I’m sorry you don’t like that I think you’re being ridiculous, but getting upset and doubling-down every time I say so isn’t likely to change my mind.

move on.

what we can do is apply some common sense, however, and realize the amount of work to do this is ridiculous. and, yes, tacking the changes isn’t that complex, but tracking that many changes and storing them for tens of millions of users’ comments for 18 years IS. Then doing what you proposed with ChatGPT is beyond absurd with regards to cost, too, considering the scale of computing work required to process so many deleted comments.

so, despite how many theoreticals you propose regarding the possibility of it, the fact remains that it’s unlikely in the extreme such an effort would have been made because of the resource, time, and cost involved.

the amounts of cost and resources for all of that would be profound. when they’re already complaining about profitability, I doubt they’d dumb huge amounts of additional funds into a project like that. they clearly have at least one level of backups, and I wouldn’t be shocked if they had 2 or 3 revision backups, but anything past that - let alone what you’re suggesting - would be too much to be a manageable cost.

it was randomly-generated letters and numbers. it would be impossible to divine what te original comment was. I then did this, over and over 10 times, so the edit history was overwritten with blocks of randomized text.

what you suggest would just spit out more garbage, or, at best, completely fake comments.

many companies have multi-year commercial leases they suddenly can’t get out of and lots of office furniture they can’t liquidate. it’s a huge investment that suddenly worthless. (boo-hoo!)

that’s why I overwrote all ofmy comments with gibberish 10 times before I deleted them, so even if they un-deleted them and/or restored previous version, they’d have real trouble finding a version that wasn’t total gibberish. I just knew they’d pull this crap.

I wouldn’t return to work if you offered me the whole building.

for my entire career, 100% of my work has been on the computer. once in a while, I may have some client interaction, and for that videoconferencing is fin 99.99% of the time. the 0.01% it’s not, I can go on-site. I’ve never attended a meeting that couldn’t have been an email or that couldn’t be handled via videoconference. what managers I’ve had fall into 2 categories:

• The Quite Ones: these are the good managers who send short emails regarding project needs/goals and periodically check in on progress, providing feedback when necessary.
• The Overbearing Micromanagers: jerkwads who feel the need to constantly insinuate themselves into my process and assert their position of power just for the sake of it, often negatively affecting both my workflow and the end-results of the project itself. They send huge, monotonous emails full of corporate-speak which say very little, set regular meetings that waste time and accomplish nothing, and set capricious, pointless policies which often change equally capriciously. I suspect this is done because they’re too incompetent to do their actual jobs and are designed both distract from that and remind us “who’s boss.”

Obviously, the first can be dealt with 100% remotely, and the second has positioned themselves, through being terrible at their jobs and being terrible people in general, to require workers to be present, mostly to justify their own jobs which would amount to nothing if there were no employees physically present to subject to their petty torments.

so, yeah, give me my own office? that’s not gonna cut it, as it changes exactly 0 of the reasons why I never want to return to the office, which are the commute, the stifling work atmosphere, the management, and the fact that there’s 0 reason to ever be there physically anyway due to the nature of my work.

oh, maybe. if so, it’s new to me!

fortune and cowsay are 2 separate packages, the output of them combined is this:

probably the best advice you’ll find in a fortune cookie