jqubed
@jqubed@lemmy.world
- Comment on Surely they yearn for the mines 16 hours ago:
The NFC readers can read the non-NFC chip without it being physically inserted? I’ve never seen that before
- Comment on If at a restaurant a guy is choking and I give them the Heimlich and accidentally break a rib while trying to save his life. Can I be sued? 1 day ago:
I would guess that’s as much about making sure you don’t try to perform the Heimlich on someone who doesn’t actually need it, but would probably cover OP’s concern
- Comment on The good stuff 1 day ago:
I think Lemmy is turning into a sketch from A Prairie Home Companion
- Comment on Surely they yearn for the mines 1 day ago:
I understand what community I’m in, but I feel like this relates to something I’ve thought about since using a rental electric vehicle. There are a lot of people who can write programs for computers. There are far fewer people who can create electronic devices reliably work in an outdoor, exposed environment. I started suspecting one reason so many charging stations want to use an app to collect payments online is because it’s easy to connect to Square or Cybersource or whatever. Making a card reader that supports magstripe, chip, or NFC and can survive being exposed to sun, rain, snow, ice, and extreme temperatures is a lot harder. Gas pumps have done this for decades, although I’m sure the roofs help, but even they had to turn to companies like Verifone when cards started using chips, and those companies didn’t make things easy (they’re why gas pumps play commercials now).
- Comment on Best out-of-context Lemmy 1 day ago:
You mean like !bestoflemmy@lemmy.world ?
- Comment on Anon delivers a prophecy 1 week ago:
I really haven’t used it much myself, but as the other commenter mentioned, since anyone can upload I’m not surprised there’s a large amount of mediocre content. So far I’ve felt like that’s a platform where you need to go in knowing what you’re looking for. But, if Steam were ever to disappear out become irrelevant, they’d certainly be in a position to pick up some of the market.
- Comment on Spotted 1 week ago:
Because that’s what it looks like
- Comment on Anon delivers a prophecy 1 week ago:
Probably GoG, itch.io, or just direct sales. A lot of companies aren’t set up for physical distribution, aren’t big enough to get their product into the retail channels, and/or would have a hard time selling internationally. Steam didn’t invent digital game sales, they just made it a little easier. I think the first game I bought online was around 2000 or 2001. It was DX-Ball 2 from Longbow Digital Arts (RIP Seumas McNally), along with a screensaver I loved that they’ve open sourced and I wish I could get it running on macOS and Linux. I was still in high school and didn’t have a credit card, so I paid using a postal money order. If developers were selling directly in the ’90s they can make it work again.
- Comment on goofy ahh car 2 weeks ago:
What is that? Some sort of knock-off Méhari?
- Comment on Must be a strange feeling that something you used to use is now only seen in museums 2 weeks ago:
I saw a mediocre movie about Walt Disney once (not authorized by the Disney company or I think even the family). It was fairly low budget and one of their selling points was having the star of Napoleon Dynamite in a minor role. Anyway, at one point in the movie a character answers a call on one of those really old crank phones where the user lifts the earpiece but the microphone stays on the wall. The caller is asking for someone else, so the character puts her hand over the phone to shout for the intended recipient in the busy building, except the actress put her hand over the earpiece in her hand instead of the microphone on the wall. I’m sure she’d never used that type of phone before, but I chalked it up to the inexperience of the production team that no one caught that goof.
- Comment on Advice for moving to NY? 2 weeks ago:
Even in the city, you’d be better off choosing the school first and then the location. If you find housing in Brooklyn but a school in the Bronx that could still be a long commute just for class and will impact time available to work, socialize, or sleep.
- Comment on Roughly how big is the internet in matters of like storage such as gb and tb or more? 2 weeks ago:
The data here is old now, but you might find this article interesting to give you an idea of the scale of the Internet. Maybe consider that Google tries to keep a copy of most of the public internet (compressed) and assume that the whole thing would be several times larger. Never mind that there is a lot that’s not covered by Google (paywalls, non-public forums/Facebook posts, etc.) but then also services like the Internet Archive that try to make multiple time-stamped copies of the Internet, although I think they usually don’t save the images/videos.
To be short, terabytes might sound like a lot to an individual, but the Internet is several orders of magnitude larger.
- Comment on I neither confirm or deny that I just procrastinated away from jobs to draw my rendition of 'myth of sisyphus' laundry edition 2 weeks ago:
Does she have some public-facing social account we should credit when we steal it?
- Comment on True story 2 weeks ago:
I haven’t spent extensive time in Europe but I’ve seen that setup three times in Czechia, Austria, and France, which made me think it has some level of commonality
- Comment on Lawful evil 2 weeks ago:
The problem is the delivery companies are abusing the definition of “tip” and how they pay their drivers. I used to drive deliveries for DoorDash and they typically only pay $1.50-2.50 per delivery, despite charging $6-8 for a delivery fee, on top of prices typically being 30% higher than the menu in the restaurant. As a driver, the rule of thumb is typically that you shouldn’t take a job paying less than $1/mile. So the rest of the money for the driver comes from the “tip”. A tip is supposed to be a bonus reward for good service, but the reality of the situation on these delivery services is that it’s just the rest of the delivery fee to the driver. The delivery companies know if they list it as an actual delivery fee they’ll lose customers because some customers will feel like the fees become too excessive. So instead they exploit inexperienced drivers into taking orders thinking they’ll get a tip later, but often end up with nothing. And customers who think the tip is actually a tip according to the original definition and voluntary often end up with bad service because experienced drivers will pass on the deliveries, meaning they sit and sit, with food getting cold while the delivery service eventually starts offering to increase the pay in 25¢ increments after a certain number of rejections. Sometimes orders will sit for a couple hours before someone will finally take the order. This is still bad for the drivers, because the customers will often leave them a bad review, blaming the driver for the order taking so long to arrive. The driver doesn’t know what part is “tip” until the delivery is complete.
The reviews are another bad system. Historically people think of a 5-star rating system goes from 1 star being terrible, two being below average, three being average, four being above average, and five being excellent. However, rating systems often rank anything below five stars as bad. So people will leave a four star review thinking that’s good but as far as the company is concerned is bad. IIRC DoorDash drops any driver with a rating below 4.7. And we see this problem a lot of places online: product reviews on shops, online business reviews, even hotels where 3 stars was traditionally decent now see that as bad.
- Comment on True story 2 weeks ago:
This seems more common in Europe, where the toilet is in its own room down the hall. What I don’t like about that is often that means people walking around the house with unwashed hands as they make their way to a sink. In the US you will find something like that most often where the master/owner’s/primary bathroom has a water closet with the toilet in its own little room in the bathroom. That can be handy for couples and feels like it contains the toilet germs more.
- Comment on fencing champions 4 weeks ago:
They just start the fight that way, but if they’re losing then they’ll switch to the right hand
- Comment on The right kind of vibe 4 weeks ago:
Funny enough N.E.R.D. also has a song called “Happy” but it’s definitely a different vibe than his more famous song of the same name. This one’s happy because an ex-lover is finally out of the singer’s life and their life is now so much better for it.
- Comment on Is posting a lot of videos and/or animated gifs difficult to handle for the servers? 5 weeks ago:
Hosted elsewhere I don’t think is much of a problem. Hosted on Lemmy could quickly become a problem for both the original instance and others as your post propagates out. If you want to help the Fediverse, putting the videos on a PeerTube instance might be a good idea.
- Comment on Beer garden ready 5 weeks ago:
Dude’s never even heard of leg day
- Comment on Odd sticky residue on DVDs 1 month ago:
I don’t really know what the answer is but I would try to copy those discs ASAP after cleaning in case it’s the disc itself deteriorating
- Comment on How common were video game scalpers in the 1990s? 1 month ago:
I believe they’re referring to buying up all of the copies of the hot new game or console, then reselling them above MSRP to make a profit in a time of scarcity.
I don’t remember scarcity being as much of a problem back then, nor was demand high enough for scalping to be common. It might have been less legal, too. As far as tickets to sporting events and concerts, back then it was illegal to resell them for more than face value in my state. That changed 10-15 years ago thanks to lobbying from Ticketmaster and affiliates.
- Comment on Hideo Kojima's PHYSINT Game Moves to Xbox From PlayStation 1 month ago:
Xbox was actively angering large swathes of the gaming community. All Sony had to do was sit back and let them implode. Instead they’re trying to outdo Microsoft.
- Comment on Incoming! 1 month ago:
Drives us crazy when we go visit my wife’s family in France
- Comment on Incoming! 1 month ago:
Do you not have screens on your windows?
- Comment on When I see people starting to deanpost: 1 month ago:
Weird, it doesn’t show if I click the image and maximize it
- Comment on Anon meets the candy man 1 month ago:
I suspect the rich kids had a line of credit where he’d just send the parents a bill at the end of the month. My understanding is many grocers used to operate that way, especially before credit cards.
- Comment on Would SpaceX continue to be immoral without Musk? 2 months ago:
I don’t think there’s any legislated law that states that, but some courts treat it as a basic principle (especially in the state of Delaware). What I’ve usually seen as an early example of this is Dodge v. Ford Motor Co. from 1919. Henry Ford had amassed a surplus of more than $60 million (equally to more than $1.1 billion today) and wanted to reinvest that money in expanding the business with new factories while continuing to raise wages and cut prices on the Model T. As part of this he wanted to cease special shareholder dividends he had been playing out of the surplus. Brothers John Francis Dodge and Horace Elgin Dodge owned 10% of Ford and sued to keep the dividend payments coming.
The court ruled that Ford had to pay out a dividend of more than $19 million (more than $360 million today) to the minority shareholders. In the ruling, in a non-binding section, the judge wrote:
A business corporation is organized and carried on primarily for the profit of the stockholders. The powers of the directors are to be employed for that end. The discretion of directors is to be exercised in the choice of men to attain that end and does not extend to a change in the end itself, to the reduction of profits or to the nondistribution of profits among stockholders in order to devote them to other purposes.
Ford was accused of trying to turn the business into a charity. Behind the scenes, though, one of his main motivations for not wanting to pay the dividend was suspicion that the Dodge brothers were using the dividends from his successful business to setup a rival car company to compete against him, which was exactly what they were doing.
It seems the interpretation of the ruling is controversial, even as to whether “maximize shareholder value” is actually enforceable or what the judge meant. I continue to think that the more investors a company has, the less the company will be able to focus on what’s best for the company, customers, and employees in the long run.
- Comment on Thanks AI for the help 2 months ago:
- Comment on For those of you kicking it old school 3 months ago:
So many of the foreigners visiting for the World Cup have missed out on another great American culinary tradition smh my head
