I had a discussion with a friend recently and during that discussion, one comment was “Fitted sheets are really both the best and the worst”, of course referencing them as awesome when put on a mattress and the worst when you’re trying to fold them....
Genitals. Both male and female. (Generally) awesome when in use but a maintenance nightmare otherwise. Reasons for being the worse (some depending on gender) include: initiating takeoff visibly and without reason, leakages, being very fragile, requiring more packaging than any other body part and others
I like how this is finally acknowledging WFH as something that is here to stay but I’m not sure I understand the connection with the housing crisis. From the article:
New York’s famous Flatiron Building will soon be converted from empty offices into luxury residences
Luxury apartments in premium locations is the first thing I would think of too if I were a developer, but their target buyers don’t sound like the sort of people who currently suffer from the housing crisis. But maybe I’m wrong and there will also be developers converting less prestigious office space into affordable housing…
The other thing I don’t get is this: I don’t know Manhattan but I did work in some (I assume) similar business hubs in the middle of overpriced cities and I wonder: are many people going to want to live in expensive converted office spaces if they don’t work near there any longer? I mean if they were given the chance to WFH from anywhere would they still choose Manhattan? Honest question and maybe the answer is yes, because of the restaurants, culture, good schools or whatever… I would personally make different life choices if I could work completely remote, though.
Ah thanks for the context, I didn’t know! But doesn’t my point essentially stills stand?
As more people work from home and more Flatiron-like buildings struggle to find businesses looking for offices, developers might find “ex prestigious office to luxury apartments” a more appealing conversion than “ex Walmart to affordable housing”.
Also, my understanding of the housing crisis is that people can’t find an affordable place to live close enough to where they work. In my country there are plenty of small towns that used to be very pretty places to live, that have very affordable housing and that are turning into ghost towns because all the jobs are concentrated in a few big cities.
If you take away the offices, less people are going to need to live in New York, San Francisco or London. Plenty of people might still choose to, of course, but there should be less competition to rent the last bed space in a filthy apartment at ludicrous prices. Or to buy a small flat in a converted former office.
Mike Dulak grew up Catholic in Southern California, but by his teen years, he began skipping Mass and driving straight to the shore to play guitar, watch the waves and enjoy the beauty of the morning. “And it felt more spiritual than any time I set foot in a church,” he recalled....
The one thing most religions agree on is that all other religions should be eradicated from the world until only the true one remains. Turns out they are ALL right!
it’s not just phones or devices that need updates, though. None of my refrigerators, washing machines, dishwashers have ever lasted more than 10 years; I think the average is about 5 years before they stop working, get all rusty or a very expensive piece breaks so they are not worth repairing. Meanwhile all of my granma’s old kitchen appliances are still working perfectly after 60+ years of service.
Sure, it might be just that over-optimizing their production so they are more performant while being cheaper to make is also making them less durable, but I don’t see a lot of motivation from companies to go out of their way to build durable things either. And it’s not that I think Corporate = Bad; as you say it’s a cost/benefit thing, it’s just that the “benefit” companies try to maximize is their shareholders’, not our planet’s. It’s on Politics to create a legal framework where some of the cost to our planet is shared with companies (so they have incentives to make things durable/repairable again) and on us consumer to choose wisely what to buy, when and from whom.
The office is crucial for professional development. You can’t expect to grow in your career without spending time with your coworkers, learning by osmosis, picking up cues from observing your superiors, and bonding with your peers and managers....
To be fair he did climb the corporate ladder to the top already, so he doesn’t need to go to the office any longer, no? Now let’s hope he falls off that ladder
So far I’ve mostly seen iPhone 15 panned for lack of innovative features, but if it turns out that it’s actually easier to repair (as Apple is saying) it would be a killer feature for me
Thanks for the additional information. I wasn’t in line to buy an iPhone 15 just yet; when I said “if it turns out it’s more repairable” I mean if it stands the test of time I might consider an iPhone 17 or 18…
The European Union has recently reached an agreement on a significant competition reform known as the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which will impose strict rules on large tech companies that will have to offer users the ability to communicate with each other using different apps. WhatsApp is one of the companies that will be...
I would be surprised if Whatsapp tried to implement its own version of Telegram’s, Signal’s and every other messaging app’s protocol to “talk” to all of these other apps. I bet they will provide an API to interoperate with Whatsapp that these other clients may (or may not) choose to implement, in order to send their messages to Whatsapp users.
In that scenario it would up to Signal (if they implement this) to choose how to display to their users that they are sending a message to someone who’s using Whatsapp, or to create options for users who want to disable this completely.
Ofc Mohammed is the most common name but thats a name common within the muslim community. I have noticed the name Sarah in every country, regardless of race or religion. Or it might be an abrahamic religion thing but thats most of the world atleast....
John the Baptist is considered a prophet also in Islam, so local variations of the name John are not so infrequent in Muslim countries, at least according to Wikipedia, see Yahya.
Say you went out on like 2 dates and said person was too clingy and you ghost em, now you might have to face them due to work. Apologize or not? And if apologize, do it preemptively or upon meeting?...
Ah yes it’s that pre-emptive awkwardness of nearing the end of a date, knowing that (although nothing in particular went spectacularly wrong) you don’t really want to have more and trying to signal this to the other person.
I’ve been on the receiving end of that too and now, many years later and away from the dating game, I can retroactively see it and accept it for what it was but man, it would have stung back then to hear it in plain and simple words. Being ghosted seemed like a better option to me too in retrospect. Kudos to you for being mature enough to handle that conversation!
I agree with this, OP. After some time has passed, it’s also pretty likely that the other person has just moved on anyway and that they also would want to avoid the awkwardness of that diacussion
Girl:does he have interests? Is he passionate about something? Do I see ourselves spending quality time together?
Boy: I’m on a date, my shirt is clean, I have mints for my breath, I have gone for the romantic walk in the park, this time I’ve done it all perfectly! I’ll get at least a kiss for sure!
RyanAir is (in)famous for this type of shit. E-tickets are used everywhere, but RyanAir forces you to have your ticket printed on paper or on their own mobile app. If you don’t, you’ll pay 20+ Euros for the employee at the check-in to print it for you. I think these ludicrous fees are meant more as “fines” than revenue.
Whether you like RyanAir or not (and I don’t like them much), they are good at keeping their prices low by cramming as many people as they can on each flight as quickly as possible. This means disincentivizing anything that can waste them a few seconds per passenger, be it additional baggage (the base ticket now has no baggage at all, except for a small bag or backpack that can be placed under the seat) or, I guess, checking someone’s identity at check-in.
Well in terms of certainty of flying, RyanAir is not worse than other companies. If anything they are a bit better, as I don’t think they overbook flights like other companies do and (by generally flying to secondary airports) they tend to be less affected by delays/congestion. I wish you good luck with your flight!
So many posts and comments end up with just a few downvotes, compared at least to the number of upvotes. The only time downvotes get relatively large is when there’s a contentious issue or outright bad behaviour. Otherwise, there’s very often just a few downvotes....
Sausage fingers + laggy phone. Sometimes I accidentally upvote or downvote while trying to scroll down. I remove the downvote when I realize but I’m pretty sure I must have left some around
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said publishing the map was “a routine practice in China’s exercise of sovereignty in accordance with the law.” Wang added: “We hope relevant sides can stay objective and calm, and refrain from overinterpreting the issue.”
I don’t know if a lot of context is lost in translation from Chinese or if China’s diplomatic language is just that weird… An “exercise in sovereignty” that is not to be overinterpreted? Is this saying that they are just putting this out for their internal public but shouldn’t be taken seriously outside of China?
Earthlings’ nutrition consists mainly of elongated pieces of synthetic rubber. These can’t be fully digested, so consuming the nutrients they contain is achieved by inserting them repeatedly in one or more of the mouths that Earthlings have in different parts of their anatomy.
I’m not even remotely a legal expert and I don’t know what type of popup that is but I think the anti-competitive piece is “could Google use the same technique to push the user to switch to google search on Edge or not?”.
If this was an ad from a web page OP had opened or from the game and if clicking “Yes” only directed the user to a site with instructions on how to switch default search engine on Chrome, then yes, obnoxious but probably fair. Google could strike a deal with the game developers to push their search engine to Edge users or buy an ad. Someone writing a new browser or search engine will probably have considerably less money than Google but could reasonably do something similar to try and gain market share.
On the other hand, if that popup comes from Windows itself and especially if clicking “Yes” directly changes Chrome’s settings, then this is Microsoft using their ubiquitous (on desktops) OS to nudge more users to switch a competitor’s browser to their own search engine. Google, or even less a new competitor. would probably not have the same type of OS-level access to switch the settings of a different browser.
I can see many many examples of how bad Microsoft and Google can be. However this one I honestly don’t understand: how’s Google supporting Mozilla’s competing product anti- competitive? Are they forcing Mozilla to do things they don’t want in return?
I am a Firefox uaer and on every install on a new machine (or phone) I switch the default search engine to duckduckgo. But for good or for bad Google is the search engine most people use (and would use on FF too even if it wasn’t the default). I don’t think Google needs to force Firefox 3%-ish market share to use their search engine.
it doesn’t even look at the smaller picture. LLMs build sentences by looking at what’s most statistically likely to follow the part of the sentence they have already built (based on the most frequent combinations from their training data). If they start with “Hitler was effective” LLMs don’t make any ethical consideration at all… they just look at how to end that sentence in the most statistically convincing imitation of human language that they can.
Guardrails are built by painstakingly trying to add ad-hoc rules not to generate “combinations that contain these words” or “sequences of words like these”. They are easily bypassed by asking for the same concept in another way that wasn’t explicitly disabled, because there’s no “concept” to LLMs, just combination of words.
Sorry if I gave you the impression that I was trying to disagree with you. I just piggy-backed on your comment and sort of continued it. If you read them one after the other as one comment (at least iny head), they seem to flow well
Just got this right before midnight in my MS Admin app alerts. If you dont configure the policy, in September it defaults to opening web links in Edge regardless of OS default browser setting....
The Moon, unprovoked, collided with the Russian vessel that was approaching amicably. An old, whitened but still recognizable USA flag was planted on the Moon’s surface, indicating this as a clear act of aggression from the imperialist power
A decision to fire an elementary school teacher from Georgia has been upheld, after she read a children’s book on gender identity to her fifth-grade class earlier this year....
What’s a “book”? Wouldn’t want any of that witchcraft near our kids!
Why go and confuse people? The world is a simple place. There’s only one gender and that’s Man. There’s Man and then there’s Weaker Man with Boobs. There’s only one colour and that’s White, which also comes in darker shades. See how that resolves all conflict? We’re all white men!
So I was asked this by my friends kid. Would you rather live in the most boring place in the world, or be a hat? So to spice it up a little here are some rules....
Plot twist: mind control does work and most of the Catholic Church woes are due to a super-intelligent but backward-thinking and sometimes pedophiliac race of hats
Thanks for posting this, I’ve learned things about cold reading and the Forer effect that, regardless.of whether they can be applied to LLMs, are fascinating information on our own minds.
I will try experimenting some more with ChatGPT and Bard and see if I can spot these effect the author deacribes
We’re supposed to be doing hybrid, 50% in the office. I don’t think we ever went over 30-35% of people in the office. My company tried the carrot, more than the stick to get employees back, like events. Everybody hated the almost-full office in those days. Most teams tried to have in-person team meetings, so there were no available meeting rooms and nobody is really used to the noise of an open-office plan full of people. There is clearly some push from above on our managers, because they try to sound happy but they mostly look as miserable as everyone else.
How was the return for you? Is the whole company back in the office or just you/your team?
Thanks, that’s a very good point! A physical office is a great bargaining chip for a large company. I remember a few years back when several cities and states engaged ina kind of auction to host the next Amazon HQ. It probably also works at the international level, where I imagine it will be easier to enter a market (from the perspective of local laws and permits) and sell your product there if you also open an office and create thousands of new jobs there.
I saw someone else pointing out in the thread that fully remote companies would, in time, probably adjust their salaries too. (EDIT: ah, oops… it wasn’t someone else, it was always you!! Sorry!)
As an employee, in the short term, I like to e.g. keep a London salary and save on housing and commute by moving to Manchester. But in a fully remote company there would be no “London” salary or London office at all, so salaries would be likely reflecting a blended national job market.
The transition is certainly awkward for existing companies, though, as nobody wants a salary cut (which by itself could be a good explaination for them wanting to maintain the previous in-office status quo).
Thanks I agree. Pre COVID, my company closed some very small offices to only keep a few HQs and a handful of people were offered fully remote contracts. They were generally very unhappy, being basically cut off from training, career growth, most of the context around work discussions, company events…
WFH is great when working from home is the norm for everyone. The office ALSO works only when most colleagues are in the office (otherwise you just add commute time to the same zoom call you could have from home).
This is true. I just had trouble picturing the CEO of a big company going “I’ll force everyone back to the office! WFH is sooo convenient but I can’t do this to Mr Joe’s hamburger joint around the corner”.
However as someone else pointed out, if WFH becomes the norm, a lot of business might be impacted and fail, generating turbulence in the economy. This I can picture getting a CEO’s attention
Also for me there is value in occasionally seeing people in person. The exact ratio will depend on the job, but for me it would be about 2-3 days per month in the office. We see each other, talk about how things are going, blockers, stuff we need to change, a little office gossip and then off we go again.
In that sense, a lax hybrid schedule works best for me personally. However, for it to work, everyone should agree to be in the office in the same days. Coming to an empty office and doing the same zoom calls you could have done from home is less than useful.
And since, again, the ratio of individual work Vs collaborative work varies by person and team, we’d need to find an average that sort of works for everyone and agree on a common schedule That is where I think the idea of hybrid comes in: 2 or 3 days per week in the office for everyone. My company is trying this and asking (but for now not forcing) people to concentrate attendance in the days in the middle of the week.
This clearly works better for some and worse for others.
I heard from a colleague that some companies are trying a different model. They shut down the offices and used part of the savings as budget for managers to create more frequent team events, so teams can e.g. meet in person at a restaurant a couple of times per month. I have no idea who these companies are and how this approach is going.
That could be a driver, yes. The problem is that the first people to go are usually the ones companies want to keep, either because they are star performers or because the job market requires their specific skills more (so they find something else easily and their roles are also harder to fill again).
But yes, I can see how a company might be more or less lenient applying their return to office policies, so that attrition is concentrated more in some teams. And firing people does have side-effects too on PR and morale of the remaining employees.
I do generally see more people leaving my company than new hires, though, so you might be on to something with the attrition rates…
That could be a consideration, yes. Funny enough, our whole Legal team has been consistently the one with the LEAST attendance in person in the office… Overall it seems like forcing your call center employees in office because you’re afraid they’ll leak strategic company secrets is a bit of an over-reaction. I doubt that the most high-level, secret discussions on mergers and acquisitions or mass layoffs have ever happened in our office to begin with.
Well yes, I do feel we might have collectively given more thought to this here than my company has…
It’s just that I work in one of those places where a trivial change that our users are asking for requires a business case and endless discussion, so it’s weird to think that a big, life-changing decision like this would just be taken without a particularly strong motivation.
But maybe I’m just starting from the wrong premise here. The purpose of the business case is for us little guys to obtain buy-in from the top management, but if a decision comes directly from the top management they don’t need much more than their own gut feelings?
Maybe especially so if they have to make a decision based on an unprecedented situation with no data and no guidance from what other companies have done before.I can see how the least risky bet would seem returning to the previous, proven situation where most people were working in the office.
This lead to lots of people investing in companies. As long as those companies paid out more money than those low interest rates, it was worthwhile. But at the same time, this meant companies didn’t have to be profitable, because they could pay out investors from money that other investors gave them???
I’m not an economist, but this is how I understand it works. If interest rates are low and your company can deliver 2% returns to investors, more people will invest in your company rather than leaving their money in the bank. Your company can ALSO borrow money from banks at near-0 interest and deliver a 2% return on that borrowed money (I’m probably over-simplifying, here, but I hope not by too much…). Basically, after building and selling more of your product thanks to the borrowed money, your company will have enough to return the money they borrowed from the bank and then some. If interest rates are 5%, your company now needs to be much more profitable for the whole thing to work.
This is why I understand most companies (even big and solid ones) have what is considered a “healthy” amount of debt. As long as your company can earn enough to repay that debt and keep something, not taking that debt is considered a lost opportunity.
If you’re a start-up, though, you’re almost by definition not profitable to begin with. You need money in exchange for a promise of big future profits. Access to that money becomes a lot more challenging with higher interest rates, so you might not be able to operate at a loss for long enough to turn profitable.
EDIT: as I see a lot of discussion on speculation, stock market and such. While these elements do exist and magnify the effects of the higher interest rates, I think the basic mechanism can also be explained without them. Low interest rates are a way of pumping “free” money into the economy, when you stop doing it, the economy goes to shit in various ways. For instance:
You have no job but own a car. You plan to drive to the countryside, buy $100 worth of potatoes and resell them in the city for $110. You estimate that gas will costs you $4. You have only one problem, you don’t have $100. But hey, interest rates are super-low! You can borrow $100 from the bank and give them $101 back after selling your potatoes, so you’re good to go! In the end, you’re $5 richer, as you’ve spent $105 and earned $110.
WAY #1 things go to shit: if rates had been higher, you wouldn’t have even be able to start your business (low interest rates attract more new businesses to the market)
Now say you want to do this again. Your net worth is no longer 0, you have $5! Can you buy $5 worth of potatoes and go on without borrowing any more? Not worth it, you would barely be able to cover your gas costs. So, even if your business is overall profitable, you still rely on borrowing. Given your earlier success, if anything you will probably want to try borrowing more and go for $200 worth of potatoes this time! Note that in this example you started with an owned car; if you’d had to buy one, it would take you years to repay the car and start actually turning a profit.
WAY #2 things go to shit if rates get higher now, you will have to shut down your business. You will still have earned some money, but you can’t continue
Fast-forward a few years, your business is moving about $1M worth of potatoes You buy them for $1M and sell them for $1.05M, earning a cool $50K. From your years in the potato business, you have accumulated $200K in cash. Now, if you want to buy your $1M worth of potatoes, you still rely on the bank to lend you money. OR at this point, you could scale back your business and only use your cash reserves to buy potatoes. You would buy for $200K and make $10K every time. But rates are still so low and demand for potatoes is still very high, so why wouldn’t you borrow and make a $50K profit instead? Or, by borrowing $2M maybe you could buy a field and start growing your own potatoes (since the farmer started raising his prices).
WAY #3 things go to shit if rates get higher now, you might still have a sustainable business, but you will need to scale it back and probably cut some costs. Maybe not too shitty for you, but probably not great news for the people you’ve hired to help you (“guys, due to difficult market conditions, our business has now 5 times less profit and we have to downsize”)
And I haven’t even touched on how an unexpected event, let’s call it Schmovid, can leave you with $1M in potatoes that you’ve already paid but nobody can buy any longer. Your $200K savings have been wiped and now you’re $800K in debt with the bank. You’re starting to recover and… NOW the borrowing rates get much higher.
18+ What things are both the best and the worst at the same time?
I had a discussion with a friend recently and during that discussion, one comment was “Fitted sheets are really both the best and the worst”, of course referencing them as awesome when put on a mattress and the worst when you’re trying to fold them....
Joe Biden wants more people to start living in empty offices (www.businessinsider.com)
America's nonreligious are a growing, diverse phenomenon. They really don't like organized religion (apnews.com)
Mike Dulak grew up Catholic in Southern California, but by his teen years, he began skipping Mass and driving straight to the shore to play guitar, watch the waves and enjoy the beauty of the morning. “And it felt more spiritual than any time I set foot in a church,” he recalled....
A new smartphone again? Rethink unhealthy culture of frequent upgrades (www.straitstimes.com)
SO. MUCH. THIS.
Marc Benioff says he's a remote worker after calling Salesforce employees back to office (fortune.com)
The office is crucial for professional development. You can’t expect to grow in your career without spending time with your coworkers, learning by osmosis, picking up cues from observing your superiors, and bonding with your peers and managers....
Calif. passes strongest right-to-repair bill yet, requiring 7 years of parts (arstechnica.com)
Whatsapp has begun working on support for third party chats (Telegram/Signal) (wabetainfo.com)
The European Union has recently reached an agreement on a significant competition reform known as the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which will impose strict rules on large tech companies that will have to offer users the ability to communicate with each other using different apps. WhatsApp is one of the companies that will be...
What is the most universal name?
Ofc Mohammed is the most common name but thats a name common within the muslim community. I have noticed the name Sarah in every country, regardless of race or religion. Or it might be an abrahamic religion thing but thats most of the world atleast....
Should you apologize to someone you ghosted before if there is a chance you might run into them?
Say you went out on like 2 dates and said person was too clingy and you ghost em, now you might have to face them due to work. Apologize or not? And if apologize, do it preemptively or upon meeting?...
Just bought a Ryanair ticket
Hello there!...
To all the people who've given those few downvotes everywhere (no shame), what's the deal?
So many posts and comments end up with just a few downvotes, compared at least to the number of upvotes. The only time downvotes get relatively large is when there’s a contentious issue or outright bad behaviour. Otherwise, there’s very often just a few downvotes....
Russia Breaks Silence Over China Map Claiming Its Territory (www.newsweek.com)
Russia Breaks Silence Over China Map Claiming Its Territory...
Why are you on lemmy right now?
Title
18+ Imagine what Aliens would think of us if all the communication they ever received from us was Cam girls masturbating.
Is this even legal? (lemmy.world)
I just got this popup while playing New vegas. I don’t even use chrome, i’ve switched to firefox. How can this be allowed? Also, this is Win10
Donald Trump arrested: Mug shot released – a first for any US president (www.hindustantimes.com)
Google’s Search AI Says Slavery Was Good, Actually (futurism.com)
Google's AI-driven Search Generative Experience have been generating results that are downright weird and evil, ie slavery's positives.
Microsoft to Force Web Links Shared in Teams to Open with Microsoft Edge (lemmy.world)
Just got this right before midnight in my MS Admin app alerts. If you dont configure the policy, in September it defaults to opening web links in Edge regardless of OS default browser setting....
Russia's Luna-25 spacecraft crashes into Moon (www.bbc.com)
Nickelback, Chris Brown, and other stars scored $200 million in taxpayer funds meant to keep arts groups afloat during the pandemic. They won't say what they did with the money. (www.insider.com)
The SBA's SVOG grants were intended for struggling small artists. But big stars like Post Malone and Chris Brown got $200M in pandemic relief funds.
Georgia teacher fired after reading book on gender to fifth-grade class (www.washingtonpost.com)
A decision to fire an elementary school teacher from Georgia has been upheld, after she read a children’s book on gender identity to her fifth-grade class earlier this year....
Would you rather?
So I was asked this by my friends kid. Would you rather live in the most boring place in the world, or be a hat? So to spice it up a little here are some rules....
The LLMentalist Effect: how chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic’s con (softwarecrisis.dev)
A long read, but fascinating.
why are companies trying so hard to have employees back in the office?
I have posted this on Reddit (askeconomics) a while back but got no good replies. Copying it here because I don’t want to send traffic to Reddit....
What's your natural talent?
Something you’re just good at with minimal effort and/or you learned much more quickly than average....
Why *is* everything going to shit?
Was just trying to explain to someone why everything is going to shit, specifically companies, and realized, I don’t fully get it either....