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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • I’m curious. Economically speaking, what would happen if Nvidia pulled a “Steam” and had a “February sale” where some models of video card were discounted enough to lead to a massive spike in sales numbers? A big enough discount to generate a greater total net return on sales for the quarter despite the fact that they were sold at a lower profit margin per individual sale? Assuming limitations like “you must create an account with a residential shipping address that can receive no more than x cards at the discounted price per street address” or some such to limit scalping, would simply showing increased profits do them any good?

    Or is the problem due to a lack of product quantity?




  • Determining the 3d structure of a protein took yearsuntil very recently. Folding at Home was a worldwide project linking millions of computers to work on it.

    Alphafold does it in under a second, and has revealed the structure of 200 million proteins. It’s one of the most significant medial achievements in history. Since it essentially dates back to 2022, we’re still a few years from feeling the direct impact, but it will be massive.

    You realize that’s because the gigantic server farms powering all of this “AI” are orders of magnitude more powerful than the sum total of all of those idle home PC’s, right?

    Folding@Home could likely also do in it in under a second if we threw 70+ TERAwatt hours of electricity at server farms full of specialzed hardware just for that purpose, too.


  • More like “sales teams are the reason middle managers think ALL employees slack off when not watched.”

    I get that sales is a SUPER depressing culture, a ridiculously antiquated work environment, and full of some utterly soul-sucking mandates from above, but I have never seen, in any workplace, a team that needs someone constantly riding herd on them like the sales team.

    Every place I’ve worked, every place that a place I’ve worked has had as a client, and every business I’ve ever visited had the same problem – sales people are largely unmotivated because their job has a much higher chance to SUCK OUT LOUD than most of the other jobs at a given company.

    When five figure quarterly bonuses, daily friendly team competitions for gift cards, more paid-for-by-the-company outings than the c suites get and pickle ball on company time twice a week aren’t enough to hype people up to do their actual job, something is really fucking wrong with the job expectations.


  • For those wondering about the upswing here:

    If the age verification movement goes unchecked, it’s possible that you could be forced to tie your government ID to much of your online activity, Gillmor says. Some civil rights groups fear it could usher in a new era of state and corporate surveillance that would transform our online behaviour.

    “This is the canary in the coalmine, it isn’t just about porn,” says Evan Greer, director of Fight for the Future, a digital rights advocacy group. Greer says age verification laws are a thinly veiled ploy to impose censorship across the web. A host of campaigners warn that these measures could be used to limit access not just to pornography, but to art, literature and basic facts about sex education and LGBTQ+ life.


  • I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.

    Corporate culture is a malicious bad actor.

    Corporate culture, from management books to magazine ads to magic quadrants is all about profits over people, short term over stability, and massaging statistics over building a trustworthy reputation.

    All of it is fully orchestrated from the top down to make the richest folks richer right now at the expense of everything else. All of it. From open floor plans to unlimited PTO to perverting every decent plan whether it be agile or ITIL or whatever, every idea it lays its hands on turns into a shell of itself with only one goal.

    Until we fix that problem, the enshittification, the golden parachutes, and the passing around of horrible execs who prove time and time again they should not be in charge of anything will continue as part of the game where we sacrifice human beings on the Altar of Record Quarterly Profits.





  • What do you use now?

    I work in IT and between the Advent of “agile” methodologies meaning lots of documentation is out of date as soon as it’s approved for release and AI results more likely to be invented instead of regurgitated from forum posts, it’s getting progressively more difficult to find relevant answers to weird one-off questions than it used to be. This would be less of a problem if everything was open source and we could just look at the code but most of the vendors corporate America uses don’t ascribe to that set of values, because “Mah intellectual properties” and stuff.

    Couple that with tech sector cuts and outsourcing of vendor support and things are getting hairy in ways AI can’t do anything about.





  • Except the overall hiring demand IS down and it has been since December.

    You know it’s bad when across the globe, IT systems administrators aren’t even getting hit up by RECRUITERS.

    In the U.S. at least, it’s been a continually “in demand” field since we recovered from the U.S. housing market crash of '08-'09… right up until before the New Year.

    Now I’m hearing the same thing from people in the field worldwide and that is that there’s been an uncharacteristic hiring stall in a historically consistent field of IT infrastructure.

    The same is supposedly true in other portions of infrastructure as well, likely because companies still view infrastructure as a cost center instead of a force multiplier.

    It remains to be seen if the hiring silence will extend to full stack devs/programmers if this heavy layoff follow the leader garbage goes on much longer, but if it hits “revenue generator” departments, I’m afraid we’ll start to see other companies tech stacks failing like Twitter’s current functionality has.


  • They weren’t, which is why the SEC updated 17 CFR Parts 229, 232, 239, 240, and 249.

    https://www.sec.gov/files/rules/final/2023/33-11216.pdf

    As of December 18th of last year, publicly traded companies are now required to disclose breaches. (soz, material cybersecurity incidents).

    Prior to that, they could …basically… just effectively sweep everything under the rug “like it never happened” minus a little handwaving and paper shuffling and nobody would find out about it until the information got sold and went public.

    I’ll have to go looking but I would be SERIOUSLY surprised if the disclosures apply to credit card companies (the MOST breached, historically) because I’m not sure what exactly qualifies someone as an asset-backed issuer, but it’s at least a really good step for the REST of things.