Author: David K.

Programming vs. Achievement Hunting

Last night, in my continuing saga of playing Fallout 76, I finished all the main quest lines, and turned my attention to one of the first side quests that you’ll run into when starting the game. You meet a robot who is a Fallout version of a Boy Scout leader which starts a mission to become a “tadpole” scout. Turns out that this “mission” is really composed of about 9 parts, each of which has about 7-10 other parts, and you probably won’t even notice that the game adds a tracker for all of these steps in an obscure place without telling you, leaving you to wonder how to accomplish these things.

Many of the steps require things you’ll need to acquire that I still don’t have at level 190. At least one requires an item that is a rare drop in an infrequent event which I can’t solo. So there’s that. For reference, you unlock the 5th legendary perk slot of only 6 at level 200. So, even by the game’s standards, it would seem I’m fairly well along the path, yet I have a long way to go to finish something that started when I was in single-digit levels.

The point of this exercise is to acquire a better backpack. Like other MMO’s, you’ll be spending about half your time in inventory management, in some form or another. After leveling up, getting a few key perks, and grinding for some critical upgrades to your gear, an extra 45 pounds of carrying capacity goes much, much further than it normally would, so this is a really nice thing to try to obtain. The good news is that you only have to complete 3 of the initial badges to obtain it, and they can be any you feel like fooling with, but there are only about 5 that you can do without being, well, apparently a much higher level than me.

The “bad” news — or, the expected news, given that we’re talking about an MMO — is that completing three “tadpole” badges unlocks a whole new series of achievements in order to obtain “possum” badges. About 19 of them. All with 8-12 steps each. Many of which require… you guessed it… things you’ll need to acquire that I still don’t have, and have no idea how long they will take to obtain.

One thing that has become clear is that it’s time to launch a nuke. There are about 3 achievements that relate to it. I saw someone else comment on a forum that they didn’t do it till level 200. I get it now. I tried it once, and realized what a slog it is, and quickly set it aside. The mission continuously generates enemies until you traipse back and forth around the level and find the thing and unlock the other thing and finally enter a code. Normally, you would have to get the code by killing special enemies in the overworld and collecting the parts, but, thankfully, these codes are game-wide for a particular time period, and people figure them out and put them on a web site. Soloing this mission will require extreme sneaking to just avoid as many bad guys as possible, and I’ve got the perks and the Stealth Boys to try it now. I just wish I could stumble on a team that had some level-1,000 guy who was doing it to start the Scorchbeast Queen encounter, and just get the achievement by osmosis. But so far, no good.

So the net-net of all of this is that I’m trying to tick off about 300 different to-do’s off my list, in as efficient a manner as possible, to speed things up. You know… Do this while on the way to do that while using this and eating that and picking up these things to craft these other things… You get the idea.

A surprising amount of this activity is taken up with taking pictures of various creatures with the in-game camera. (As opposed to using the game’s photo mode for other achievements.) What I’ve noticed is that taking a picture of some animals now counts for multiple achievements, between the various “badges,” and the game’s “overworld” baseline achievements, which means I’m probably going to just walk around parts of the map where I can run into a bunch of particular kinds of creatures to photograph in one area. Oh, and be on the lookout for rare plants and mining deposits exclusive to that region.

Anyway, the point of writing this down is to note how similar this exercise feels when I’ve finished a major sub-project in my professional life, and start looking over my backlog in Pivotal Tracker, and trying to prioritize my next tasks. I realize that I’m looking over the list for ways to combine activities and push the lowest-hanging fruit to the top of the queue. And, suddenly, it dawns on me why, despite so many frustrations, I’m still drawn to MMO’s, and, at the same time, why they often feel like work to me.

Secret Service and ICE break the law with fake phone towers • The Register

Investigations ‘at risk’ from sloppy surveillance uncovered by audit probe

Source: Secret Service and ICE break the law with fake phone towers • The Register

Once again, the UK media is doing the job the US media won’t. This has been the case for several years now. Whatever truth-to-power legacy the likes of Ellsburg and Woodward and Bernstein laid down is utterly washed away now. I smell collusion between the US deep state and ALL US media companies now.

There’s a bunch of legal mumbo-jumbo here about how the laws are written and interpreted, versus the departments following their own, internal guidelines. To me, it’s all the same as the situation with privacy laws, and all the privacy policies we click through and agree to every day. These kinds of laws are written to be exploited in specific ways, and designed to be completely obtuse, even to other lawyers. Even if you could somehow look inside these organizations, and prove that laws were being broken by either the government or some Fortune 100, it would take an army of elite lawyers and specialists to successfully litigate it. The end result is the same: “they” are going to do whatever they want, regardless of the legalese they throw down on the desk.

Look no further than the continuing saga of Edward Snowden. He laid several smoking guns on the table, proving that the government knowingly broke their own laws, regarding several of our Constitutional rights. He’s still on the lamb, and Congress has done nothing to change the situation. So, this is nice and all, but, really, who cares? It’s clear nothing can be done about it, or anything like it.

Videos of people absolutely losing it are becoming really, really popular on sites like TikTok. What they show is a society in which a lot of people are at their breaking point at any given time. In my opinion, these kinds of stories — that we are absolutely powerless against a government that is actively, purposely violating the basic tenets of its charter — is a large factor in why everyone is so pissed off all the time.

Twitter Reprieve; News Holiday

I deleted Twitter a couple weeks ago, and have been playing Fallout 76 in the mornings, when I often would have had the news on, while I caffeinate. I have no idea what’s going on in the world now. The only tidbits I get are through sites like 9gag, and most of that is about Ukraine, which I just skip over like it was religious nonsense. I just thought, wow, I’m so at peace! What’s differ… Oh yeah, right.

So I just checked Drudge and Fox News, and find I haven’t missed it at all. I don’t know why I’m supposed to care who any of those people on the front page are, and there’s no reason to figure it out, except to get back on social media, and scream into the void about it.

I keep thinking that I could use Twitter, but avoid everyone that talks about politics, and only follow, like, comedians and novelty accounts, but I use it to rant and rave at companies all the time, and that’s not changing anything, except making me feel terrible. I don’t know if I will cave and try this, but I think I have a couple more weeks to feel this out.

Employee claims she can’t use Microsoft Windows for “Religious Reasons” : Reddit/r/AskHR


And they let her! You mean, all this time, I could have requested Linux on my corporate laptop for religious reasons!? BRB. Going to HR to explain my actual, deeply-held beliefs on this…

Caring about Costs is Cool

But costs aren’t just about the bottomline, they’re also a measure of efficiency. I have a distinct distaste for waste. Money spent on the frivolous or the ill-considered is money that can’t be spent elsewhere. Like an engine drinking too much oil just to run. Tight tolerances (but not too tight!) are a joy in themselves.

Source: Caring about costs is cool

I’ve been a fanboy of DHH for many, many years. Yes, he created Ruby on Rails, which I’m still enamored with, 14 years later, so we have that in common, and as someone who’s made a living using it for the past 10 years, that’s a big deal. However, he’s one of only a couple of people “on the internet” with which I agree with on almost everything, and I’ve never really understood why until this post.

Of course I’ve known that he was an F1 driver, but you can probably drive those cars without understanding the engineering concept of correct tolerances in an engine. That he intuits this premise deeply enough to draw this analogy is the key I was missing to understand my fascination with him.

I may be a programmer (and system administrator, and network engineer, and database architect), but I’m a mechanical engineer at heart. It’s how my mind works. I see how things are related and interconnected. I tell everyone I work with the same thing: I’m awesome at seeing the trees, but pretty bad at seeing the forrest. I’ll give you options; you make the decisions.

Being a physical engineer, whether mechanical or civil or electrical or aeronautical or nuclear, isn’t just a vocation; it’s a way of thinking about the world and how it works. In this way, I think our thinking lines up really well, and I think that leads to thinking basically the same way about most everything else.

It’s a theory, anyway.

Tax Exemption for Churches (Is the Wrong Question)

For the many-th time, I see a repost from Twitter on some other social media site, complaining about the wealth of mega-church pastors, and trying to rile people up about how churches should NOT be tax exempt. And, sure, Joel Olsteen’s lifestyle is a mockery of Jesus’ life, but there are only a handful of “mega” churches and “mega church” pastors in this country. Meanwhile, many, many thousands of the so-called 1% in this country pay a lower tax rate (and sometimes, ACTUAL tax) than the average, blue- or white-collar person does.

As a country swimming in debt, we would get a lot more mileage out of calling for meaningful taxation of billionaires and multi-hundred-millionaires before we start worrying about removing tax exemptions for churches and pastors. I think those posts and reposts on Twitter are probably jointly paid for by The Koch Brothers and George Soros, for the class-warfare angle. And maybe Bill Gates, for the anti-religion angle.

Joel Osteen pays taxes on his income. How much of it he has managed to shelter from the IRS is a game played just like all the rest of the 1%. The church, as a non-profit, does not pay taxes, because the money being received in donations cannot be considered a profit to tax. That’s the definition of how non-profit organizations work.

Churches are supposed to be prevented from getting involved in politics. It’s part of the deal in being religiously tax-exempt. (How this works when Presidents and candidates go to churches and make speeches from the pulpit is quite beyond me, but I digress.) If you start taxing churches, then there’s no reason for them not to get heavily involved in promoting particular candidates, and forming political action committees, just like corporations, taking an active role in getting people elected, and lobbying government for favorable treatment.

You may retort that large, corporate churches like the Catholics or Mormons already exert a huge influence on government, and I’d say you’re right, but it’s still less than the average Fortune 100. If we open the floodgates here… With the “war chests” accumulated by both of those organizations? As they say: you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Do the people calling for the removal of tax exemptions for churches really understand what they’re asking for? I don’t think they do.

Cummins, Brought to You by the Letters B and V

Cummins’ CEO just proudly spammed the whole company, announcing that she was “delighted” that the board has approved 3 more corporate officers for the company.

Goodie.

The only way this announcement affects me is to let me know that the company is now spending several more million dollars per year on executive pay packages. And this is happening as I am watching them like a hawk, and expecting them to announce a 3-5% headcount reduction later this year, to jump on the bandwagon that every other big company is riding.

That’s it. That’s the sum total of the impact of this interruption to my workflow. In fact, I have no idea who inside the company is supposed to benefit from this information, or in what way.

This can only be about juicing news for Wall Street, which has nothing to do with people, and everything to do with holding companies. Cummins is just another one of countless companies in the US which is being run by Blackrock and Vanguard, and various investment banks that you may (or may not) have seen printed on your 401K statements. According to Yahoo!, Cummins is 86% owned by “institutions.” Our country is being run by companies, and our companies are being run by Wall Street.

UPDATE 12/8/23: Many companies are announcing layoffs just before the holidays. (What an annoying time to do so!) Cummins offered early retirement buyouts. I’m hoping that this settles the balance sheet to their satisfaction.

UPDATE 1/4/24: Oops. CEO Jenn Rumsey says this settlement won’t affect stock price, business outlook, or even internal compensation. I hadn’t realized that Cummins made so much money year over year to be able to weather a settlement like this without even a flinch. I think this shows that the figure was reached based on Cummins’ ability to pay, rather than some quantifiable harm their actions supposedly incurred. This feels like a political shakedown, by a liberal administration, of a sympathetic Fortune 250, with deep pockets, which happens to make a product that’s politically unpopular with the party’s base.