kicksystem
@kicksystem@lemmy.world
- Comment on Very few people realise how environmentally devastating this game is. 1 year ago:
I thought cricket was the most boring sport in existence.
- Comment on WeWork founder remains a billionaire even with firm’s bankruptcy | The Straits Times 1 year ago:
I kept pushing for my vision, which would have taken a bit of patience, but the shareholders kept pushing for faster returns within unreasonable time frames. The other founder was CEO at the time and he didn’t dare resist the shareholders impatience.
The other founder kept changing the company strategy after pretty much every prospect he talked with, because he wanted to make a faster return, which, against my constant back-pressure to get stuff properly done, made us move in all directions without ever really committing to a single strategy or even properly finishing work. We had a period of fast growth for a while, mostly due to a smart sales strategy and a slick story (based on my vision), but then all the unfinished loose ends kept creeping back and we lost a lot of customers to quality issues and an inability to deliver on our promises. Every customer wanted something else and since we were building a platform we could in theory do everything, but in practice we had only a certain amount of developers, so we just couldn’t make them all happy. There was also a real pressure from sales to make prospects and POCs work, but there was very little pressure to make actual production systems produce value, so it seemed we were never really working on the things that our customers actually wanted, but always on features that prospects like and may sell well.
After years of fighting to get the company aligned on a single product strategy, the other founder and I finally got it to that point, but we had lost a lot of business and had to fire nearly 30 people (half the company size). A relatively new power hungry product manager basically did a bunch of shareholder ass kissing behind closed doors. He then got elected as the new CEO, when the old CEO (who really wasn’t very good) got demoted. His true narcisistic/sociopathic nature was then revealed. At that point I couldn’t handle it anymore. The company still exists and I wish them well, but I am so happy to not be involved with it anymore.
It all got started with a lofty vision, but greed for money, status and power basically fucked it over from all sides.
- Comment on WeWork founder remains a billionaire even with firm’s bankruptcy | The Straits Times 1 year ago:
I was a founder once and I had a very lofty vision for the future. I was very surprised when people started asking me for my exit strategy. What the hell, yo? I am trying to make the world a nicer place, not just fill my pockets.
- Comment on WeWork founder remains a billionaire even with firm’s bankruptcy | The Straits Times 1 year ago:
Reminds me of “human resources”. My experiences with HR have also been largely negative. They’re there to protect and make sure the humans are a resource to the company, not for the humans and humanity.
- Comment on Apple has a memory problem and we're all paying for it 1 year ago:
Which LLM are you running on your macbook?
- Comment on Seek relief 1 year ago:
I heard some doctor say during a podcast that these medicines are really bad for your microbiome. Apparently this is still not common knowledge in the medical science and the effects may be much more devistating than once thought.
- Comment on Heat pumps can't take the cold? Nordics debunk the myth 1 year ago:
Feast your heart on this:
- Comment on ‘It’s quite soul-destroying’: how we fell out of love with dating apps 1 year ago:
Sure, but even so you’re nudging people in a direction that may or may not be the right direction. Some justification for advice is in order, right? I don’t know, perhaps @figaro@lemdro.id is a social psychologist who has spent years researching this topic?
- Comment on ‘It’s quite soul-destroying’: how we fell out of love with dating apps 1 year ago:
I don’t know. Some justification for your advice maybe? I know you intend well, but I am genuinely wondering how you know whether your advice is right and why you feel qualified to give advice.
Just one thing, you can say dating apps all suck, but I found my wife on a dating app, so maybe weave that into your story as well if possible :)
- Comment on ‘It’s quite soul-destroying’: how we fell out of love with dating apps 1 year ago:
I couldn’t really found scientific research to back this claim up. Can you elaborate and back your claims up?
- Comment on ‘It’s quite soul-destroying’: how we fell out of love with dating apps 1 year ago:
That seems like super generic advice. Why would you give it to anyone? Are you more qualified somehow than the people you give it to?
- Comment on Has HP printers always been this bad? 1 year ago:
Every HP printer I owned over the last two decades was a huge pile of crap. I hate printers now and will never buy one ever again. I go to the library to print.
- Comment on New Study: 54% of American Adults Read Below 6th Grade-Levels 1 year ago:
I have had to tell software engineers time and time again that is is totally okay to make error strings beyond one sentence or one word. It almost seems to me that they never realized that strings can hold multiple sentences and and don’t have relevant memory constraints.
- Comment on New Study: 54% of American Adults Read Below 6th Grade-Levels 1 year ago:
One way my code improves is by thinking what I need to comment. Then I refactor some and the comments become somewhat redundant.
- Comment on Living to 120 is becoming an imaginable prospect 1 year ago:
Have you ever considered asking a question or are you only just interested in misrepresenting what I said?
- Comment on Living to 120 is becoming an imaginable prospect 1 year ago:
My work is a hobby, so there’s that
- Comment on Living to 120 is becoming an imaginable prospect 1 year ago:
We don’t need to be compatible for the point to stand
- Comment on Living to 120 is becoming an imaginable prospect 1 year ago:
I don’t tend to think about the amount of work available nor the demand for the fruits of work to be fixed.
I agree with the issues you are raising.
- Comment on What is your favorite programming language? 1 year ago:
I’ll have a look when that type system is there. I am too dumb to program without a type system.
- Comment on What is your favorite programming language? 1 year ago:
Scala 3 is such a nice language. People should really give that a fair trial, not looking back at Scala’s ugly past.
- Comment on Living to 120 is becoming an imaginable prospect 1 year ago:
Perhaps you are half joking or not, but I used to think like this in my younger years. I spent a heck of a lot of time in my 20s and 30s doing all the bucket list stuff. Bunch of sex, drugs, traveling, wild adventures, starting a company, etc. Having gone through that I can tell you that I am much happier now than I was when I thought all those bucket list items were going to make me happy. Sure, they felt good and some were amazing, but it wears off and before you know it you’re chasing the next thing again.
A while ago I came across a nice, although a somewhat simplistic, equation that said that happiness equals the number of things you have divided by the number of things you want. I find that wanting less is a much easier route to increase that metric than getting more. Easier said than done though, but I found that silent meditation retreats do the trick for me.
- Comment on Living to 120 is becoming an imaginable prospect 1 year ago:
Maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but I don’t think working till very late age is a bad thing. I don’t expect to be sitting on my ass whole day long by the time I get to retirement age. What I do think is a bad thing is if by that time I am financially struggling to get by.
- Comment on Living to 120 is becoming an imaginable prospect 1 year ago:
Have a look at the seventh jhana. Maybe it’ll help.
- Comment on Living to 120 is becoming an imaginable prospect 1 year ago:
Pro tip: whole food plant based diet.
- Comment on Meta sparks privacy fears after unveiling $299 Smart Glasses with hidden cameras: ‘You can now film everyone without them knowing’ 1 year ago:
I think the lesson they learned from Google Glass is that the glasses have to be cooler, not make you look like a nerd, and the technology has to be way better.
- Comment on Meta sparks privacy fears after unveiling $299 Smart Glasses with hidden cameras: ‘You can now film everyone without them knowing’ 1 year ago:
This is exactly the kind of fear mongering that they are hoping people will buy into.
- Comment on Most U.S. adults don't believe benefits of AI outweigh the risks, new survey finds 1 year ago:
I’d like people to make a distinction between AI and machine learning, machine learning and neural networks (the word deep is redundant nowadays). And then have some sense of different popular types of neural nets: GANs, CNN, Transformer, stable diffusion. Might be nice if people know what is supervised unsupervised and reinforcement learning. Lastly people should have some sense of the difference between AI and AGI and what is not yet possible.
- Comment on DeepMind’s cofounder: Generative AI is just a phase. What’s next is interactive AI. 1 year ago:
ChatGPT with plugins already does this. Nothing controversial here.
- Comment on DeepMind’s cofounder: Generative AI is just a phase. What’s next is interactive AI. 1 year ago:
Of course you’re going to be right at first and very wrong in the long run.
- Comment on Unity deleted these terms, don't let them get out 1 year ago:
Finally, someone who actually makes arguments! :)
I can fully imagine that some people who counted on the old business model are really fucking bummed out by this change, need to rethink their business strategy and feel forced with their back against the wall. That has got to be a major pain in the ass and disappointment.
I am unsure why Unity is making this change. Perhaps they are just greedy bastards, perhaps they need it to survive or perhaps something in between. Regardless, if you would be in Unity’s position and would want to do this change then I don’t see a way an easy way around it. Even if they’d decide that older versions are licensed in the old way, then that would potentially mean you’d get a whole bunch of people sticking to an old version, which of course opens up a whole new can of worms that they might have good reasons for not wanting to open up.
While everyone is up in arms and hating on Unity my entire point was only to say that the business model that they are proposing isn’t unreasonable. Paying per installation. People are acting like it is totally unreasonable to charge for the number of installs, as if Unity isn’t a core ingredient of all those shipped products. It seems like people lose critical thinking skills when they get emotional.
This is not to say that it doesn’t suck monkeyballs for those affected. I use a free ferry service quite often where I live. It’s great and it would suck ass if the municipality would start charging for it, but I wouldn’t pretend that it is totally unfair that they decided to ask money for it.
PS some person accused me of using ChatGPT while directing their Unity hate onto me, but I truly don’t, so I am keeping my wall of text because I think it gets my point across more effectively.