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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1136 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 31, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Swung by my company's IT desk today, because they offered me a laptop upgrade after I submitted a ticket complaining about a weird issue I was having (several times a day my taskbar would disappear, and, when it reappeared, my file explorer and MS Teams would close).

Anyway, I got to the IT guy's desk and he had fighter jets printed out on paper and hung up around his desk. He had miniature models of Star Wars fighter-craft that hadn't even appeared in the movies, only videogames (he had to tell me this). He had 1-foot-tall models of anime characters I didn't recognize, and he complained about how Intel refused to compete with AMD and Nvidia in some consumer market (I think GPU). He bragged about his several-terabyte storage system that would take 23 hours or something to back up. I heard something about how Nvidia's latest GPUs don't have the hardware to process quite everything and they fill the gaps with AI.

I was at this man's desk for about an hour, listening to the things that interest him, and halfway through I felt this...rush of affection towards him. It wasn't unlike being emotionally drunk. He was talking about all the things I read so much about online, that no one I know irl ever talks or cares about. He was here, before me! There's a nonzero chance he's on this website, reading this.

I noticed he had no wedding band on his left ringfinger. I'd bet his apartment is a bachelor pad with even more impressive models of stuff than what he brought to work. Idk man. I have a kid now, and all my social life comes through my church. I don't run into too many guys like this anymore, and I was very impressed by how unabashed he was in his interests, or how undaunted he was by the fact that I could barely keep up with what he was talking about.

I'll be back at his desk on Monday to get my BIOS updated.

My boss told me to decorate my cubicle, so I strewed it with items—modular origami, house designs, a reorganization of the New York–Washington corridor, a guide to organizing your email account, etc. But nobody in my civil-engineering office was ever interested in any of them. >:-(

maryland reduced to baltimore rump

based based based

This map is based on metropolitan areas, which in turn are based on urban areas. A handy interactive map of these features as defined by the federal Census Bureau is available here.

Note that the Census Bureau's official criteria for defining urban areas have some unjustified hysteresis, and therefore may be considered untrustworthy. (Specifically, if the algorithm indicates that two urban areas have merged into one urban area in the past ten years, then in some situations the Census Bureau will keep them separate anyway.) For an alternative, global viewpoint on urban areas, see the UN's "degree of urbanization", of which two different interactive maps are available here. (I have glanced at this topic previously in this comment.)

Can you share the email guide?

I didn't keep a copy, but tl;dr (and IMO and IME):

  • Organizing your emails is important. Whether at work or at home, you want to be able to find information without having to sift through the hundreds of results of a search across your entire email account. Keeping all your old emails in an undifferentiated "inbox" or "archive" folder full of literally thousands (or even tens of thousands) of messages is dumb.

  • For your personal email account, Gmail and Proton Mail let you organize emails in overlapping labels. It's convenient to organize by sender and by topic. For example: You can put all your receipt emails from an online retailer that fails to collect state sales tax in the "receipts", "[retailer name]", and "sales tax deferred" labels. Months later, when you're doing your annual state income tax return, it will be easy to export to PDF all the emails in the "sales tax deferred" label, and put those PDFs in the "tax documents" folder on your computer to help you calculate the sales tax that you owe.

  • For your work email account, Outlook lacks good label functionality, but it lets you organize emails in nested (non-overlapping) folders. It's convenient to organize by topic. (In most cases, the identity of the sender doesn't matter, since you will be working with lots of different people on any given project. But you may still want to put emails from, e. g., Human Resources in their own folder, and then use subfolders for HR topics.) In the rare event that an email is relevant to multiple topics, you can click-and-drag with the right mouse button in order to copy an email from one folder into a second folder.

This was already questionable advice in the age of search and is now probably worthless advice in the age of LLMs.

I've never organized my work emails beyond autotrashing some of them and I've been doing just fine for almost 20 years.

Years ago HR demanded that I decorate my cubicle as well. I papered the entire thing with printouts of the most egregious bug reports in our system along with our most embarrassing sections of code. The diktat was rescinded soon after.

Cowards! I see it as a very good laugh.

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