Taldan
@Taldan@lemmy.world
- Comment on An oopsie occured 1 day ago:
I actually had this happen once. Dasher got in an accident
The app just showed his car going in circles around the point he crashed
- Comment on "Between raising two young boys and putting in long hours at a marketing job, Kevin Caldwell can almost never find the time to make dinner. So he and his husband spend about $700 a week to order in" 1 week ago:
In many cases it’s cheaper to get delivery than to drive
About the only reason I would need a car is getting groceries or food. The median cost of car ownership in the US is over $10,000 per year. I choose to not own a car and instead pay for delivery. I save a ton of money doing it. The time savings is just a bonus
Since you’ve indicated you’re a judgemental dick, you probably won’t take the clear L here, and can’t argue against my circumstances for using delivery, you’ll likely try to attack me, as a person. To get ahead of that: I do leave the house plenty. I just prefer to walk and bike everywhere. Most stores are inconveniently far away, and I’m quite limited as to how much I can carry back with me
- Comment on When you know your boss is an insane moron 1 week ago:
can I take your swearing at me and telling me to be silent
He clearly said Sharon. Are you sharon?
- Comment on When you know your boss is an insane moron 1 week ago:
They wouldn’t even accept us beginning to get ready to leave until our clock out time, because up to that point we are supposed to be working
Even the US outlawed that. What country do you live in where that’s normal?
In the US if you’re required to do something for work, at work, you’re on the clock. For example, if you have a uniform you’re required to wear, you clock in then out it on
Lots of employers break that law, which is why wage theft is by far the #1 form of theft in the US, but it is the law
Similar thing with responding to work messages outside normal work hours
- Comment on Gaming market melts down after Google reveals new AI game design tool — Project Genie crashes stocks. (A.K.A . Investors panic because they don't understand what "real" videogames are) 1 week ago:
It’s an initial proof-of-concept. It’ll be developed into more complex games eventually, that’s not really an issue for it
The main issue is that it’s just a facade. It completely lacks the foundation required for a game. It’s a world without hard rules, which is a terrible experience for any user. The game isn’t determining cause and effect from actions. It’s just guessing at what would come next
What’s the point of decorating an in-game house if the next time you go there, the AI forgot what was supposed to be there?
What’s the point of completing quests if the AI forgets what you’ve completed?
What’s the point of getting new gear if AI hallucinates what gear you have?
There is no progress in an AI generated game because everything is made up as it goes. Google would need to fundamentally change their approach to allow for that
- Comment on Why is Valve being sued for almost $900 million, but Epic Games wasn't sued when they bought Rocket League and Fall Guys to remove them from steam? 1 week ago:
30% is the standard retail markup for many things
It most certainly is not standard in retail. Most retail stores have a margin of a couple percentage points. Walmart, for example, is ~3% net margin most years
Unless you’re trying to compare wholesale price to final consumer price. In which case I would say that’s a silly and pointless thing to compare, but even then it’s far smaller than 30% across retail and varies wildly based on the individual item being sold
A 30% cut is only really common in the tech sector where the underlying economics make it feasible
- Comment on Over 50% of game developers now think generative AI is bad for the industry, a dramatic increase from just 2 years ago: 'I'd rather quit the industry than use generative AI' 1 week ago:
The market is going to be flooded with so much slop. It’ll be incredibly difficult for regular game developers to get any sort of budget to compete
We as consumers need to find a way to reward quality games
- Comment on But think of the landlords! 2 weeks ago:
These blocks look very different as a person on the street. They mostly only look bad from above where you can see all of them together
We have some burtalist apartment buildings in Minneapolis. They’re generally desirable apartments
- Comment on But think of the landlords! 2 weeks ago:
The USSR collapsed entirely in the early '90s
Safe to assume everyone is aware they had severe societal issues
- Comment on But think of the landlords! 2 weeks ago:
I hate it. Feels so restricting. Cant go anywhere without driving, and evenbdriving a block is a huge pain in the ass because of all the traffic and traffic control
- Comment on Are people still fooled by this dumb quiz's? 3 weeks ago:
normal humans are - by and large - smart enough to get the job done
Jury’s still out on that one chief
- Comment on Anon thinks about wheat 4 weeks ago:
What type of corn are you referring to? I’m not familiar with the history of corn, but what you’re saying doesn’t match my experiences with any variety
Dent corn is used as livestock feed, and is generally considered the less edible version. Sweet corn can be eaten by humans raw. Basically every variety I’ve ever seen can be eaten if boiled long enough
- Comment on Metal Exclusionary Radical Astronomy 4 weeks ago:
It looks like this chart is based on mass, rather than number. By number hydrogen is >90% by itself
- Comment on Do people actually believe those "gurus" on the internet that supposedly "give advice"? These seems very sussy and feel scam-adjacent, isn't it? 5 weeks ago:
Some do apparently or they wouldn’t keep making the videos
Whole lot of people are desperate to make money. They’ll keep doing it for a while even if it isn’t making money. Multi-level marketing schemes as an example. A few make a ton of money on MLMs, more than 90% lose money. They’re still everywhere
- Comment on Off the Rails 5 weeks ago:
Considering the human eye is basically backwards, I always found it funny people would try to use it as an example of an intelligent creator
Like we seriously have all the working bits in the path of light, permanently blocking our vision in spots. We just hide it with some post-production brain magic, and I’m supposed to believe that’s evidence of an intelligent creator?
- Comment on Not so fast! 1 month ago:
Housing got cheaper in Japan. They went from the most expensive housing in the world to the cheapest in the industrialized world
They did it by removing barriers to building housing, and incentivizing building homes. The downside is that rich people can’t profit as much off housing, which is a non-starter in many other countries
- Comment on Add a third, larger bar for "knowing the right people" skills 1 month ago:
Don’t need that if you know the right people
- Comment on OP has a realization 1 month ago:
Plenty of “supernatural” things exist.
We can fly through the air with nothing connecting us to the ground at all - flight was as fantastical as magic to early humanity.
Psychic powers? We can already silently communicate across the world in fractions of a second - is that not functional telepathy?
Chaos magic? We have the ultimate earth rending fireball spell. We call it nuclear arms.
To repurpose a saying about alternative medicine: Supernatural phenomenon proven to exist is just science
- Comment on OP has a realization 1 month ago:
It’s crazy to think how fast we’re moving through the universe without encountering much of anything; energy or matter. Thanks heliosphere and the vastness of the universe
…Still makes me uncomfortabel to see visualized though
- Comment on OP has a realization 1 month ago:
When they come up with that model, it’ll be able to explain both how protons are formed, and show that the 9th planet, Vulcan, exists…
- Comment on Totally unhinged 1 month ago:
Do they?
I’ve never met one. I’ve seen plenty of rage inducing posts online though. I’m sure somewhere, someone like this exists, but it’s probably rare enough most of us would never encounter someone so socially maladjusted in our entire lifetime
Which isn’t to say entitled people don’t exist - they do - more so that this level of oblivious entitlement is unlikely to continue existing into adulthood. Eventually it comes in conflict with reality and they learn acting like that only ends in mockery
- Comment on Apparently your hobbies becomes less interesting if you're forced to do them all the time? Who knew? 1 month ago:
Man, I feel that deeply. Working in tech has destroyed any joy I got from technology. After several years I got burnt out so badly that I had to take a couple years off
Now here I am, only a couple months back into working and every moment I spend actually doing the work is torture. I used to love it, now I’d be happy to never use technology in a productive way for the rest of my life
- Comment on Elon Musk’s Optimus Robot shuts down after reproducing the gesture of its human operator removing their headset 1 month ago:
It was AI – Actually Indians
- Comment on French Anatomy 1 month ago:
This would probably rupture a humans organs
Anyone around for early '00s internet knew that already…
- Comment on Radon 2 months ago:
The problem, to me, is that not everyone on a boat is catching fish. There are plenty of different roles. It’s just that people outside the industry don’t have a concept of the nuanced differences between roles, so it gets simplified to “I catch fish” even if they aren’t involved in catching fish at all. Most people outside of tech have no idea between the different roles that exist in tech either. It wasn’t too long ago where no matter your role in tech, you’d tell laymen, “I work in IT” as a catchall for any technical role
- Comment on The moment we've all been waiting for: you now can have targeted ads on your 2k smartfridge 2 months ago:
Streaming is a perfect example of this, as people don’t seem to realise just how expensive it is to maintain the infrastructure for it compared to traditional cable infrastructure
Much of the cost of streaming for platforms like Netflix, and especially YouTube, are due to the need to centralize it to allow for more data collection. The cost of streaming also gets overblown, by a lot. Companies like Google and Netflix are spending huge amounts of money trying to build out new features and offerings, like games, that make it look like maintaining the streaming service is far more expensive than it is
But that price was also only possible because of various venture capitalists investing heavily in Netflix
Netflix has never needed to rely on venture capital for their streaming platform. Netflix has made a gross profit every quarter since 2011 when this data starts. They have also had a net income all but one of those quarters, which is absolutely insane for a new tech company investing that much in R&D + licensing
The recent hikes (all the way up to what, $20?) are the result of venture capital drying up
No. They’re the result of perpetually increasing profit margins. They were very profitable before the price hikes. Their expenses have gone up far slower than their revenue. It’s simply extracting more wealth without providing additional value
as Netflix went from a market-shaker startup to revenue generating machine
It’s a bit pedantic, but Netflix wasn’t a startup when they got into streaming. They were an existing business that was profitable to fund their pivot to a technology platform
So how do you offset these increases?
Netflix has had an operating income (revenue - operating expenses) of $12.6B over the past 12 months. With ~300M subscribers, that’s about $3.50 per subscriber per month. Subscription prices are much lower in most countries than in the US. For the ~80M US subscribers, that is probably $6 in profit. The $5 cheaper ad tier is probably about what we’d expect their prices to be if they had simply continued to make a couple billion a year in profit. Also keep in mind they would probably get and retain more subscribers with a lower price, and their increased operating expenses includes them building out tons of stupid mobile games most people don’t want, and one-off necessary expenses like building out their original content capabilities
Note: This last bit is doing some napkin math and is subject to error. I didn’t feel like digging deep enough into their financials to get more exact numbers (such as the average subscription price for the rest of the world)
TL;DR – Much of the price increases and addition of ads can be attributed to increasing profit margins, not increased operating costs
- Comment on The moment we've all been waiting for: you now can have targeted ads on your 2k smartfridge 2 months ago:
How long until we have no real choice? The vast majority of TVs are smart TVs now
- Comment on The Answer May Surprise You 2 months ago:
The largest cost is going to be building out data centers and buying the chips to fill them. OpenAI has essentially been telling investors they’re only losing money for now as they build out infrastructure, but when that’s done they’ll be making money hand over fist
We have no idea what the compute costs actually are since OpenAI is a private company. It’s just a shift in the speculation that it’s higher than previously estimated
- Comment on Anon takes a DNA test 2 months ago:
Also “Turned out my father isn’t my real dad” is BS. Genetic test results are useless for determining such.
I’m so confused by this. Are you playing semantic games here? Because this is otherwise completely wrong, and contradicts the story you told before it
- Comment on 2 months ago:
That’s tough man. At least as a food service worker you’re contributing a lot to the economy. When I worked in restaurants, I worked a lot harder than I ever have in a corporate job, for far less money