SatanicNotMessianic

@SatanicNotMessianic@lemmy.ml

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[What If?] Would a Submarine Work as a Spaceship?⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think they also have an EMP effect that can damage ship/sat electronics.

  But, like the internet, a sub is a series of tubes. You have a big horizontal tube that the people and the engine lives in, and you have vertical ones where the things that blow up cities live.

  I mean, there are optional smaller horizontal tubes, but I feel like if you’re going to launch a sub into space it really ought to be one of the big ones. Maybe it’s just a Freudian thing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Air Canada must honor refund policy invented by airline’s chatbot⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The summarizer could do better by just copying over the entire text of the article. This was incoherent. Its only utility is for people who can’t or don’t click through.

  You know how they say an infinite amount of monkeys in an infinite amount of time could produce the works of Shakespeare?

  This is five monkeys in fifteen minutes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It’s a dark time to be a tech worker right now⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh, that’s a fun one. By the actual Y2K I think I had already transitioned into a dot-commie (where it pretty much was ignored), but the run up was interesting. I was previously in a much more Office Space kind of situation. I was the hot new talent using modern technologies like Perl and Java, but virtually everyone else was writing cobol on green screens for an IBM midrange system, with many many hours dedicated to updating code to use four digit dates. These were the days when news channels were predicting airplanes would fall out of the sky, nuclear plants would melt down, and cash registers would stop working entirely. World ending chaos.

  The people around me were doing basically the same job for 30 years. I don’t even know enough cobol to write a joke in it, but we’re not talking about Donald Knuth here. I’m talking about green screen terminals connected via token ring or some kind of crap like that.

  This is when Gateway Computer stores were in shopping malls and came with stickers on the front boasting about how they were “Y2K compatible” and were upgradable so that 16 MHz 386SX was the last computer you’d ever need.

  Getting old is fun, other than the back pain, organ failure, and that memory thing I can’t remember the name of.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tenacious flu⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  In the US, there is no law or regulation. It’s decided company by company. We usually distinguish between vacation days and sick days, and the number of hours for each accumulate throughout the year based on the number of hours worked, with more senior employees having a higher ratio (meaning they accumulate hours faster). The total number of hours are generally capped (eg, they can’t go above 240), but they do carry over year to year. Some companies (and I believe this is required in some states, like California) must pay out the remaining vacation hours when the employee leaves the company, so that if you leave with 120 hours of vacation on the books, you get three weeks vacation pay in addition to any additional severance package. That does not hold for accumulated sick leave. These are both considered “paid time off” (PTO) because employees are paid their salary/hourly pay. When I left my last position, I did so with 240 hours of vacation that they had to pay out, which was in addition to my hiring bonus and moving allowance at my new employer. It came in handy.

  Other companies do what’s called “unlimited paid time off.” This means there’s no pre-existing cap and that vacation and sick time get bundled together. It’s all at the manager’s discretion. Depending on the company, though, it can be a disadvantage. Corporate culture can be such that people are discouraged from taking time off, and there’s no vacation pay out if you leave, because you don’t have set hours on the books. Americans in general take long weekend or week-long vacations, sometimes up to two weeks. Depending on the role (and the nature of the vacation), they’ll still work some hours, because that’s often the cultural expectation.

  The worst jobs - and this means the majority of service jobs - allow for either zero PTO hours, or will routinely deny employee requests to use them. The above applies to corporate jobs (eg engineers and designers), union jobs, and government work. The person making your pizza or telling you where the shoe department is probably doesn’t get those “benefits,” and if they do, they have to jump through a ridiculous number of hoops (including facing the wrath of their manager) to exercise them.

  I’d like the US to have legislation to force minimum levels of PTO, and I’d like to have the culture change so one can say “I’m going to be in Greece for four weeks but will call you when I get back” rather than saying “I have stage three liver cancer and will be getting my organs replaced but I can make the meeting at ten.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tenacious flu⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Manager at a FAANG here. Three days of sick leave (per year I’m guessing) is fucking insanely low. Just a flu will take someone out for a week easily. If you force them to come in or else take unpaid time off/risk being fired you’re going to a) get someone who is marginally productive at best and b) likely to get more coworkers sick, causing a bigger slowdown and costing the company more money. You also come off like the person who writes the memo that 40% of sick time is taken on a Monday or a Friday.

  You’re Colin Robinson, the energy vampire of your office.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It’s a dark time to be a tech worker right now⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I am an engineering manager at a FAANG company and I get that it was mostly in fun, but as a professional who does this for a living I just wanted to point out that not only were you wildly wrong, literally Elon Musk’s lived and executed experience proves you wildly wrong.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It’s a dark time to be a tech worker right now⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yup. I went back into academia, then rotated between that, military, and government work. Now I’m waiting to see if the other shoe drops and I either sponge off my partner or buy a beach house in Mexico.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It’s a dark time to be a tech worker right now⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve been working in tech in one form or another since about 1994 and even before that if you include “writing some software for some guy’s cash register.” I’ve been through a few of these. They suck, but two years from now it’ll be forgotten.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It’s a dark time to be a tech worker right now⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not disputing their experiences - I’ve replied otherwise on this thread - but I’m going to guess that a lot of those experienced devs didn’t go through the 2000-2002 ish dot com crash, or maybe even the 2008 recession.

  Sometimes the money goes away for a while. The money has currently gone away. Eventually they drop the interest rates, people decide that real estate or EVs aren’t sexy anymore because they’re overbought, and the money floods back in. Then it gets too much, to the point that some kid gets $60M for the idea of selling barbecues and charcoal over the internet, and the cycle repeats.

  We thought Keynes fixed this but then decided it was more fun for a handful of people to make shitloads of money and then crash the economy every decade or two.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It’s a dark time to be a tech worker right now⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  While you’re right that many tech companies overhired, they overhired into an increasing market. Multiple companies, including Twitter, then over-fired and ended up trying to get employees to boomerang or otherwise hire into positions that they cut. Other companies, like Apple, expanded but did not overhire, and as a result have not done mass layoffs.

  I also have no idea how you come up with a 20 person IT department at every site when internet services companies live and breathe on IT services. Everything from data centers costing tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars to making sure devs can commit code and that backups get made takes IT services. I’m not sure what industry you’re in but you’re vastly under-budgeting and setting yourself up for failure, exactly the same way Elon is doing. Elon managed to crash twitter’s valuation by a whopping 90% inside of a year. If the cuts he made were justified, the line would have gone in the other direction.

  Content moderators and ad sellers are literally the entire point of having a company like Twitter. Curation is the product, and the ad buyers - not the users - are the ones paying the bills.

  So, yes - companies hired because they needed to hit production targets during Covid that were not sustained by continued market levels post-pandemic. That’s always going to result in cuts.

  But a lot of what we’re seeing right now is upper management/c-suite types seeing how close they can cut costs to the bone without it hitting the quarterlies as production falls off and reliability tanks, and just hoping to make it out the door before that happens.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It’s a dark time to be a tech worker right now⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  grinding, screeching noises coming from the engine room

  To be fair, those are the normal TARDIS sounds.

  On the other hand, Dr Who doesn’t have an engineering or SRE staff.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If we can use hydrogen to power electric motors, why can’t we use water to run a car?⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You should probably look into the chemistry needed to do 2 H~2~O -> 2H~2~ + O ~2~

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If Paul Bunyan were real, he would have been a major contributer to deforestation⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I cannot find the lemmy thread, but here’s an older reddit thread which itself contains a link to this video.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If Paul Bunyan were real, he would have been a major contributer to deforestation⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Based on a recent discussion, I think it was decided that Paul Bunyan (and, one would infer, Babe) should be classified as kaiju. It feels a bit racist (or at least specie-ist) to single him out compared to the damage done by all the others.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Daily briefing: Want a glowing houseplant? Now you can buy one⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes. Yes, I do.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Journalist says he finds it ‘surreal’ to have account on X suspended after writing critique of platform⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Towards the end he says that it was about 35 minutes. Plus maybe green ket is like blue meth.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Journalist says he finds it ‘surreal’ to have account on X suspended after writing critique of platform⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yup - this is one that stayed with me. This has earned a place in internet history.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How does employing a rapist not constitute an unsafe work environment for female employees?⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Sorry - I should have realized others would point that out as well. I didn’t mean to pile on.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How does employing a rapist not constitute an unsafe work environment for female employees?⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  “Right to work” means employees can work in a union shop and receive the benefits of such without having to join the union or pay dues. It’s a set of laws that have successfully destroyed unions.

  You’re thinking of “at will” employment laws, which means an employer can fire an employee for any reason or for no reason, but not for an illegal reason (which varies depending on state but includes the right to organize and rights against discrimination and retaliation).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Elon Musk Bought Twitter to Settle His Jet-Tracking Beef, New Book Claims⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Elon is first and foremost a con man.

  He gives them the old razzle dazzle, and even tech investors get so impressed with his confidence and his technobabble and his statements like “This is ready to ship today” that they’ve just lined up to give him money.

  I think what’s happening now is that the blush is coming off the rose. Elon first got his money because he was I volved as a founder in a company that he was fired from because of incompetence, but kept a large enough founder equity stake that he cashed out a billionaire. Then, because money was cheap and because you hit a tipping point where it’s easier to make money than lose money, he failed upwards.

  Now reality is starting to catch up with him, and he’s in a panic. He’s psyched himself out enough that he’s turned pure Trump, doubling down and becoming more outrageous instead of taking his responsibility to his companies into account.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Shell Is Immediately Closing All Of Its California Hydrogen Stations | The oil giant is one of the big players in hydrogen globally, but even it can't make its operations work here.⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think that Toyota recently announced they sold a total of 14,000 (in the US, I’m assuming). They also announced that they were planning on continuing production on the same article, but I don’t know what this will do to their plans.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨“Don’t let them drop us!” Landline users protest AT&T copper retirement plan | California hears protests as AT&T seeks end to Carrier of Last Resort obligation.⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Residents also described problems with wireless service that could serve as the only replacement for copper networks in areas that AT&T hasn’t deemed profitable enough for fiber lines.

  When I lived rurally, I had two choices - landline or edge cellular network which was unreliable. I also had the absolute best connectivity off all of my neighbors because not only was I the only one able to have an account on the ISP’s over-subscribed DSL line (at a whopping 1.5 Mbps), I was also fortunate enough to have the house with the highest elevation - literally on top of the hill. No one else had any cell reception at all. Eventually AT&T actually gave me a femtocell box, which routed all of my cellular calls across my shitty DSL, but they weren’t having to pay the fees to the edge provider.

  Part of being granted monopoly rights when doing things like laying lines is that you have to take the good with the bad.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do you think that there will be another event like 9/11 in the next decade in the United States of America?⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think it’s more likely that we will see smaller scale attacks by domestic terrorists, ranging from mass shootings to something on the scale of a Timothy McVeigh. I can also see a probability of a return to a 1960s/1970s level of political violence and assassinations.

  I think those are more likely than a large scale attack from foreign terrorists.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI lobbying spikes 185% as calls for regulation surge⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m going to write a script that uses chatgpt to write letters of concern about AI to my representatives and senators daily.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apple employees outnumbered customers at Vision Pro launch in San Francisco's Union Square⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  They’ve sold 200k preordered as of a couple of weeks ago.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Offspring⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh shit! I didn’t know they did a live action of him!

  I ate the onion today.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Offspring⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Max Headroom has escaped cyberspace and he looks pissed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ray tracing made possible on 42-year-old ZX Spectrum: 'reasonably fast, if you consider 17 hours per frame to be reasonably fast'⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s like playing chess by mail, but with Doom.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anti-racism be like⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Depictions associated with slavery and servile minorities are different than a little girl in a sun hat. Who would have guessed?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anti-racism be like⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Depictions associated with slavery and servile minorities are different than a little girl in a sun hat. Who would have guessed?