Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like dsa, marine corps and chainmail. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone gave two hoots.

But one of my favourite tags happens to be offbeat! Taking its original inspiration from Sir Nils Olav III, this thread is looking for any far-fetched offbeat stories lurking in the newspapers. It may not deserve its own post, but it deserves a wider audience!

A while ago some of the keys on my Dell XPS laptop started working poorly, they were only registering the presses half of the time or if I pushed them really hard. I tried removing the keycaps and cleaning the keys on the inside, but to no avail. Well, I thought, that means it's time to get a new laptop. So I was choosing the next laptop to get. One of the options I considered was the Framework laptop, which is supposed to be super repairable - I mean, if only I could just replace my laptop keyboard, I wouldn't have to buy a whole new laptop just because of a few broken keys!

Then I thought about it again. I realized that a repairable laptop is only useful if you actually try to repair your laptop, which I've never done. So, I looked it up, and turns out Dell, while obviously not as easily repairable as Framework, has very well-detailed official service manuals as well!

Two weeks of waiting for a Chinese copycat keyboard from AliExpress and three hours of work later, I finally have a fully working laptop! Turns out it isn't hard at all to replace a broken keyboard - but I'm still very proud of myself for doing it, mostly for even deciding to do it instead of just turning a fully functional laptop into e-waste as I would've done otherwise. I was also really surprised that Dell laptops are that easy to fix (though they don't officially sell replacement parts to consumers), since it's known to be a company that makes a ton of money on expensive support offerings.

I don't really know what the lesson of this post is, I just wanted to share this small achievement with y'all.

Have you watched any TV shows recently you want to discuss? Any shows you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

As some of you on here may know, I was made redundant from my Assistant Commercial Reporting Analyst job three months ago and have been struggling to find permanent work since. Many of my interactions with recruiters and hiring managers have been negative and have felt like they were wasting my time, but one particular (ongoing) experience has taken the cake.

In mid-April, I applied for an Assistant Client Accountant position through LinkedIn. The role was with a large property management and building consultancy firm (offices based in the UK & France), who have some pretty big-name clients. Fully office-based, advertised pay between £25k - £29k (already similar payscales to what credit control and purchase ledger roles near me are offering), and the position ideally asked for fully AAT qualified or ACCA part-qualified candidates (I have full AAT membership, am 3 exams into my ACCA, and have over 6 years experience in previous accounting and financial reporting roles.)

Nine weeks later, I am still going through this application process which has been nothing short of a shitshow:

• It has taken multiple weeks to schedule and conduct interviews for each stage, due to unanswered emails and heavily delayed responses from both the Finance and HR teams. I had emailed on nine separate occasions to schedule the the second and third stage interviews I was invited to, and only twice did I get replies. At first I was told it was due to staff sickness, but then the trend of replying in business weeks just kept going on, even after the third-stage (which I'll get to.)

• The first stage interview was a 15 - 30 minute phone interview going through my CV and salary expectations. Stages 2 and 3 involved a series of hour-long competency based interviews, one conducted via Teams and the other in-person with the Head of Finance. This is already a ridiculous number of hoops to jump through for an office-based role with this salary level.

• During the third-stage interview (3rd June) I was asked a lot of supervisory/leadership questions which I honestly didn't expect. It made me question whether I was being interviewed for the correct role, so I checked the job description of what I applied for. Only 4 of the 590 words contained within the job advert even alluded to me leading junior colleagues - so maybe it was easily missed?

• On the 5th June (two days after my third-stage interview), I received an email from HR thanking me for accepting the Client Accountant position and asking me to confirm RTW (right-to-work) details. The thing is... I never received an offer letter, and after immediately chasing this up I found out the email was sent to me by mistake. This HR rep apologized and said they'd chase feedback. I emailed twice to chase this feedback and promised it would be coming.

• Today when I emailed again to chase feedback, the HR advisor responded to raise concerns about the salary expectations I communicated in the first stage, insisted the role actually paid £26k at most and asked me to confirm a salary within their range. This is false (I know, I actually double-checked the job ad and even did a screen recording on my mobile of me going into the LinkedIn app and opening the job posting) and I get the impression that they're now trying to lowball me. I emailed again asking for clarification where I linked the job ads and I get the feeling they confused the salary bands with a Purchase Ledger role I applied for several months prior but was not considered for.

I will find out Monday (after nearly three weeks) if I was successful in my application, but even if they offer me the job at a reduced salary rather than outright reject me, I am already seeing a shitload of red flags.

At this point I've had enough. Normally I'd cut my ties and move on but with how desperate I've been for work and how much I feel like this company has taken me for a ride, I feel the need to take things further. Not sure whether I should (or even could) formally raise a complaint, drop some negative feedback on their Glassdoor page, or go public (with receipts) and openly name & shame the company on LinkedIn, Facebook or Instagram. The latter options feel like I'd be going nucelar and as cathartic as it would be, I'm worried it would be seen as unprofessional and hurt my future job prospects.

What would be the best way to proceed?

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

MLMs = "multi-level marketing" companies, which is essentially a euphemism for "pyramid scheme." These are flat out illegal in many countries, but are, notably, quite legal in the US.

They used to be huge in the 2010s, but I don't hear much about them anymore (granted, I haven't been on social media since 2016). I know several IRL people who got into them, and I even regrettably bought products from some of them before I really understood what they were or how they worked.

I recently read Hey, Hun by Emily Lynn Paulson who was toward the top of the pyramid at Rodan + Fields.

In the book she mentions that algorithmic changes from social media companies ended up downgrading a lot of MLM postings, which cut off oxygen to the cycles of recruitment that these companies rely on. For example, Rodan + Fields moved to an affiliate model in 2024.

I'm curious about what the MLM landscape looks like right now.

• Are MLMs still common?
• For those of you on social media, do you still get recruitment and sales messages?
• Have they changed their tactics or models?

People don't have to limit responses to just those questions -- consider this a general MLM discussion topic where anything related to them is fair game.

Canadian Grand Prix
Circuit Gilles-Villeneuve
June 13-15, 2025

Grand Prix Qualifying:
Saturday, June 14, 2025 - 20:00 UTC / 4:00p US EDT

Grand Prix:
Sunday, June 15, 2025 - 18:00 UTC / 2:00p US EDT

See your local times here

Next race:

Austrian Grand Prix
Red Bull Ring
Sunday, June 29, 2025

So since the USB-C spec came out, there are so many different cables advertising different optional capabilities.

Even if you are careful to select a cable which does what you need, there is a good chance it won't have all capabilities as advertised, you only find out when it arrives.

The situation on Amazon is particularly bad, with co-mingled stock and questionable brands like XZZTTG and EIUTOO dominating the listings.

For me, now, I'm specifically struggling to find a short replacement cable for my Samsung T7 SSD, which came with a USB 3.2 Gen 2 cable which was ~15cm and flexible. It was very nice, but they're not sold seperately!

So, where do you look these days to find a listing of decent and reliable accessories like USB cables?

UPDATE:

Great recommendations on brands to look for.
Thanks all!

What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! Feel free to talk about something you saw that was cool, something that was bad, ask for recommendations, or anything else you can think of.

If you want to, feel free to find the thing you're talking about and link to its pages on Anilist, MAL, or any other database you use!