kryptonianCodeMonkey
@kryptonianCodeMonkey@lemmy.world
- Comment on Here comes mommy 1 day ago:
“Julio González committed an act of arthon known as the Happy Land fire, which killed 87 people! He’th a math murderer! Thufferin’ Thuccotash!”
- Comment on Lefty tax 2 days ago:
Ok story time from the Fireworks stores.
First some background: My wife’s dad owns a couple fireworks stores. One sells items individually, the other sells everything as buy one get one free because it is right next to a competitor that uses that model. Fun fact about stores that sell everything as BOGO all the time… the prices are just double. You’re just paying for two. That’s the whole model. My father in law hates it too and wishes we didnt need to do it to compete with the other store. It’s not only not a deal, it’s arguably worse because you have* to buy two of the same visual display, meaning you’re just watching the same thing twice for no good reason.
*We don’t actually make anyone buy two of anything. We also tell them they can mix-and-match, i.e. buy one item and get a different item with the same price free. And we don’t really advertise it, because it actually pisses some people off, but if you just want one of the item, you can get it for “half price”. No problem at all. It makes no difference at all to me. I don’t even have to do anything fancy with the registers. We just ring up every item individually. They’re all priced exactly the same as they are at the other store. It’s all an illusion.
But there is a certain percentage of shoppers that absolutely, positively, will not buy a product unless they are “getting a deal”, and those people are univerally bad at math. We sell a select set of items as BOGO or mix and match at the other store too and those people will only buy those items. My father in law will even tell them that no one needs to watch the same thing twice. We actually use the stupidity of the BOGO model as a selling point at the other store. But that’s all that some people want. The people that shop at the BOGO store will come in saying they went to our other store (not knowing they’re related) and everything was so expensive compared to them and they didnt have any good deals, then buy a cart full of shit at THE EXACT SAME PRICE PER PIECE. It’s absurd.
So anyway, back to the fun story. I had to cover as a salesman and cashier at the BOGO store once. A couple came in, he wanted a bunch of fire crackers, bottle rockets, Roman candles, etc. The typical play stuff. His wife wasnt into all that, she just wanted to see something inexpensive and pretty. I showed her videos of a few smaller items that I thought she’d like and she really liked one in particular. It was the only one I had left on the shelf though. I tried to look around and see if there was a good mix and match to go with it, but it was at a less common price point, and I couldn’t find anything. So I told her that since I couldn’t find her another or a mix and match, I’d give it to her for half of the tag price (again, that’s also just… the normal price). She was very happy with that. She just wanted the one pretty thing anyway.
So we get up to the register and I started to scan out their cart… two rolls of firecrackers, 8 roman candles, 2 packs of bottle rockets, etc. Then I scanned her item. He asked where the second one was. I explained that that was the last one and we couldn’t find a mix and match so I was just going to charge her half of the tag price for it. He said, dead serious, “if I don’t get anything free with it, I’m not buying it.” He told me just to set it aside and put it back. They only thing she wanted. Becuase half price wasnt as good as buy one get one free… I ended up just handing it to her and telling her to take it. She has an ass for a husband, a stupid one at that. She deserved to see something pretty.
- Comment on Wowee 3 days ago:
Where did you find the other 15?
- Comment on Vibe management 6 days ago:
It would if all the the chip makers weren’t making chips on credit from a broke ass industry
- Comment on Vibe management 6 days ago:
The Chinese AI companies being state sponsored just means that they can go longer and throw more money at development without turning profit than other investor driven companies.
The US is certainly throwing a bloated amount of money at AI too. And a much as it infuriates me, they’ll almost certainly absorb the bubble pop with tax another bailout for criminal corporate behavior. But it’s not quite been a direct pipeline of openly flowing cash, just yet. They’re still paying for discrete contracts which have to be approved in the budget. They’ve been massive contracts, but they’re still making these companies compete e each other for them too. Like with the recent flip from DOJ contracts with Anthropic to OpenAI, for example.
In China, they’re buying in supporting the entire industry. They’re building infrastructure for AI data centers, giving them grants and subsidies, have direct ownership in the companies, and had made specific carve outs in their laws to give AI development deregulated room to do what it needs. I’m not in favor of either approach. Just pointing out that China’s approach does seem to have been an advantage in the AI race, or at least was enough of one that they made up a ton of ground, and maybe passed their US counterparts.
- Comment on Vibe management 6 days ago:
Not quite the same. The tulip industry was making money hand over foot. It was the speculators that ended up being shafted. Tulip mania was more comparable to the beanie babie craze, or even NFTs. AI companies, on the whole, are making no profit at all except.
- Comment on Vibe management 6 days ago:
This feels predictable. AI is one of, if not the most invested in yet unprofitable industries in the history of humanity.
The last few years have been the beta and the tech demo. But that is not paying for itself yet. US companies are competing with (and falling behind) Chinese state-sponsored companies. OpenAI in particular, a company whose revenue doesn’t even cover half of their operating costs, has extended themselves into owing more than a TRILLION dollars to the entirety of big tech who are building chips and data centers on these IOUs, and will need to be paid sooner or later. The bills will come due.
Other corporations are already paying massive bills for licensing, tokens, training, and infrastructure changes to accommodate this shift to AI while laying off massove chunks of skilled workers on the idea that AI is cheap and will get cheaper over time. But that is simply not the case. This is the “first taste is free” part of this deal. Once they have companies deeply invested in AI and have destroyed the fabric of the labor economy in favor of it, that price is going to skyrocket because OF COURSE IT WILL.
Maybe at some point this will all level out. AI bubble will pop. Prices will sky rocket. Companies will try to backpedal, which will be slow and difficult, they’ll end up paying AI companies huge sums while they work to decouple themselves after just forming the bond, they’ll also end up paying stupid money to professionals who are suddenly in high demand, and many companies won’t survive the chaos.
AI will eventually get cheaper (but probably never this cheap again, at least not in the near future), and it will probably be a permanent fixture in our lives and work to some degree. But it’s usefulness and cost effectiveness will be limited in scope, with specialized purposes. It will not ultimately be the great labor replacement companies think/thought it would be, even as stupid and short sighted as that desire is in the first place (if 30% of the global work force is unemployed, how do you think that will effect your revenue, morons!?). But that also is assuming that the coming chaos doesn’t turn out so bad that AI is permanently legislated into oblivion after the chaos it’s about to cause.
- Comment on Here I come! 1 week ago:
Goochie goochie
- Comment on PS5 Exclusive Saros Has Reportedly Only Sold 300K Copies 2 weeks ago:
Probably doesn’t help that this is the first I’ve heard of it.
- Comment on Name one 2 weeks ago:
I think he’s more or less neurotypical. His quirks seem largely to be an intentional act to throw off his suspects and make them underestimate him.
- Comment on Name one 2 weeks ago:
Are we counting early Columbo’s cigarettes as his addiction? Cuz otherwise I think he fits the bill
- Comment on DNAddy 2 weeks ago:
That confused me as well. The stuff I read didn’t elaborate on how that would help.
- Comment on DNAddy 2 weeks ago:
Another fun-ish, kinda fucked up, weird story… There’s a woman, Henrietta Lacks, who had a biopsy for her cervical cancer in January of 1951 before passing in October of that year. These cells were found to be incredibly resilient and quick to replicate. Most cells only lasted a few days before dying, but hers seemed to be functionally immortal under controlled lab conditions.
So, unbeknownst to her as consent wasnt required for such things at the time, her cancer cells were cultured and grown into large samples to be used in research. Those samples were split off and passed off to other labs. They’ve since spread around the entire world for a ton of research and commercial purposes.
They were used in the development of the polio vaccine, for example, as well as having been used in research on cancer (obviously), AIDS, the effects of radiation and toxic materials, gene mapping, etc. They are used to test safety of cosmetics as well. Approximately 11,000 patents involve these specific cancer cells.
In the 1970s, there was an incident where these cells contaminated other cell cultures, so the researchers needed DNA samples from the Henrietta’s family to differentiate her cells from the others. This is the first time anyone in her family learned that her cells had been used in research at all, let alone that her cells were being cloned and used in research and commercial product development across the entire world. It became a legal issue after this, and after a couple decades of litigation, it made it to the Supreme Court of California where they ruled that “discarded biological materials” is no longer ones property and could be commercialized freely. They continue to occasionally fight against aspects of her cells’ usage, and they’re are health privacy concerns for her family as well, but results have been mixed for them.
Henrietta the person died in 1951 at age 31, but her immortal cancer cells which still contain her full DNA sequence continue to live to this day, 75 years later. One source claims that as much as 50 million metric tons of tissue has been generated from these cells.
- Comment on Oh no I've dropped my box of Twinkies. This is such a...uh...oh, what's the word I'm looking for...? 2 weeks ago:
Boooooo
- Comment on WTF is a meter? 2 weeks ago:
What?
- Comment on WTF is a meter? 2 weeks ago:
Those are definitely not two left feet. That is a left and a right foot.
- Comment on [Video] British actor Michael Malarkey upon realizing he received a Starbucks puts it away and says "I boycott Starbucks and you all should too" 2 weeks ago:
Boycotting a company because some stores are unionized is wild. Particularly a company that really tries not to be unionized. They’re punishing a company for not cracking down in their employees’ rights hard enough, apparently. So weird.
- Comment on Might explain some of my dating missteps 2 weeks ago:
This could be my wife. All of her coworkers and employees constantly give her their life stories in gritty detail. She is always appalled by the amount they tell her, but… she doesn’t ask them to stop.
The woman loves drama that she isn’t involved in. Internal drama stresses her out, but other people’s drama is just her reality tv shows come to life. Everywhere she has ever worked, inevitably her favorite coworker is the grumpiest person in the office who has no filter about everyone else in the office.
Actually, at this very moment, she is scrolling through people posting on a facebook group who are angry that this local doctor got just got fired “out of nowhere”. In reality, we know the full story. He was fired for harassing and disparaging every woman in the clinic with a bunch of sexist shit, driving at least 3 to quit, and for massively overprescribing pain meds to a ton of people and trying to get other (women) physicians to write his scripts for him to take the liability off of himself. He’s a real scumbag. Half of the people in the threads are his patients who have been getting their fix from him, though, so they are talking about what a great doctor his is. She keeps sending me screenshots.
- Comment on Tattoo 2 weeks ago:
My wife had a freckle on her right hand. It’s the only way she can tell left from right. Ask her for directions and watch her eyes check the back of her hands.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
College. Traditionally dorms for US colleges are just a shared bedroom/study space in a hallway of similar rooms. The bathroom is also a community bathroom with banks of shower stalls, toilets/urinals, and sinks for every resident in that wing on that floor. Then there is a shared common space for everyone in the building for gatherings, recreation, studying, etc.
I never did a traditional dorm. I had a more apartment style arrangement on campus with two other roommates my first year in college. Unlike a traditional dorm, we had our own common area and bathroom for just the 3 of us, which was nice. But like a dorm, there was only one bedroom for all of us, with a twin size bunk bed and a twin size single bed. One of my roommates slept on a futon in the living room instead though, so it was really only me and another in the room. We were all friends from High School already too. So at least I didn’t have to share that tight space with two random strangers. We had enough drama with one of my roommates as it was.
I moved into real apartments the following years where I had my own room, even my own bathroom in one of them.
- Comment on How many Americans think they could beat Donald Trump in a fight? 2 weeks ago:
I… don’t really know what to think about the 33% of Republicans. Are they unusually self-defeatist? Or do they actually think that this frail old man is really a tough mother fucker?
- Comment on [PlayStation] [DRM] Licenses now requires an online check-in every 30 days. 4 weeks ago:
Literally the kind of bullshit that Sony mocked Xbox for trying with the Xbox One when it and the PS4 came out. When legitimate concerns were brought up that some gamers were not able to connect their device to the internet regularly, for instance if they are in the military deployed overseas or on ships that play games on their downtime, or if they simply lose service for some time for financial issues, or if they have metered connections that they depend on for work, etc. they were told to just buy an older Xbox. Sony gave them hell in interviews after that. Here we are 13 years later, and Sony is busy retroactively doing that. Smh
- Comment on Borders 4 weeks ago:
No I’m telling you that if you’re rooted to the ground close enough to a similarly rooted neighbors and the wind makes both of your arms wiggle hard enough, you might lose a finger
- Comment on Borders 4 weeks ago:
Wind blows, trees’ branches rub together and snap off twigs growing at the ends, creating gaps. They grow again, next windy day, they break again.
- Comment on A long-ass way to write 'not parmesan'. 5 weeks ago:
“On par-mesan”
- Comment on A long-ass way to write 'not parmesan'. 5 weeks ago:
Based on a parmesan story
- Comment on John - it's a trap! 5 weeks ago:
He’s a hardware guy at Apple. The company that once removed everything from their physical interface but one button. The company that created a proprietary screw shape and licensed the companion driver to prevent users or small time repair shops from fixing their phones. The company that removed the independent headphone jack and replaced it with a lightning to aux adapter that hogged the only charging port instead. The company that put a glass plate on the back of the phone so that you had two surfaces to shatter and leave sharp edges to cut your hand on. Yeah… I don’t expect great things from him.
- Comment on Inner Monologue 5 weeks ago:
This is giving strong Don Hertzfeldt’s Rejected Cartoon vibes .
- Comment on Lmao 5 weeks ago:
The original Aladdin story in One Thousand and One Nights is set in China (Aladdin is also Chinese), is based on a middle eastern folk tale, and was written and added to the book by a Frenchman. And then it’s most recognizable incarnation (at least to a western audience) migrates the setting and characters to a fictional Arabic kingdom and gives him an American white guy voice. The character, Aladdin’s, cultural identity as we know it is a little all over the place.
- Comment on snow isn't real 5 weeks ago:
The famous red wastes of Brazil.
