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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Yeah golden parachutes are such a joke in this society that likes to pretend to be a meritocracy.

    Though on that note, I’d love to see a law that limits golden parachutes to the lowest paid position in the company. Hell, I’d be ok with that being scaled to full time. Not because disgraced executives deserve even that much but because it would give some incentive to increase pay rates across the company. I’ve also long thought that executive compensation should also be limited by some multiple of the lowest pay. And yeah, I’d include stock options and grants in that (for both employee and executive compensation).


  • IMO a fumbled and later recovered launch is different from the enshitification of video games like P2W, MTX in general, lootboxes, releasing what should be patches as paid DLC, invasive DRM and anti-cheat. I’d file all of those under bad design, while a bad launch is more of a bad execution. There can be overlap, like if they fully intended for early players to fill the role of beta testers.

    The way I approach it is I try to avoid the bad design stuff entirely but just avoid buying new games at release and definitely never pre-order. I’ll also support games in early release if I really like the concept and want to give them a better chance at being able to pull it off, but I go into those with the understanding that it’s not complete right now and there’s a chance it never will be. But I don’t see any reason to hold anything against the games that have messy launches but later recover.

    Though I’ve learned to not jump on the hype train and that makes it much easier to not take any of this stuff personally.



  • I’ve also been avoiding playing games that involve some third party launcher or login. I’m not perfectly consistent with this and have bought some games before realizing they had this, but even steam games can be subject to a company deciding they don’t want to support their game anymore (which IMO is fair) and just killing the game off entirely, which isn’t fair. I’d like to see a requirement that other steps be taken to keep it going without their active support. Like opening the source and relinquishing all copyrights on that code. If they want to keep parts of it, then pull it out into a library that they continue to maintain.


  • Putting all the eggs in the solar basket has risks, too. Like a large volcano eruption that reduces the amount of light that reaches the surface for a few years would be a double whammy, affecting food production as well as electricity production (which we’d need to rely on to try to offset the food losses). If we’re instead facing brownouts or full blackouts, that’s a recipe for a complete loss of stability. I suspect less solar energy reaching the surface would also reduce total wind energy (less localized heating would mean lower pressure differentials, but I could be missing other significant parts of this equation).

    I’d be most comfortable with a nice mix of energy sources combined with mothballing instead of decommissioning some capacity as renewables are able to take over more and more of the day to day energy needs so that we’re prepared to deal with an emergency like that.

    I’d also like to see more food production moved to vertical farms that can be powered by electricity rather than relying entirely on the sun and weather. But I do understand that the scale of food production would make doing that with a significant portion of the food supply very difficult. But with climate change (plus nutrient depletion of the soil), keeping so many eggs in the “just keep farming” basket also doesn’t seem like a great idea.


  • I wonder if people will soon realize that that rage they have for scalpers is just directed at the amateurs and that the upper class is full of people doing pretty much the same thing just in less obvious ways.

    Your employer (if you work for a private for-profit company) pays you x for your labour and then takes the proceeds of the labour and sells it for y where y is (generally) much higher than x. A business is profitable when the sum of all y is higher than the sum of all x.

    If it’s a non-profit, then the difference between y and x must be put back into the business in some way, which could be an investment into an expansion of its scope or it could be a raise for some or all of the workers (payroll is not profit, it’s an expense). And that could mean just the CEO gets a raise, because some of the leeching is via different pay levels for different people that isn’t based on just the difference they are directly making to the income.

    Public services can vary. If the service is profitable, then the profit goes into the budget of the government entity(s) that run it, as determined by legislature. So everyone is acting as the middleman there. If it’s not profitable, then it’s covered by taxes, at cost. There’s still varying salaries but it’s subject to government oversight, so things shouldn’t get as unbalanced as they would in the private sector, at least in theory. Though even in the public sector, there’s this assumption that promotions should come with big raises, regardless of how the workload changes, so you can still have people at the top making orders of magnitude more than people at the bottom.



  • Yeah, I wish C++ had function/scope epilogs and labeled loops/breaks, too. Those are the cases where the “never use goto” rule can be broken to make better code than adding all of the code that would be required to handle it the “right” way (setting up early exit flags and if statements after each level of nested loop to check the flag).


  • That’s the core of neo liberalism. Liberalism has a “my rights end where yours begin” component but neo liberalism drops that and expects the free market to solve such conflicts.

    And by “collective public elements”, I meant public organizations like the postal service, police departments, etc. The government itself is supposed to be one of those. Liberalism is neutral on what is and isn’t collectivized. Neo liberalism likes privatization but appreciates that some functions are better handled by the public, like law enforcement and road maintenance. Libertarianism believes it should all be private.

    In the last comment I said neo liberalism and libertarianism are pretty much the same, but it’s more accurate to say libertarianism is an extreme version of neo liberalism.



  • Buddahriffic@lemmy.worldtoLinux@lemmy.mlVLC Player
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    1 month ago

    I didn’t expect to click on a VLC appreciation thread agreeing that it’s awesome only to end up maybe switching to MPV based on the comments, but such is life I guess.

    I will remember it just like I will remember winamp, as one of the greats of its time.



  • They might mean neo libs.

    It’s fucking annoying when capitalists keep coming up with capitalist positions and naming them so that they sound like they are something else. Like neo liberalism or libertarianism, which are pretty close to the same thing (all about a deregulated, private, free market), only libertarians like to emphasize how they are ok with sex and drugs.

    Liberals want governments and collective public elements to protect the rights and freedoms of individuals (from other individuals, organizations, and governments).

    Neo liberals want governments and collective public elements to stay out of their affairs and let them manage their own interests.


  • Yeah, I thought Reddit would be a great data set at first because it comes with quality indicators via up/down votes. But, thinking about it more, a) total number of votes is more of a function of how popular the thread is and that comment’s positioning is in that thread, b) comments can get upvoted for accuracy or humour, and in the latter case, many times the humour is specifically about making inaccurate comments. And there’s a bias towards funny. My own most upvoted comments were mostly short funny ones while long thoughtful ones wouldn’t get that much attention. Not that being long or thoughtful implied anything about correctness, because c) different communities had different biases, and d) it was all populist stuff, so something that sounds good but isn’t accurate can outperform something that is accurate but less poetic.

    And to drive home how stupid the way we’re currently training approaching AI is, it’s pretty much the equivalent of sticking a kid in front of an internet browser, taking a little while to teach them how to use the browser, then leaving them on their own while they learn everything else they know, including the languages it’s all expressed in.

    Instead we have a whole curated education system that takes over a decade. I think AI could reduce that time but it still needs the curation part as well as feedback systems to reinforce correct knowledge and correct bad knowledge.




  • I think part of it is going through all those sorting methods to show quick sort is the best so that a) students who run into new sorts are better equipped to determine it most likely isn’t better than quick sort and b) to show the process used to determine quick sort is better than the rest in case you have some other algorithm options you want to pick the best of.

    And yeah, depending on what you do, some tasks never involve any of that, or when they do, they get offloaded onto a library or something that gives the solution to that step directly.

    But, for example, if you have a collection, the question of array vs linked list vs tree is still relevant, even if you’re just choosing a provided construct that is built on top of one of those. Each has their strengths and weaknesses depending on how the data is added, removed, and accessed.

    And with how slow things are these days despite how much better the hardware is, I think there’s a lot of successful software engineers and programmers who should be using that stuff from school more than they are.


  • Also big O analysis IMO should just be the starting point of maximizing efficiency. Those coefficients that just get dropped can have a huge impact. For example, any algorithm written in JavaScript or visual basic will be of the same order as that same algorithm written in C/C++ or rust, but will likely perform much slower. And the exact manner of implementation could even result in the C version being slower than the VB one.

    And on the other hand, I wouldn’t call a lot of big O analysis very advanced math. You might get a tighter bound with advanced math on some algorithms, but you can get a rough estimate just by multiplying and adding loops together. The harder question would be something like “does this early exit optimization result in an O(x³) algorithm becoming an O(log(x)*x²)?”