admiralteal

@admiralteal@kbin.social

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ordered back to the office, top tech talent left instead, study finds⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  We can't claim to know it left them with "bad" employees. I think there's vanishingly little evidence that recruiters actually go after the "good" employees effectively -- I'm pretty skeptical that a pro recruiter actually gets you better employees, they just make the process of getting employees way less stressful. We also have no reason to assume that a good or bad employee is correlated in any way with caring about not returning to office -- it's possible very bad employees are just as likely to quit as very good ones. How do you even tell good from bad, anyway?

  What this who return to office DOES do is preferentially retain the most obedient/desperate employees. Which may be part of the goal, along with low-key downsizing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tesla to lay off everyone working on Superchargers, new vehicles⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Musk told workers that Tesla "will continue to build out some new Supercharger locations, where critical, and finish those currently under construction."

  Sounds to me like the plan is to finish what is already under contract and do no more. I sure am glad the US authorities committed to that north american charger standard... what's even the status on getting a full specification for it including third-party development at this point anyway?

  I can't pull a quote for the new vehicle development team's situation because Tesla basically just keeps making the Model 3 with barely even incremental improvements to it, and even that one has totally inconsistent build quality vehicle to vehicle. Unless someone thinks the Cybertruck is going to save them -- hah.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Windows 11 Start menu ads are now rolling out to everyone⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Not really. With the super easy, friendly distros it basically just goes.

  I switched to Linux Mint Cinnamon a while ago expecting to just fool around a bit but mostly boot back into windows to do stuff. I've now found that the ONLY thing I need to go back to windows for is when I'm forced by dumb policies to use an MSOffice product, which fortunately doesn't happen to often -- and no, LibreOffice is absolutely not a sub for MS Office. The spreadsheet app is worse than google docs, and I'd rather work in typst than have to deal with the libreoffice writer -- especially as soon as I need to display an equation/figure/table of contents. Of course, I'd rather work in typst than deal with MSWord too, even while admitting that MSWord is better.

  That said, I don't really play games anymore. Games may still require frequent windows visits. But... I've been looking forward to a complete edition of horizon forbidden west and all accounts say it's linux compatibility is near perfect, so maybe things aren't so bad these days on the gaming front.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If you're selected for jury duty (US), should you give up your anonymous social media accounts?⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Good answers here, but ignoring probably the most realistic and practical truth of the matter in my opinion.

  You won't immediately be sent to the stocks for saying "I don't want to answer", the worst case scenario is that some officer of the court informs you that you must answer the question even if you don't want to. And even that is only going to happen if the attorney answering the question insists. And I struggle to imagine a situation where a competent attorney would do so.

  Being hostile towards your prospective jurors, making them feel exposed and uncomfortable, is not a way to march to victory in a trial. They want to ensure you aren't prejudiced against their client/case. Making you dislike them personally IS prejudice. Causing prejudice is a bad way to eliminate prejudice.

  They will ask questions, mostly yes/no ones, that you need to answer honestly. They may ask for clarification. If you don't want to answer and say so, it's unlikely anyone will press you because that unnwillingness to answer is just as clear an indication of who you are as anything else.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If you're selected for jury duty (US), should you give up your anonymous social media accounts?⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Good answers here, but ignoring probably the most realistic and practical truth of the matter in my opinion.

  You won't immediately be sent to the stocks for saying "I don't want to answer", the worst case scenario is that some officer of the court informs you that you must answer the question even if you don't want to. And even that is only going to happen if the attorney answering the question insists. And I struggle to imagine a situation where a competent attorney would do so.

  Being hostile towards your prospective jurors, making them feel exposed and uncomfortable, is not a way to march to victory in a trial. They want to ensure you aren't prejudiced against their client/case. Making you dislike them personally IS prejudice. Causing prejudice is a bad way to eliminate prejudice.

  They will ask questions, mostly yes/no ones, that you need to answer honestly. They may ask for clarification. If you don't want to answer and say so, it's unlikely anyone will press you because that unnwillingness to answer is just as clear an indication of who you are as anything else.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This technology existing would essentially be the end of all knowledge-sector jobs, instantly. It eliminates the value of your time, which means the labor market would almost definitely use it to pay wages VASTLY below minimum wage-per-perceived hour. People would take that bargain. You only have to work ONE day a week and we pay you a million dollars a year! ...that one day a week will be time chambered up to 15 years, though.

  Why pay one ace coder a bigshot salary when you can pay a whole village in the developing world to spend as much time as the problem could possibly need the same price and they'll still finish by Thursday?

  The economic ramifications are just beyond my fathoming, but I know it cannot possibly work in a society which has any kind of resource scarcity.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘My hoo haa is gonna be out’: US Olympians slam Nike for skimpy women’s track kit⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Wow, on top of that wild crotch it is also ugly. Wild.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Texas got more electricity from solar than coal last month⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Wind's not doing terribly, but in the last decade solar has seen something like a 7fold increase in prevalence while wind has only seen closer to a doubling.

  There's a chicken and egg problem here. These products are on learning curves. The more you sell, the cheaper they get, the more they sell. Solar has a killer feature -- it's ridiculous modularity. It scales from facilities that are acres and acres large all the way down to the roof of a van. That scalability has been a big part of driving demand for PVs beyond anyone's predictions.

  Wind needs some help. Again, these energy sources are ridiculously complementary and we need both for the future. I want to see wind keeping pace with solar PV. If it can do that, natural gas is going to be wiped out by them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Texas got more electricity from solar than coal last month⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Comparisons to coal are pretty... ehh.

  Coal is dead technology. It just sucks. It's incredibly expensive and polluting. Outside of a few plainly-corrupt politicians (like a certain senator from West Virgina), no one is really standing up to defend coal. That's even true internationally. China's trying to export all theirs to places that have no regulation around things like flyash because only by completely externalizing those factors can it make any sense, and even then it's a huge stretch. Germany has a concrete plan to decommission all of theirs (which has way too long a timetable, but that's a separate discussion). Australia is starting to sort their shit out on the subject, too, though the politics around Aussie energy policy make wonk heads spin they're so all over the place.

  There are regions in the US I know of where local utilities are buying out coal plants in order to shut them down and terminate their purchase agreements because it's cheaper than continuing to buy the coal. That's how lousy a power source coal is. Within my lifetime, I suspect I'll see virtually all North American coal plants get sold off / decommissioned even absent the regulation we ought to be passing to shut them down immediately.

  Solar is just cheap. It's cheap cheap cheap. The market is going to continue to make it explode. There are actual terrawats of solar wanting to come online with the transmission infrastructure (and FERC et al.'s broken policy regarding interconnection queues) being the main thing holding it back.

  What we really need to see right now is more investment in wind. It's totally complementary to solar production -- the wind tends to be blowing when the sun isn't shining -- but wind has not experienced the same wild learning curves wind has. That's holding us back from having renewable grids and needs to change. If only backyard/rooftop wind were as easy to do as solar.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI Adds Free Instant ChatGPT Access for Everyone. Here's Why That Matters⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Particularly goofy because ChatGPT is hardly the only bot and you can use the free version of e.g., Claude and get those better results now, for free.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Texas AG Ken Paxton Sues Chaturbate, xHamster Over Controversial Age Verification Law⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The analogy isn't quite right, though.

  In this case, you are leaving the state (digitally) and going to a market where the goods are not restricted. The vendor is then packaging them up the same way they always do, and you're bringing them back home with you.

  ...then the AG is suing the bodega you bought them from for not checking that you were from a state where it was restricted.

  It seems to me if anyone should be getting sued, it's either the ISP or the consumer. Both of which are politically infeasible; the first draws intense net neutrality implications on top of being an imposition among his homies and cronies in the ISPs and the latter would be unenforceable under current technological and legal paradigms.

  Long term, we should ABSOLUTELY expect these christofascist lunatics to push us towards our own Great Firewall though. That's definitely the endgame. They want total control over morality backed by the clenched fist of the state.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Users ditch Glassdoor, stunned by site adding real names without consent⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I did the same thing twice.

  Two different employers that really deserve to be absolutely thrashed but as soon as I got to the point where it was asking me my true identity I realized there was no hope it wouldn't come back to bite me in the long run.

  I understand why in their business model they want to be able to verify employment. I'd even say it's reasonable. But the Privacy implications of it are just too tremendous and they I've never been practically or systemically trustworthy.

  And knowing this about them means they aren't a reliable place to be warned off of a bad employer either. The primary purpose of their site is completely undermined by this bad policy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Calling things "fat" or "heavy" is fattist. We should all say "rotund" instead.⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Cool, that's nice. I'm on a different instance than you. It took hours for your comment to even federate, so the implication I'm trying to gotcha you through a self-correction made within 3 minutes of my original post and over 10 minutes before yours is totally bad faith and you know it.

  Let's just be clear about what happened here though. I posted something correct about the entire idea of fat-phobia. That is, the way you avoid being fat-phobic is by just not feeling a need to whip out a soap box and tell fat people it's their fault and they've behaved badly to become that way there while knowing nothing about them.

  And what did you do? You replied to me, immediately whipping out your soapbox to say that fat people are not "actual" vulnerable groups because anyone who's body doesn't doesn't match your subjective standards can "do something about being fat".

  Then started this absolutely moronic verbal diarrhea about how being respectful of other people is somehow a zero sum game where if you treat one population with basic respect, it somehow waters down another group's need to be treated with dignity? Idiotic. Just idiotic. That's the "logic" used by TERFs.

  Next time, just shut the fuck up. Seriously, all you had to say was nothing. This is a personal characteristic about someone and you just don't have expertise in it. You don't know what effort they have or haven't made. You don't know what other medical issues may be linked or causal. You don't know whether it's negatively impacting their health, and even if it were, it's still none of your fucking business. All you know is what you can see. Don't worry, the fat people already know you don't like looking at them, so this kind of signaling is unnecessary. Instead, leave them alone and don't preach about their lives of sin.

  You want to talk about addressing things with "external stimuli"? Let's talk about the entire skin-bleaching cosmetics industry in SE Asia. The vast apparatus of plastic surgery in places like South Korea designed to change Asian-presenting eyelids to more culturally preferred western features. And don't even get me started about hair care products targeted at Black Americans. The long histories every country and population has pursuing goals to "pass". Telling people they must change to match the subjective standards of idiots for their own good, irrespective of what harm might be done to them along the way.

  But what, all that kind of shit is bad and bigoted, but telling an otherwise-healthy but fat person they should get medical interventions because they look fat is fine? Leave people the fuck alone, dude. If there's medical problems going on, that's between them and their medical provider if they so chose.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Calling things "fat" or "heavy" is fattist. We should all say "rotund" instead.⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Here would be an almost textbook example of what I mean when I say shaming people for not putting in the effort, for any onlookers that are curious.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Calling things "fat" or "heavy" is fattist. We should all say "rotund" instead.⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The word "fat" is not a slur any more than the word "black" is. Sure, someone can use it with an intent to hurt, and if the only thing you know about a person is this single adjective you probably shouldn't be talking about them, but the word is just a description. And just like for "black", all the euphemisms offer nothing helpful and are largely spread by people who have not lived and understood the experience.

  If you're worried about being fat-phobic the thing to be worried about is treating fat people like shit based on their physical appearance. Up to and including shaming them for "not putting in the effort" or lecturing them about how unhealthy you think they are based on the single point of evidence of their apparent weight.

  And I have to say, I'd be WAY more fucking mad at someone calling me "rotund" then fat. Holy shit you have missed the mark on this.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reddit has reportedly signed over its content to train AI models⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Can't wait for the day a major court declares EULAs universally nonbinding outside of the most common-sense terms.

  "We can store and display your content and use stuff you publicly post as examples in advertisements for our platform" is pretty common sense.

  "We can use the things you post to do complex data analytics to package and sell your identity to advertisers" is fucking sus.

  "We can use the things you post to train ANN generative systems to build next-generation technologies to impersonate you and your peers" is simply nuts.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Councils call for pavement parking to be banned across England⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Everything is owned by members of the public. That is not a clever argument.

  There's no reason to be subsidizing this. It is not necessary nor helpful for the health of the city.

  Not being geometrically sustainable means that a city with good planning doesn't lean into it. It's not the "result of poor planning" that's idiotic. You can't change the laws of geometry with planning. Cars are an inefficient and ineffective transportation plan outside of the countryside and cities should only support them the bare minimum necessary while encouraging other forms as primary - subsidizing them by providing free/mandatory parking is leaps and bounds beyond the bare minimum and can put the death sustainable urban growth.

  When in the midst of a housing crisis we should not be devoting city resources to these intensely inefficient, regressive uses.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Councils call for pavement parking to be banned across England⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Why do city governments need to provide free storage for private vehicles in public spaces, now?

  It is not financially nor geometrically sustainable. It is a wealth transfer from the poorer to the richer. People who want cars can store them on their own property.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Councils call for pavement parking to be banned across England⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Why are city governments obliged to provide storage for private vehicles on the public dime?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨FLOSS communities right now⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It's real-time chat. That's fundamentally different, philosophically, from the way a forum/wiki works.

  You can cludge forum-like features into it with stickies and bots and yada yada yada... or you could just use a platform that is designed from the ground up to be a permanent knowledge store instead of extended, glorified AOL chatrooms.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨FLOSS communities right now⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The children do not yet know how much they yearn for the mines of listservs.

  A new, novel solution to an already-solved problem that is worse in pretty much every way. But at least it is anathema to retention of institutional knowledge.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why It Was Almost Impossible to Make the Blue LED⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Makes me presume power harassment.

  On the flip side, he was using up millions and millions of company dollars on his singleminded pursuit with no obvious results to show for it. Had things gone even a little differently, things would've gone very differently indeed. Hard to imagine most companies tolerating an employee flat ignoring instruction to change to another task when their old task was proving fruitless.

  Hindsight is clear enough here, but in context it was pretty nuts what the guy was doing.

  Makes you wonder how many great inventors of revolutionary tech were shoved off their path by dumb luck.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mozilla’s new service tries to wipe your data off the web⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  No, because you are asking the data broker to do something with your data that they possess. It is not possible for them to delete your data without knowing which are your data.

  The only alternative is fully banning this kind of data collection. Which would be nice, but isn't happening anytime soon.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"How to bypass and block infuriating cookie popups" 🙄🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  And please, if you use consent-o-matic, report the pages it doesn't work on. It's very easy to do and results in shit getting fixed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ethiopia set to become first country to ban internal combustion cars⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I have no idea what the specific requirements for vehicle registration are. I doubt this article is even true, frankly.

  But electrifying smaller vehicles is much, much easier than electrifying large vehicles. The biggest cost center in an EV is the battery, and smaller vehicles need proportionally way less battery compared to large vehicles. An ebike that can go 20-30mph runs off of something not substantially different from a cordless tool battery -- a pack of cheap, commodity 18650s -- and otherwise functions off of totally standard, mechanically simple parts.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ethiopia set to become first country to ban internal combustion cars⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  155k registered motor vehicles in Ethiopia for a population of about 130 million. Is it really so unimaginable to you that a country may not be car-dependent?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Aaron J. Waltke: "Prodigy has cracked Netflix Top 10 lists in six different countries and counting."⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I'm about 6 episodes in and so far it is enjoyable, though I doubt it'll go down in my heart as a one of the very special shows. It's pretty heavy-handed with its kids writing, which is still TBD if it will wear me out before I get to the end. And at about 6 episodes in, it is not at all episodic. I'm hoping that eventually changes. All the best of Star Trek is mostly episodic.

  Extreme disappointment that the hologram did not introduce itself with "Please state the nature of your ___ emergency."

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Substack says it will not remove or demonetize Nazi content⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  IDGAF if it feeds into the narrative. It also shuts down a recruitment pipeline. It reduces their reach. It makes the next generation less likely to continue the ideology. De-platforming is a powerful tool that should be reserved for only the most crucial fights, but the fight against Nazi is one of those fights.

  The Nazis were already full-blown conspiracy theorists. EVERYTHING is spun to feed into their narrative. That ship has sailed.

  A platform operator needs to AT MINIMUM demonetize the content and censure it, and is likely only being responsible if they ban it outright. If you aren't prepared to wade into the fraught, complex world of content moderation, don't run a content platform.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Substack says it will not remove or demonetize Nazi content⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The problem being we basically know that's not how it works.

  If you push them underground, the main result is fewer Nazis. Intentionally platforming them helps them maintain a facade of normalcy that makes it WAY easier to recruit people into the organizations and further radicalize them. Not to mention the simple amplification effect of having a platform.

  The idea that the underground Nazis are going to be a more distilled, pure, volatile form of Nazi SOUNDS theoretically sensible. But if that's your argument, the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate it actually happens. And even if it sometimes does, if there's only 10 of them it barely matters.

  The simplest solution, to shut down the recruitment pipeline, is also the correct choice for a platform operator to make.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Substack says it will not remove or demonetize Nazi content⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Condone (transitive verb): To overlook, forgive, or disregard (an offense) without protest or censure.

  Neat.