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ttmb

481 karma · joined July 29, 2016

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ttmb··on QuakeNotch: Quake Terminal on your MacBook's notch
I must be well out of the loop because I had no idea that the notch was anything other than a cosmetic trick to hide the camera.
ttmb··on The Matrix (1999) Filming Locations – Shot-for-Shot – Sydney, Australia [video]
I was working in Sydney and the instructions for dropping off the off-site backup tapes said "turn left at the Woman In Red fountain".
ttmb··on What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of Mad Magazine
I had never heard of the Babylon Bee and I just took a look at it. Are you saying you think The Onion is the very political one, or did I misread your sentence?
ttmb··on Corporations Learned the Maximum Amount They Can Charge for a Product
When a company says "cost of living" they mean their own, not their employees. So-called COLA adjustments are for Cost of Hiring, or Cost of Employee Retention. The distinction is that it is calculated based on minimizing unwanted attrition due to wage competition elsewhere, and has nothing to do with how much rent or milk prices may have increased.
ttmb··on A forged Apple employee badge
Maybe they did. Do you suppose they got scammed on eBay - which they "perfectly" remember buying it from - or from the Red Cross, which they have an invoice for?
ttmb··on CityGaussian: Real-time high-quality large-scale scene rendering with Gaussians
Not all of the videos are Matrix City, some are real places.
ttmb··on Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions
The bigger companies used their cash during the pandemic to go on a hiring spree, both bloating their headcount and their overall salaries.

The smaller/lower tier companies did not have the cash to compete with this, and now do not have as much to fix.

Also the layoffs in smaller companies just aren't big news.

ttmb··on Duolingo Cuts 10% of Contractors as It Uses More AI to Create App Content
At the same time, it also seems to accept unintelligible grunting as a correct pronunciation for many questions, and not just German.
ttmb··on Duolingo Cuts 10% of Contractors as It Uses More AI to Create App Content
I'm sure it's not the best language learning tool around, but it has taught me enough of three different languages to visit a foreign country, ask for directions, order things, etc, with a number of conversations never falling back into English. And all for the price of free.
ttmb··on Duolingo Cuts 10% of Contractors as It Uses More AI to Create App Content
Wasn't one of their initial monetization ideas that crowdsourced translations - from amateurs, not even paid contractors - would outperform AI translation? The translation thing never came close to panning out, from what I can tell.

Back in the day you used to be able to see a mini discussion thread about any exercise. The comments in these threads - from unpaid users - were frequently much more helpful than the official teaching notes. But they got rid of those a while back, too. At the time people suggested it was because they wanted to push people into some sort of paid tutoring offering that they'd announced. But I don't see any hint of that around. Now I'd guess it's because the questions are no longer hand crafted by people, and are now autogenerated by AI, leading to an inability to have discussions about specific questions.

ttmb··on Police get medical records without a warrant
Delivery from online, it's not just for spammers.

In fact, every medical insurance provider I've had for years has tried to push me onto their in-house pharmaceutical delivery service. Traditional pharmacies have been getting squeezed for a long time.

ttmb··on Way ahead of its time: The Remote Lounge NYC (2013)
They keep opening new branches around here. They are glorified ATM lobbies with minimal staff who will often direct you to use an ATM for anything that an ATM can do. But they do keep opening them. I sometimes wonder if it's just a complicated real estate investment play.
ttmb··on The early 90s tech scene that created L0pht, the legendary hackerspace
To be extra pedantic, he only said that "early systems" had that limitation, and that that drove username culture.
ttmb··on Aerobic exercise can reduce the risk of metastatic cancer in mice: study
Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if more runners do die from cancer. Because they're not falling victim to all the other things that are improved by cardio fitness, etc.
ttmb··on Manager's Handbook (2020)
YMMV, apparently.

For me, the standard medium for a meeting for decades been face to face, with videoconference in second, long before covid changed everything.

I have always hated phone calls, and conference calls specifically are one of the circles of hell.

ttmb··on Monorepos done right
> VCS is truth

VCS can only ever be intent at best.

ttmb··on U.S. eliminates human controls requirement for fully automated vehicles
This regulation is saying that if you did build an autonomous Russian roulette revolver, there's no requirement to outfit it with a pistol grip and a trigger.

If there is a fully driverless (not driving itself with a human still in it) truck - as companies tell us is their goal - it does not increase or decrease safety to have or not have a seat and a steering wheel in it.

The argument here is that building an autonomous Russian roulette revolver is a stupid thing to do, which is orthogonal.

ttmb··on Google mandates workers back to Silicon Valley, other offices from April 4
So over 800k people over the age of 50 have died from covid in the US.

Are you saying that it's "dishonest" to estimate that at least 1% of them are grandparents involved in childcare? By napkin math this more than works out; I'll also hint that if you spend even a minute researching, the stats on how many of these people are likely to be grandparents, and how many grandparents are child carers, are readily findable. If you care to engage in an honest discussion.

ttmb··on Unvaccinated workers who lose jobs ineligible for unemployment benefits (Canada)
It's a great analogy because the no-harm-to-others argument doesn't apply in either case.

In an incident, an un-seat-belted occupant can turn into a projectile and harm or kill others in the vehicle that might be wearing seatbelts.

ttmb··on Lego has designed a set that can't be taken apart
There are only a few pieces in that set that don't appear in hundreds of other sets:

The baseplate is custom and the most egregious example of what you are talking about, of course. The slope at the front with the swirl on it is also custom. There's a round tile with a snowflake on it, that appears in two other sets. The giant snowflake on top, about two dozen other winter-themed sets. The slide also appears in only a couple of dozen pieces, but this basically all pieces that include a playground or similar. The slide is functional for play so it can't be trivially made of smaller pieces without compromising that. There also an ornamental swirly translucent smoke-like piece that only appears in a handful of sets, again, all winter themed.

That's it, the rest of the pieces in the kit appear in literally hundreds of other sets.

ttmb··on Lego has designed a set that can't be taken apart
> it means that half the pieces are now custom made for the particular set

I do not believe this is true. There are Lego enthusiasts that thoroughly review every new set and are careful to point out the introduction of new pieces and new building techniques. The number of new pieces per set is very low, and even then the pieces are typically well received for the number of new build techniques they may open up.

ttmb··on Gender in Latin and Beyond: A Philologist’s Take
I think it's common in colloquial speech but rarely used in formal speech these days.
ttmb··on Iceland almost gets female-majority parliament
This event is not being regarded as notable because it is a goal in and of itself (to most people). It's notable because it has never happened before, was unthinkable in the not so recent past, and is a reflection on positive changes in society at large that now it is a thing that can happen.
ttmb··on Apple Will Not Reinstate Epic’s Fortnite Developer Account
And then the brick and mortar store says "oh and also we want 30% of anything the customer purchases through your product for ever" -

Yes, yes I do think we would be saying the same things.

ttmb··on Workers are often told not to talk about pay. That's not legal
These numbers do not seem to correspond to actual salaries. If I look up my company I can see multiple entries for job titles that I have specific knowledge of, and the quoted salary is much much lower than anyone's base salary has ever been.
ttmb··on U.S. sanctions virtual currency exchange after spike in ransomware attacks
You would think that any reputable news editor would know not to use an autoantonym in a headline.
ttmb··on A generation of American men give up on college
> [0] His crew is run by Swedish woman who was trained as a metal worker

It is a small world and I am 98% sure that your son has been in my house recently.

ttmb··on Edinburgh’s computer scientists banned from using Alice and Bob as too Western
It is possible for both to be inflammatory. The comment you replied to only mentioned the article.
ttmb··on Atlas robot does parkour
> 1. They've done this before. [1]

Your link says nothing of the sort.

ttmb··on Google may cut pay of staff who work from home
An important distinction is that these companies generally do not and have not ever described location-based pay differential as cost-of-living. They are pretty consistent in saying that the differential is due to hiring market competitiveness. If they choose to hire in a particular market (because they have an office there), how much does it cost to make sure they get the people they want in that market?

This is somewhat but not entirely aligned with cost of living, and there have always been clear examples of better and worse markets - eg engineers in London are not that well compensated compared to their cost of living.

The big losers here will be people who lived in a HCOL location and yet still had a long commute to an office. They have no tradeoff to leverage if they decide to leave the high-pay salary market.

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