partial_accumen
@partial_accumen@lemmy.world
- Comment on Young men are struggling in a slowing job market, even if they have college degrees 1 week ago:
If you’re going for a job that doesn’t require one, I would recommend not disclosing you have one for the exact reason you cited. That isn’t a new idea though, I remember being told it decades ago.
- Comment on Young men are struggling in a slowing job market, even if they have college degrees 1 week ago:
As far as seasonal work goes, I don’t know if he’s applied to any tourist stuff or not
These are certainly location dependent. Regional theme parks (Six Flags, Cedar Point, etc) are always big for hiring for the summer usually 5,000 to 9,000 workers each summer so there’s lots of positions and the job lasts for the summer months. In touristy places theres also lots of jobs at much smaller employers. However, don’t over look small fairs or community events. County fairs will hire general labor to do non-skilled tasks. These will last slightly longer than the length of the even (setup, event, teardown), so perhaps a few weeks or a couple of months. Some like Cedar Point actually have worker housing so even if you don’t live close you can go live in the company dorms for the summer (very cheaply) and earn doing the work.
- Comment on We will all be slaves 1 week ago:
Padme: So the solution is a huge investment in public housing or state subsidised housing, right?
Anakin: …
Padme: right? - Comment on Young men are struggling in a slowing job market, even if they have college degrees 1 week ago:
If you’re interested/comfortable in sharing some specifics I’m interested in hearing more about his real world experience:
The hiring signs for don’t necessarily mean much. I have a friend looking for such “basic” sort of a job, or anything really, that I’ve been trying to help out. Two years later and we’re both still trying to find more places around for him to apply to. I know the guy well enough to know that he’s not like being a jerk to the occasional interviewer he gets or anything like that, and while he doesn’t have much he doesn’t have zero work history either.
It sounds from your explanation that he is actually getting interviews, but hes getting ghosted afterward. Has he talked about what how the interviews go? Does your friend feel good about how they went or was he getting questions he didn’t like or had trouble providing an answer to? Have you done a “mock interview” with him to see how he presents to see if there are things he could use help on there too? Are you in an area that has seasonal work (such as tourism support) and has he gone for any of that? Those kind of workforces tend to be more permissive with their hires.
you’d think statistically at least one of them would have worked out by now, but most won’t even give the courtesy of a “no”
Sadly, I know this is VERY common for employers to simply ghost applicants even after interviews. Its a practice I don’t like either.
I suspect those signs are more there to have a constant pool of applicants in case they should need to quickly replace an existing employee (or reassure overworked ones that they’re “looking” for someone) than any actual intent to hire more staff.
I’ve personally talked to a few of the managers/owners of the places I frequent, and nearly all the ones I’ve talked to are actually actively interviewing to hire, not just build a pool. Even the one that I talked to that IS building a pool communicated he has a high turnover workforce (usually working students whose school schedules frequently change and they have to quit). Again, all of my second hand experience is within 15 miles of where I live and I absolutely understand conditions could be different literally everywhere else in the USA.
- Comment on Young men are struggling in a slowing job market, even if they have college degrees 1 week ago:
Instead, two years after he graduated with a computer science bachelor’s degree from the Illinois Institute of Technology, he’s unemployed and living with his parents in the suburbs of Chicago. Despite having applied to more than 900 jobs — from secretary positions to a role at a prison — he has gotten only a handful of interviews.
I completely understand wanting a job in your field, and commend him branching out to other roles even secretarial. However, nearly every retail business in my area has “now hiring” signs. Is my area an anomaly and are basic retail jobs scares elsewhere?
- Comment on I did not look up how progressive lenses really work before getting some. 1 week ago:
I don’t need long distance correction, but do need reading glasses distance correction. I got bifocals with no correction on top and my reading prescription on the bottom. When I was choosing types of bifocals, I was given a non-perscription demo progressives to try and hated them. I was then informed by the optometrist that there are a whole bunch of different lens styles to choose from besides progressives for bifocals. I chose “Segmented Ds” which look like this:
These do exactly what I want. If I’m in a meeting and have my laptop or notepad (reading distance) close to me, and at the other end of the room a whiteboard or projection screen, I pop out my bifocals and they work perfectly. I can see both the distance (no prescription for me) and the close reading distance without having to lift my glasses off my face each time. I do not give a shit if someone sees that they are bifocals. I’m using them to help me be the best version of myself, not make a damn fashion statement. I have not one time had anyone say anything negative about them, and indeed had a few people ask how to order the same thing for themselves. If I’m doing pure close work, I don’t use the bifocals and just use regular full field reading glasses.
- Comment on Sounds like a plan 1 week ago:
I think we have slightly different approaches but ultimate want the same thing: opportunities for juniors to get exposure.
However, employers these days are reluctant to hire them, and the barrier to entry is higher now so they can’t necessarily get in the door on their own merits without that experience they don’t have access to learn.
- Comment on Sounds like a plan 1 week ago:
And nearly all of those problems are ones that other people have run into or at least have guidance on how to go about addressing. Old organically grown systems are many times unique one-offs which have little to no established path except to start diving into the fundamentals about the hardware and software.
I’m not here to get into a pissing match about who’s job is/was harder. If you think juniors have a better chance at learning on today’s systems than they did in the past, I still disagree with you. Problems exist on modern system, except juniors will rarely if ever get a chance to try to solve them and thereby learn from them.
- Comment on Sounds like a plan 1 week ago:
You still have to debug things in a cattle approach, though. If anything there’s even more and more complex things to debug.
I would disagree on your complexity metric (for the purposes of learning troubleshooting) for cattle. What can be more complex than a completely unique system that only exist because of 10+ years of running on that same hardware with multiple in-place OS upgrade occurring along with sporadic (but not complete) patches to both the OS and the application? Throw in the extra complexity of 9 other unrelated applications running on that same server (or possibly bare metal) because the org was too cheap to spring for separate servers or OS licenses for a whole hypervisor.
If you have a memory leak in your application in a container running on k8s that will kill the pod after running for 72 consecutive hours, would you even notice it if you have multiple pods running it on a whole cluster as long as the namespace is still available?
- Comment on Sounds like a plan 1 week ago:
I’m not the slightest worried about my own job, but it is currently a shitty market for fresh grads. Probably due to all the post-covid layoffs saturating the talent pool with more experienced people, and the aforementioned AI fad.
Its a bit more than that I think. IT is killing its entry level job pipeline which grew people into seniors. In the infra space, we don’t really troubleshoot systems anymore in a “pets” method, we just redeploy new “cattle” meaning all the troubleshooting skills and underlying understanding of our systems you would have had doesn’t get learned anymore. For those of us that had to go through that, we’re fine because we developed the skills, but the new folks we bring in we just tell them to re-deploy to get it working.
I’m seeing this too in the software dev space. Small modules worth a few story points would have been given to junior developers to learn on and knock out getting some work done, but more importantly getting those juniors trained up with trial and error. Now an LLM can crank out mostly working code for that small module in a seconds and after a few minutes of human review that module is done. So the work is being done faster now, but the critical educational experience the juniors had before is missing.
In both infra and software dev spaces we’re cutting off our ankles, then legs, because when we retire very very few will have our skills that we had to learn, but didn’t give them the chance to learn.
- Comment on AOL will end dial-up internet service in September, 34 years after it's debut — AOL Shield Browser and AOL Dialer software will be shuttered on the same day 1 week ago:
Ha! Sorry, I didn’t mean to be intentionally vague. I didn’t think people would actually care about doing this today. Here’s complete steps for you to do it yourself. I posted from memory from doing this myself 25 years ago or so. I had to go look up the actual schematic and found someone else did a slightly more modern take on the software side too. The cable is still the same basic design premise to offer a line voltage to the modems I used way back when.
I was using a higher value capacitor (because I was poor and using scrap parts) which also forced me to put a 100 Ohm resistor in series on the output to get good consistent connections. If you can get exact values, use the ones pictured in that parts list instead of my hack job.
If you like this era of gaming you might enjoy !retrogaming@lemmy.world
- Comment on what's the best material for wiping out a cast iron skillet? 1 week ago:
I don’t think its misinterpreted. I do the same thing with one of these to get stuck on food bits out:
I’m not sure how this could “destroy the pan” considering the stainless steel links have a Brinell hardness of 217 and the grey cast iron (the pan’s metal) has a Brinell hardness of 235, the pan will scratch the stainless steel links before the stainless steel links scratches the pan.
After that I wash out the path with liquid dish soap, then put the pan on the inductive stove to bring it up to boil away any remaining water on the pan.
- Comment on AOL will end dial-up internet service in September, 34 years after it's debut — AOL Shield Browser and AOL Dialer software will be shuttered on the same day 1 week ago:
Nooooooooo! How will I connect my Dreamcast to the internet now? 😩
I know you’re being sarcastic, but I can give you an actual answer from when I was a Dreamcast owner.
One of the wonderful things about the Dreamcast modem is that you can configure it skip dial tone detection. You can them take an old telephone line (the kind you’d plug into the wall, then to the modem), cut it in half and a couple of resistors in specific places. You take that modified cable and plug one end into your Dreamcast, then the other into a modem in PC. You then set up Dial up routing software on your PC. There’s a lite version built into Windows 98 if my memory is correct (Dial up networking services Server). Initiate the Dreamcast to dial (it doesn’t matter what phone number). The PC answers (you hear the dial up handshake squaking), and your Dreamcast is online! You can use the Dreamcast browser or online Dreamcast games like Timesplitters. If you did this long enough ago you could also play the MMOs like Phantasy Star Online.
- Comment on Expand North! So much room up there. 2 weeks ago:
No one lives in the Maritimes and Newfies are a figment of our imagination?
- Comment on AI Laundromat???? 2 weeks ago:
Have you seen prices drop since companies have laid off all the human help? If human interaction is such a botique concession how did business manage until now and where did their savings go?
A portion to expensive human salaries. Another portion so naked profit taking on the part of these businesses.
To the salaries angle, look at nations which still have massively large populations with low labor costs. You’ll see that work is done by dozens or hundreds of low paid humans instead of automation. There is a tipping point where it becomes cheaper to invest in automation rather than paying a human. In places like Europe, USA, and Japan we’re way past that tipping point and automation (whether thats robots, computer automation, or AI) becomes the significantly cheaper option to getting something done/manufactured. China is quickly joining our ranks too. While they still have a large population, the cost of labor in China is reaching middle class levels and we’re starting to see the same thing there were automation is replacing human workers.
Why are prices staying the same (if we’re lucky) or still rising, services are staying the same (if we’re lucky) or getting worse,
Because in our economic system a small amount of inflation is necessary. A deflationary status in our economy would actually be devastating. However, when the economy overheats we get significant inflation.
companies are taking all these cost-saving measures like sweeping layoffs, and yet the biggest companies are generally posting record profits?
I don’t disagree with this.
I understand you’re probably playing devil’s advocate but devils aren’t entitled to an attorney.
I am, but if people are asking these question non-rhetorically, then they actually want to know why these things happen. I’m willing to provide the understanding I’m aware of, most of which isn’t obvious without prior study. Understanding why the current state exists is the starting point for affecting change, if they want change.
- Comment on AI Laundromat???? 2 weeks ago:
Neither of us can control them.
Why do we need to? Those are the responsibility of those residents.
- Comment on AI Laundromat???? 2 weeks ago:
As for your example of the washing machines, I’ve got news for you and it’s not good - they’re both shit, the above cited example isn’t an example of the washing machines purchased by our Grandparents which were built like brick shithouses. The unit costing $1000 more isn’t on par with the models and designs of yesteryear, not nearly.
Citation needed. How are they not good repairable washers?
Add to this the shrinking pool of home appliances which are manufactured without tied-in computerization, another factor which will shorten their service life considerably (replacement chips will be in short supply once the model is discontinued, forcing owners to source a small pool of qualified repairmen who in turn will be unable to source parts or be forced to cannibalize other broken units).
The Speedqueen has none of those things so I’m not sure why you’re bringing that up as a rebuttal to my Speedqueen example.
I seriously can’t believe that your example of high quality appliance is Speed Queen sold at Best Buy, is it the one that you bought, or could you really not think of a better one on the spot?
This is a really odd question you’re asking because how you asked it destroys your own argument. “or could you really not think of a better one on the spot?” suggests you know of a good washer equal to the units of the past, but your argument above is that better washers don’t exist. So which is your argument, that there are the good washers like those in the past that I simply haven’t cited, or that no better washers exist and they are all enshitified?
- Comment on AI Laundromat???? 2 weeks ago:
It’s up to me?
Your actions are up to you, yes. Whether you choose to interact or not in your water utilities or regulation boards is up to you.
I am not in control of every single city or county especially in the states. More than 60% of the states do not even have basic reading skills. Now you just being silly.
Getting involved and taking action locally is silly? I have no idea what your literacy comment has to do with anything we’re talking about.
Have a good one.
Thanks, you too. If you’d like to join me at my co-op annual water meeting, its in July. Hit me up and we’ll go together. If you were a member, you could even run for the board yourself and directly affect water policy in the county. You won’t be able to vote for board members because you’re not a member of the co-op like I am, but you can see how it works and where we have a voice.
- Comment on AI Laundromat???? 2 weeks ago:
This. The only example where I pick a robot over a human is self checkout… and that’s cuz it’s faster due to there only be 1 queue for several checkouts. Not because it saves me money.
You choose to go to a store that has outsourced human labor to machines. Even if you only occasionally use the self-checkout yourself, many other shoppers use the self-checkout. The prices you’re paying for your purchases are lower across the board because they don’t have to pay for as many cashiers.
Are there no stores (for the particular goods you’re buying in this example) that have zero self-checkout? If there are others that employee humans exclusively to check out, then your philosophy should have you shopping only at those and not at stores that have replaced humans with automation. I should warn you, those stores are probably more expensive to shop at.
- Comment on AI Laundromat???? 2 weeks ago:
Inversely; How comfortable would you be in a society where you couldn’t access another human if you couldn’t afford one? Because that’s where prioritizing profit over people is going to lead us.
I’d argue we’re already there in many aspects of our society.
- Comment on AI Laundromat???? 2 weeks ago:
Once again, I argument with you on this.
- Comment on AI Laundromat???? 2 weeks ago:
The fucking normal amount.
The “normal amount” keeps going up especially with the cost of human labor. So the “normal amount” would actually be a “large increased amount” for the same service with no additional benefits.
Some of it is literally garbage straight out of the box. Despite this, prices have not only not decreased, but normalized at best. Even worse, it’s become difficult to source products which aren’t worthless pieces of shit which cannot be repaired, at least not without considerable research - some of it also cannot be repaired without cannibalizing copies of the same device because no replacement parts have been manufactured.
The good ones can still be had, but they are massively more expensive, so people don’t buy them. Lets take washing machines. This is generally the same design, quality, and longevity out grandparents bought 40 years ago. This is a basic unit without any fancy features:
Here’s the modern enshitified basic unit like the kind you’re referring to that won’t last:
People ‘vote with their wallets’ inasmuch as people on a raft in the ocean vote for beef instead of fish for supper. There is none available, of course they’re going to eat the fucking fish.
Speedqueen exists! What brand of washer do you own? Do you walk the walk and did you spend over $1000+ more for a unit that does the exact same job, but is repairable will last 20 or 30 years or did you buy the cheap one?
- Comment on AI Laundromat???? 2 weeks ago:
As we know, people are stupid and they won’t manage their city/ county whatever’s utility management.
Well thats up to you. I interact with my water co-op yearly at our annual meetings of operations and budgets. This is how I have all this info on Data Center water usage. We have two DCs being built in our co-op coverage territory as we speak. One is a regional colo provider “closed loop” system and uses only marginally more water than an office building of cube farms. The other is an AWS datacenter that is going “open loop” and wants the most water at the worst time (hottest time) of the year. We’re putting the the screws to them and charging them out the yang for it. Its going to pay for additional water infrastructure elsewhere to serve more of the co-op customers and allow us to build an expensive pipeline from one end of the service area to the other.
So I guess it would be more beneficial to keep that in mind and not do the AI crap or are people going to magically become smart?
Make sure you don’t use crypto either then. Its been a larger offender of electricity and water waste than AI has yet.
- Comment on AI Laundromat???? 2 weeks ago:
I agree. This will be a problem. However very few people will care about this question when they’re faced with two products/services that are nearly equivalent, but the human derived one costs significantly more.
- Comment on AI Laundromat???? 2 weeks ago:
Can you provide an example where “Most people … choose the non-human one because its significantly cheaper to the consumer of the product/service.”
Sure. Frontier airlines charges a fee to talk to a customer service human agent while the same tasks can be accomplished for free through the app/website:
- Comment on AI Laundromat???? 2 weeks ago:
Then why are they asking people to stop having showers in cities to power the AI?
Because those communities have not structured their laws/regulations/bylaws to properly capture the true cost of utilities to its consumers and price it accordingly. Users should have fairly low rates up to a certain point, and then higher rates for higher consumption. The higher the consumption should cost exponentially more. Think of “gas guzzler” taxes on inefficient cars. Up to now these water utilities probably haven’t needed to make these changes.
If the water utilities price it appropriately high for the data center provider one of two things will happen:
- the data center provider will not build there and go elsewhere
- the data center provider will switch to a “closed loop” system so they don’t have to use so much water.
The reason DCs don’t do that second one by default is because “open loop” (extremely water hungry) is significantly cheaper to operate.
- Comment on AI Laundromat???? 2 weeks ago:
I would pay more for a human without a second thought.
Fuck AI
Edit: what do you really save when you personally save for example $.30 on a transaction when the AI spends five dollars in energy?
Your scales are off. The fully loaded cost of a human worker that can answer customer service questions is probably $60k-$100k per year. That worker can only talk to one customer at a time. That worker can’t cover an entire shift by themselves because you have to have extra workers to accommodate sick/vacation time. So the cost to the company to service the customer service request is potentially $15-$40.
The cost of the AI to provide customer service (we’re not talking about quality in this statement) is maybe $1 to $5 per customer serviced.
The cost of the automated support is about an order of magnitude less than the human worker. Those higher costs for the human have to be rolled into the cost of the product or service.
This might mean you pay $10 or more for the product or service (possibly much more if multiple customer service events are expected for the product/service). Likely not 30 cents saving you’re estimating.
- Comment on AI Laundromat???? 2 weeks ago:
Grrrrr me want human.
From a business point of view, how much more for the product/service would you be willing to pay for a human operator on the other side or conversely, how cheap would the non-human supported product/service have to be for you to choose it over the more expensive human supported option?
This is really the questions that are driving these changes. Most people vote with their wallets and choose the non-human one because its significantly cheaper to the consumer of the product/service.
- Comment on One Angry Man 2 weeks ago:
Are you sure?
spoiler
I’m pretty sure its a 1995 American crime thriller film directed by David Fincher and written by Andrew Kevin Walker. It stars Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman, with Gwyneth Paltrow and John C. McGinley in supporting roles. Where they try to stop a serial killer.
- Comment on One Angry Man 2 weeks ago:
From the new title I have to assume that its about a man going on a hunger strike and getting really hangray.
