partial_accumen
@partial_accumen@lemmy.world
- Comment on Dodged the maga family visitors on 4th July by happy accident, now trapped with them at wife's birthday celebration. 3 days ago:
Though in this case I was granted a reprieve because they couldn’t stay as long as expected.
There must have been some lower income children about to receive needed healthcare or perhaps a nutritious meal that your wife’s relatives had to prevent from happening.
- Comment on Dodged the maga family visitors on 4th July by happy accident, now trapped with them at wife's birthday celebration. 3 days ago:
Pull out a little notebook and write some shit in it, put it back in your pocket, look back at them quickly then continue as if nothing happened.
I like this! If they press you on an explanation for what you’re doing you could say “I have a bet going.” Glance down at the pad, perhaps flip a few pages, moving your pen like you’re counting, then say “It looks like I’m winning!” then smile.
If you don’t mine starting a fight you could even go with “I’m playing MAGA bingo. You could really help me out if you say something predictiably shitty about immigrants or perhaps something laughable about ‘small government’”.
- Comment on Dodged the maga family visitors on 4th July by happy accident, now trapped with them at wife's birthday celebration. 3 days ago:
I’m sorry to hear about your intestinal distress which will make you spend most of the visit in the bathroom with a quick in-person “goodbye” right before jumping in the car.
…or…
which means they get to “accidentally” drop little comments then titter in apology
When they do this just stare right at them, with a blank expression. Keep the stare for about 10 seconds until it starts to get uncomfortable for everyone, and then just say “hmm” while maintaining eye contact.
- Comment on YSK There's a campaign to replace the distorted Mercator world map with the fairer Equal-Earth projection 1 week ago:
Obligatory West Wing Gall-Peters Projection link
- Comment on Have men really stopped reading? We take a deeper dive into the data 1 week ago:
I read way more ebooks than paper books. The convenience, portability, low light control, and text size manipulation are big wins with ebooks over paper. There’s also simply tons of ebooks available from public libraries.
- Comment on We will all be slaves 1 week ago:
Padme: So the solution is a huge investment in public housing or state subsidised housing, right?
Anakin: …
Padme: right? - Comment on Butter made from carbon tastes like the real thing, gets backing from Bill Gates 2 weeks ago:
To put it in simple terms, Savor says they take carbon dioxide from the air and hydrogen from water, heat them up, oxidize them and get a final result that looks like candle wax but is in fact fat molecules like those in beef, cheese or vegetable oils.
So their process sounds like it creates synthetic lard, not butter. This can still be a good thing as the extra ingredients to make it “butter” aren’t really the hard/impactful part of butter.
- Comment on Sounds like a plan 2 weeks ago:
I think we have slightly different approaches but ultimate want the same thing: opportunities for juniors to get exposure.
However, employers these days are reluctant to hire them, and the barrier to entry is higher now so they can’t necessarily get in the door on their own merits without that experience they don’t have access to learn.
- Comment on Sounds like a plan 2 weeks ago:
And nearly all of those problems are ones that other people have run into or at least have guidance on how to go about addressing. Old organically grown systems are many times unique one-offs which have little to no established path except to start diving into the fundamentals about the hardware and software.
I’m not here to get into a pissing match about who’s job is/was harder. If you think juniors have a better chance at learning on today’s systems than they did in the past, I still disagree with you. Problems exist on modern system, except juniors will rarely if ever get a chance to try to solve them and thereby learn from them.
- Comment on Sounds like a plan 2 weeks ago:
You still have to debug things in a cattle approach, though. If anything there’s even more and more complex things to debug.
I would disagree on your complexity metric (for the purposes of learning troubleshooting) for cattle. What can be more complex than a completely unique system that only exist because of 10+ years of running on that same hardware with multiple in-place OS upgrade occurring along with sporadic (but not complete) patches to both the OS and the application? Throw in the extra complexity of 9 other unrelated applications running on that same server (or possibly bare metal) because the org was too cheap to spring for separate servers or OS licenses for a whole hypervisor.
If you have a memory leak in your application in a container running on k8s that will kill the pod after running for 72 consecutive hours, would you even notice it if you have multiple pods running it on a whole cluster as long as the namespace is still available?
- Comment on Sounds like a plan 2 weeks ago:
I’m not the slightest worried about my own job, but it is currently a shitty market for fresh grads. Probably due to all the post-covid layoffs saturating the talent pool with more experienced people, and the aforementioned AI fad.
Its a bit more than that I think. IT is killing its entry level job pipeline which grew people into seniors. In the infra space, we don’t really troubleshoot systems anymore in a “pets” method, we just redeploy new “cattle” meaning all the troubleshooting skills and underlying understanding of our systems you would have had doesn’t get learned anymore. For those of us that had to go through that, we’re fine because we developed the skills, but the new folks we bring in we just tell them to re-deploy to get it working.
I’m seeing this too in the software dev space. Small modules worth a few story points would have been given to junior developers to learn on and knock out getting some work done, but more importantly getting those juniors trained up with trial and error. Now an LLM can crank out mostly working code for that small module in a seconds and after a few minutes of human review that module is done. So the work is being done faster now, but the critical educational experience the juniors had before is missing.
In both infra and software dev spaces we’re cutting off our ankles, then legs, because when we retire very very few will have our skills that we had to learn, but didn’t give them the chance to learn.
- Comment on AOL will end dial-up internet service in September, 34 years after it's debut — AOL Shield Browser and AOL Dialer software will be shuttered on the same day 2 weeks ago:
Ha! Sorry, I didn’t mean to be intentionally vague. I didn’t think people would actually care about doing this today. Here’s complete steps for you to do it yourself. I posted from memory from doing this myself 25 years ago or so. I had to go look up the actual schematic and found someone else did a slightly more modern take on the software side too. The cable is still the same basic design premise to offer a line voltage to the modems I used way back when.
I was using a higher value capacitor (because I was poor and using scrap parts) which also forced me to put a 100 Ohm resistor in series on the output to get good consistent connections. If you can get exact values, use the ones pictured in that parts list instead of my hack job.
If you like this era of gaming you might enjoy !retrogaming@lemmy.world
- Comment on Mozilla under fire for Firefox AI "bloat" that blows up CPU and drains battery 2 weeks ago:
- Comment on what's the best material for wiping out a cast iron skillet? 2 weeks ago:
I don’t think its misinterpreted. I do the same thing with one of these to get stuck on food bits out:
I’m not sure how this could “destroy the pan” considering the stainless steel links have a Brinell hardness of 217 and the grey cast iron (the pan’s metal) has a Brinell hardness of 235, the pan will scratch the stainless steel links before the stainless steel links scratches the pan.
After that I wash out the path with liquid dish soap, then put the pan on the inductive stove to bring it up to boil away any remaining water on the pan.
- Comment on AOL will end dial-up internet service in September, 34 years after it's debut — AOL Shield Browser and AOL Dialer software will be shuttered on the same day 2 weeks ago:
Nooooooooo! How will I connect my Dreamcast to the internet now? 😩
I know you’re being sarcastic, but I can give you an actual answer from when I was a Dreamcast owner.
One of the wonderful things about the Dreamcast modem is that you can configure it skip dial tone detection. You can them take an old telephone line (the kind you’d plug into the wall, then to the modem), cut it in half and a couple of resistors in specific places. You take that modified cable and plug one end into your Dreamcast, then the other into a modem in PC. You then set up Dial up routing software on your PC. There’s a lite version built into Windows 98 if my memory is correct (Dial up networking services Server). Initiate the Dreamcast to dial (it doesn’t matter what phone number). The PC answers (you hear the dial up handshake squaking), and your Dreamcast is online! You can use the Dreamcast browser or online Dreamcast games like Timesplitters. If you did this long enough ago you could also play the MMOs like Phantasy Star Online.
- Comment on Expand North! So much room up there. 2 weeks ago:
No one lives in the Maritimes and Newfies are a figment of our imagination?
- Comment on X plans to show ads in Grok chatbot's answers 2 weeks ago:
Grok: “I’m sorry to hear about your cancer diagnosis. That must be incredibly painful to face. One of the things nearly all doctors agree on is that stress can have a compound negative result on your health when you’re facing a disease like cancer. You should find something in your life that can bring you calm in these trying times. Some may find that comfort in religion. Others in physical activity like Yoga. However, for centuries humankind has used the soothing power of tobacco to bring relief and de-stress. You can find that relief right now in a Marlboro cigarette. I see they are available from “Johnny’s Bodega” just .25 miles from your current location. Why don’t you go pick up a pack and start taking care of your health by getting rid of stress?” /s
- Comment on Trump says he plans to put a 100% tariff on computer chips, likely pushing up cost of electronics 2 weeks ago:
Do you have examples of individual components being swapped to avoid tariffs?
I don’t, but these new tariffs don’t match what we’d had before.
The closest I can think of is one scheme to avoid aluminum import tariffs. A company cut bar stock into longer lengths and did the cheapest/fastest/worst job of spot welding them together into the shape of a finished good (a chair or table, can’t remember). The “chairs” were imported, then the receiving company simply broken the simple spot welds and fed the again-bar-stock into manufacturing processes.
For PC parts, it would be very inexpensive to make a cheap mobo, chassis, and UX. E.g., they could put a high end server CPU or something into one of those small handhelds (like Anbernic devices), and then move it to an actual server in the US.
It would be cheaper, but not inexpensive. This would require setting up an entire manufacturing assembly line to create and assemble the carrier product, and a reciprocal dis-assembly line on the other side to reclaim the desired CPU part. Its doable, but quite a bit of additional expense when the straight non-bypass method is a robot removing a CPU from a tray and inserting it directly into the finished product. Would it be worth it? Potentially yes! That’s why I made my first post here on the topic.
- Comment on President Trump calls on Intel CEO to resign 2 weeks ago:
Republicans from 2011:
GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain echoed the advice. “The government should not be in the business of picking winners and losers because most of the time they pick the losers,” he said.
- Comment on This 81-year-old still works at Home Depot to support herself and her 90-year-old husband 2 weeks ago:
I just read your post and you responded to 10 or 12 of my points, which I appreciate. However, in all but 2 which you had good faith responses you strawmanned ever single other one misrepresenting what I said or claimed I said the exact contradictory language to what I actually said so it fit your point.
I don’t think there’s a path forward we can continue conversing on this. I hope you have a nice day.
- Comment on Trump says he plans to put a 100% tariff on computer chips, likely pushing up cost of electronics 2 weeks ago:
I’m guessing the chip in the finished product would be taxed separately, otherwise it would be trivial to dodge the tariff (just package the chip in a different “finished product” and move it to a US-made product).
You’d guess wrong. Welcome to the wonderful world of tariffs and import/export controls!
I wouldn’t call it a trivial dodge because the act of building the tariffed good into another product takes time and resources at the origin side, then again at the destination side to undo the manufacturing steps. However, sometimes its worth it to a company. There are lots of examples of companies doing exactly this.
Ford Transit Connect cargo vans were made in Turkey. Ford wanted to import them to the USA. However, there was a tariff placed on vehicles for commercial use, so Ford installed cheap passengers seats in the back and imported them as passenger vehicles. As soon as the vehicles would arrive onshore in the USA, Ford would rip the cheap seats out, and sell them as commercial vehicles.
- Comment on Trump says he plans to put a 100% tariff on computer chips, likely pushing up cost of electronics 2 weeks ago:
Wouldn’t this only affect goods manufactured in the USA? If a finished product containing chips from say, Europe, were to land on USA shores it would only have a 15% tariff right?
Why does trump hate American manufacturing?
- Comment on One Angry Man 2 weeks ago:
Are you sure?
spoiler
I’m pretty sure its a 1995 American crime thriller film directed by David Fincher and written by Andrew Kevin Walker. It stars Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman, with Gwyneth Paltrow and John C. McGinley in supporting roles. Where they try to stop a serial killer.
- Comment on This 81-year-old still works at Home Depot to support herself and her 90-year-old husband 2 weeks ago:
In your list, nearly everything that comes after that is a symptom of trying to navigate financial hardship
Which symptom cause the husband to quit his nearly $200,000/year job in 1994 and start a band without saving for retirement first?
- Comment on This 81-year-old still works at Home Depot to support herself and her 90-year-old husband 2 weeks ago:
You might be able to make an argument for this grandma, but there are countless others. You can’t deny we have a systemic problem that leaves seniors out in the cold
My comments are only about the couple in the article. The reason that is important is that the couple in the article are not the archetype we need to solve for. Its, as you point out, all the countless others. In effect, we should not look at this couple to see how to solve the problem of our senior citizens not able to age/live gracefully.
- Comment on This 81-year-old still works at Home Depot to support herself and her 90-year-old husband 2 weeks ago:
I would argue that they were in fact victims of circumstance. The 2008 mortgage implosion seems to be the root of their troubles.
I would disagree with you. The root of their trouble started in 1994. The husband was making the equivalent of $195,221.66/year and quit that job to start a band. They could have been set for life if he worked just a few years at that job and saved for retirement. How badly would you blame anyone today that quit a nearly $200k/year job to start a band, and then had a tough time covering their basic needs in retirement?
I doubt they thought they were making subpar choices in the aftermath.
It looks like right now they’re paying on a vehicle that cost at least $37,000. They are still making bad choices.
Putting the blame on them really shifts focus from the elephant in the room, that our society should provide a baseline level of dignified existance for the elderly and infirm no matter the quality of their life choices.
I’ll be the first one to say we need something like UBI, but we do have a system in place that provides a baseline level: Social Security. As I pointed out, their income they are receiving today would give them hundreds of dollars in surplus if they didn’t live in Connecticut, but instead in a lower cost of living area. Again, they’re choosing to live in a more expensive place forcing the wife to work. It was no mystery how much they would be getting in Social Security when they retired. I can look up right now how much I’ll get when I retire. The disconnect seems to be them not doing simply math to see what a sustainable path is. Now, I’m sure there is more to it that my simplification above for their specific circumstances, but even with additional complexity the simply math by itself doesn’t add up to a sufficient answer before adding any other life complexity/challenges.
Suggesting they move to west virginia because it’s cheaper is a ridiculous idea that only someone who lacks life experience would propose. I’m calling out a kid, aren’t I?
I lack life experience? I think I could accuse you of that if this is your take. Life doesn’t always go as we want. You don’t get to do something just because you want to. You do what you have to in life to live. Sometimes that means moving for work, or making choices you wouldn’t like to do otherwise. This is a lesson our couple didn’t seem to learn as it looks like they’re living above their means and having to kill themselves working far into their years to continue on this path, nor is it one it sounds like you’ve had to experience yet. What the wife is doing, working at Home Depot, isn’t sustainable. What is their plan when she can’t work? Who is going to pay the rent and the expensive car payment? They have no plan B. They still aren’t looking at their circumstances and making changes to secure their futures for the years they have level.
Further, West Virginia was an example of cheaper cost of living place to live. I’m not prescribing that’s the only place on the planet they can go and live within their means. I wouldn’t not have told them to end up where the are in circumstances. I am simply taking what they have left and suggesting an alternative that addresses the fire in the room, her working at 81 to keep a roof over their heads. On this current path, they’re headed for homelessness if they don’t change course.
Your writing is too verbose
Sorry, this is how I talk and write. You’re under no obligation to interact with me if it bothers you that much. I’m certainly not changing just for you.
and lacks tact.
Your first response to me was accusing me of victim blaming. I’m following your tone on tact.
- Comment on One Angry Man 2 weeks ago:
From the new title I have to assume that its about a man going on a hunger strike and getting really hangray.
- Comment on One Angry Man 2 weeks ago:
Fantastic one
- Comment on One Angry Man 2 weeks ago:
1 Fast 1 Furious
- Comment on So glad I suck dick 2 weeks ago:
Thats a very kind service. How about one for our fellow Lemmings in Australia?
