ilinamorato

@ilinamorato@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Please Don’t Make Me Download Another App | Our phones are being overrun⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Do you actually know anyone who’s in this situation?

  In my experience, it’s not a choice they’ve made. Some people are bad with money, to be sure. I’m related to a few. But they don’t typically just decide they’re going to blow August’s grocery budget on a new wardrobe; they have a job opportunity dry up after they already moved for it, or they had a messy divorce because their spouse was abusive, or they poured a ton of money into some career training that turned out not to give them any real, marketable skills. Some bad choices, some unavoidable occurrences, some terrible luck, but nothing that crosses the line to them being frivolous.

  Thirty years ago, a family could weather one or two of those, no problem. My dad got laid off not too long before I was born, and he was the sole earner for our family. He got hired fairly soon after, but in the meantime we were fine.

  I don’t live a whole lot different than my parents did then. We have more kids than they did, but I’m in a higher earning potential career than he was. Plus, my wife and I are both employed. Yet if either of us were laid off, we would not last long on savings.

  One thing I’ve learned as I get older: yeah, people are irresponsible. But the generations are pretty much the same, and trying to pretend otherwise is a good way to get clicks on your article but a bad way to actually get any meaningful insight about people. So if our generation is having more widespread problems than our parents’ generation did at this age, it’s probably not because we aren’t as responsible as they are. Something systemic probably changed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Please Don’t Make Me Download Another App | Our phones are being overrun⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  not being strapped for cash is possible for pretty much anyone in the lower-middle class and above, and even those in the lower class could get there by stabilizing their finances so they can take some risks to increase their income (i.e. night school, quitting a bad job for a better job, getting CDL and financing a truck, etc).

  It’s easy to say “stabilize your finances!” but on a practical level it’s almost impossible to do when there’s no wiggle room. You can’t stabilize any finances if you’re taking out payday loans in order to pay rent every month. It’s not like there’s any money to be put into savings if you’re making $2,000 a month but putting $1,000 toward rent, since most people rather like to eat.

  I’m thankful to not be in that situation, personally, but it’s not something you can just wish your way out of. Even your examples require a certain level of financial breathing room that people don’t tend to have when every dollar is spoken for. You can’t finance a truck if your DTI is already high. You can’t take CDL training or night school if you have to work two jobs just to keep food on the table.

  I’ve heard plenty of stories about lawyers and doctors having trouble keeping up with debt payments because they got caught trying to keep up with those wealthier than them.

  But if you get into that scenario, you can just sell the supercar or downsize your house or whatever. That’s not really an option for people who are living paycheck-to-paycheck.

  So I don’t think “strapped for cash” is a good metric for economic class, income is,

  I think income divided by local cost-of-living could be, maybe.

  At the end of the day, irresponsibility with money is still a problem for sure. And keeping-up-with-the-joneses is probably a problem for some people. I’m not one of them, and none of the people I know are either, but I suppose some people have that issue. In my experience, though, most people who are struggling financially are not in those situations. They’re just trying to keep their heads above water.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Please Don’t Make Me Download Another App | Our phones are being overrun⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I disagree strongly that $1k is enough for any one emergency. My healthcare deductible is higher than that. The last two times I’ve needed car repairs, the bill was $2-3k to get the thing back on the road. If one of our appliances breaks down, we might be able to replace it for $1,000 if it’s the dryer or the dishwasher, but if it’s the fridge, that’s not close to enough.

  $1,000 was plenty when I was in college back in the mid-00s, but I was single with no kids. That’s just not a realistic emergency fund in 2024, and even less so if you have a family.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Please Don’t Make Me Download Another App | Our phones are being overrun⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Honestly, what you see isn’t familiar to me at all. The people I know are very good at being frugal and wringing the last out of every dime, not being extravagant or frivolous, etc. We have no car payment on our ten-year-old minivan, own our home, and haven’t been clothes shopping in years except to replace things that wear out, that sort of thing.

  The problem isn’t budgeting; we have a budget, and we stick to it pretty well. There are very few things we could cut, and doing so might save us a hundred or so dollars per month. The problem is that inflation has eaten up every dollar from my paycheck we used to have in surplus. The problem is that my salary hasn’t kept up with inflation and nobody else around here is hiring.

  Yes, you can budget yourself from the top of one financial class into the bottom of another one; and you can manage money poorly enough to drop from anywhere to the bottom of the heap. But that doesn’t change the fact that there is a significant financial crunch happening for most people in the world right now.

  Seems like everyone has their own preferred explanation as to why that’s happening (corporate greed vs. government overreach), but the fact that it’s happening seems pretty clear.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Please Don’t Make Me Download Another App | Our phones are being overrun⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  For sure, but like…I’m a middle-aged software engineer in a low cost-of-living area. My parents always had enough on one income, but we’re struggling on two.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Please Don’t Make Me Download Another App | Our phones are being overrun⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  We’re very much NOT upper class.

  I kinda think that not being strapped for cash is being upper-class.

  Upper-class: Always having enough

  Middle-class: Always having almost enough

  Lower-class: Never having enough

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Please Don’t Make Me Download Another App | Our phones are being overrun⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Most folks I know like that are not strapped for cash.

  Whoa. What group do you run in? Literally everyone I talk to on a daily basis is.

  I actually just thought through an average day, and the people I talk to regularly. I’ve had conversations with each and every one of them over the past few months about how we’ve had to make major changes to our lifestyles in one way or another because the money is going out faster than it’s coming in. We’re all solidly middle-class, for whatever that means anymore.

  So what circles are you in where not everyone is looking for every possible discount they can get? Saving $5 on groceries means I can afford another gallon and a half of gas. I can’t afford to be principled about privacy when those are the stakes. But it doesn’t mean I have to like it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft retires WordPad after 28 years — app no longer available as of Windows 11 24H2⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Sure, though it’s not something that anyone is likely to switch OSes for.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft retires WordPad after 28 years — app no longer available as of Windows 11 24H2⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Doubtful. There are a myriad of free and FOSS options that are available right now to people of even limited technological skill. WordPad isn’t damaging their bottom line, but since it’s certainly not adding to it, there’s no point in maintaining it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You'll have to use pto time to drown, but make sure it's approved first⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  If “a state of emergency” doesn’t protect workers who are fleeing said emergency in the same way that jury duty and voting rights do, then they are broken and need to be fixed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reddit Logging in with Google Accounts Automatically⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yep. The “always open in container tab” gets a little fidgety because Reddit uses a whole bunch of different domains (some of which it only flips to for an instant while redirecting elsewhere), so it takes a bit of work, but I’ve been able to successfully silo off Reddit, Xwitter, Meta, etc. into their own distinct containers that are independent of everything else I do.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Marques Brownlee says ‘I hear you’ after fans criticize his new wallpaper app⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There are a lot of people walking around with cracked screens who would seem to disagree.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Marques Brownlee says ‘I hear you’ after fans criticize his new wallpaper app⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Marques has a decent chunk of his fan base that’s…kinda rich? That’s the only thing that can explain why he reviews supercars and expects people to use their phone without a case. So if he’s directing some of that fan base’s money toward artists, I’m all for it, assuming the profit sharing is reasonable (and I have no reason to believe it’s not).

  I mean, I’m not going to pay that sort of money on a wallpaper (I almost always use photos of family or friends anyway). But if the people who buy it like it, and the people who sell art for it are treated well, you go MKBHD.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Marques Brownlee says ‘I hear you’ after fans criticize his new wallpaper app⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Fiverr is the worst. They enable abusive clients to find victims, and AI con artists to find marks.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is UI design backsliding?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  They have to maintain backwards compatibility for 40+ year old applications so that they don’t lose big corporate and government customers, but they also have to chase the newest trends in order to keep their shareholders happy. They built their business on selling their software, but most of their competitors are giving functionally-equivalent programs away for free. Their software runs without incident on literally billions of devices for decades, but one or two high-visibility bugs or design missteps and public perception of their brand totally tanks.

  And so, their business model sucks. Moving Windows to become a data-harvesting SaaS was a terrible choice, their pivot to AI is going to crash and burn, and software subscriptions are a scourge.

  But I think they’re just too big and too vertically integrated to actually be any better at this point. I just don’t think it’s possible for their executive team to make good decisions anymore. It’s like a black hole, where the closer you get to the event horizon, the more possible paths point toward the singularity; likewise, the bigger Microsoft gets, the more possible decisions point toward “devastatingly bad.” They honestly should have been split up 25 years ago; for the industry’s sake and for their own.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is UI design backsliding?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, I’ve been trying to make a switch over to Linux for a lot of reasons, but honestly Paint.NET is the one thing that keeps me tethered to Windows that I’m not super grumpy about (Adobe also keeps me tethered to Windows, but that makes me angry every time I think about it).

  If *Nix has a decent image editor with layers that isn’t super over-engineered like GIMP is, I haven’t heard of it yet. Maybe that’s all become web-based.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is UI design backsliding?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, I still use it too, almost weekly.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is UI design backsliding?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think so. He just said that he had evaluated it and it wasn’t a good fit for the application. I remembered it was in our Popular Feature Requests thread, and I looked back and (crazy enough) […getpaint.net/…/2940-popular-feature-requests/](it’s still there.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is UI design backsliding?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I was a moderator on the Paint.NET forums for a long while in the mid to late 00s. You would be surprised at how many questions we got about when Paint.NET would get “the new ribbon UI!”

  The answer was never, incidentally.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Launches⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, gravity assists are a cheat code here, but the delta-V is still being changed—just by stealing velocity from elsewhere.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Launches⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, orbital mechanics gets a little bit mind-bendy sometimes. If you’re in a stable circular orbit, accelerating in the direction you’re traveling will actually result in you traveling more slowly because you have moved to a higher orbit, and firing engines to slow down will actually speed you up because you move in closer to the host body and take up a faster orbit.

  This is actually a problem spacecraft deal with regularly. If a Dragon capsule is behind the ISS and wants to dock, using its thrusters to accelerate toward the ISS will actually result in it falling further behind. Decelerating will get it closer, though it will then be in a lower orbit. Orbital rendezvous is tough.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Launches⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If you’re willing to settle for that kind of timeline, you could “launch someone into the sun” by just…leaving them on Earth for five billion years. At that point, the sun will become a red giant and probably expand to engulf the Earth.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Launches⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Good question, but if you cancel out only a little bit of orbital velocity, you just orbit in a little bit closer. Without any appreciable drag acting on you, there’s nothing that will keep your orbit decaying. You’ll just be in a smaller, perhaps slightly more eccentric orbit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It hurts.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s obviously a head shot of a person holding their hands in the air like they just don’t care.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Launches⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Because the Earth is really cookin’, and anything anyone you hurl toward the sun will inherit that orbital velocity as well, meaning that they’ll actually end up going around the sun, instead of into it. And due to the speed it would pick up on its way in, it would basically take up a stable yet highly-eccentric elliptical orbit.

  “Well, what if we throw them in the other direction, to make up for it?” That’s called retrograde, and that’s basically exactly what you’d have to do: cancel out the Earth’s entire orbital velocity. Which would take a lot of energy, plus a couple of really exacting gravity assists from planets on the way in.

  By contrast, even though the escape velocity from the solar system is no slouch (42 km/s), you get to start with the Earth’s orbital velocity (30 km/s)–meaning you’re already a little under 3/4 of the way there. Plus, if you can make it to Jupiter and Saturn, you can get a significant gravity assist, and they’re much bigger targets for such a maneuver than Mercury or Venus are.

  So, yeah, bottom line: you only need a delta-V of about 12 km/s to get out of the solar system, but a delta-V of 30 km/s to get to the sun without going into orbit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Unity cancels the stupid Runtime Fee⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  John Riccitello should find it very hard to get a job as an executive after a blunder that massive, but alas he’s doing just fine.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Unity cancels the stupid Runtime Fee⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  it’ll take many, many years for them to even be on the radar for most developers now.

  Probably longer than the company has, to be honest. The engine’s best bet is to get purchased by another company that partially open-sources it or something.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Discord lowers free upload limit to 10MB: “Storage management is expensive”⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  “Storage management is expensive”

  It’s really not, though. Discord has 200,000,000 MAU. If every single one of them uploaded a file every month (of pretty much any size) and Discord tossed it into an AWS S3 IA bucket, it would cost them $500 to store that data. Their total S3 bill for storage would be five hundred US dollars. Storage is dirt cheap. AWS doesn’t even charge per gigabyte on that storage type, it’s so cheap; they charge for downloads.

  So, ok. Let’s talk downloads. If each of those files were 25GB and downloaded twice (probably an underestimate, but not everyone is uploading files, so I’m going to make the completely unfounded assumption that it’ll all shake out), it would cost them a couple hundred thousand dollars. Which, ok, that’s much more significant than $500. But Discord made $575 million last year—so the S3 download costs would be 0.03% of their total revenue. They probably spend 2-3 times more on coffee.

  Storage management is emphatically not expensive.

  My guess? They just saw that the higher upload limit was eating into their Nitro subscriptions.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"Concord servers are now offline. Thank you to all the freegunners who have joined us in the Concord galaxy"⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not saying that would be a better experience for players, just that if they wanted it to succeed they should probably have done more marketing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"Concord servers are now offline. Thank you to all the freegunners who have joined us in the Concord galaxy"⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not entirely oblivious to gaming news, but the literal first I had ever heard of this game was when they announced that it was being shut down. Methinks after eight years of development it could’ve had a few more dollars tossed into the marketing budget.