5,914 karma · joined January 10, 2011
I'm assuming once it's stable enough to leave beta, the community can polish up some proper documentation for it.
You lay off hard to instill fear and legally-depress everyone's wages, but you give good severance so that when you inevitably want to hire people in the next two months (as GitLab is likely to do), they're aren't too terrified to accept your offer because of all the layoffs you just did. 7% of staff as "layoffs" comes out to about 150-ish? people, but they are also currently hiring for over 100 open job position at GitLab on job boards right now. GitLab is also up 74% year-over-year in quarterly revenue, and had their highest sales quarter ever just four months ago, according to their own PR department (https://ir.gitlab.com/news-releases/news-release-details/git...)
It's a pretty transparent process, frankly. Lots of companies are doing 'fake layoffs' (layoffs they don't need, done solely to appease the executive class, who strongly desire a recession), but unfortunately for them, the truth is that the economy isn't anywhere close to a recession, so they simultaneously have to keep hiring open, to keep labor incoming, to keep up with all the new business growth or increased sales they're experiencing right now.
Ok, I understand that this is presumably an experience you had in your life once, but like, could you simply not hold a bad opinion against all labour rights forever, just because one person told you an (pretty obvious) blatant lie one time?
Come on, is that really the honest truth? What occupation or union has union dues at 50% of salary?
In the US, UAW's dues max out around ~1.5% of salary (or an hourly approximate equivalent), the teachers union maxes out at 1.6% of salary (highest possible dues cap out at $55/month max), the nursing union dues cap out at $65/month, our local teamsters are approximately ~1.45% of salary ($50/month for someone at a $20/hr job), and so on.
The "expensive Union Dues" mess is almost always FUD or outright lies. Union dues are usually pretty modest.
They've already communicated their needs (wages are too low), and you've already dismissed their concerns. Your comment here is kind of proving exactly why Apple employees so desperately need to unionize -- they aren't going to get fairer wages any other way.
You say this like they didn't spend the last decade selling 75 million devices that barely pushed ~360p, and making a small fortune from it. I get wanting Nintendo to bump the hardware (I'd love a beefier Switch too), but they've proven over and over again that they don't need to do anything.
If anything, I kind of like that Nintendo has chosen to cede the market of "indie/port" titles, their decision to mostly ignore that market is a big part of what's allowing Steam Deck to flourish right now. And the Steam Deck might be the healthiest new development the industry has seen in 20 years.
AAA video games haven't actually been $59.99 for over a decade. AAA games for the last decade or so have had an "entry-level" / beginnners plan (at that $59 price point) but content that previously would have been in the base game has been sectioned off into upsells / DLC / add-ons for an extra $15 to $40/ea.
I don't personally care much (indie games have gotten so good, I barely play AAA stuff much anymore) -- but in the interest of honesty, inflation correction has already been happening in gaming this entire time. However, the "add on another extra 15% just for the CEO alone" increase that other industries did in 2021/2022 hadn't happened in gaming yet, and that's what the higher base price is for here.
A small-but-meaningful number of 'paying customers' aren't themselves users. They are paying the subscription price for the value of community peace, not any specific content.
For example: I pay for a Netflix account. I never use it anymore (since Netflix keeps killing the only shows they made that I liked), but my kids use it sporatically-but-heavily. (i.e., maybe one or two hours per day 4-ish days a week, but all at once). If Netflix makes it break for my kids (like they're threatening to) then I might as well cancel it anyway, it's worthless for those 'kid tv breaks' now.
It sounds like a small-but-not-trivial percent of Netflix subscriptions are something like mine (paying to keep other people happy, paying to prevent people from bothering them, not to watch any specific show/movie). And Netflix is playing in the "fuck around" part of "fuck around and find out".
The edge cases don't even have to be that "edge".
We have a pretty 'normal' family, (two parents, single household), but happen to have 5 kids. We fit into a single regular minivan, but Amazon Kids Tablets don't work (Amazon families max out at 4 kids, I suppose) and this new Netflix plan also has a same 4-simultaneous limit.
Like, either no one at Netflix thought about this at all, or some senior leadership is high on their own supply, and overruled every reasonable voice within the org.
Probably? I live in Michigan, which (with the exception of two spots) has no meaningful limits on construction. Even the cities that technically have-and-enforce zoning, waive all the rules constantly anytime a developer asks.
And yes -- it means developers can build almost anything they want, almost anywhere they want. (Truly anything, I live next to a 15-story concrete castle apartment building that a developer built on what was once a trailer park).
Unfortunately, it does not mean you get lower cost of housing (prices here are still astronomical, and while they look cheaper in comparison to California, is only because of the severely reduced income locals make -- prices are still at record-all-time highs)
But it does mean, developers routinely cut down entire forests or farmland for new suburbs anytime they'd like. If you want a house made of sticks and cardboard, we have loads and loads of them for 'just' $450k. Years worth of 'inventory' here.
Churches (at least in the US) haven't been open to all for many decades now, they're highly exclusive places. Yes, technically anyone can usually walk through the door on a Sunday morning for free, but other than that literal hour, Churches usually have a lot of restrictions before a person is allowed to meaningfully participate in any way (restrictions on income, location, wealth, lifestyle, etc)
US Christian Churches are basically political country clubs pretending to be non-profits by way of their religious veneer. I would argue they're almost the complete opposite of a Public Library or Emergency Room.
People would care more, if Netflix would stop cancelling everything. I'm not sure they realize how much they're killing their own backcatalog revenue by making everything a one/two season max.
The Xbox dashboard is slow because of Microsoft's business goals for it, not because the Xbox 360 hardware or software struggles with HD-sized JPEGs or whatever.
That's not how it works. Generally speaking, any publicly funded hospital in the US must take patients by law, they can not turn away patients except under very specific circumstances.
> There isn't a national nurse shortage
Literally everyone disagrees with you:
- The New York Times - https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/15/us/hospital-nursing-short... - University of St Augustine - https://www.usa.edu/blog/nursing-shortage/ - University of California SF - https://scienceofcaring.ucsf.edu/patient-care/nursing-shorta... - Center for American Progress - https://www.americanprogress.org/about-us/ - McKinsey and Co - https://www.hcinnovationgroup.com/policy-value-based-care/st... - Both the US Democratic Party and US Republican Party - https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/healthcare/347826-bo...
> that's out of an inability to pay traveling nurse rates.
If you pay extra to import a nurse (traveling nurses) you remove them from the area they were previously. That's great, but it's not a fix for a shortage, that's just relocating the shortage somewhere else.
And, if they're short, why aren't they able to pay traveling nurse rates? Medical revenues are at an all time high, prices too. There's no reason a hospital couldn't pay higher nursing rates, they just choose not to, because again, that figure is not determined by supply or demand.
Yeah, the problem is that the "law of supply and demand" is a simple metaphor to help children gently begin learning economics, not how anything actually works. Almost no price any real person encounter anywhere in their daily life is actually determined in any meaningful way by "supply" or "demand" -- unless you stretch the definition of those two words so thin they're practically meaningless. They're potential factors, sure, but only small ones.
As one of a bajillion examples, see how every hospital is short staffed (low supply) and desperate for nurses (high demand), while we also see them constantly lay nurses off or reduce hours (and nursing has consistently-fixed low salaries, despite the shortages). Same for CNAs, nursing home staff, etc.
Yep! This is also exactly how e-mail works, and yet everyone manages to get an e-mail account (or ten) with no problems.
> I still gave their server browser a try, and couldn't find anything that looks remotely official on the first page.
"Hello, helpdesk? I can't find the official email server. No, not Hotmail, not Yahoo, not G-mail, not Apple Me. I only want the official email server. Hello?"
> tl;dr for now mastodon doesn't offer an easy path to just use the service w/o thinking about its details.
Sure it does? Pick a free+open provider to register yourself (or ask any of your friends for an invite to their server).
It's no more effort than say, signing up for a cellphone telephone number, and everyone figured out how to do that. Children manage to handle "you have to pick a server first" when they load up Minecraft (each of which has it's own moderators and their own unique rules! -- some are even invite-only!), and the kids seem to get along just fine.
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I get your point. Being a free, open, decentralized network means there's one extra step to registration -- I agree with your complaint.
But it's literally just one extra step, and it's not even a difficult one. The idea that this makes Mastodon difficult to use because of that, seems completely farfetched -- every other popular network has had a similar step and managed to overcome it with zero issues.
This is not a thing people regularly did? Old-school blue checks were never a status symbol, just a way Twitter used to denote "real" (meaning from-the-author-stated) and "fake" (real-humans-parodying-someone-else) accounts.
The idea that they denoted status was a criticism born from misunderstanding and invented by far-right activists who mostly were never involved in Twitter socially during the first 10 years of it's run, and never really understood Twitter user's culture. 99% of people with "blue checks" were not doing some holier-than-thou dance or whatever. (It's also why none of these people are rushing to pay $8 for this newly-invented blue-as-status symbol thing -- it was never about status, these people are already often rich and famous or at least noteworthy in their field, they don't need some weirdo micro-validation from Twitter.
Only a completely tone-deaf crazy person would pay money for Twitter in an attempt to gain validation or status.
They did? Mastodon is basically a full-blown clone of Twitter by a competent team.
Yes, it's also open-source and decentralized. But you can mostly ignore that most of the time, and 99% of users do so. (in much the same way that iPhones are decentralized across cell carriers, but that mostly doesn't matter to regular folks).
> Make it easy to migrate your past tweets over, maybe some way to migrate your connections, boom.
They also did this. When you need to migrate all your tweets and connections over, suddenly your really thankful Mastodon was quietly-decentralized underneath, and makes doing this mostly just a two-click operation.
But yeah, exhibit A in "don't execute poorly" -- maybe don't give away your most popular show to your biggest streaming competitor.
Streaming seems to be working great, if you invest in decent originals that subscribers like, regularly, with realistic-but-modest budgets, and sell that at a cheap predictable subscription. (It's working out great for Paramount+, it was working pretty well for HBO before Discovery decided to kill off all of Warner Brothers)
But like, AMC doesn't seem to be doing much of that. If you love the "Walking Dead Universe", yeah, AMC's gotcha covered. For anyone else, there just isn't much here.
The last time I heard of an interesting AMC show I personally wanted to watch, was "Dispatches from Elsewhere" back in 2020 (and at that time, you weren't even allowed to pay them money to watch it, you had to buy a whole cable package)
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Streaming isn't struggling, it's just competitive. You can't expect to execute poorly, fumble your way through and still magically make a lot of money.
There's some inherent overhead in a federated model (vs a single-source one), and the ActivityPub protocol Mastodon happens to use, wasn't necessarily designed to be the lightest possible thing in all use-cases.
Also, there's just a lot more traffic. My instance said, after Twitter's major struggles, they saw something like 30x more traffic and 20x more daily registrations. For instances that, prior to the influx, were running by volunteers in spare time out of people's bedrooms or small cheap VPS's and such.
These instances weren't necessarily ideally performance-tuned prior to the influx (and even if yours was, the remote ones your users might need to hit to fetch content from may not have been)
We do also do that too.
Every car is built with a fancy headrests and seatbelts and airbags -- the entire car is literally a helmet, and we require this on every new vehicle sold for decades. (And we require the seatbelt be worn too, legally enforceable by law in most areas)
We even check every single car sold to make sure the Helmet-worthiness of it is safe for the general public (see https://www.nhtsa.gov/vehicle/2019/CHEVROLET/VOLT/5%252520HB... as an example of a vehicle results)
When an occupant of the car is small enough such that the built-in helmet-worthiness of the car might be rendered insufficient, we also require they get extra helmet-like protections wrapped around their head/neck/body - see https://www.dmv.com/car-seats for specifics -- and even these are also legally enforceable by law in most areas
I apologize for referring to concerns like these as "crank causes"
Well, that's not quite accurate. (a) there isn't a large increase of trans people, historically speaking, just folks being more open and honest about their status recently, since it's become marginally less punished in a few specific places, than it has been prior, and (b) in recent years, trans men or transmasc folks are the largest group of those new influx, not trans women.
> There are massive amounts of compounds in our environment that are endocrine disrupters or mimic sex hormones like estrogen
If people were getting estrogen in the environment that they didn't want in any amount meaningful enough to effect them, you'd wouldn't expect to see more trans women (trans women, generally speaking, are usually deficient in estrogen), you'd expect to see more dysphoric men. You'd expect to see a sharp increase in cis men presenting with ED and gynecomastia and such. (Which, to be fair, is a thing we're seeing. But so far, appears to be mainly linked to increasing obesity rates)
> Maybe they would even benefit more from hormone treatments in the opposite direction than the "gender affirming" treatments.
This is barbaric if you think about it for more than 5 seconds. So barbaric in fact, that it's been outlawed in many nations -- see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversion_therapy for more info
Yep, it's that. The author is not arguing in good faith (IMHO), and is mad that crank causes can't easily subvert a school district, if the school district is sufficiently large enough to resist it. The big tell is that the author won't actually list what "community values" or "will of citizens" they think are missing in these democratically-elected school district boards (because if they admitted it honestly, it would be immediately obvious why districts resist it)
And this isn't just a thought-piece, this is a real battle happening at the local level in Michigan right now, during the past election, something like 60% of the candidates for each random district are that district's crazy cranks from school board meetings, intentionally running in bad faith, just to push minority-held crazy religious/political-extremist beliefs onto children via the school board). Districts can't kick them out of the meetings, if they are on the board themselves.
I'm not convinced Twitter had a ton of bloat. (Most of the teams actually involved don't seem to think so). Just because Elon can't understand something, doesn't make that thing "bloat".
Twitter definitely had a few weird features that could be cut (the audio podcasting thing, for example). But calling most of Twitter microservices "bloat" is about as dumb as calling a cars Seatbelt and Airbag and Crumple Zones and that spare tire in the trunk "bloat" -- it's only "bloat" if you assume all people will always be perfect and no one will ever make a mistake anywhere, and nothing bad will ever happen.
* Some hospitals, for instance, still have entire wards using DVDs. Downtime in a room is many tens-of-thousands-of-dollars lost per hour. Outpatient medical settings often use them as well (pediatricians offices, dialysis clinics, etc)
* Some schools are still tied to the format, for multimedia installations / video carts / pre-purchased equipment / etc.
* Tens-of-thousands of minivans are sold with infotainment that's always 10 years behind modern tech. (For almost 10 years, you had to have a binder-full-of-DVDs to use any Chrysler Minivan's video player system, the only other option was the analog RCA ports next to a kids seat). My 2016 Minivan, for example, only supports DVDs and nothing else (even though both BluRay and HDMI had been common standards for 10+ years by that point)
* And of course, there's millions of homes that aren't bothering to upgrade. (Netflix still has something like 2+ million unique DVD-only subscribers each month)
I'm not convinced of that. Tesla's connector is thinner and lighter yes absolutely. But Tesla is also weaker and less reliable \ less fault tolerant than standard EV charger cables (See the dreaded EP307 / lock error, something that can't even happen with a normal EV CCS charger)
I definitely think it's preferable for CCS win, as it's the safest, most durable, most compatible, while also being the lowest cost option.
In my home state, for example, there's about 8% more single Women than Men. And there's a list of like two dozen medium-sized and major metros where this is true across the US (Pittsburgh, Boston, Detroit, Richmond and DC metro, etc) - https://www.movebuddha.com/blog/best-cities-single-men/
Atlanta too, has more single women than men by a wide margin ( https://www.thrillist.com/entertainment/atlanta/why-dating-i... )
Yes, the tech hub metros lean male-heavy (SF, Seattle, Austin, etc). But, generally speaking, most of the US is the opposite, so.