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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • SkyNTP@lemmy.mltoPeople Mastodon@quokk.aubring back web 1.0
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    2 days ago

    You are living the consequences of what happens when a market is no longer a free market (where companies compete on merit) and instead an oligopoly, where companies extract all the value for themselves at the expense of everyone else. Now bow to your tech overlords, peasant.



  • While you are not wrong about these different specialities within the trade, there can still be an effect. Let me illustrate:

    Suppose you like bananas but not apples. One day there is an apple disease that kills most of the apple trees leading to a collapse of the apple market. You feel relieved because you don’t eat bananas anyways. But you go to the supermarket and find that not only are the apple shelves empty, the banana shelves are empty too! Why? Well people still gotta eat, and not everyone is as picky as you, they switched to bananas and now the banana market is under supplied too. And it’s not like you can build a banana farm overnight.

    Back to electricians, if the salaries of data center electricians increases rapidly, you will find that those electricians who are qualified for both (even if it is just a very small number) might focus on data centres, straining the supply of residential electricians. Just like with banana orchards, it takes time for new electricians to enter the market, and those new hires will further be swayed to the data center specialty first, further straining the residential market.

    We can see a real example of this with the price of RAM. RAM manufacturers saw increased demand for data centre RAM so they switched focus to that market and it ended up drying out the consumer side supply, hence the surge in price. And just as with banana plantations and electricians, you can’t start up a RAM fab overnight.





  • Okay, but I don’t think the scenario you are describing is particularly relevant to the comic. This looks like a white collar job application, not a blood diamond mine or sweatshop.

    So back to the point at hand. The question is, why do you want to work here? It’s a super relevant question. If all that was important to you is money, you’d go work on an oil rig. But most people don’t do that. Thousands of intangible factors someone might choose a workplace besides just for cash. Work/life balance. Personal interest. Comfortable work environment. Relevant experience. Proximity to home. Perks…

    The point of the question or interviews in general is to stand out from other applicants. The answer “I need cash” doesn’t make you stand out.







  • The earth’s core is about 5500C and is mostly composed of iron and nickel, probably. Presumably, it would shrink tremendously going from 5500C to 0C so in theory you could calculate the rate of shrinkage using iron’s rate of thermal expansion. However the core is also under immense pressure which makes iron much denser (smaller) than on the surface of the earth. The immense temperature and pressure is a result of the action of gravity pulling the core onto itself.

    The short answer I think is the earth cannot exist as we know it at anything below its core temp of 5500. Suppose we waved a magical wand that set it’s temperature to 0, it would implode on itself (along with the rest of the planet) and heat right back up to its current core temp of 5500 before you could measure the effects of thermal expansion.


  • Society has been steadily forgetting the importance of reliability, all in the name of convenience. And in the end, you get neither.

    “They don’t make it like they used to”. Sure. Sure. Old man yelling at clouds. Blah blah. But when your light switches stop working because of some overly complex system that requires the switching data to travel twice around the world just to fucking turn a light on (or an AI to invent 15 Python scripts and a mathematical proof just to add two integers together), you’ve got a really fucking fragile system.

    And you know what isn’t convenient? Fucking fragile products that break as soon as you touch them. Who the fuck wants a hammer made out of salami? Sure, it might look like a hammer, it might taste great, but it can’t drive a nail for shit. That’s a garbage product that belongs in the garbage.

    An LLM can tell me a (lame) joke. So can Bob. Bob can also turn on the lights, and is pretty good at that. But those things together don’t automatically mean an LLM is good at turning on lights. They are fragile, by design, like the salami is!

    Stay in your fucking lane tech companies.





  • You crave salt and fat because your body needs a little bit of these things to survive, but finding salt and fat out in nature is really really hard, so those cavemen that liked the taste of salty or fatty foods enough to make the extra effort to find those foods were more likely to survive to be your ancestors and you inherited that behaviour. That’s why you like McDonald’s, it’s full of the salt and fat that is hard to obtain if your diet consists of mostly roots and mushrooms and leaves.

    McDonalds is bad for you because it’s unnaturally full of salt and fat. Far, far more than your body needs and far more than your cavemen ancestors would have eaten naturally. Especially if you eat McDonald’s often. Too much of anything turns that thing into a poison.

    McDonald’s has only been around a generation or two. That’s not enough time for the people who crave McDonalds and eat too much of it to die off, leaving mostly people who don’t crave McDonalds to remain.



  • Enshitification is the specific process of capturing a supplier/consumer market through short term subsidies, squeezing out the competition, and then squeezing the suppliers and consumers directly.

    Increasing prices alone isn’t enshitification. But increasing prices after sustaining artificially low prices for the purpose of creating a monopoly or quasi monopoly is enshitification.

    Plex most definitely was providing a good quality product but was not generating revenue, and has little to no competition (Jellyfin is a bit debatable) as a result. Was it intentional or just incompetence? Hard to prove either way. I’d say the biggest argument against enshitification is that Plex is mostly a product instead of market space hosting suppliers and consumers, like Google, YouTube, AirBNB, Uber, etc.