scarabic
@scarabic@lemmy.world
- Comment on Why do video game leaks (such as the huge GTA VI videos leak) cause "low morale" for the staff working on it? 12 hours ago:
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If people liked what they saw, this steals thunder from the actual release. All it will do it set expectations higher, and some people will inevitably say “a leak showed the game was working 8 months ago - why is it taking so long to release?”
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If people don’t like what they see it is an unfair judgment of the work and that’s disheartening
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These people live under confidentiality agreements and don’t tell their friends or sometime even family anything about their work. Seeing some jackass leak everything invalidates all that effort and sacrifice.
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- Comment on Does anyone else notice an up tick in hostility on Lemmy lately? 13 hours ago:
Actually yeah it just clicked for me what “TDS” is. I guess I didn’t have to go further than this very comment. Trump Derangement Syndrome is more than a mild caricature - it’s a codified partisan dismissal of all Trump criticism. Anyone who uses the term unironically is a Trumper.
I withdraw my objection.
- Comment on Does anyone else notice an up tick in hostility on Lemmy lately? 1 day ago:
That person is complaining about political axe-grinding seeping into every corner of every community. Yes they used a mild caricature of anti-Trumpism but this isn’t what I’d call a “rightist.” Although I am on the left, politically, I frequently argue with people here who are even further to the left. I don’t think chanting about seizing the means of production is… productive, and I say so. This probably makes me a “rightist account” in some people’s eyes. I’m also a bootlicker because I don’t advocate for lining up all CEO in front of a firing squad.
- Comment on Richest American to FAFO? 2 days ago:
I wish I could say Trump but the man evidently has an unlimited lifetime pass to fuck around without finding out.
- Comment on I analyzed 200 e-commerce sites and found 73% of their traffic is fake 2 days ago:
How old is this article? Is it a reprint from years ago? Because he talks about suddenly pivoting his data by “conversion rate” and having an AHA moment about how we measure success.
Except… conversion rate is a bone-standard, absolutely ubiquitous way to measure traffic quality in ecommerce. No one places ads without knowing how many of them lead to conversions. Defining your conversion event is often part of setting up an ad in the first place.
He then goes on to describe his hand-rolled script that analyses mouse movements to differentiate humans from bots.
Except… that’s exactly what the “I am human” checkbox from CloudFlare and Google have been doing for years.
CloudFlare have said that about 30% of Internet traffic is bots. This is well known. It could easily be 70% for some sites.
I would say that there’s nothing to see here, but it’s probably a little worse than that: just adding some really shaky data and anecdotal data to an already widely-covered topic. Are we actually going to trust an internet marketer’s hand-rolled mouse movements analysis over CloudFlare?
I’m not.
- Comment on I analyzed 200 e-commerce sites and found 73% of their traffic is fake 2 days ago:
Nobody pays for ad impressions anymore. Haven’t for… gosh like a decade.
There’s a lot of stupidity in adverting, but eventually people stop coming back to dump more millions into a bunch of bot page refreshes that don’t lead to sales.
- Comment on Is the AI Conveyor Belt of Capital About to Stop? 2 days ago:
I think the Lemmy perception of AI boils down to just a few things:
- but it hallucinates!
- I hate tech bros
- but the MIT report!
Of course there’s more, like underlying fear of losing jobs, stealing from artists, and being dehumanized in general.
I happen to care a lot about those things too, but ranting on about 1-3 doesn’t actually help and is just people repeating each others points in a circle jerk. Meanwhile AI is on the move.
- Comment on Is the AI Conveyor Belt of Capital About to Stop? 2 days ago:
Is anyone going to talk about how the amounts don’t remotely match up? If you just cancel them all out, you still get Open AI buying $160 billion in Oracle compute.
- Comment on Is the AI Conveyor Belt of Capital About to Stop? 2 days ago:
I’ll just offer some facts as a counterpoint to the prevailing narrative here.
My employer, a major multinational tech company, is pushing AI use internally so hard it hurts. After studying it they announced it was saving our software engineers about 4 hours a week net, or half a day. Thats as of now with adoption still growing and new tools being explored constantly. Half a day weekly is 10% of our software engineering budget which is a large number, and the company will without a doubt pay a significant sum to continue getting that benefit to get more out of their staff, who are their biggest cost of doing business.
I live in the dissonance between, on the one hand, the narrative in places like Lemmy that AI is shit and doesn’t do anything right and these companies have no monetization plan, and on the other hand, seeing it dramatically change my enterprise workplace and provide real value.
Yes engineers are confirming to my very own ears that they are using AI tools and they have their uses and save them time and toil. For example, we had one version update to push through hundreds of teams all with disparate front end code, and it was not possible to just script the update for them all because custom integration work would always be needed, but we did come up with a prompt that could use a set of documentation and entity mappings to accomplish the update in under a minute with a high rate of success. This is just how thu he are staring to get done.
- Comment on Everyday AI looks more like the '08 housing bubble 4 days ago:
Yeah. Signing up for a social service doesn’t make you the most technical person in the world.
- Comment on Everyday AI looks more like the '08 housing bubble 4 days ago:
One reason it’s dangerous is that the rest of the economy sucks, so AI is masking bigger problems which will become evident and tumble out of control when the money has nowhere left to go.
- Comment on Everyday AI looks more like the '08 housing bubble 4 days ago:
Lemmy is not the most tech savvy people on the internet nor the customer base for AI. Where did you get either of those ideas?
- Comment on Everyday AI looks more like the '08 housing bubble 4 days ago:
I know right? It’s not a bubble if there are transactions between the different companies in an industry. Nothing here shows that these investments are self-supporting circular, nor that all of this is propping up the economy.
Circle != bubble
- Comment on If you lose your memories, are "you" dead? If a close relative/friend lose their memories, are they still "your relative/friend"? What the hell even is memory? How sentimental are you about memories? 1 week ago:
My point of view is that the entire “you” concept needs to be constructed in the first place because it isn’t a self-evident, easily-defined thing. There are centuries of philosophy on this topic, none of it conclusive. Ergo: it’s kind of your call if you are even “you” when you wake up each morning, or just a fresh iteration with your memories that believes it’s “you.” Having hit my 50s I’m quite confident that the person in all my pictures from college is not “me” in any meaningful way.
- Comment on Why do companies always need to grow? 1 week ago:
Because they take investment.
Privately held companies can sit around earning the exact same amount of profit forever.
But if you are publicly traded on the stock market, people are walking up and injecting money into your business. They expect a return for that investment. And that means that the part of your business they’ve bought has to be worth more in the future in order for them to sell it for more than they bought it.
Therefore: growth. Owning 1% of a $100k business isn’t with as much as owning 1% of a $200k business. So if you own 1%, you want it to go from $100k to $200k.
If you aren’t taking outside money, none of this is a problem. Unless the owners just want a raise, which most people generally do over time. If nothing else, inflation is constantly eroding the value of money so you need to grow a little just to stand still. Most people don’t want to make do with less and less over time.
- Comment on Are Street Racers "bad people"? 2 weeks ago:
Once I actually stated meeting people in life who go out to the track, I saw street racers in a new light. I never admired them in the first place, but I started seeing them as absolutely pathetic, once I became aware of how easy and popular it is to take your car out to a track and actually push its limits and/or compete with others.
A lot of people like to go to the firing range, too. But you don’t see them doing target practice walking down the sidewalk. That’s essentially what street racing is.
- Comment on Cracker Barrel Outrage Was Almost Certainly Driven by Bots, Researchers Say 2 weeks ago:
Oh I completely agree. My point is that just because it was driven by bots doesn’t mean it was fake and therefore we can ignore it (I believe some people have that perception when they hear that some online uproar was driven by bots).
- Comment on OpenAI takes on Google, Amazon with new agentic shopping system | TechCrunch 2 weeks ago:
Enough with the agentic experiences.
Bring on the entish experiences.
- Comment on YSK that only by being yourself will you find people who like the real you. No one can beat you at being you, but you’ll only ever be second best at pretending to be someone else. 2 weeks ago:
Real talk. A crappy imitation of someone else can still be a better person than 100% authentic “you.”
Be the best person you can be whether that feels like it’s coming from your innermost soul or not. A lot of us have a bunch of trash inside that’s not worth being 100% true to.
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
Nice. None of those “go woke go broke” boycotts ever actually materialize into meaningful business pressure.
Unless you’re fucking Cracker Barrel.
- Comment on Cracker Barrel Outrage Was Almost Certainly Driven by Bots, Researchers Say 2 weeks ago:
The thing is people were persuaded to GAF. We hear “driven by bots” and we think “oh so it was fake.” But bots are merely the PR mechanism of choice in 2025. In prior decades it might have been AM radio and a bunch of press releases faxed around or influence networks pumping the talk shows for airtime. But the game has always been the same. It’s only the tools that have changed.
- Comment on Google's shocking developer decree struggles to justify the urgent threat to F-Droid 2 weeks ago:
I’m frustrated that the article didn’t link to the “decree.” Do you know where it is?
- Comment on Which career to pursue? 2 weeks ago:
My advice is to Target either healthcare or the trades. What you need is a medium-skilled career that will earn well, so you can write as a hobby. You can do very well as a carpenter, plumber, sonograph operator, or other medical technician. These are trades that have professional skill training courses you can take. It’s not necessarily a college program.
But forget writing. If you write well that will always help you a little bit but the fact you have written two short stories doesn’t even belong in a conversation about what job to get.
And forget coding. It doesn’t sound like it’s for you and it’s a very unstable field right now because of AI. We don’t know what it will be in 5 years.
Get into the trades. You’ll always have good work. You won’t be tied to any one area.
- Comment on Sniffing out danger: Electronic nose capable of detecting explosives, narcotics, dangerous chemicals and more. 3 weeks ago:
Or better yet they just point something at you that looks like a big microphone and then make that hand-flappy wafting-the-vapors gesture in front of it and say “go ahead anytime…”
- Comment on do you use non violent communication at the workplace? 3 weeks ago:
Just yesterday I was coaching someone on how to turn their demands into requests, so I guess yeah.
- Comment on Do all American stores have greeters? 3 weeks ago:
In most stores, greeting is just a task that all staff are trained on. The store has to be over a certain pretty large size before that one task becomes an entire person’s job. They also fulfill other functions like giving directions that make more sense at larger stores.
- Comment on Sniffing out danger: Electronic nose capable of detecting explosives, narcotics, dangerous chemicals and more. 3 weeks ago:
In all seriousness, we will eventually be able to do a lot of health diagnostics with technology like this. The applications mentioned in the article are frankly not very imaginative. Finding TNT: cool. Finding cancer early: amazing.
- Comment on Sniffing out danger: Electronic nose capable of detecting explosives, narcotics, dangerous chemicals and more. 3 weeks ago:
Where the movie can smell you? Because that’s what this tech does. It doesn’t create smells for us.
- Comment on Sniffing out danger: Electronic nose capable of detecting explosives, narcotics, dangerous chemicals and more. 3 weeks ago:
Generative AI assisted in the writing of this story.
No shit, good gawd. The way it went in circles repeating itself. Yeesh.
- Comment on what's your take on employers banning the use of languages other than English between coworkers at the workplace? 3 weeks ago:
I work somewhere that has two centers. One of them is not a place that speaks much English. The other is in the US. And then there are people scattered throughout the world.
All major official communications are done in both English and the other language. They will even redub CEO announcements that were in English for the people at the other center.