Elderos
@Elderos@lemmings.world
- Comment on YouTube Says New 5-Second Video Load Delay Is Supposed to Punish Ad Blockers, Not Firefox Users 11 months ago:
Don’t you just love being fed plausible deniability BS over and over and over again. I’ve lost friends over this bs, people who always argue in bad faith, always invoke plausible deniability, always min/max each interaction with hidden motives should be given no attention and credibility. Unfortunately, those people strives in corporate environments, and as you would expect, they’re often responsible for marketing, PR, sales, and corporate strategies. Corporations are the annoying lying friends you don’t want around.
- Comment on Silicon Valley May Never Learn Its Lesson | The tech industry is designed for people like Sam Bankman-Fried 1 year ago:
Story is behind a paywall, so yeah, X to doubt.
- Comment on YouTube is increasing Premium prices in multiple countries, right after an ad-blocker crackdown | You either pay rightfully for the video content you consume, or you live with the ads. 1 year ago:
- Comment on New Google Trial Docs May Explain Why Search Sucks So Bad Now 1 year ago:
Learn how to fix wrong driver 0x000015F1 no sound in Warcraft on your computer!
- Comment on "Fuck you, we're not paying": inside Unity’s Runtime Fee fiasco 1 year ago:
of all the games released on Steam in 2022, only 70 have hit the million dollars threshold. I think it is misleading to bundle all “indies” in one big basket. Those 70 games can afford to pay or negociate. Don’t get me wrong, total dick and amateurish move from Unity, but the amount of people around social media who believe game devs can just hit the threshold by accident and become unprofitable is ridiculous. Current gamedev here and ex Unity employee. It is worth denouncing Unity and fighting for our indies, but understand that this affect the 0.01%, literally. 70 games out of 6000 released games on Steam in 2022. Sure most games are shit and w/e, but you get the point.
- Comment on Redditor when women 1 year ago:
Yep, to the point where it is actually hard to meet with someone who is not immediately expecting sex.
- Comment on Running AI is so expensive that Amazon will probably charge you to use Alexa in future, says outgoing exec 1 year ago:
That is sort of the issue when mixing good conscience with capitalism. Either the goods are valued at what we’re willing to pay, or either they’re valued at what we think the profit margin of the business should be, but mixing the two ultimately leads us to fall for PR crap. Business are quick to gather sympathy when the margins are low, and we fall for this PR crap, but then as soon they own a part of the market it turns into raising the price as much as they possibly can.
That being said, Amazon became what it is because Bezos was hell bent on not rug pulling customers, at least in the early years, so it is possible they would decrease prices eventually to gain market advantage, that’s their whole strategy.
- Comment on Google Flat-Out Refuses to Bargain With Workers, Prompting YouTube Music Strike 1 year ago:
There’s apps to sync your stuff when you move to another platform. It won’t be perfectand certain features on certain apps are paywalled, but you should get a fairly acceptable copy of your content after using a service like this.
- Comment on The only thing doing tech tests has taught me is that I'm too stupid to do the job I've been doing professionally for the better part of 2 decades. 1 year ago:
Yeah, payroll was outsourced and they met with the firm once or twice a year. The firm took care of mostly everything legal, including insurances and tax benefits afaik. The head of “HR” was a lifelong friend of the owner so I guess he didn’t want to go there.
My experience in a big software company was different and probably just like yours. The people there were rockstars.
- Comment on The only thing doing tech tests has taught me is that I'm too stupid to do the job I've been doing professionally for the better part of 2 decades. 1 year ago:
Yeah, 4 employees out of 20.
The fact this department even existed is a mystery to me. They didn’t even screen candidates or participate in interviews. It was basically 4 glorified secretaries. To be fair they also managed the payrolls, which consisted of sending the same excel file to he accountant each week. Realistically we would only have needed 1 person to keep track of whatever might pop up and to make sure the payroll system was up to date. The owners liked to screen and do the interviews themselves.
At some other place I worked we had 1 admin/accountant person working like 1 or 2 days a week for a business of about 40 employees. Again the owners were taking care of new hires.
HR as a department seems largely useless unless you’re hiring 365 days a week and have so many employees that you can’t keep up with all the requests.
- Comment on Unity issue an apology on Twitter for "confusion and angst" over the runtime fee policy. 1 year ago:
Must be AI-written.
- Comment on The only thing doing tech tests has taught me is that I'm too stupid to do the job I've been doing professionally for the better part of 2 decades. 1 year ago:
Holy. One place I worked at had way too many HR personnel. It was crazy. I happenned to have my workstation directly next to them. They quite literally did nothing all day. Nothing. At. All. It blew my mind.
So why did we have so many? Well at basically every company-wide meeting this dep was putting on the biggest theater performance of being overwhelmed by “governmental endless bureaucracy” or something. So they always tried to hire more of their own friends. Temporary roles always became permanent and we ended up with 20% of the company working HR. The owner of the company, bless his heart, really could not say no.
My experience with HR in most companies has been hit and miss, but this one example really opened my eyes. Of course if you hire people who are basically actors you run the risk of forming an HR dep that is very dramatic and manipulative.
I can’t really blame the workers for taking advantage of an easy job and making a great living out of browsing Facebook and gossiping all day. But it really suck that the actual good workers were over-worked because other areas of the business were under-staffed. Virtually nobody else had the political impact in the hiring process HR had. Obviously this business wasn’t run by genius.
- Comment on It's a mass extinction event 1 year ago:
Java feels archaic compared to C#. I am not sure what problems you’re having on Linux? This sounds like a very outdated take tbh.
- Comment on It's a mass extinction event 1 year ago:
It is pretty damn close to actual C# nowadays. Some version, I think it was 2019, really upped up the scripting backend.
- Comment on It's a mass extinction event 1 year ago:
I am curious, what exactly is missing in the latest LTS version from .Net what makes it so clunky to use for students? Afaik it is pretty solidly close to actual .Net 4.7 nowadays.
- Comment on Unity boycott begins as devs switch off ads to force a Runtime Fee reversal - Mobilegamer.biz 1 year ago:
Calm down. It is a shit move and a break of trust but very, very few business will be bankrupted by those actual fees. You guys here are outraged but you have no stake in this, it is easy to claim that you’d burn your company to the ground to get rid of Unity, but there is a reason why only the rich indies are going to ditch Unity short-term.
- Comment on Isn't it weird that we have exactly five fingers and five toes on each hand and foot. 1 year ago:
You know what they say about guys with big hands.
- Comment on Unity boycott begins as devs switch off ads to force a Runtime Fee reversal - Mobilegamer.biz 1 year ago:
That is just reductionism. The post above yours went above and beyond to explain why they can’t just change the engine. For a lot of business it would mean bankruptcy now. So you understand that given the choice between bankruptcy now or maybe being squeezed again by Unity later, the latter is still more an attractive option, right?
- Comment on Unity Silently Deletes GitHub Repo that Tracks Terms of Service Changes and Updated Its License - GamerBraves 1 year ago:
Yes, very much. Unity has an army of highly-paid developers, some of which are behemoths in the industry and built other highly-regarded technology. It could be done, I mean, I don’t think Unity was particularly efficient spending its internal resources, but it is gonna take a while for other open-source engines like Godot to catch up.
- Comment on Update: Unity office death threat was made by a Unity employee 1 year ago:
Unity employees have extraordinary working conditions and pay. It sucks that their hard work gets tarnished by stupid executives and poor PR but let’s not paint the employee as a victim here.
- Comment on How to improve the gaming industry 1 year ago:
Too early to tell, but it could signal the start of a trend where developers and game studios at least entertain the idea of having a look at other engine before going with unity.
Don’t underestimate the sunk cost of Unity. it’s big, it’s taught in game classes, you might have years of in-house tools which you couldn’t re-use.
I can see hobbyist switching and game studios with games that are easy to port, like arcade-style 2d games. For a lot of studio switching is a real risk of bankruptcy, more so than the extra fees. It will take more than a few days for Unity to fall, or even have an “exodus”.
- Comment on Unity will start charging developers each time their game is installed 1 year ago:
I agree with the essence of your post, but the part about Unity already charging devs proportionally based on sales is not true. The editor is currently licensed per-seats and there is currently no cap to how much money you can make if you run the enterprise license, which is 5k/year per employee.
- Comment on Unity has changed its pricing model, and game developers are pissed off 1 year ago:
You’d be crucified in most communities for pointing out something like that though. Brand loyalty and addiction to outrage is rampant with gamers and tech enthusiasts.
- Comment on Unity has changed its pricing model, and game developers are pissed off 1 year ago:
What? The revenue threshold is mentionned over and over again, there is even a table with the revenue brackets. The info is right there, in the article and in the Unity blog post. Are you so addicted to outrage that you won’t even get your basic facts right? I am done here.
- Comment on Unity has changed its pricing model, and game developers are pissed off 1 year ago:
Installs don’t matter until you make 200k dollars per year, over a million dollars on pro. I
- Comment on Unity has changed its pricing model, and game developers are pissed off 1 year ago:
I am not defending the absolutely awkward pricing model of Unity.
Do you think we should also give them a flat 30% then? 1/3 of your gross is massive, and we could argue Unity is just as important in the execution of your game.
As far as I am concerned the comparison with retail does not hold. Retail runs on thin margins. Steam on the other hand is absolutely massive and afaik is one of the most, if not the most profitable business per employee in the USA. It is absolutely greed.
- Comment on Unity has changed its pricing model, and game developers are pissed off 1 year ago:
This is not the point I was trying to make. Replace “recoup” by whatever term you see fit I don’t think they are owed this money either. They are trying to cut on their quaterly losses tho, which are massives.
- Comment on Unity has changed its pricing model, and game developers are pissed off 1 year ago:
Absolutely not.
You don’t pay a dime until your game sells for 200k per year, at which point your quickly forced to go pro. It is not then until the 1M mark that you owe money. It is right there on the pricing page, did you read it?
- Comment on Judge in US v. Google trial didn’t know if Firefox is a browser or search engine 1 year ago:
Experts are supposed to break it down to them. But yeah, this is a flawed system but I fear the honnest take is that most humans know nothing about most things (even if we’re tempted to believe otherwise), so you’d be running out of avalaible judges real quick.
- Comment on Judge in US v. Google trial didn’t know if Firefox is a browser or search engine 1 year ago:
Since smartphone became a thing it has always been my theory that millenials, and up to a point GenX, would be the only two generations to be forced into being tech-savy. Boomers and GenZ have been overwhelmingly tablet and phone users. Whoever still logging on a PC nowadays will have a vastly different experience than what it used to be.
It is a different world really. I am a huge geek and I have been in tech for a long time now, but I still get confused look at family gathering when I tell them I have no idea how to fix someone’s Ipad or what app/settings/touch gesture to do whatever.