.” (Literal words. Nothing the fuck else.)

(Putting the dropped email and the full team back in) “According to calendars, your team is not available as a full group for two weeks. Given the tight deadline on this, if you or your team have any specific questions, I’d be happy to discuss over email.”

Nothing for two weeks, in the meeting it’s clear that none of them even attempted to read any of it.

It’s also sometimes a necessary tactic to cover your team’s ass. Very often, the people holding things up will blame another group on the project. Getting everyone on the same call so the bullshit can be called out in front of everyone can be necessary to protect your team’s reputation.

Holdups: “Well, we can’t start testing until Infrastructure builds our servers!”

Infrastructure: "You asked for a 3TB server. The largest in our environment is 1TB, and it handles [heavier thing than this]. Two weeks ago we suggested a smaller size to begin with and that we would increase it as need was demonstrated, asking for your confirmation before we continued. We also asked [group owning the vendor relationship] to see if we could schedule a chat with a technical resource at the vendor to help us better understand the need for something so far outside our standards.

We’ve not seen a response regarding our suggestion. Can you confirm that our suggested solution is acceptable during this meeting, or do you need to confer with other people in your department?"

Happens all the fucking time. Instead of admitting that the timeline isn’t possible, or rightfully blaming the vendor for absurd requirements (no, we aren’t giving you fucking domain admin), teams will just play pass the blame all the way to whatever department owns the deepest part of the tech stack or access management.

The easiest way to push back is to state how unambiguously bad their request was, and that they’ve not replied to you, in front of everyone. If you’re lucky, all that takes is an email. If it’s a project involving people who think they’re too important to read email, then you need the call/meeting. Unfortunately those “too important” people are also the ones who have the biggest sway on the business.

It’s stupid, but as long as people are involved in business, there will be people problems to solve. Those often don’t work in the realm of “most efficient” or “most sensible”.

Whatever your level of digust at it is, the soomer you learn to start looking at the “business politics” side of things the better you’ll do.

This is also what good project managers are for. Unfortunately those are rare.

Not that lever!

One set of my great grandparents met as a “musician for a speakeasy” (given some stories there’s no way it was just that) and a dancer for one.

Which makes it extra hilarious how much their daughter (one of my grandmas) really really obsessed over having the appearance of being high society. Definitely an over-correction. Ended up marrying into money, but was never high society.

known pedophile

Or are we going to conveniently ignore that the rumor that Trump sucked Bill’s hog means that Bill was running in those circles too? The reason there’s barely any movement on releasing the files is because it implicates fucking everyone in that socio-economic strata.

Trump’s openly horrid. That doesn’t mean the previous chucklefucks were spotless.

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.