jqubed

@jqubed@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Zynga shuts down Torchlight 3 developer four years after its acquisition⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  TIL Zynga still exists

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How does HTML actually run on a computer?⁩ ⁨⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  If it was pre-compiled that could also cause issues not just across operating systems but also the architectures, right? Like x86 on desktop versus the ARM architecture most mobile devices use?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Does anyone use a phone without a protective case?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  I always have a case. Basically every phone I’ve tried has felt too slippery without one to me, so I get one that’s a little more grippy

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Whatever happened to cheap eReaders? – Terence Eden’s Blog⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve had a Kindle for a long time and considered upgrading to a non-Kindle device but was concerned that they don’t seem to get manufacturer updates for very long. This could make that more attractive!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨European Commission fines Delivery Hero and Glovo €329 million for participation in online food delivery cartel⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  All the abovementioned practices were facilitated by Delivery Hero’s minority shareholding in Glovo. Owning a stake in a competitor is not in itself illegal, but in this specific case it enabled anti-competitive contacts between the two rival companies at several levels. It also allowed Delivery Hero to obtain access to commercially sensitive information and to influence decision-making processes in Glovo, and ultimately to align the two companies’ respective business strategies. This shows that horizontal cross-ownership between competitors may raise antitrust risks and should be handled carefully.

  I suppose it can work if they still face robust external competition, like how Hyundai and Kia own stakes in each other and use their combined efforts to compete on the global market, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if even that has anticompetitive implications in their home market of South Korea, both for consumers and workers.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI sees human interaction as a competitor to ChatGPT's super assistant ambitions⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I read an article a while back highlighting how many “tech bro” products seem to be about eliminating human interaction, like grocery or meal deliveries, or self-checkout in stores. There is a convenience factor for these things at times, of course, but with the way many of these executives seem to be pushing exclusively using their services and having zero direct interactions with other humans it starts to raise questions about perhaps their own interpersonal skills and why they want to eliminate the human interaction. This feels like more of the same.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK that the Australian Prime Minister said CEOs of multinational corporations conspired to undermine his elected government⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Thank you for the explanation!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK that the Australian Prime Minister said CEOs of multinational corporations conspired to undermine his elected government⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  “white-anting”?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨No time to explain, grab a milk and look at the camera⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  As it got dark they began the arduous procedure of aiming the laser and something very quickly dawned on everyone: While considerable attention had been made in the design and alignment of the laser’s optics and in achieving good sensitivity of the optical receiver, no-one had really thought too seriously about the practical difficulties of aiming a very narrow beam over a distance of 118+ miles! Using a number of improvised techniques, the laser crew managed to get the beam “close”, setting the elevation with various shims and other pieces onhand, but getting both azimuth (horizontal) and elevation (vertical) dialed in proved to be a hair-pulling task.

  After a bit of fussing, the receive site crew was tantalized by the occasional brief, bright flash from the distant laser but it seemed as though the transmit site crew could never repeat the maneuver - plus the necessary corrections - to get the laser back and on-point! When the receive site crew queried the Grassy Hollow folks about this on the radio it turned out that they were using two primitive tools to adjust the aiming of the laser: A large rock tapped at the end of the metal channel in which the laser was mounted for coarse adjustments and a much smaller rock for fine-tuning!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨No time to explain, grab a milk and look at the camera⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I haven’t finished but this is a very interesting read

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨WTF is a rural town in the USA?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The role of the county government can vary significantly from state to state too.

  My understanding is that in Virginia the city/town that serves as the county seat is explicitly not a part of the county it’s located in!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨EV Tax Credit Ending Dec. 31, Effectively Increasing Prices Up to 28%. See How Popular EVs are Impacted.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s hard to imagine any way this doesn’t throw a huge wrench into the adoption of sustainable car technology for the USA.

  I think that’s goal

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are American animations more expensive than Asian animations?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s why a lot of American cartoons like The Simpsons or Futurama are animated in Asia, usually Japan or Korea. They might have American animators do the key frames and then pay Asian animators to do the tedious in-between frames, or just send it all to Asia.

  This also puts a downward pressure on American wages, with the threat effectively being, “take a pay cut or lose the work entirely.” Seems to be what Hollywood is hoping to do with “AI” also.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Shats⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  !nominativedeterminism@feddit.uk

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Shats⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Daniel Shats, M.D.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The World's First Mass-Produced Flying Car Is Here and It Costs $1 Million⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I couldn’t find specs skimming through the article, but it doesn’t look like it would fit in any normal parking space. Driving around might be as unwieldy as a motorhome or box truck, without the height advantage when you inevitably drive over a curb while turning. Doing that might also make it un-airworthy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The World's First Mass-Produced Flying Car Is Here and It Costs $1 Million⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  This looks to me like yet another in a surprisingly long line of airplanes that are also designed to be driven on roads in someway, but they’re basically all noticeably worse at either task than vehicles designed specifically for one of those tasks. It also invariably ends up more expensive than two specialized vehicles, so there’s never really any reason to build these.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The World's First Mass-Produced Flying Car Is Here and It Costs $1 Million⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Way more expensive than most private aircraft, though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I’m very good at math and would like health insurance. What is the easiest option?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Sorry for the slow reply; just remembered to ask her. For bookkeeping you don’t need anything. It could be valuable to get a certification in QuickBooks, but not required. It just seems to be the most common software.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Best tool for creating a basic business website⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If you’re okay with writing a little HTML and just don’t want to deal with writing/designing the CSS, I recently found out about HTML5 UP, which has a bunch of Creative Commons Attribution 3.0-licensed templates. It’s fairly straightforward to modify the content if you understand the HTML, and then you can host it for free as a static page at any number of places like GitHub Pages or Cloudflare Pages.

  If you don’t want to have the CC-By attribution on the webpage, the designer also offers a service called Pixelarity with the same templates and more for a $19/quarter non-renewing subscription. You can continue using the templates even after the subscription expires and can keep making new sites with any template you already downloaded, you just don’t get any updates or tech support when the subscription expires. Upload to one of those free static hosts and it’s dramatically cheaper than Ghost or WordPress, and probably less work than a static site generator for something that’s not changing often.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Company Regrets Replacing All Those Pesky Human Workers With AI, Just Wants Its Humans Back⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The buy-now-pay-later company had previously shredded its marketing contracts in 2023, followed by its customer service team in 2024, which it proudly began replacing with AI agents.

  A few months after freezing new hires, Klarna bragged that it saved $10 million on marketing costs by outsourcing tasks like translation, art production, and data analysis to generative AI. It likewise claimed that its automated customer service agents could do the work of “700 full-time agents.”

  As Siemiatkowski told Bloomberg, “cost unfortunately seems to have been a too predominant evaluation factor when organizing this, what you end up having is lower quality.”

  Also, just want to recognize this gem:

  Though executives in every industry, from news media to fast food, seem to think AI is ready for the hot seat — an attitude that’s more grounded in investor relations than an honest assessment of the tech — there are growing signs that robot chickens are coming home to roost.

  Robot Chicken clip of Lando Calrissian saying “This deal is getting worse all the time!”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I’m very good at math and would like health insurance. What is the easiest option?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Have you considered accounting/bookkeeping? My wife has done it before and it’s not necessarily the most exciting work but typically pays pretty decent. She says it can be interesting trying to track down what is preventing the books from balancing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Lemmy seems to have an LLM issue⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Maybe the kind of people/organizations who do karma farming on Reddit haven’t figured out that’s meaningless here

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Will all these multiplayer games being released without support for LAN or hosting our own servers no longer be multiplayer when the company shuts down the servers?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, I’ve never played Madden online. That’s very much a couch game to me still. Not that I’ve played it much in years. I picked up my first copy in over a decade a couple years ago when it was on sale at the end of the season.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is your favorite indie game?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I haven’t seen it mentioned and feel like it should count, since it really just had a solo programmer working with a graphic designer and musician, but RollerCoaster Tycoon and RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 took a big chunk of my gaming time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If you’re in the market for a $1,900 color E Ink monitor, one of them exists now - Ars Technica⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I did see something a few months ago about a company making large color e-Ink displays for applications like that and outdoor advertising at bus stops and the like

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If you’re in the market for a $1,900 color E Ink monitor, one of them exists now - Ars Technica⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m thinking at those prices this is probably intended for corporations that absolutely need a readable display in bright sunlight areas but don’t really care about refresh rate or color depth.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Consumers make their voices heard as Microsoft's huge venture flatlines in popularity⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Copilot is Microsoft’s name for their AI service, like Google’s Gemini or Chat GPT. Recall is their service that will screenshot everything you do for training improving the results.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You wouldn't steal a font⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Fun fact: the shapes of the letters in a font can’t be copyrighted, but the file that defines a font can. The name could be trademarked, though, so even if you redrew a font you might have to give it a different name. If it’s not trademarked, though, that’s how you end up with several companies having their own version of the same font.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What do office workers actually do?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Office work is largely paperwork, even if very little is on actual paper nowadays. Much of the work involves creating records or communicating with others to get things done. A salesperson will try to find clients for the product or service. They’ll typically create a record of customers or prospects with their contact information and notes about the negotiation. They’ll create a formal quotation or estimate for the customer and if the customer wants to move forward they’ll create an order confirmation. That document will trigger some other department to fulfill the order, either by providing a service or product to the customer. A work order might be provided to a service technician specifying what work is to be done and where. If a product needs to be delivered a picking slip might be created to tell someone in a warehouse where to get the product and how many to get. Once it’s been picked the product will go to the shipping department to be packed and shipped. An item fulfillment will be created saying what items were packed, how many, and what the tracking number is. Once the order is fulfilled an invoice will be created. If the customer paid in advance the payment will get applied to the invoice automatically or by someone in the accounting department. If the customer is on credit terms they’ll be sent the invoice with instructions on how to pay and when payment is due.

  There are so many steps like this. The records help the business plan. They know how many parts and supplies to order. They can track if they’re selling more or less than forecast, if they need to place a rush order for more parts, ask people to work overtime or hire more employees. If something starts costing more they can look to see if they need to raise prices or redesign the product to use a different component, or find an alternate source. At the end of the day, it all comes down to accounting, making sure the company is generating enough income to pay the bills, suppliers, and employees, and hopefully make a profit.