Inside almost every arcade cabinet is a Dell Optiplex running Windows 7, or 10 if its really recent. There’s no such thing as an arcade board anymore, they’re all Dells, or sometimes those HP mini PCs, usually with the protective plastic still on.
Daytona even uses a Raspberry Pi to control the second screen. SEGA intentionally ships those with no-brand SD cards that consistently fail after 3 months. It’s in their agreement that you’ll buy another card from them instead of just flashing the image onto an SD card that won’t break.
The Mario Kart arcade cabinet uses a webcam called the “Nam-Cam” that is mounted in a chamber with no ventilation, which causes it to overheat and die every few months, so of course you’ll have to replace those too. The game will refuse to boot without a working camera.
Oh yeah also all arcade games with prizes are rigged. All of them. We literally have a setting that determines how often the game will allow wins.
Oh yeah also all arcade games with prizes are rigged. All of them. We literally have a setting that determines how often the game will allow wins.
One time on vacation, my little sister and I found a crane game in the game room of our hotel that was clearly over tuned - basically every button press was another win, it was great. We still remember it fondly. A stupid thing, but even at that age we knew these are usually scams and we we’re stoked to just basically get cheap toys.
If I was to open up a classic video.game arcade and run it entirely on downloaded roms is someone coming to take me down?
Yes. You have to have a license to charge people money to play those games.
Otherwise you would have seen a ton of arcades open already
Edit: I only know this because I asked a guy who ran one. His machines were in pretty bad shape and I inquired why he didn’t just do as you thought.
You have to own the game to legally download a ROM. Can’t say other than that.
I worked in an arcade in the 90s. Wow have things changed. I bet pinball games are not easily fixable anymore either.
Optiplex is fucken goated stg
That last paragraph sounds like something that is braking entire sets of laws and a big lawsuit waiting to happen
Software Engineering. Most software is basically just houses of cards, developed quickly and not maintained properly (to save money ofc). We will see some serious software collapses within our lifetime.
Package management is impossible. When a big enough package pushes an update the house of cards eill fall. This causes project packages with greatly outdated versions to exist in production because there is no budget to diagnose and replace packages that are no longer available when a dependency requires a change.
Examples: adminJs or admin bro… one of them. Switched the package used to render rich text fields.
React-scripts or is it create react app, I don’t recall. Back end packages no long work as is on the front end. Or something like that? On huge projects, who’s got the budget to address this to get the project up to date?
This has to be a world wide thing. There is way to many moving targets for every company to have all packages up to date.
It’s only a matter of time before an exploit of some sort is found and who knows what happens from there.
That’s basically what happened with log4j or whatever that java bug was a few years ago. A lot of things still haven’t been patched.
As an everyday user of software who’s not a developer, this is not a secret. Nothing works well for any extended period of time.
Because it fit into an ecosystem of tech that is constantly evolving. Software as a whole evolves more quickly than most tech. You see the same effect in every other branch of engineering but just slower.
Example: They are having problems rebuilding a certain famous church in Europe that burned down because the trees that went into it are now all smaller. They can’t get a replacement part.
I just dealt with this about a month ago at work. A customer machine died and they wanted “an exact replacement”. I explained to sales that is all I need to hear to know this project is going to be a disaster. Parts go out of stock, the network stuff is not as backwards compatible as people think it is, and standards change. They went over my head and demanded the same machine. I get daily emails from our fabricators about the problems they are having. Engineering is not a once and done thing. You need to have the staff and resources to continue to make your product match up with the environment it is in.
Does leftpad count as a collapse?
Supermarket employee here. We have a “fresh” fish counter selling stuff like whole mackerels and raw salmon fillets and the like.
Each and every one of these has been frozen at least once - this is a mandatory health hazard prevention thing (to kill off parasites etc) and also basically the only food-safe way to transport them in great quantities over long distances without them going bad. They get delivered frozen solid, get thawed behind the scenes and then put on display / on ice for customers to buy. And then they’re lying there all day long until someone happens to buy some … people still treat the pre-packaged fish from the frozen foods aisle as a second choice, even tho those have NOT been lying around half-thawed in the open air for 10 hours straight.
Long story short, “fresh” fish from the counter is less fresh than the frozen stuff, despite customers commonly believing it to be the other way around.
Hold up, you mean that market in the middle of nowhere (like Kansas) with “fresh caught” fish was not caught by my local fisherman.
Shocked, I tell you 😂
Oh you’d be surprised … by the way, the same goes for literally everything at the bakery counter. Heard a customer complain once that she won’t ever buy pretzels in the store again because they weren’t actually freshly made, the employees just tossed prepackaged frozen pretzels ino the oven yadda yadda … uhhhm lady, do you really think they’re kneading dough behind the scenes?! Never wondered why your croissants, bread rolls and the like always have the same shape, size and weight? It’s almost as if they were made in a factory or something …
…yet these, too, are treated like first choice over the frozen bread rolls you can bake at home, because “a real baker made them” …
The bakery part hits me especially hard, I’m living in germany, where many people are proud of the bread culture, and you basically need to look for artisan bakeries to get stuff they actually made themselves instead of having frozen stuff delivered and just baked in the store. The saddest part is most people don’t realize, while still writing comments online about how “american bread is just sugar”
Hear, hear. Another bullshit part about this is that they often explicitly ask for baker apprenticeship and/or certificates in the job description, and you still end up just tossing factory-made frozen dough clumps into an oven. Why do you first need to prove that you can make cakes and doughnuts and the like from scratch, in order to be allowed to toss frozen clumps from a factory into an oven? It makes no sense.
Just a guess, but marketing and truth in advertising laws. They can then say they have real bakers preparing the products and not be lying.
I have a micro-bakery (I run it completely alone) where I make everything from scratch, and every day I get customers who enter and immediately leave disappointed because I only have 6 or 7 different breads at most, when the big-name franchise store in the main street has literally dozens of varieties. Once one woman asked me why I wasn’t baking fresh baguettes every hour like them. I don’t know, lady… maybe because my baguettes take more than 3 hours just to do the first proofing, while they simply have to put industrial made ones in the oven?
I am eating a kaiser roll that was baked in my local grocery store at 3 am today.
If they’re by a creek, then maybe!
Along with this, just because you are going to a shoreline restaurant, doesn’t mean you are getting fresh seafood. The same frozen fish that gets deep fried in that quaint shore town is the same frozen fish served 6 hours inland.
In the UK that’s not true here. I work at a supermarket distribution centre and fish comes in chilled not frozen.
Given that the UK is largely surrounded by the ocean and is a mere smudge in comparison to some American states (Texas, California, …). The logistics of the fish coming in chilled is feasible. As you move more inland in the United States (Arkansas, Tennessee, Kansas). Freshwater fish coming in chilled is just not possible or safe, unless shipped via overnight plane (very expensive!)
Some fish in the UK is still frozen because it comes from outside of UK waters. Like tuna. But that’s good, that means it’s safe to cook a tuna steak medium rare.
Ah, forgot to mention where I work … Southern half of Germany. To get to the coast, you have to either drive through all of Germany to the “other side”, or cross the border to France or Poland or whatever. Sea-dwelling fish like Mackerels just aren’t “fresh” here.
I have an allergy to a bacteria that grows on fish during the freeze/thaw process. I can definitively say that if you don’t catch it yourself, or witness it being caught and prepared, then it’s been frozen. I’ve tried a few “fresh” fish places, and the result is always a sleeve of benedryl and being itchy for 3 days.
Yep, I always ask for the bag of frozen shrimp, and smack my husband upside the head when he buys the thawed stuff. I’ve TOLD you, over and over, get the frozen bag!!
and smack my husband upside the head when he buys the thawed stuff
Is that considered a form of foreplay in your house?
Otherwise, ouch!
I used to be a funeral director. The majority of outsiders were unaware of pretty much everything we did. Often on purpose because thinking of death is uncomfortable.
The biggest “secret” is probably that the modern funeral was invented by companies the same way diamond engagement rings were. For thousands of years the only people who had public funerals were rich and famous. It was the death of Abraham Lincoln that sparked the funeral industry to sell “famous people funerals at a reasonable price”. You too could give your loved one a presidential send off! The funeral industry still plays into this hard, and I’ve found many people are simply guilt tripped by society to have a public funeral.
You didn’t talk about how coffins are sold for many thousands of dollars when they are just cheap plywood boxes that shouldn’t cost more than a hundred bucks and that serve no purpose other than to decay as quickly as possible.
While I do think expensive caskets are a waste of money, they’re actually one of the least marked up products sold at a funeral home! Typically, caskets and urns are sold for twice what they’re bought for wholesale. This is mostly because anyone can sell caskets and urns so they can’t have ridiculous markups or people will go elsewhere for them. Urns for example are almost always bought off Amazon instead of at a funeral home.
The products with the highest markups were insurance based. Estate Fraud insurance (if someone steals the dead person’s identity, the insurance company will pay any costs involved in correcting it) and Travel insurance (if you die on vacation, the insurance company will pay any costs involved in bringing the body home). Both of these insurance policies had real costs of about $10 or $20. They’re often sold for $300 to $500.
That’s what keeps the hit show “Coffin Flop” on the air, as long as CornCob TV is able to broadcast. Just clip after clip of naked dead bodies busting out of shit wood and hitting pavement.
Not so fun story:
One of my first jobs when I was barely 18 was with one of the big funeral home/cemetery providers in the US. It was positively horrible, and not for the reasons most people think.
As a new hire, you’d start on the cold-calling phone banks, which was bad enough. Nobody wants a cold marketing call from a cemetery. But it got worse from there.
After a month on the phone bank, I’d done well enough to be promoted to field sales, which meant going to the most impoverished areas of town to follow up on the appointments the phone bank had made, basically trying to scare poor elderly people into handing over what little they had to ‘pre-plan’ for their deaths, with the pitch that if they didn’t, their family would suffer.
After a few appointments it was clear I didn’t have the stomach for that, so they moved me to on-site sales, which was somehow worse.
On-site sales included helping to host the Mother’s Day open house at the large main cemetery. They set up a greeting station at the entrance with refreshments and ‘in memorium’ wreaths that could be bought by bereaved family (on that day, mostly children of the deceased, but also mothers who had lost their children, some at a very young age). It sounds like a kind thing to do, because many young mothers/fathers coming to visit were so distraught, they hadn’t stopped for coffee or thought about flowers.
I was not stationed at the welcome station. I was a ‘roamer’, meaning I was one of several staff expected to meander through the graves and check on families graveside – to ask if they needed anything and to upsell them pre-planning packages for themselves or their other children. I am not kidding, we were expected to do that.
I had to be prodded to approach my first mark (a young couple ‘celebrating’ the woman’s first Mother’s Day at the grave of her several months old child, and I couldn’t stomach it. It felt barbaric, to even try to sell someone who could not stop crying at the grave of her young child. I couldn’t do the pitch, obviously, and backed out as soon as possible, then hid by the skips behind the main building until the end of the day when I quit.
I’ve done many jobs in my life, including cleaning bowling alley toilets, but I’ve never been asked to do anything as vile.
I’ll bet everyone in the funeral industry can guess which company I’m talking about.
I also had the pleasure of working for Service Corporation International. Thankfully solicitation of funeral services is banned in Ontario, Canada. So no cold calling or bugging people at cemeteries. Their way around it was to hold seminars about Last Wills at places like retirement homes. If someone had a funeral related question the staff would get them to sign a form agreeing to a phone call or visit from a sales person.
The pre-arrangement sales people were all on commission and it made them very pushy. The pitches were so manipulative I couldn’t listen to them. Our government is throwing around the idea of banning commissioned sales in funeral services as well because of it. Some other Canadian provinces have already banned it.
Their practices are so scummy, I’m surprised they’re still allowed to operate at all in Canada. Glad they can’t do their worst in Ontario, that’s a small win.
You’re right about their abhorrent manipulation – I still have binders in storage from my sales training; I should dig them up and post some of it. It’s still, 35 years later, the most disgusting emotional manipulation I’ve ever seen. After all these years, it’s only got worse in the US from what I hear.
You were supposed to ask them to relive their most recent familial death experience under the guise of polite conversation, then hone in on whatever detail was the most unpleasant, and hammer home how if they didn’t buy a package, their children would go through worse. Have they considered how much emotional and financial pain they would cause if, god forbid, they died tomorrow? Don’t take time to think about the money you don’t have, because every hour of delay raises the chances your kids will be left with a financial mess when they’re grieving you. You’re basically heartless for doing that to them.
The graveside pitch was even worse. It’s so sad you lost your baby last month, but what if your six-year-old died tomorrow? Are you prepared for that? Like jesus, I can’t imagine the paranoia a grieving family faces after losing one child, constantly afraid for their remaining child. Let’s rub salt in that wound and scare the shit out of them for a few thousand dollars. It should be illegal everywhere.
What do you mean by “public funeral”? What’s the alternative? It sounds like you’d consider an event with only friends and family where there was a coffin in a room to be a “public funeral”. That seems to be what most people have, but it isn’t very public. Is a non-public funeral one where the family makes the coffin themselves and there’s no event where people see the dead person and the coffin?
The minimal services are essentially transportation, government documentation, and disposition (cremation, burial, entombment, etc). Some funeral homes won’t charge for a private viewing by immediate family, some charge a small fee. Typically there’s a cap on number of people and amount of time, something like 10 people total for 30 minutes.
Anything more than that will require you pay thousands of dollars extra. Hours of receiving guests, a published obituary, a mass or ceremony, musicians, clergy/celebrants, reception. All of those are pushed as “traditional” or expected but they’re incredibly expensive.
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Outsourced IT provider here:
90% of businesses have basically zero IT security. Leaked passwords in regular use and no process or verification for password resets. As soon as someone complains that 2FA or password rotation is difficult it gets dropped. Virtually all company data is stored on USB keys, plaintext hard drives and on staff’s personal home devices.
The reason they’re not constantly having their data stolen is because no-one cares about the companies either.
Isn’t password rotation a horrible practice because it makes people use passwords like “MyNewPassword15” since it’s the 15th password reset they’ve been forced to do?
password rotation is generally not considered a “best practice” but not doing something because it’s not a best practice is only a good strategy if you’re actually going to follow the best practices. password rotation is less effective than a good password manager and long randomly generated passwords that are unique to each site. requiring passwords be rotated can be an impediment to using strong unique passwords, which is why it’s not a good practice.
but a freshly rotated “MyNewPassword15” is a million times better than your password being “password”, or being the same thing you use on every sketchy website whose database has been breached a dozen times.
Password rotation for your “emergency” system account (the one that shouldn’t be root) still needs to be rotated every time someone with access leaves or changes job roles.
Any password someone who leaves had access to should be roasted, no?
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We have a custom backend website I have to log in for my work. You don’t have to use a password, just an email address. The only “security” is it’s on a weird URL that people wouldn’t likely know if they weren’t given it.
Security by obscurity is :(
Not to leave out the Active Directory Admin password that gives God mode and everyone has it.
Password rotation is very insecure. No one should be doing that. I also hate when companies set maximum length for a password, like 12-16 characters. Bitch, my 32 character password is much more secure!
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Private mental health providers in the US are pretty unsupervised and have a conflict of interest in that they make more money by keeping their patients/clients unwell, which can lead to negligence and abuse. The only thing keeping in line is the possibility of someone informed and insightful enough to report them to the licensing board or pressing a lawsuit.
For example, if a provider has poor integrity, it is in their best interest to not treat depression, but rather help the patient/client feel good for the moment. What the patient/client experiences is that they feel better when they see their provider, so they become dependent on their provider. This ensures the provider a reliable source of revenue.
Another issue is that masters level therapists, while capable of providing treatment for simple cases such as a clear depressive episode, are not properly trained to conduct thorough assessments for complex cases, meaning they can misdiagnose quite easily. Complex cases would be better treated by a well-trained psychologist that can conduct thorough psychometric assessments that are quite sophisticated and take lots of time to analyze. These services are costly and the vast majority of insurance policies won’t cover them.
Relevantly, yet another issue is insurance for mental health. Most insurance policies that pay for mental health services pay low, so the care you receive can be substandard since the more effective providers are charging what they’re worth in a market economy. One example that comes to mind is Better Help. They pay providers insultingly low, like around $30/hour, while effective providers are charging ~$150/hr out-of-pocket. That means that when someone uses Better Help to obtain care, they’re getting the bottom of the barrel therapist.
Lastly, the majority of family and marriage therapists aren’t properly trained in narcissistic emotional abuse. This can mean that therapy would not only be a waste of time, but can make things much worse as they can help the narcissist abuse the victim even further. Narcissistic abuse is quite complicated and requires a relationship therapist that specializes in that to properly assess and help the victim escape.
Tips: If you have been seeing a therapist for 12 sessions, and you haven’t realized any considerable long-term changes, find another therapist. Also, if your therapist doesn’t call you out on your bullshit, let’s you ramble about tangential matters, or focuses on helping you overcome specific weekly struggles, rather than helping you develop skills and restructure deep cognitive matters to address them yourself, find another therapist. An effective therapist would develop a clear treatment plan with you that aims to meet objectively measurable goals within a certain time frame.
Note: I am not a therapist. I have just worked in the mental health field and have friends that are therapists.
An effective therapist would develop a clear treatment plan with you that aims to meet objectively measurable goals within a certain time frame.
This is a great point and true for non-therapists as well. A good measure of whether or not someone helping you is providing you value is if you are progressively improving in measurable ways.
True for doctors, meds, physical therapists, coaches, you name it
One example that comes to mind is Better Help
During the pandemic, this company was heavily advertised across Twitch. Not surprised they pay shit wages. Wonder if they originally paid 2-3X market rate during the hype, but slowly clawed back the teaser rates in favor of the dog shit rates.
I heard all the bad shit about better help. But I had been interested in therapy so I tried to find a therapist from a local person instead. Found out my bill was nearly $200 a session. And since therapy isn’t something like an annual doctor visit or a twice a year dentist visit, I noped out of that.
So I more than understand why people choose Better Help. It’s often actually affordable.
This is very accurate. I worked 5 years in a BH Insurance company. We saw shitty providers all the time, and we were constantly having to play the game of deciding how much we (and our members) could tolerate before cutting the providers out of the network. Cutting too many providers doesn’t correct bad actors or replace providers for people who need them and can cause backlogs if other providers aren’t available to take on their patients.
The only thing we were able to do to correct many providers by changing their pay to a value based model, so providers would get paid more for better outcomes (and sometimes only paid when patients improve). It would increase pay a lot over standard rates. But providers fought that big time. They just wanted to do things their way and cash a check of a set amount with little or no oversight.
Better help is used by providers as a way to supplement their income, and they typically pay a bit less than conventional appointments because of the digital channels. However, Ive heard they have some issues with data security on their platform and their matching system is pretty flawed due to their network being somewhat ephemeral.
If you do want to seek therapy, remember you have multiple ways to get it covered. Your health insurance probably has some coverage, and your employer (in the US) likely has an EAP program which will have coverage for therapy for at least a few sessions (typically 3-12) sessions. It’s worth looking into that before paying out of pocket.
I get that Better Help isn’t necessarily that great of a service, but therapy without Better Help is so ungodly expensive.
I was interested in therapy so I found a local provider that takes my insurance. Found out that even with insurance, it was going to cost me nearly $200 per session. So I passed on it because I’m not exactly in dire straits. I don’t understand how average Joes afford regular therapy. Better Help’s main advantage seems to be that it’s actually affordable. Though granted, I’ve never used them so maybe it would still end up being that much with my particular insurance.
You nailed it. 💯
This is why I hate that “get therapy” has become a common meme. Most therapy is a scam in the US.
I have worked in the gaming industry and let me tell you that in some game studios most of the people involved in making the games are not gamers themselves.
Lots of programmers and artists don’t really care about the final game, they only care about their little part.
Game designers and UX designers are often clueless and lacking in gaming experience. Some of the mistakes they make could be avoided by asking literaly anyone who play games.
Investors and publishers often know very little to almost nothing about gameplay and technology and will rely purely on aesthetic and story.
You have entire games being made top to bottom where not a single employee gave a fuck, from the executives to the programmers. Those games are made by checking a serie of checkboses on a plan and shipped asap.
This is why you have some indie devs kicking big studio butts with sometime less than 1% the ressources.
Afaik even in other “similar” industry (e.g filmmaking) you expect the director, producers and distributors to have a decent level of knowledge of the challenges of making a movie. In the video game industry everyone seems a bit clueless, and risk is mitigated by hiring large teams, and by shipping lots of games quickly.
A lot of the same things you mention about game development are also apparent in open source software which is why it is usually so terrible. Someone that can program some complicated visuals for a 3D modeling program does not mean that same person actually does 3D modeling, which is why the interface for so many open source programs are abysmal.
I have a friend who has been coding various things for years and they are never successful because he builds interfaces he understands how to use. No one else does things his way.
Yup! That right there. You give a technical person a job that requires some level of “soft skills” and that is what you get.
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This is probably true of many many other industries. I work in automotive and while a lot of us care about delivering a quality product, the majority are not “car people” and have never changed a part on their car.
Yeah, it is kind of the default isn’t it. It kinda make sense for the programmers and artists, but it is still kinda weird that the actual designers don’t really understand why people play video games. You wouldn’t expect a movie director to not like movies, or a car designer to not like cars. I guess it must be happening everywhere at least to some degree.
Nowadays I would compare some game studios to what some boys bands were to music. You start with some guys with money who are neither musicians, nor sound engineers, nor anything really. They pick singers and musicians based on look and market research, they hire a large team of specialized workers, and then they spend millions on marketing to flood the space with their new album. The indie developers in this scenario would be Pink Floyd.
It wasn’t always like this, at least for video games. I feel like in the 80s up to the early 00s it was mostly dominated by passionate workers, but there just isn’t enough passionate workers for the demand. As the industry grew, big players started building those “soulless” projects to make good return on investment. Not to denigrate the individual contributions of the workers, but sadly the people who own those business don’t really care if they’re making games or cars or selling cigarettes. They care about r.o.i.
I’m not sure what kind of role you had in the industry, but I’m not sure what you’re saying is entirely accurate… although there are some bits in there I agree with:
Lots of programmers and artists don’t really care about the final game, they only care about their little part.
Accurate. And that’s ok. A programmer whose job it is to optimize the physics of bullet ricochet against thirteen different kind of materials can go really deep on that, and they don’t need to (or have time to) zoom out and care about the entire game. That’s fine. They have a job that is often highly specialized, has been given to them by production and they have to deliver on time and at quality. Why is that a problem? You use the corrolary of film, and nobody cares if the gaffer understands the subtext of the Act 3 arc… it’s not their job.
Game designers and UX designers are often clueless and lacking in gaming experience. Some of the mistakes they make could be avoided by asking literaly anyone who play games.
Which one? A game designer lacking in gaming experience likely wouldn’t get hired anywhere that has an ounce of standard. A UX designer without gaming experience might get hired, but UX is about communication, intuition and flow. A UX designer who worked on surgical software tooling could still be an effective member of a game dev team if their fundamentals are strong.
Investors and publishers often know very little to almost nothing about gameplay and technology and will rely purely on aesthetic and story.
Again, which one? Investors probably don’t know much about the specifics of gameplay or game design because they don’t need to, they need to understand ROI, a studio’s ability to deliver on time, at budget and quality, and the likely total obtainable market based on genre and fit.
Publishers – depending on whether you are talking about mobile or console/box model – will usually be intimately familiar with how to position a product for market, what KPIs (key performance indicators) to target and how to optimize within the available budget.
This is why you have some indie devs kicking big studio butts with sometime less than 1% the ressources.
This has happened. I’m not sure it’s an actual trend. There are lots of misses in the game industry. Making successful products is hard – it’s hard at the indie level, it’s hard at the AAA level. I would estimate there are a thousand failed Indies for every one you call out as ‘kicking a big studio’s butt.’ Lots of failed AAA titles too. It’s just how it goes.
The same, by the way, is true of film, TV, books and music. A lot of misses go into making a hit. Cultural products are hard to make, and nobody has the formula for success. Most teams try, fail, then try again. Sometimes, they succeed.
Hey, fair points. I am not saying that all big are bad and all indies are good. The industry is definitely getting carried by indies in some genres and that is ok.
It would seem you agree on most points, as I passionate myself it just surprised me to sometime be surrounded by people who didn’t really care. It depends on the project and the studio of course. I can’t really blame the workers though as I said, so I agree with you that it makes sense in most cases to not recruit only “gamers”. Thanks for sharing!
you expect the director, producers and distributors to have a decent level of knowledge of the challenges of making a movie.
But not about the source material.
Adaptations nowadays suck ass because there’s no fans in charge.
Making games is an art form… The fuck
I 100% believe this. It doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad work, but the way you phrased it makes a dozen or so instances of “something feeling weird” make sense. Sometimes it’s just a mismatch between the intensity of the fans fanaticism and the developer having to go to work every day and do a job.
I think game developers can harness this by embracing their modding communities. I’m currently waiting to see what Cities Skylines 2 is like. It has to be hard for a bunch of devs who seem like normies to develop a game for a bunch of nerds, some of whom know more about civil engineering and traffic planning than real engineers. :D The original was well-modded and it feels like the game was a collaboration between the community and the developers. To me, this kind of bridges the developer/gamer gap.
Game designer here. I’d say there are degrees in these. Most game designers I know love to play game, but which type of game that they love? Well train designer should be able to design anything, you might say that, but most people have a thing that they keen more than the other thing.
So, they may be very well verse on some genre and might not so much on some. Now, getting a job in the right company that making the right game that you are keen of might not be that easy.
I’ve seen some young to old designers who only play certain type of games and be clueless on other type and some who can adapt their design skills to many types of games.
But game development can’t be without testing if they design something wrong, it should show up on test…
Still, sometimes you got the best devs and the test results came out surprised you.
It’s easy to point what is wrong looking from the end product pov but when the design starts with a clean drawing board it’s also very easy to miss things.
Game dev is hard man…
Idk but I really like Valve, I believe they care about the stuff they push out.
Do you think this occurs equally across all big budget games?
No, not to the same extent. I mean past a certain size we probably shouldn’t expect big executives to care, but you still have a lot of passionate people in this industry, so you can totally have “true” gamers working in big budget games.
Burning waste qualifies as recycling.
I used to work for a specialty waste company. We would brag about our ability to recycle better than any of our competitors. Because we would burn most of the waste.
I’m in the industry, at least in the US, and this is not technically accurate… especially not using the language and common understanding of the layperson.
What is it then?
Disposal and/or treatment of waste. Unless its “waste-to-energy”—in which case you’d use that terminology, but you’d never call either “recycling.”
Pile of ash - made from 100% recycled materials
That’s pretty fucked up.
Rapidized oxidation treatment.
Recycled into energy feed stock
The USA is run by unpaid 22 year old interns being supervised by underpaid 24 year olds.
Old people in charge are definitely a problem (McConnell, Feinstein etc) but the people in their offices doing all the heavy lifting are basically children.
I mean, people in their 20s have done some pretty amazing things.
Yeah but most people aren’t Alexander the Great or Mozart. And even if you are, you’re probably not working in congress, hah
Alexander had Aristotle to tutor him. If you find yourself young and in power, you better hope your elder advisors are that good.
Best I can do is Blippi sorry
(Google him if you haven’t, he’s hypnotic)
Nice
[in the US] your insurance dictates your healthcare, not your disease, deformity, symptoms etc. If your insurance pays for an allergy test, you’re getting an allergy test (even if you came in for a broken arm). If insurance pays for custom orthotics, you’re getting custom orthotics (even if you came in for a wart removal). We will bill your insurance thousands of dollars for things you don’t need. We’re forced to do it by the private equity firms that have purchased almost all of American healthcare systems. It’s insane, it’s wasteful. The best part is the person who needs the allergy test or the custom orthotics can’t afford it, so they don’t get the shit we give away to people who don’t need it.
I would gladly kill myself if it meant we got universal healthcare, but private equity firms can’t monitize a martyr so it would be pointless.
Fuck everything about the current US healthcare system. The US can be so much more, can be so much better, if we could somehow just make a single percent stop fucking over the other 99%
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Cars produce more harmful airbourne pollutants from their brakes than they do from the tailpipe. Copper is being phased out and the ultimate goal is to abandon friction braking entirely in favour of electrical regeneration.
Cars produce more harmful airbourne pollutants from their brakes than they do from the tailpipe.
That’s why you never live nearby a freeway or major highway.
People brake less often on highways?
Have you seen a highway in Los Angeles during rush hour?
…Have you seen almost any other highway in the U.S. ever?
That’s why you never live nearby a freeway or major highway.
People brake less often on highways?
Versus freeways? I would imagine not, that they would be roughly similar.
Where I live, freeways and highways are the same thing, so I’m confused here.
Where I live, freeways and highways are the same thing, so I’m confused here.
Oh they’re definitely different here.
Freeways are usually eight length cement highways with an impassable divider in the middle and no buildings on their immediate sides, just off ramps.
Highways are usually two or four lane roads that you can pull off of at any point to go to a building. They have more traffic than regular city streets, but they’re not considered throughways like freeways are.
To my point I made earlier that you reply to about the confusion, I wasn’t speaking so much about breaking, but just the faster you go the more tire wear and tear and hence the more tire dust you get to breathe, as well as emergency braking for sudden stops or lane changes, etc. City streets cars are usually a little more tame and mundane speedwise than they are on highways and freeways.
Technically not my industry anymore, but: companies that sell human-generated AI training data to other companies most often are selling data that a) isn’t 100% human generated or b) was generated by a group of people pretending to belong to a different demographic to save money.
To give an example, let’s say a company wants a training set of 50,000 text utterances of US English for chatbot training. More often than not, this data will be generated using contract workers in a non-US locale who have been told to try and sound as American as possible. The Philippines is a common choice at the moment, where workers are often paid between $1-2 an hour: more than an order of magnitude less what it would generally cost to use real US English speakers.
In the last year or so, it’s also become common to generate all of the utterances using a language model, like ChatGPT. Then, you use the same worker pool to perform a post-edit task (look at what ChatGPT came up with, edit it if it’s weird, and then approve it). This reduces the time that the worker needs to spend on the project while also ensuring that each datapoint has “seen a set of eyes”.
Obviously, this makes for bad training data – for one, workers from the wrong locale will not be generating the locale-specific nuance that is desired by this kind of training data. It’s much worse when it’s actually generated by ChatGPT, since it ends up being a kind of AI feedback loop. But every company I’ve worked for in that space has done it, and most of them would not be profitable at all if they actually produced the product as intended. The clients know this – which is perhaps why it ends up being this strange facade of “yep, US English wink wink” on every project.
A couple decades ago I worked for a speech recognition company that developed tools for the telephony industry. Every week or two all the employees would be handed sheets of words or phrases with instructions to call a specific telephone extension and read them off. That’s how they collected training data…
I’m not surprised tbh. Having perused some of the text training datasets they were pretty bad. The classification is dodgy too. I ended up starting my own dataset because of this.
What do you mean with ‘classification’? Sentimwnt analysis?
As a paramedic, if you can’t remember your name, address, and social security number, we’ll take you to the hospital but you probably won’t get a bill. Unless you tell the hospital, then we’ll get a face sheet. Stay Safe, John and Jane Doe.
So if the paramedics take me to the hospital for a broken leg or something… and I claim that I don’t remember any of my identifying information, they’ll just treat my leg and let me go? They won’t keep me around to get to the bottom of my sudden amnesia?
Make up you name, address, and birthday and say you never memorized your social.
Infinite medical care glitch
What if you have your ID on you?
The hospital will treat anything life threatening and then let you go.
New home construction materials are the lowest possible quality that will meet specs. The allure of a new coat of paint and modern design masks the cheap quality and low durability. Some doors are basically slightly stronger cardboard. My theory as to why American homes have gotten so huge is that for the same budget you can get a much larger volume of materials than in the past.
There is a golden period from about 1985 to 2000 where houses were built without asbestos but with real building materials. I only buy property built in this window.
Every property I’ve inspected built after 2010 that’s more than 5 years old is either splitting at the seams, sinking into the ground or both. They’re built from polystyrene with a coat of plaster. They’re built to palm off to naive new homeowners who don’t understand or landbankers who don’t give a fuck and I pity anyone trying to live in one for more than a few years.
My parents just sold their rock solid old house to have a new one built and I was so pissed off. Now I’m going to have to inherit this piece of shit when it’s falling apart. It’s less than a year old and already has a ton of issues they’re just living with because the builder refuses to fix anything and they apparently signed something that says there’s nothing they can do about it.
Housing cost still rising tho :/
Never buy a brand new home. Get one that’s at least ten years old. All the mistakes made during construction will have been found and hopefully fixed correctly. It’s still new enough to not have a lot of the old code issues that crop up in pre 1990s houses
Restaurants are 100% more disgusting than your own kitchen.
It really doesn’t matter which one unless it’s like super high end. And you’ve almost definitely eaten something that was dropped on the floor.
I was a chef for 10 years and worked in multiple kitchens. This just isnt true. At least its not a blanket rule.
Ive worked in cheap places with immaculate kitchens and posh places with grotty kitchens and vice versa.
Its luck of the draw sometimes but ive never EVER served food that fell on the floor or witnessed it happening.
I think you have likely worked in some bad places.
It’s important to remember that the food is only as clean as the grossest person who had access to it. I was genuinely surprised at some of the shit I would see when my cooks thought I wasn’t watching them, especially during prep
Like i said. Its not a blanket rule. Some places are bad. Others are good. But i was responding to someone who said all restaurants are less clean thatn your home kitchen which is verifiably false.
Worked in commercial refrigeration for 10 years. Even the super high end ones are almost always disgusting…
And the inside of the ice maker is probably about as clean as the floor drain.
I think the previous owners of my house would give them a run for their money. Even apart from parts of the fridge and range being broken, I’d have seriously considered tossing them just because of how disgusting they were. I don’t like tossing things that still work though. So while I wasn’t keen on spending over a thousand to get them replaced, I’m probably much better off for it.
I honestly don’t know how they could stand it being that dirty. Everything was caked. I even had to give the pantry a scrub down before I could paint it.
Same here! Our whole kitchen had at least 2 sets of owners worth of grease and grime coating everything. The people before us only owned the house for a couple years, but I don’t think they cleaned the place even once. We spent the first day of homeownership scrubbing all the nooks and crannies of just the kitchen. The outsides and tops of the cabinets are still a bit sticky, but we’re hoping to replace them soon. One of the burners on the stove was absolutely encrusted with burned stuff, the bottom of the fridge drawer had tons of dust and crud, and the walls were covered in handprints, food splatters, and misc. grime. Bleh!
I’ve read enough horror stories about this that I have started eating out much less. With friends or partner to have fun sure, I don’t want to give up or reduce my social life (even then I try to pick “safe” food, and definitely cooked food), but unless I am like super tired or really didn’t have a second to go buy groceries, I will cook my own food and not order take-away any day of the week. At least I trust what I am cooking.
If Gordon Ramsay’s nightmare kitchens taught me anything, it’s exactly what you said.
That might be true where you live, but that’s definitely not true here in Europe.
