skisnow
@skisnow@lemmy.ca
- Comment on Poland presses ahead with 3 percent digital tax despite Trump threat 11 hours ago:
companies whose global revenues exceed €750 million, effectively targeting larger U.S. tech companies
For me the brass-neckedness of this is that as soon as it comes to tax, all the big “U.S.” companies are actually Irish, Bermudan and Caymanian companies.
- Comment on Poland presses ahead with 3 percent digital tax despite Trump threat 11 hours ago:
Generally (for most countries that do this, I haven’t researched Poland) the point is that traditional (non-digital) companies have always paid import duties, usually much higher than 3%, when goods are physically imported. Digital goods by their nature have effectively been skirting the system for a few decades, and it’s not good for local businesses to be in a situation where they’re paying a bunch of taxes locally but foreign businesses competing in the same market get to just skip it.
The $750M requirement is likely because the amount of paperwork required for a small business to correctly calculate, process and pay that tax would be prohibitively expensive for them to sell their service to Polish customers, and they don’t want a situation where small businesses just straight up refuse to sell in Poland.
- Comment on mmmm yes undoubtedly 11 hours ago:
I’ll raise you Image
- Comment on mmmm yes undoubtedly 1 day ago:
also, dentistry is more accessible in the UK; free treatment is available to a bigger chunk of the population, and private dental care is cheaper as well.
So, in terms of severe complications stemming from lack of dental care, the US is worse, but the obsession with straightening & whitening means that people who have got it together enough to appear in the media generally have superficially nicer teeth.
It’s like most things in America - if you’re doing ok then it’s great, and if you’re not then the rest of the country just pretends you don’t exist.
- Comment on Our Channel Could Be Deleted - Gamers Nexus 1 day ago:
Before Google came along, most search engines were manually curated. I’m disappointed that nobody’s had any success bringing that concept back. They always cave in and take the cheap route by trying to make the general public & algorithms rate things, which of course instantly gets gamed to uselessness.
- Comment on The internet kind of sucks right now 3 days ago:
Sure but (and this goes to the other person who replied with much the same thing) there’s an order of magnitude of difference going on there, plus usually when someone says something wrong on a forum others usually show up to correct them.
AI responses have so far been very clearly a step down in reliability, so don’t be treating it as a binary.
- Comment on The internet kind of sucks right now 3 days ago:
Let’s say I scraped a guide you wrote about something you spent a lot of time researching, and then republished it as a Kindle eBook for $5 with my name listed as the author, whilst at the same time the site you posted it to went bust due to losing all its traffic to Google’s AI summaries. Would you consider it petty to object? After all, I’m increasing its audience for you.
- Comment on The internet kind of sucks right now 3 days ago:
Written grammatically correct English you are, which what LLMs thrive on is.
- Comment on The internet kind of sucks right now 3 days ago:
At least A.I might preserve some knowledge.
Big oof when you realize that literally nothing an AI tells you can be trusted, and you still have to find a proper source for it.
- Comment on The internet kind of sucks right now 3 days ago:
Yeah. The vinegar is rich in hydrocarbons, which improve the fuel/air ratio during combustion whilst also keeping the engine smelling nice.
- Comment on Instagram Caught Hiding Posts That Say "Immigrants Make the Country Great" 3 days ago:
Even if it’s not malicious, it’s still a case of a company sitting on more cash reserves than most small countries, and just choosing not to do better on their moderation systems.
- Comment on 🤡 We've all been played for fools. 🤡 4 days ago:
I thought one of the fundamental principles of a PhD was that you were no longer expected to have information spoon-fed to you. Dude failed two different tests at the same time.
- Comment on 4 days ago:
I get the impression from the other comments that a popular YouTuber made a recent video about it, where I’m guessing he tried to be a smartass about some of the implications of “fish” being ambiguously defined, and a bunch of his more credulous viewers have got the wrong end of the stick and ran with it?
I mainly know the idea from an old QI episode that explained it as “there’s no such thing, biologically speaking”, which in turn became the title of the show’s researchers’ long-running podcast “No Such Thing As A Fish”.
- Comment on 4 days ago:
Continuing a long proud tradition of “midwit” memes being made exclusively by people who think they’re the 145 IQ guy, but are actually the the 55 IQ guy.
- Comment on 4 days ago:
you’re a tree
- Comment on Computer Science, a popular college major, has one of the highest unemployment rates 4 days ago:
Same here. It’s popular to rag on leetcode-style technical interviews, and yet it’s astonishing how many CS grads with 3 years experience we get in who can’t seem to get through even the most basic “reverse this array”, “find the longest substring” type questions in the language they claim to be strongest in.
People sign up for CS degrees because they see high salaries, but don’t realize those salaries are for the high achievers who have been coding since the age of 10 and are writing code for fun in the evenings as well. Then they flood the market, only to discover that no companies have need of someone who cheesed their way through college, have never written more than a few hundred lines of code their whole life, and have no useful skills to offer.
- Comment on Computer Science, a popular college major, has one of the highest unemployment rates 4 days ago:
I’m probably going to cop a few downvotes for this, but in my whole career the only software engineers I ever met who were worth a damn were people who loved it for its own sake, and would be doing it regardless. So, if your feelings about the field are such that you’re thinking you might be better off doing a trade, you’d definitely be better off doing a trade.
Good luck either way.
- Comment on nooo my genderinos 4 days ago:
A lot of problems in the world can be attributed to people who think “if I don’t understand something, it must be because the experts saying it are all wrong”.
- Comment on 95% of Companies See ‘Zero Return’ on $30 Billion Generative AI Spend, MIT Report Finds 4 days ago:
The comments section of the LinkedIn post I saw about this, has ten times the cope of some of the AI bro posts in here. I had to log out before I accidentally replied to one.
- Comment on [deleted] 5 days ago:
Yeah, I imagine it’s quite cosy being able to live that lifestyle if things are going well, and you have the option of bailing as soon as things don’t go your way.
- Comment on Silicon Valley Is Panicking About Zohran Mamdani. NYC’s Tech Scene Is Not 1 week ago:
See also the entire Indochina war, where America tried to bomb Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos into being friends with them
- Comment on State names of the US if there were no letters "A" "M" "E" "R" "I" "C" "A" 1 week ago:
The moment I saw the title and thumbnail I KNEW that OP would have deliberately made at least one mistake in order to gin up engagement. The internet sucks now and I hate OP
- Comment on YSK There's a campaign to replace the distorted Mercator world map with the fairer Equal-Earth projection 1 week ago:
I’ll split this into two:
only matters to stupid people
People who are interested in geography, geometry, cartography, political science, geopolitics, culture, cognitive biases, ethnocentrism… generally not a low IQ cohort.
and does not qualify as something “I should know”
Ironically this might be true, just not for reasons that are flattering to you…
- Comment on YSK There's a campaign to replace the distorted Mercator world map with the fairer Equal-Earth projection 1 week ago:
you need to tag nudity as NSFW
- Comment on YSK There's a campaign to replace the distorted Mercator world map with the fairer Equal-Earth projection 1 week ago:
What really disappoints me about that site is the button that reads “Download the Correct Map”. They destroyed all their credibility with one word.
- Comment on YSK There's a campaign to replace the distorted Mercator world map with the fairer Equal-Earth projection 1 week ago:
Yeah I had a Peters Projection map when I was young and there wasn’t any big deal over it, somehow I just assumed everyone did.
- Comment on Steam payment headaches grow as PayPal is no longer usable for much of the world: Valve hopes to bring it back in the future, 'but the timeline is uncertain' 1 week ago:
The company has found ways to avoid some of the regulations that banks are held to
If you look at all the unicorns of the past few decades, a surprisingly large number of them did it with software that wasn’t in any way technologically advanced, but exploited technology to find loopholes in the kind of industry regulations that were there to stop companies from screwing people over.
PayPal was a way to do banking without registering as a bank. Uber, Doordash and other gig economy apps are exercises in sidestepping employment law. Airbnb, despite its origins as a couchsurfing app, didn’t get huge until professional “hosts” started using it as a way to run apartment hotels without having to meet the expectations or obligations of one.
If you want to build a tech unicorn, all you need to ask yourself is, “how can I make something 5% more convenient and 200% more shit?”.
- Comment on Steam payment headaches grow as PayPal is no longer usable for much of the world: Valve hopes to bring it back in the future, 'but the timeline is uncertain' 1 week ago:
It’s got all the worst parts of extreme anti-fraud measures, like freezing your account and holding onto your money just because you did something suspicious like receive money, but without actually protecting anyone from fraud.
- Comment on AI experts return from China stunned: The U.S. grid is so weak, the race may already be over 1 week ago:
Yes. As others in this thread have explained, they’re approaching peak coal and that line is not one that you can extrapolate upwards as a straight line into the future.
I also think it’s not reasonable to compare a developing/emerging economy with hugely increasing total energy requirements, with ones that already got their polluting growth phase out of the way in the 19th-20th centuries, especially when a very significant part of that coal is burned in the service of making consumer products for the latter. It’d be much more reasonable to compare them to India, which oh look, they are doing much better than in both current percentage and growth rate. Whilst it’s true that Africa is doing better in those graphs, they’re also not having nearly as much success in production or growth terms.
So overall, yeah it could be better on paper, but it’s very much treating perfect as the enemy of good and preaching at a country who built as much TWh solar&wind capacity just in the last 12 months of your graph alone, as the USA has over its entire lifetime.
(I was about to draw a few more conclusions from those graphs but noticed they’ve left out a bunch of other energy sources for no obvious reason, possibly mischief, so I can’t compare - the graphs imply that these regions are replacing coal with solar&wind, but without the data for total consumption including gas, nuclear, hydro etc we don’t actually know what the true situation is.)
- Comment on ChatGPT 5 power consumption could be as much as eight times higher than GPT 4 — research institute estimates medium-sized GPT-5 response can consume up to 40 watt-hours of electricity 1 week ago:
There’s such a huge gap between what I read about GPT-5 online, versus the overwhelmingly disappointing results I get from it for both coding and general questions.
I’m beginning to think we’re in the end stages of Dead Internet, where basically nothing you see online has any connection to reality.
