UnderpantsWeevil
@UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
- Comment on Oh. 10 hours ago:
“What do we do here?”
“Fundraise so we can afford more unpaid interns”
- Comment on Hrmmmmm 10 hours ago:
Do you actually think that’s worse than the elite deciding who is going to starve and who’s going to be disappeared to maintain their power?
I think that’s how it is accomplished. Divide and conquer.
- Comment on Hrmmmmm 12 hours ago:
The state has no control over the food at the pantries beyond
My brother in Christ there is literally a department of agriculture at the federal level and every single state. To say the state has no control over food in pantries you have to ignore water rights and farm tax credits and crop subsidies and trade restrictions and registration in pesticides and that’s just on the production end.
I live in a city where people are routinely arrested for distributing food to the homeless.
The state clearly has enormous control over what gets produced, where it is distributed, and who eats it. Even what price its sold.
- Comment on Hrmmmmm 13 hours ago:
True communism is very democratic.
At some point, you have to get passed “true whatever” and accept certain institutions already exist.
Also helps to recognize that communism as a movement has been anti-colonialist first and democratic only as it serves the former cause. Communists aren’t receptive to a liberal democracy that allows half the people to sell out the other half.
Folks love to get lost in the sauce talking about what Marxism really truly means, as an ideology, without asking why people adopt it or how they apply it in practice.
- Comment on Hrmmmmm 16 hours ago:
In the US? The church and the state are joined at the hip. Go look up the history of Mitt Romney. The man is an ordained Mormon Bishop while he lived in Boston.
We organize our charitable relief at the retail end through church fronts. But the money and the materials routinely come from state coffers.
- Comment on Hrmmmmm 20 hours ago:
If the food pantries are run by churches, then they are not state run
What if the state is subsidizing the church through tax credits, grants, and subsidies?
- Comment on Hrmmmmm 20 hours ago:
23 downvotes
People in the West absolutely can’t stand when you point out all the same instructions of poverty exist on their home turf.
It’s a sin to acknowledge poverty exists. Nevermind to suggest that westerners might be worse at alleviating it than their foreign peers.
- Comment on Hrmmmmm 20 hours ago:
You don’t see any state run bread lines do you?
I remember getting extremely screamed at on Reddit when I posted “Bread Lines” and a line around the block at a grocery store on the eve of a hurricane.
Apparently, that’s not a “real” bread line because idfk free markets or some shit.
- Comment on Hrmmmmm 20 hours ago:
A very costly lesson many maya people and other enemies of the aztec empire learnt after the spanish came to the americas was that the enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend.
See, I thought the lesson was more for the Aztecs. You can only commit so much human sacrifice before even a handful of foreigners with some novel propaganda can topple your empire from within.
- Comment on Hrmmmmm 20 hours ago:
As a precursor, sure. The OG 1918 October Revolution was fueled by a string of famines, exacerbated by the World War.
The American Bonus Marchers of 1932 were also propelled by food shortages of The Dust Bowl.
- Comment on At this SF grocery store, you can't leave unless you buy something 3 days ago:
Just about all we’ve got. Like, three store cops for every one clerk.
- Comment on At this SF grocery store, you can't leave unless you buy something 3 days ago:
Which means you’re going to have security guards checking receipts, not unlike at Krogers or Costco.
And I’m sure they’re very aggressive with anyone who looks criminally young or tan.
- Comment on At this SF grocery store, you can't leave unless you buy something 3 days ago:
I mean, I do have to wonder how many people with physical or mental disabilities are effectively just going to be trapped in here.
Also get the sense that they’ll have more and more and more and more and more security in and around the building as younger people start passing around exploits in the security setup.
- Comment on At this SF grocery store, you can't leave unless you buy something 3 days ago:
While I watched some customers struggle with the new technology, my receipt scanned immediately. The glass doors slid open, and I was free. But if, like this person on the San Francisco subreddit recounted, I hadn’t bought anything, my only means of exit would have been to beg the security guard to let me out.
The security guard
- Comment on Controversial startup's plan to 'sell sunlight' using giant mirrors in space would be 'catastrophic' and 'horrifying,' astronomers warn 3 days ago:
“We’re a startup”
“What’s your plan?”
“Giant mirrors in space to control the sunlight that hits the earth’s surface.”
“Wow, sounds incredibly expensive and of dubious technical merit. What are you asking to make this happen?”
“We need whatever money you have in your wallet right now.”
“And the return on investment?”
“Infinity zillion dollars.”
“I guess I’d be a fool not to hand you all my money.”
“Absolutely. Now… that’s a really nice watch. And shoes. We could get you an amazing return if you gave us those, too.”
- Comment on Meta is earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads, documents show 3 days ago:
What are they supposed to do?
My grandparents spent a lot of time playing tennis and bridge, knitting, and fishing.
- Comment on Meta is earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads, documents show 3 days ago:
Really raises the question of how profitable these scam ads have become.
Also speaks to the addictive quality of social media (or perhaps the grim state of offline society). People keep coming back to these obviously booby-trapped websites to claw at a thin veneer of simulated friendship because they’ve got nothing better to do with their lives.
- Comment on Square Enix says it wants generative AI to be doing 70% of its QA and debugging by the end of 2027 3 days ago:
They’re just gonna lay them off.
And hire other people with the excess budget. Hell, depending on how badly these systems are implemented, you can end up with more staff supporting the testing system than you had doing the testing.
- Comment on Square Enix says it wants generative AI to be doing 70% of its QA and debugging by the end of 2027 3 days ago:
Ugh. QA. Quality Assurance. Reflexively jamming that & because I am a bad AI.
Regardless, digital simulated users are going to be able to test faster, more exhaustively, and with more detailed diagnostics, than manual end users.
- Comment on Square Enix says it wants generative AI to be doing 70% of its QA and debugging by the end of 2027 3 days ago:
I mean, as a branding exercise, every form of sophisticated automation is getting the “AI” label.
Past that, advanced pathing algorithms are what Q&A systems need to validate all possible actions within a space. That’s the bread-and-butter of AI. Its also generally how you’d describe simulated end-users on a test system.
- Comment on Square Enix says it wants generative AI to be doing 70% of its QA and debugging by the end of 2027 3 days ago:
You don’t let AI check your work
From a game dev perspective, user Q&A is often annoying and repetitive labor. Endlessly criss-crossing terran hitting different buttons to make sure you don’t snag a corner or click objects in a sequence that triggers a state freeze. Hooking a PS controller to Roomba logic and having a digital tool rapidly rerun routes and explore button combos over and over, looking for failed states, is significantly better for you than hoping a massive team of dummy players can recreate the failed state by tripping into it manually.
- Comment on Square Enix says it wants generative AI to be doing 70% of its QA and debugging by the end of 2027 3 days ago:
I wouldn’t be shy about getting into Remake or Rebirth now. They both stand up as their own games (concise start/ending, somewhat distinct mechanics, each one is easily 40+ hours of gameplay). And with Part 3 targeted for 2027 release, I suspect this kind of overhaul would be outside their dev cycle to implement.
- Comment on Square Enix says it wants generative AI to be doing 70% of its QA and debugging by the end of 2027 3 days ago:
I would initially tap the breaks on this, if for no other reason than “AI doing Q&A” reads more like corporate buzzwords than material policy. Big software developers should already have much of their Q&A automated, at least at the base layer. Further automating Q&A is generally a better business practice, as it helps catch more bugs in the Dev/Test cycle sooner.
Then consider that Q&A work by end users is historically a miserable and soul-sucking job. Converting those roles to debuggers and active devs does a lot for both the business and the workforce. When compared to “AI is doing the art” this is night-and-day, the very definition of the “Getting rid of the jobs people hate so they can do the work they love” that AI was supposed to deliver.
Finally, I’m forced to drag out the old “95% of AI implementations fail” statistic. Far more worried that they’re going to implement a model that costs a fortune and delivers mediocre results than that they’ll implement an AI driven round of end-user testing.
Turning Q&A over to the Roomba AI to find corners of the setting that snag the user would be Gud Aktuly.
- Comment on They even do Price Discrimination on video games now 3 days ago:
Price discrimination lets airlines price first class tickets above cost so coach tickets can be priced at marginal cost.
Economy tickets aren’t prices at marginal cost. The first available economy seats are priced at a base rate. As the plane fills up, economy seat prices increase. Then the original economy passengers are bombarded with emails and texts asking them to upgrade to premium, when higher class tickets go unsold.
There’s also a secondary market for tickets exploited by resellers (Expedia, etc) that buy up tickets in advance and try to leverage corporate discounts for a profit.
But all of this ultimately making flying more confusing, more difficult, and less flexible (it’s basically impossible to cancel a ticket now), due to all the middle men playing hot potato with unsold tickets.
The “optional play” for flying is to just go to the airport and gamble on standby tickets, which require you to have far more free time than free cash. If you need to keep a schedule, this is a horrible model.
- Comment on The Great Firewall: Massive data leak reveals the inner workings of China's censorship regime 3 days ago:
With this series, we aim to present not just the most complete picture yet of the GFW, but a roadmap for pushing back against the machinery of state censorship.
It’s definitely a deep technical dive into the underlying infrastructure of Chinese internet services. But I’m not seeing any of this in the guts of the article.
- Comment on The Future of Advertising Is AI Generated Ads That Are Directly Personalized to You 4 days ago:
Definitely stems the tide, but it’s a long way from “never seen an ad in 25 years”
- Comment on Smart kid 4 days ago:
Pretty sure I read this in a joke book one of my grandparents had
- Comment on The Future of Advertising Is AI Generated Ads That Are Directly Personalized to You 4 days ago:
I’ve had some trouble setting up a pie-hole. It’s an imperfect system and something of a constant struggle between advertisers and ad-blockers.
If you’ve escaped every digital ad over the last 25 years, congrats. I’m reasonably tech savy, use adblockers where I can, and haven’t been remotely this fortunate.
- Comment on What 4 days ago:
Vast Lesbian Conspiracy to meet another girl at a softball game, move out to a cabin in the woods together, and run for city council in Portland.
- Comment on What 4 days ago:
Quite a few languages use borrowed words.
Imagine being a native Spanish speaker and listening to English media. Blah blah blah macho blah blah blah cafeteria blah blah guerrilla blah blah adobe blah blah blah El Nino.
