• 3 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • That’s because employees are seen as a liability, while holdings are seen as value.

    Basically, employees need to be paid, so having a lot of employees hurts your company value. But owning immaterial things helps company value, because you don’t need to pay for ideas beyond the initial investment.

    So headlines like these are common any time a company is looking to boost their stock. Lay off a bunch of employees to reduce cash out, use that freshly gained cash to buy intellectual properties (or buy the companies that own that IP) and then sit on the IP because actually using it would require employees like the ones you just laid off. You don’t care about actually leveraging the IP, because simply owning it is what gives you the value bump. You’re not worried about income from those IPs yet, because you’re just trying to make the company larger with the existing cash you have access to.


  • Something something Dunning-Kruger Effect. Dumb people who know very little about a topic will tend to overestimate their knowledge about said topic. As you gain more knowledge about the topic, the more you realize you don’t know, and the less confident you are about it.

    In extreme cases, it ends with the person having Imposter Syndrome. When a person is very knowledgeable and experienced in a certain topic, but believes they aren’t qualified enough to be considered an expert. They feel like an imposter who will inevitably get outed by someone more knowledgeable than they are. So they have a lot of anxiety about speaking on the topic, because they’re afraid it will result in them being outed as an imposter.



  • The time sink is honestly the biggest part. At least when you’re doing laundry at home, you can do other things while you wait on the laundry. At a laundromat, there’s not much to do except maybe bring an iPad or e-reader. Once you’re done folding your current load of laundry, you’re just kind of stuck waiting for the next load to be done.

    It always feels a little bit like when you show up 2 hours early for your flight, but then there’s no line at security and you get to your terminal in like 5 minutes. There’s nothing to do except wait. At least at home, you could go hop on your computer and get some work done, get some other cleaning done, or boot up a game console.


  • The unfortunate part is that Nintendo is likely going to win it. It’s a Japanese company, in Japanese court, and the courts are hilariously biased in favor of Japanese companies. Nintendo has literally never lost a lawsuit in Japan against a foreign defendant, because the Japanese courts are set up to trust Japanese claimants more than foreigners by default.

    Japan has a lot of cute media and a reputation for being polite, but the harsh reality is that the country is one of the most racist in the world. They get away with it because the culture is built upon being polite. But under that polite exterior, there is a lot of overt racism. Japan is one of the most homogenous populations in the world, with 99.8% of the population being native Japanese. That remaining 0.2% includes all of the tourists, visa holders, immigrants, half-Japanese children, etc… Japan has a saying, which roughly translates to “the nail that sticks out gets hammered down.” In a society that is focused on blending in, immigrants stick out.

    Imagine how bad the White Power rhetoric would be if America were 99.8% white, and that other 0.2% (not 2%. Two tenths of 1%) of non-white people included tourists, immigrants, and naturalized citizens. In a packed 20,000 person stadium, that would only be 40 non-white people in the crowd.




  • I work in live production, and have actually encountered the Brown M&M’s clause in real life. It was a small 5 person band. We had the show’s producer sitting backstage, picking brown M&M’s out of the fishbowl for probably 45 minutes.

    They showed up for sound check, and immediately went “holy shit you guys actually pulled out the brown ones? We added that as a joke!” The producer was in earshot, and I got to watch him take psychic damage in realtime.


  • Tankie is a sort of derogatory term for people who whitewash and cover up the horrors of communism.

    There was a rebellion in the Soviet Union. The SU responded by rolling tanks into town and violently busting it. This put two sides of communism at odds; On one hand, there was the plight of the working class (the rebellion) and then on the other there were the actions of the people in control (the tanks). Tankies are the “communism has only ever helped people, you’re just listening to capitalist propaganda” folks who decided to side with the tanks, instead of siding with the working class. It’s sort of like calling someone a fake communist, [insert “No True Scotsman fallacy” argument from a tankie below], because a “real” communist would side with the working class.

    You see it a lot on Lemmy because many instances have some major communist lean. After all, the “anyone can run their own instance and be in charge. No centralized instances, if you don’t like the mods you can just change instances” concept of the Fediverse jives very well with communist ideals. For instance, the “ml” in lemmy.ml is meant to stand for “Maoist/Leninist”. And that means the entire communist spectrum is on display; From both the more moderate “yeah communism has some cool parts but was also responsible for some major humanitarian crises” to the more extreme “those crises [were caused by individuals, not by the political system]/[never actually happened at all. They’re lies made up by capitalists to deter people from supporting communism!] Communism never actually hurt anyone.”


  • Yeah, booting from USB is something you see a lot in the data security and/or privacy-oriented circles. Because many USB boot drives are designed to be volatile, meaning nothing about the OS is actually stored on the drive. So you can nuke the whole OS just by unplugging the drive.

    Basically every (smart) drug dealer who orders their supplies on Tor uses a USB drive OS, so if the cops ever bust down their door they can just yank the USB and destroy all evidence of their online orders.

    But it can also be useful for test-driving a particular repo. If you ever manage to fuck things up royally, you’re just one reboot away from a fresh start.








  • Yeah, the issue was with Windows doing funky things with GRUB during an update. GRUB is a popular bootloader, which detects which OSes you have installed, and presents them in a menu. But Windows has been setting Windows Bootloader to run instead of GRUB when it updates. And Windows’ Bootloader doesn’t automatically detect Linux installs. If you use your BIOS to choose your OS (instead of using GRUB) you’re fine.

    Even then, the fix is relatively simple in most cases. It’s just running a command in Windows’ Command Prompt, (the specific command is a little bit different depending on your specific distro) to re-enable GRUB after the update disables it.


  • Warning: You basically get no time off. Even when you’re off, you’re expected to be on-call. And no, you’re not paid extra for that.

    With the rise of computers, railroad scheduling got precise. It eventually reached a point where railroad companies began cutting workers, because they were able to bounce one conductor from train to train the same way airlines bounce pilots from one flight to the next. They cut so many workers that it got to the point where a single sick person can bring the entire system to a screeching halt. Instead of actually keeping enough people on the roster to actually fill their needs, they just started implementing increasingly strict attendance policies, to the point that railroad workers have basically zero time off.

    This led to the 2022 strike, where railroad workers were eventually allowed one day of PTO per year. They’re either working or on call for the other 364 days.